Link Posts
New project by Iain Broome:
An independent directory of online writing resources, from blogs, advice and news outlets to writing applications, bookshops and workspaces.
Subscribed. Though it’s hard to take serious the writing-related suggestions from someone who doesn’t use the Oxford comma.
Chris Herbert put together a massive collection of simple iPad backgrounds based on Atle Mo’s Subtle Patterns website.
Update: If you tried to download them and the link wasn’t working, try again.
Breezi is a new website design and hosting service that lets you set up a site design based on their templates and then customize until your heart’s content. One thing that’s different about Breezi is that you can edit in place, rather than in an admin panel. And there seems to be quite a bit of granular control over your site’s design and the exact placement of text and images, but without requiring coding.
You can watch a quick walkthrough video here.
Just when you thought this conversation couldn’t get any more in-depth and nerdy, Brett makes this outrageously impressive comparison chart and info page for the 32-some-odd iOS text editors and counting.
Michael Schechter points out that, thanks to Simplenote’s new URL schemes, you can now share text from Instapaper to Simplenote.
This is a great update to Simplenote’s iOS app. It’s not an aesthetic update so much as it is an engine swap — Simplenote’s performance and speed have been massively improved. You can tell right away that the whole app is faster — all the interactions, transitions, scrolling, and searching are noticeably more snappy. And it now has a URL scheme which means it can tie in with other apps, such as Launch Center.
Some apps come and go on my iPhone’s Home screen, but I’ve been a die-hard Simplenote user since it first debuted on the iPhone back in 2008 (I currently have nearly 500 notes). Here’s the review I wrote about the app back in 2010.
Michael Surtees:
The first observation is that I see the two devices more as one connected system than ever before. I think this has to do with the screen parity. I’ll write something on my iPhone and push it to my iPad. I might sketch something on my iPad and send it my iPhone.
My iPad and iPhone feel like more of a “pair” now, too. I realized this when about a week and a half ago I started being bugged by the fact that my iPad and iPhone’s Home screens didn’t match. For two years they’ve never matched, but until now I never noticed or cared.
A handy bookmarklet.
Vivek Gowri and Anand Lal Shimpi pen 20,000 extremely nerdy and detailed words on the new iPad. It’s an excellent review covering nearly all the technical and practical tidbits of the iPad. I read it all and drained 20% of my iPad’s battery life in the process.
If you don’t plan to read the whole review, I suggest you at least read the Final words portion.
Here are a few parts that stood out to me:
Despite similar brightness and contrast to the previous model, the new iPad offers remarkably better color gamut and color reproduction than its predecessor. Relative to other tablets, the iPad’s display is spectacular.
I feel like I noticed this instantly when comparing my iPad 2 and 3 side by side. I have one of John Carey’s Retina-optimized iPad wallpapers, and not only does the image look crisp and sharp, it also looks much more vibrant and color-rich than it does on my iPad 2.
Regarding battery life and LTE:
“If you want to use the new iPad as a personal hotspot, you’ll likely run out of data before you run out of battery life.”
I’ve had a few people ask me why I went with the LTE model iPad rather than just use my iPhone as a Wi-Fi hotspot. There are two reason:
LTE is significantly faster than 3G. Using my iPhone as a hotspot would not give me as fast of speeds. As Shimpi writes:
I mentioned the LTE connectivity on the new iPad is the most tangible feature of the tablet because the improvement in web page loading times alone makes the tablet feel much faster than its predecessor. While you can argue about how significant the Retina Display is, there’s no debating about how much faster LTE is over the 3G iPad 2 models when out of range of WiFi. It’s just awesome.
Regarding battery when in use and when charging:
With a 70% larger battery than the iPad 2 but with more power hungry components inside, how does the new iPad fare in real world usage? Subjectively: it doesn’t last as long as its predecessor. Objectively, our numbers seem to agree.
Though I haven’t done any scientific tests with my iPad, my gut tells me this is the case as well. Put another way: the new iPad’s battery life performs as Apple says it should, but it does not last as long or charge as fast as the iPad 2. The iPad 2 was an overachiever I guess.
I remember last March when Walt Mossberg dinged the iPad 2 for this. His iPad 2 got better battery life than what Apple claimed, but he complained that it was not as long as his original iPad had gotten.
With no change on the CPU side, CPU performance remains identical to the iPad 2. This means everything from web page loading to non-gaming app interactions are no faster than they were last year:
What this says to me is that the iPad 2 just got a one-year-longer shelf life. Of course, 18 months from now Apple could still decide to drop support for the iPad 2 because it has less RAM than the new iPad, but at the moment, there virtually no performance difference between the current and previous generations of iPads.
On episode 54 of The B&B Podcast, Ben and I had a good time talking about the weather, using the iPad as a work device, Ben’s workflow for writing and posting links, and Twitter, ads, and business models. While we were at it we brainstormed a few ideas on how Instagram could make a buck or two, and I came up with a pretty clever new weather app.
And speaking of business models, The B&B Podcast has some show-specific sponsorship openings for April. Since moving to 5by5 this month we now record live and the show listenership has gone up. If you’re interested in booking a sponsorship, please get in touch with Ben Brooks.
Sweet mercy.
My thanks to Popclip for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.
When Apple announced they were bringing iOS features “Back to the Mac” with OS X Lion (and doubled down on it with Mountain Lion), the iOS implementation of copy and paste was not included.
PopClip is a clever Mac app that brings iOS-style copy and paste to OS X, and raises the question of why Apple hasn’t done this already. If you’re curious as to how well it works, the answer is: pretty well. The most common sentiment in the user reviews is: “I’m hooked.”
If you have a Mac, you should check this out. You can download a free demo at Pilotmoon Software. The full version costs $4.99 on the Mac App Store.
A few days ago I asked on Twitter what FTP-capable Text Editor I should get for the iPad. The near-universal answer was Textastic.
I have been using Textastic for the past several days and am getting comfortable with the idea of making small changes and edits to my site files if need be. I wouldn’t code a new site by hand from my iPad alone, but for a current project I’m in the middle of there are times when I can jump into Textastic and make small edits on the fly.
The document workflow is a bit different than what I’m used to with Coda. With Textastic you pick a file or folder on your server you want to work with, download it to your iPad, work with the local copy, feel free to save it, and if/when you’re ready to upload it you chose to upload. In Coda, you’re basically working with the live file, and when you save it, you’re saving it to the server.
However, Textastic’s approach seems to make more sense for an iPad editor because it’s easier to make syntax mistakes and you generally code a bit slower on an iPad (especially if you’re using the on-screen keyboard).
That quibble aside, the app is great. It has an option to use Inconsolata, which I love; it has great syntax highlighting; and it was just updated for the Retina screen.
There was another app which people (Ben Brooks in particular) recommended, and that is Koder. I downloaded this app as well and it’s document workflow is much more akin to Coda’s. However, Koder is not yet Retina optimized and so the text is like ouch on my eyes.
Disclaimer: Textastic has previously been a sponsor of the RSS feed.
Last week when I linked to Federico Viticci’s overview of iPad writing apps, I mentioned how Writing Kit has a particularly clever feature: if you tap in the left or right margin it moves the cursor one character respectively. I just wanted to make note that it appears this feature was first introduced by another app, Writings, back in December of 2010.