1Password 4 for Mac [MAS]  →

This is a fantastic update to the Mac version of 1Password. I’ve been using the beta for about 6 weeks and it’s spectacular. Highly recommended for nerds of all ages.

There are, of course, a slew of new and clever features, such as the ability to share vaults and items with others, a favorites list, a Menu Bar utility app, and more.

But of all that’s new in 1Password 4, the app’s new look is my favorite feature. I use 1Password quite a bit on my Mac, and the redesign is just such an improvement over version 3.

Also, I find myself using the Menu Bar utility — a.k.a. 1Password Mini — quite a bit as well. You can bring it up with a hotkey and quickly search your entire vault without having to launch the full 1Password app.

If you already own the Mac App Store version, then the update is free and available today. If you bought it direct from the AgileBits’ website there are some generous upgrade discounts, but they won’t be available until later this week. And if you don’t yet own 1Password, right now it’s on sale for 20-percent off as part of their launch promotion.

1Password 4 for Mac [MAS]

iCloud and Its Storage Limits

Nik Fletcher:

Much as Apple is offering free versions of iWork with a new iOS device, it’s time to stop tying backups to a storage quota and simply say: “We’ve got this. Your iOS device – no matter how much you’ve got on it – will be backed up”. iCloud Backup likely started people automatically backing up their devices for the first time – a great achievement in and of itself. It’s time to make these backups invisible, “just” a part of the service and reflect Apple’s multi-device ecosystem.

Agreed. Instead of free downloads to the iOS iWork apps, I’d much rather get a free boost in iCloud storage when I buy a new iOS device. Or at least a free boost for 24 months (the “average” upgrade cycle for iPhone owners).

Apple sells 64GB iPhones and 128GB iPads. If you own one or both of these, and fill them up with photos and documents, you literally cannot buy enough storage to back up even one of them in full — iCloud’s largest tier of storage maxes out at 50GB.

Automatic nightly backups of our iOS devices is one of iCloud’s greatest features. And restoring from an iCloud backup is a piece of cake (albeit, a piece of cake that takes a few hours to eat).

One of the awesome things about buying a new device is how you can just log in with your iCloud ID and watch your new device restore itself to the same state as your previous one. All your apps download and then place themselves in the same spots you left them with their data all there; your photos, music, movies, background wallpapers, all just set themselves back in place.

iCloud restores just work. But only if you’ve got a recent iCloud backup.

The free 5GB of storage that everyone gets has become too small many, especially those of us who own more than one iOS device. Apple’s best customers — those who own multiple iOS devices, who use iCloud email, take lots of photos, and buy and use apps that use iCloud storage and sync — are the ones being boxed in, and even penalized, by iCloud’s storage limits.

Many iOS users will elect to cease backing up their devices rather than pay $40/year to upgrade to the next plan. And of those who do pay to upgrade, some can’t buy a big enough plan even if they want to.

iCloud is one of the paramount services to a great iOS experience, allowing us to keep apps and photos in sync, perform automatic backups, easily set up our new devices, and more. Yet all “magic” of iCloud is at risk from something as silly as a measly storage limit.

iCloud and Its Storage Limits

Learning Avoidance  →

Lukas Mathis:

Rather than doing extra upfront work that will provide benefits in the long run, people will continually pick the choice that is easier in the short run.

I know I’m certainly like this, and I have quite a few friends and family members who are as well.

It’s why once a year (-ish), I like to do a “workflow audit”. I try to take a few weeks every year to consider my main areas of work and the tools I use to do those jobs. I try to assess if the tasks I’m doing are still vital to my overall work and life goals and if the tools I’m using to do those tasks are still the best choices.

In short I seek to know if my schedule, habits, and tools are aiding or hindering my pursuit of doing my best creative work every day. And if they are hindering, well, then what am I going to do about it?

