A big update to a great application. I’ve been using 1Password for quite a while and never has it been more helpful or useful in my day-to-day activities than since the extension was updated.

Just a reminder for those who want to keep Safari Flash-less after upgrading to a clean Lion install or a new Mac, that the YouTube5 Safari Extension is the perfect companion. It supports Vimeo and Facebook video as well.

“I really rather like it.”

“Quite possibly the last hammer you’ll ever have to buy.”

Until last week, Garrett Murray hadn’t done a clean install of OS X since Tiger shipped in 2005:

That OS X made it so simple and safe to upgrade to each major release, and that Macs made it so simple to clone the entire filesystem onto an entirely new machine was a godsend for computing. But it also made me 100% unwilling to start over. That is, until I started doing it this week and realized just how much bloat there was:

• 215 apps in my Applications folder, over 140 of which I hadn’t used in as long as I could remember
• 400MB of content in ~/Documents, not a single bit of which was anything I wanted or needed, including five years of iChat transcripts
• Freelance client work from 2002 (!)
• 18 PrefPanes, only three of which I had touched in recent memory
• 26 Login Items, some of which I didn’t even recognize and had to research
• Three versions of the Apple Developer tools, including Xcode 3, Xcode 4 beta (ugh, seriously?) and Xcode 4
• A complete user account I used to use for presentations at conferences with random junk all over the desktop

I’ve read many articles and personal stories about standing desks, but this article by Corbett Barr is one of the better ones. Corbett not only shares his personal experience about moving to a standing desk, but he also lists out several resources and other areas of information regarding standing.

I switched to a standing desk two and a half months ago and it’s been a love-hate relationship. I love the extra energy that I feel throughout the day, and I love knowing that it is far healthier for me to stand than to sit for such long periods of time.

But deep down I don’t like standing. For me, I’m giving something up that is most often experienced only when sitting: that feeling you get when you lean far back in your desk chair, take a deep breath, hold your coffee in both hands, and stare up past the computer — simultaneously reveling in the quiet joy of the moment while also thinking your way through whatever conundrum your project has presented you with.

These comic book travel location posters by Justin Van Genderen are awesome. Big framed prints of all six of these would be perfect on the walls of any nerd’s cave.

My thanks to Typekit for again sponsoring the RSS feed. Typekit is a fantastic and easy way to use custom fonts on the Web. I use Typekit here on shawnblanc.net. It was a piece of cake to set up, and I find the site to be more readable.

If you want to spruce up your weblog, or if you are a web developer that wants to offer your clients a depth of typeface choices, I highly recommended you look into Typekit. All their plans come with a free 30-day trial.

In short, if you’re buying an 11-inch MacBook Air the increase in performance over the 1.6GHz i5 is noticeable; if you’re buying a 13-inch Air that comes stock with the 1.7GHz i5 then the improvement is more subtle.

Alas, no mention of battery life comparisons. Hopefully future in-depth tests will compare the battery life of the i5 MacBook Air against the i7.

Scott Adams (who lives in San Francisco) got rid of his iPhone because it got worthless reception and he went to Android:

Anyway, my Android phone works most of the time for voice calls. But I’m afraid to actually use it because the battery life is about an hour and it’s no good to me with no power.

Now I only think of my phone as an emergency device, like my first brick-sized cell phone. I wouldn’t use it to make a social phone call. My battery wouldn’t last. And I wouldn’t often use it for email because the keyboard sucks and the battery drains then as well.

Jim Dalrymple, in his review of the 13-inch MacBook Air, hits on exactly why I think the 15-inch MacBook Pro will be replaced by a powerful 15-inch MacBook Air:

With the release of the latest 13-inch MacBook [Air], Apple has once again reduced the number of factors users have to consider when purchasing a laptop computer.

There was a time when you went shopping for a laptop that you would have to consider all the things you wanted to do with the machine and eliminate models based on those criteria. Things like having enough power to record music or process a mix are a thing of the past.

All of Apple’s laptops are powerful enough to do all of those things these days. The only real consideration left is the screen size you want.

Great review of Alfred by application-launcher newcomer, Jon Beebe.

I use LaunchBar, but I’ve spent a good amount of time with Alfred and, like Jon, I have nothing but good things to say about it. Both utility apps are feature rich, quick and powerful — I honestly don’t know that one is better than the other. It really boils down to personal preference.

Jay J. Nelson wrote a nice overview of Adobe InDesign CS5.5 for Macworld. InDesign is my favorite Creative Suite app and the one I’m most familiar with. I still use CS3 (though I haven’t yet installed it onto my MacBook Air, and even when I do I’ve heard rumors that I won’t be able anyway), but with these new digital publishing tools that InDesign CS5.5 has it may be worth it to upgrade.

Though I’m a fan of Dialvetica I never felt compelled to try Calvetica. However, Ben’s review and the just-released Calvetica 4.0 changed my mind.