Link Posts
Another week, another action-packed episode of The B&B Podcast. This week Ben and I talk mostly about Android and the Galaxy Nexus which Verizon was kind enough to loan me. We also talk about Christmas and consumerism and the spirit of giving, Kansas City geography, Ben’s interesting fashion sense, and iPad bluetooth keyboards.
Episode 38 is brought to you by: Instacast.
Random but related story: on Sunday I sent a text message to a friend and the bubble turned blue, so I added in, “Hey, you got an iPhone!”. He asked how I knew, and I told him the blue bubble told me.
SublimeVideo is an online service that lets you upload videos and embed them as HTML5 videos that fall back to Flash if HTML5 isn’t supported (usually the opposite is true). They now have a free plan that lets get unlimited plays, video lightboxes (where the video pops up over the web page when you click on a thumbnail), and more. The only “catch” of the free video player there is a simple “SublimeVideo” badge in the bottom-right corner.
I’ve been using Vimeo for the few and far between times I post video to this site, but in the future I’ll be giving SublimeVideo a shot.
Joshua Blankenship:
The discovery opportunities that exist for Twitter as a product and for me as a user are vastly under-served. […]
The #discover results could be almost any randomized content and it would be exactly as relevant to me as the current offering. How do you sit on that much data about your users, ignore it, and serve up Chachi instead? How is that not a massive, wasted opportunity? Why do you ship a product that doesn’t address it?
Nice interview with Paul Haddad — the programmer behind Tapbots — talking about Tweetbot.
MG Siegler:
Mobile is not only the future of personal computing, it’s the most personal form of computing. It’s a machine you’ll have with you during all the most important moments in your life. That’s the opportunity here.
If you haven’t guessed by now, I’ve been fiddling with Path for the past view days. I downloaded it on Sunday in order to check out the UI and UX of the app which we’ve been hearing such great things about, and while using it the app “clicked” for me. It get the point of it and how it could fit in to my life. I’ve been using it for the past few days and am very much impressed with the way the app looks and works. I don’t know if I’ll continue to use it long term, but I am very glad that I at least took the time to try it.
John Carey:
The landscape of social media is quickly changing and I feel Path is a brilliant move in the right direction.
Speaking of John Carey and Path, those amazing default photographs you can use for your cover image? They were taken by John.
“Dogs in Cars”, by Keith Hopkin. Snickers is my favorite.
My thanks to OmniGroup for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.
You have goals — use OmniFocus to reconstruct fragments of ideas or projects into actionable steps to complete those goals.
Move the responsibility of remembering daily tasks from your brain to OmniFocus — gather everything into the Inbox for later review, and then organize those bits into folders, projects, actions, and contexts.
OmniFocus is as simple or advanced as you decide to make it, and available on Mac, iPad, and iPhone with free cloud sync. Move past mere task management and get things done with precision.
Read more about OmniFocus here.
[Editor’s Note: I am a huge OmniFocus fan. I have been using it for over a year and a half, and I highly recommend its entire suite of Mac, iPhone, and iPad apps.]
Matt has had his for several weeks and no trouble whatsoever. My first one, after its battery was first fully recharged, stopped holding a charge for longer than a couple days. So Jawbone sent me a new one a few days ago and the battery hasn’t yet needed to be recharged so I don’t know if my second unit is defective or not yet. But, goods and bads aside, perhaps the most telling thing for me is this: I’m not wearing it right now.
I was interviewed by Chris Enns for his awesome podcast, Welcome to the Internet. We talked a about coffee and writing and my workflow and the “origin story” of how I made the leap into writing for my weblog full-time.
For writers, business leaders, designers, developers, and anyone else who works primarily with their mind, taking time out to just think is so vital. No doubt, if you’re reading this, you know what I mean. And so Jacob Gorban’s post isn’t exactly a revelation. But it’s better than that. Because Jacob is actually doing it. He’s actually taking time out to think.
In the past 9 months since going full time with this site, taking time out of my week and/or day to be away from the computer and the RSS feeds and the hustle and bustle of the Internet has been one of the most difficult and yet important disciplines of my job. Like Jacob, I also try to take time out on Mondays.
It’s easy to forget that, as a writer, you don’t have to have your fingers on the keyboard to be doing your job. Sometimes your best work is only realized when you are away from the very place where that work will later be put onto the page.
Blends is a great and new-to-me iPhone and iPad dictionary app. It’s fast and has a very nice design. But what’s best about it are some power-user features I haven’t seen in other dictionary apps before:
Ready on Launch: Go into the iPhone’s Settings app → Blends → enable Ready on Launch. This means that when you launch the app, the cursor will be in the search field and the keyboard will be pulled up ready to go.
In my experience, 90% of the time I launch a dictionary app it is to search for a word, and yet a couple extra taps are always needed to do so. Not with Blends.
Alasdair Monk, designer and iPhone/iOS aficionado, shares his thoughts on the Nokia Lumia 800 and Windows Phone software. Spoiler: he loves it.