Learning Avoidance

Sponsor: The Theme Foundry  →

The Theme Foundry has been building premium WordPress themes since 2008. They recently released Collections — a unique and beautiful WordPress theme for sharing, designed by Veerle Pieters. Visit the live demo of Collections to see it in action, or purchase it now for $79.

What makes The Theme Foundry special?

  • A focus on quality over quantity. You won’t find a huge assortment on their site — they keep a small, curated collection of premium WordPress themes.
  • Exclusive partner with WordPress.com (the official hosted WordPress provider). Each and every theme goes through a stringent audit process from some of the best WordPress coders in the world.
  • Whole team support. You get fast and friendly support from the team that actually built your theme, not a part time support rep.

* * *

A huge thanks to The Theme Foundry for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. If you’re looking for a classy and distinct theme for your WordPress site, these guys are worth checking out — they have a great collection.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Sponsor: The Theme Foundry

A Beginner’s Guide to Pinboard

On Friday, May 4, 2012, I signed up for Pinboard, a website that lets you bookmark URLs.

My move to Pinboard was prompted when Yojimbo, unfortunately, got too big for its britches. In Yojimbo I had more than 600 bookmarks, plus hundreds of other notes and files and things. Alas, because Yojimbo doesn’t weigh its search results by relevancy, it became increasingly difficult to find what I was looking for. In short, the more I was adding to Yojimbo, the harder it became to find what I was looking for.

A good filing system is one where you can find whatever you’re looking for in less than a minute. As of this sentence I have 2,334 bookmarks — I use Pinboard to collect any and every URL that is or was interesting to me — and I’ve never had trouble finding what I’m looking for when I go to search for a particular bookmark.

I wanted to share a few of the tools and services I am using with Pinboard. If you are wanting to get more out of Pinboard, then hopefully this will help you out.

Why Pinboard?

Pinboard is a great bookmarking service because it lives on the web, and so many of the apps and services I use every day can send bookmarks to my Pinboard.

For example: any article I “like” in Instapaper gets bookmarked to Pinboard; if a tweet that I “fave” has a URL in it, that URL gets bookmarked to Pinboard (you can configure this yourself in your Pinboard settings). And because Pinboard connects with IFTTT, you can set up a gazillion other ways to bookmark URLs.

In a nut, it’s very easy to add bookmarks into Pinboard. And it’s equally easy to find those URLs later by searching or by tag lists.

A Smarter bookmarklet

Beyond going to the Pinboard website itself and clicking the “Add URL” button, the most basic way to save a URL to Pinboard is through a bookmarklet.

I use Joel Carranza’s “Particular Pinboard” bookmarklet to save links when I am on a web page in Safari.

Joel’s bookmarklet is a bit more clever than the default ones found on the Pinboard website. It does some cleanup to the tile of the web page, populates the description field with selected text or else with the page’s description from the header, and will auto-add tags you use if they are relevant to the article based on keywords.

There is one thing I changed in Joel’s bookmarklet, and that is the height and width of the popup window. At the end of the javascript I changed the width from 610 to 700 and the height from 350 to 550. For some reason the default dimensions were causing the popup window to display without a status bar and without a window shadow. The slightly larger dimensions fixed that for me.

A Tag-Specific Quick Bookmark

Let’s say there is a tag you use often in Pinboard, and you want a way to save a URL using that tag with the least amount of fuss possible.

Then use this bookmarklet.

This will take your current Safari tab and save it to Pinboard using a pre-defined tag that you chose, all without showing you a pop-up dialog window or anything.

Tab collections

You know when you’re doing research on something and you end up with about 30 open tabs and then you don’t know what to do with them all?

Pinboard Tab collections are your friend.

This Safari extension will grab all of your open Safari tabs, organize them by windows (say you’ve got 3 windows with several tabs each) and then let you save them as a set.

Sometimes it’s nice to use this as nothing more than a placebo bookmark, when all you want to do is quit out of Safari and save your work for later (maybe).

