Chris Bowler, regarding the Omni Group:

The OmniGroup applications I own have delighted me over time. It’s hard to describe — using the tools is the best way to experience what I’m referring to.

So true. Over the last couple of years, I’ve probably spent more time learning and wrangling OmniFocus than any other app. And I think the dividends I’ve reaped from OmniFocus have been better than probably any other app. There are apps in similar categories as OmniFocus, but no app is like it.

Great piece by Matt Alexander regarding the just-announced 128GB iPad (4):

In the word’s of Phil Schiller, “With more than 120 million iPads sold, it’s clear that customers around the world love their iPads, and everyday they are finding more great reasons to work, learn and play on their iPads rather than their old PCs.”

The rhetoric is telling. The PC is “old” and the iPad and iPhone are at the forefront of the company’s profitability and growth. The iPad is the future of the company’s presence in computing and today, in my eyes, marks the beginning of the company’s true and emphatic push into that era.

In other words, today’s the day the iPad became the Mac. And that’s no small matter to consider.

Now, I don’t know that today is the day the iPad became the Mac, or that there is any particular day at all, for that matter. But a few things are clear: the iPad is cannibalizing Mac sales; and every day it gets a little more capable as a stand-alone PC, and every day a few more people put aside their preconceived notions about “tablets” and they realize the iPad makes a darn good personal computer.

My 3rd-gen iPad “only” has 32GB of storage — just one-quarter of what you can now get. And no doubt there will come a day when the iPad has 1TB of storage. If the original iPad had offered a 128GB capacity, it wouldn’t have been any more usable as a PC on day one than it was with the storage capacities it did offer. And today, my 32GB iPad (3) is just as usable as a 4th-gen iPad with 128GB of storage.

Because the tipping point for the iPad’s usability isn’t mostly regarding internal storage. The tipping point is the apps. People are “finding more great reasons to work, learn and play on their iPads rather than their old PCs” because of the iPad’s apps, not its storage capacity.

Anyway, getting back to the point Matt is making in his article, he’s not arguing that the iPad is “finally” usable now that it comes in 128GB flavor. Rather, he’s making a point that a threshold has been crossed. And I agree. The iPad just became that much more “professional grade” — which is just one more reason for people to buy and use an iPad rather than a traditional Mac or PC.

Louie Mantia:

I believe good app icons are most valuable for your customers, your everyday users, not first-time shoppers. […]

Instead of focusing on what your app does, focus on what your app is. This will help your brand show through, which will be more unique and more recognizable.

I’ve used Mail.app since I became a Mac user back in 2004, and I’ve always thought it was the best. I’ve used Sparrow, and PostBox, and Gmail in the browser, and they all just pretty much seem like different types of window dressing for the same fundamental task: read and act on incoming emails, write outgoing emails.

While I like the cleverness in this article by Pierre Wizla (via Dave Caolo), I could never actually use this set up because it would make managing email on iOS nearly impossible. Since, as you’ll read, Pierre uses his Inbox as his “archive” and lives entirely in smart folders.

But it’s a good read nonetheless. Because, I am a huge fan of stepping back every now and then to look at how I’m using my software, what my workflow is like, and how I can adjust that workflow, or tweak my software in order to work smarter. Because, needs change and software changes and sometimes we don’t realize we’re being old fashioned and slow with our work habits.

Also, anyone else miss Hawk Wings?

Proof that not all blogs should be comment free. (Via the new, A Blog Apart.)

Hot dang! The new A List Apart site looks absolutely incredible. (And guess what? The new blog has link posts.)

Poster — a WordPress blog editor — is the easiest way to blog on iOS. It has built-in support for Markdown, can quickly create new posts from Dropbox files, and supports the WordPress features other iOS apps don’t, like custom fields, custom post types, post slugs, and much more.

Version 2 was just released, and it’s available at a special launch price of $2.99. Go check it out on the App Store.

* * *

Editor’s Note: Poster is the iOS app I use to post to this site. Version 2 of Poster just came out, and it’s just about as close to the perfect iOS WordPress app I could ask for. Poster has support for custom fields, it lets me edit the post slug, I can create a new post from a Dropbox file, and thanks to it’s use of URL schemes, I have a handy dandy bookmarklet that grabs the title and URL of a Web page and tosses them into Poster so I can easily post links from my iPhone or iPad.

If you’ve got a WordPress site and an iOS device or two, you’d be silly not to check out Poster. Especially considering the fact it’s a universal app and is just 3 bucks(!).

Oh my nerd.

This week on The B&B Podcast, Ben and I discuss what we would consider to be the short list of apps which most moderately computer savvy people should be using. We focus not on apps that replace Apple’s apps (like replacing Reminders with OmniFocus, Notes with nvALT, or SuperDuper with TimeMachine), but rather on the apps that upgrade the Mac to do something which it doesn’t do out of the box already.