Link Posts
A new utility from Apple that lets you put Lion Recovery onto an external drive without hacking:
The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant lets you create Lion Recovery on an external drive that has all of the same capabilities as the built-in Lion Recovery: reinstall Lion, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the web with Safari.
Let the productive, office-supply aficionado take note: The Levenger Circa (which I love) now comes in Action Method notebooks and inserts.
Josh Farmer:
Many people adore the Gill Sans family. It has its own significant following amongst professionals in the know, and, due to its ubiquity there, it is called the Helvetica of England. This quintessential “British typeface” can seem straightforward and frank but still has an inherent warmth due to the humanist touches throughout. The choice of spurless forms (e.g., b, d, p, q) adds only more to the humanist feel.
But I am not a fan of Gill Sans. So much so, in fact, I have disabled it on my computer.
Nice profile of Kickstarter on The New York Times by Rob Walker. I did not know that when Chen, Adler, and Strickler started Kickstarter they asked their friends to post projects to get things rolling and to set the tone.
The best tech product videos on the Internet.
A great interview with designer, Christian Helms. It’s worth reading for a look at the Frank branding alone.
Rdio’s fantastic iOS app is now universal.
My thanks to Timing for Mac for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Timing is a utility app that runs in your Menu Bar and keeps track of where you’re spending time on your computer.
Something I said in my MacBook Air review was that my office isn’t my office, my laptop is. The vast majority of work I do is done right here on my laptop. I may be in my home office, on the back porch, out of town, on an airplane, or any number of places.
I am always seeking to be focused and intentional about how I spend my time, and that I stay focused. And they say hindsight is 20/20, which is where Timing comes in. I’ve been using this app for the past couple weeks — and by “using it” I mean I installed it and simply let it run in my Menu Bar. The app does all the heavy lifting of tracking what apps I’m active in, what websites I’m spending time on, and more. Then I can bundle those apps into “projects” (or categories, as I consider them) of work.
MarsEdit, Byword, TextEdit, iA Writer, are all in my “writing” category. Mail is it’s own category. And the list goes on. Also you can have the same app in multiple categories / projects.
You have to give Timing a few weeks to really get some good useful stats that you can look over in aggregate to see how you are spending your time, where you’re spending it, and if there are certain apps or websites you need to be more conscious of in order to be more focused and productive.
Timing is on sale in the Mac App Store for a few more days. Highly recommended.
Speaking of the HP TouchPad, they’re on sale this weekend for $400. Dan Frommer has a good perspective on the price drop: “it’s better to seed the market than to sit still, especially when you have inventory to move.”
Joshua Topolsky, reporting on the over-the-air update to the TouchPad that was released earlier this week:
The TouchPad post the 3.0.2 update feels much more like the device it was supposed to be. Snappy, tight, sure of itself. When you press the screen or scroll a list (particularly in the mail application, which has been improved) you get what you expect. The keyboard changes may be the most significant here — the onscreen keyboard is not only improved over the previous version, but so accurate that it may just be my favorite tablet keyboard yet. The auto-correction and predictive text input is excellent.
I wonder how my review would have turned out if this had been the software running on the TouchPad at the time.
With smaller-storage SSDs finding their ways into our lives an app that helps you keep tabs on large files is worth its weight in gold.
I remember when DaisyDisk was a hot topic a little while ago, but when I would look at the screenshots I couldn’t figure out what the hubbub was all about other than the fact it had a gorgeous UI. Thomas Brand’s recent review of DaisyDisk finally cleared things up for me on why this app is as functional as it is beautiful. And since it’s currently on sale for 50% off in the Mac App Store, I finally decided to buy a copy.
On episode 21 of Ben’s and my technology talk show we talk about the pros and cons of owning a desktop computer instead of or in addition to a laptop. We also talk about patents, app pricing, and more.
This fine episode is brought to you by the fine folks at Harvest and Campaign Monitor.
Overview of the new features for Automator and Services in Lion. It’s amazing how much you can do using Automator and Services and yet how few people take advantage of it.
I mentioned this clever little app in my MacBook Air review yesterday as the way I got the F4 key to default to launching Dashboard again (instead of Launchpad). But it deserves a link of its own.
FunctionFlip is a background utility app that installs as a preference pane and it lets you “swap” the special keys back to regular F-keys on a key-by-key basis. Apple lets you do this in the keyboard preferences pane but the only option is to swap all the F-keys or not.