Mac Apps

There are some Mac menubar and desktop apps, but I don’t use any of them. I think the Pinboard website is very easy to use and so Safari is my go-to place for accessing Pinboard from my Mac.

Search via LaunchBar

If you use LaunchBar you can set up a custom Search Template for Pinboard that lets you enter your search query from within LaunchBar and then search the Pinboard site.

Bring up LaunchBar, click the “gear” icon that’s on the right-hand side, then go to Index → Show Index. Or hit OPT+CMD+I when LaunchBar is visible.

When the LaunchBar Index is up, click on the Search Templates label in the sidebar. Click “Add”. Name your Search Template something like “Pinboard”, and then place this code as the Details:

https://pinboard.in/search/?query=*+&mine=Search+Mine

 

Now, bring up LaunchBar, type “Pinboard”, hit Space Bar, type your search query, and hit Return.

Search Pinboard with LaunchBar

iOS Apps

I actually have two favorite iOS apps for Pinboard.

  • Pushpin: It has a clean interface, it’s a universal app which works on iPhone and iPad, it lets me browse through my list of bookmarks, tags, and notes, and it offers access to Pinboard’s Popular list and more.

  • Pinbook: This app has a more narrow focus than Pushpin does — Pinbook excels at search. Searching your bookmarks in Pinbook is fast, and you can search by Title, Tag, or Description. So if there is a particular tag you want to pull up, just search by tag.

Both these apps have URL schemes, so you can send bookmarks to them from other apps. Here is the Javascript bookmarklet I use to add a URL from Mobile Safari to Pushpin. It’s based on the very same Particular Pinboard bookmarklet mentioned above.

I realize it’s a bit nerdy to have two Pinboard apps. If I had to pick just one, it would be Pushpin. If you don’t want to spend $10 on a Pinboard app, and you just want a nice way to add and find your bookmarks from your iPhone and iPad, get Pinbook. You won’t be disappointed with either.

Using Pinboard

Pinboard is like Birdhouse was — there are many like it, but each person’s is their own.

To get the most out of Pinboard it helps to have easy ways to save bookmarks, and then to know that you can search them when you need. Hopefully what I’ve shared above gives you some ideas for how you can use the service better.

A Beginner’s Guide to Pinboard

Home Screen Follow Up

After my article yesterday about iOS 7’s Home screen upgrade, I got quite a few questions about my own iPhone’s Home screen, my choice of apps, and their placement.

So, here’s a bit of follow up to answer some of the common questions.

Why do you only have three icons in your Dock?

A 3-icon dock and an empty bottom row is how I’ve rolled for a very long time. It makes for a more “open” home screen, and I like it.

Wait, what’s with that Tweetbot icon?

See here.

What Weather app is that?

Perfect Weather.

Why do you have the Clock and Camera apps on your first Home screen if your article was all about how those apps are now just one-swipe away thanks to Control Center?

Because old habits die hard. I had the clock and camera apps on my home screen when I updated to iOS 7 and never thought to move them off.

I’ve since swapped the clock app with Day One (which was on my 2nd Home screen). But I’m keeping the Camera app there because, if anything, it’s the best looking app icon that ships in iOS 7.

Home Screen Follow Up

The iOS 7 Home Screen Upgrade

Unlock your iPhone, click the Home button, and what do you see? The Home screen.

My current iPhone Home screen looks like this:

iphone home screen

It’s a grid of app icons. Tap one and you’ll launch that app.

Aside from the new aesthetics of iOS 7 and the slow-churn change of various apps that come and go in this space over time, my iPhone’s home screen looks and functions the same as it did in 2007 on the original iPhone OS. And so has yours.

However, I think the Home screen in iOS 7 got a significant improvement right under our noses.

I’m talking about the updated Notification Center, the new Control Center, and the new placement of Spotlight.

Apple implemented some fantastic updates to the Home screen, and did so without making any obvious changes to the way things have looked and functioned since day one. It’s a vast improvement that didn’t require us having to learn anything new or re-orient ourselves to the way we’ve been using our iOS devices for the past 6 years.

Here’s what we can do from the iOS 7 Home screen that we couldn’t do before:

  • We now have one-swipe access to turn on or off our iPhone’s Wi-fi and Bluetooth, enable/disable Airplane mode and Do Not Disturb mode, and lock/unlock the screen orientation.

  • We have one-swipe access to adjust the brightness of the screen.

  • We are one swipe away from being able to launch the Clock app, the Calculator, the Camera, and turning our iPhone’s flash into a Flashlight.

  • We have one-swipe access to the currently playing audio, and the ability to adjust the volume, pause/play the audio, and skip to the next or previous track.

  • We are one swipe away from being able to search our entire phone’s catalog of apps, emails, contacts, notes, music, and more.

  • From any Home screen, we have one-swipe access to our calendar of events for today and tomorrow, as well as the current weather, anticipated drive time to our next routine destination, and a list of all recently updated apps, incoming notifications, and missed notifications.

Since these new and improved features are not tied directly to the Home screen itself, they can be accessed from anywhere on the device — inside any app, and even from the Lock screen.

If Apple had instead chosen to incorporate some of these features by doing Home screen widgets, then access to them would be restricted to only our first Home screen (or whichever screen we’d placed those widgets on).

There is still much growth and iteration that can — and I believe will — happen here. But with iOS 7, Apple has begun to let us interact with iOS in significant ways that don’t require the launching of an individual app. Certain functions of iOS are slowly expanding out of their silos.

The iOS 7 Home Screen Upgrade

Matt Mullenweg On the new Simplenote and WordPress  →

Lots of good news for fans of Simplenote and/or WordPress from Matt Mullenweg.

Regarding how Simplenote and WordPress fit in together:

Simperium [the syncing engine that powers Simplenote] is at the core of several new things we’re either building or hope to build in the near future. We’re investing quite a bit to make the service robust and flexible for our needs as a top-ten internet site, and that development will benefit everyone who uses the service much the same way our investment in anti-spam benefits the internet at large through Akismet. You will start to see the Simperium engine make its way into almost everything we do.

And regarding the sustainability of Simplenote:

The beauty of Simplenote being under Automattic’s wing is that we are already blessed with incredibly fruitful businesses. […] Our main goal is to pour our heart into something and make it great, then [share] it with the world. I find Simplenote indispensable, delightful, and use it every day, and I hope you will too.

I have a lot of respect for Matt Mullenweg and the business he has built around WordPress. It sounds like Simplenote has a very bright future.

Matt Mullenweg On the new Simplenote and WordPress

A Personal Note of Thanks

Today my heart is full, and I’m feeling so thankful.

The past two weeks have been a sprint. My son, Giovanni Blanc, is 14 days old today, and we could not be happier to have another boy in the house.

My original intention was to take a few weeks off after Giovanni was born. But, bless his heart, he waited to be born until the day before Apple announced their new iPhones. I’ve never written so many words while changing so many diapers with so little sleep in such a short amount of time. (Achievement unlocked?)

As far as work goes, I spent a lot of time testing and reviewing several new and updated 3rd-party apps, covering iOS 7, keeping somewhat up to date with the lead up to the iPhone launch, and then standing in line for an iPhone 5s.

On the home front, the Blancs are now a 4-person family. And my wife, Anna, has quit her job and is now at home being an amazing mom to our two boys.

The work I am doing here at shawnblanc.net now completely supports our family. And the single biggest piece of that pie continues to be all the subscribing members. Thank you!

This coming spring will be the 3 year anniversary of when I began writing here full time. The past couple of weeks I’ve been reflecting much on the past few years as well as looking ahead to what’s next. And I just wanted to say thanks to the small group of you who show up every day to read this site and support the work I’m doing here. It means the world to me, and I’m working hard to make sure I’m doing my best work every day.

— Shawn

A Personal Note of Thanks