Justnotes 1.3  →

A very nice update to one of the best Simplenote clients for OS X. The biggest change is that the new version of Justnotes supports Simplenote’s new API. Thus Justnotes has much improved and faster syncing as well as better conflict resolution.

And there’s a secret default which addresses one of my persnickety quibbles about the app — you can now hide the note’s modification date from the list. In Terminal, just type this:

defaults write at.selfcoded.justnotes note/preview/date.hidden YES

 

While researching Simplenote alternatives earlier this year, I used Justnotes for quite a while. It’s a great app that works extremely well with Simplenote.

Justnotes 1.3

Last Call for the Membership Drive Giveaway

Today is the last day of the 2013 Membership Drive. The window of opportunity to win something from the more than $3,000 in prizes in the giveaway closes tonight at Midnight CST.

Update: The giveaway drive is now over and winners will be contacted during the first week of March. The ability to sign up for a Membership to shawnblanc.net and all the perks that includes, of course, always open.

As a member, you get access to the Shawn Today daily podcast, the new Coffee Methods section of the site, and The Members Journal.

You can sign up for your awesome membership right here.

As a reminder for the giveaway, all active members (new or longstanding) are eligible to win — it’s not just for the new members. If you want to toss your name in the hat for a specific prize from the list please fill out this form. If you end up winning something I’ll do my best to hook you up with the prize you’re interested in.

I am so incredibly grateful and honored by all the friends of the site who’ve generously donated something to to the giveaway. And thanks to all the members who have signed up already over the past two weeks. Without an ounce of hyperbole, I mean it when I say I could not do what I do without your support.

I tend to enter into these drives with two expectations: a low-end expectation of how many people will “probably” sign up, and an optimistic goal of how many people I “hope” will sign up. This year, my low-end expectation was for 100 new members to join. And my hope was for 250 because, well, my wife and I have our second kid on the way and she’ll be quitting her part-time job this fall.

There is still a half-day to go, but already this year’s membership drive has been a success. As of this writing, there have been 115 new member signups. Which means the future of this site continues to look bright. Thank you!

Moreover, quite a few members who were on the PayPal system have migrated their membership over to the new Stripe system. (To those still on the fence about if it’s worth it to migrate your membership, I say go for it. Everything about the Stripe system is just better and easier.)

Something that’s interesting to me is the ratio of Annual Membership signups versus the month-to-month signups. For the previous PayPal-based membership system, about 10-percent of new signups were for the annual membership plan. But on the Stripe-based system, it’s just over 20-percent. I can only attribute this change to the fact that the Annual Membership plan is much more visible on the new signup page.

On the old sign-up page, there was just one button and it was for the standard $3-month plan. And down the page were some text-link options for the Executive Membership and the Annual Memberships. When building the new signup page I was very concerned that showing all 4 membership plans so prominently would actually dissuade people away from signing up at all. But, so far as I can tell, that has not been the case.

Another concern I had was with the price increase. I effectively raised the cost of a membership by 33-percent, from $3/month to $4. But I have not received a single complaint that $4 is too much. Not even from the longstanding members who voluntarily migrated their membership from the $3 PayPal subscription to the new $4 Stripe subscription.

All this to say, I am once again blown away at the generosity of this site’s readership. The membership continues to be the primary source of income allowing me to write here full time. Thanks to everyone who has supported this site over the years through a membership or through simply showing up to read. It means the world to me.

And, though I wanted to, I decided not to post any cute pictures of my 1-year-old son announcing his unborn sibling as a way to tug on your heartstrings and maybe guilt you into becoming a member. I mean, come on. Who would do a thing like that?

Noah is going to be a big brother

Last Call for the Membership Drive Giveaway

Outbox  →

A few weeks ago when I saw the promo video for Outbox, I honestly thought it was a joke, like Gmail Paper was. But Outbox is real.

The fundamental idea and goal of Outbox is great. Pay someone to digitize and organize all my snail mail, recycle all my junk mail while they’re at it, and then deliver any hand-written notes or other things I want to my door. And I think $5/month is an extremely reasonable price.

But the execution, as Laura June points out in her article for the Verge, seems less the great:

  • For one, you’ve got someone else opening up and scanning your bills, personal letter, and bank statements. Personally, I’m uncomfortable with that. So maybe right there is proof enough that Outbox isn’t for me.

  • Secondly, your mail still gets delivered to your house or office by the USPS. Then, later, Outbox sends their own courier to your home (3 times a week) to get what’s in your mailbox and take it back to their headquarters for scanning.

While the idea of having someone else do the dirty work of digitizing my mail and tossing the junk is nice, it still doesn’t solve the biggest “pain point” I have with snail mail: processing and following-up.

Outbox doesn’t pay my bills on my behalf, they won’t call my doctor to get clarity on a bill, and they won’t cash my checks. I guess that’s why they’re only charging $5/month.

For the digitization and organization of my snail mail, a simple document scanner and a handful of Hazel rules has done wonders for how I digitize and organize my incoming snail mail.

Outbox

The Sweet Mac Setup of @AppleSpotlight

Who are you, what do you do, etc…?

I’m Rob, but I’m better known as the guy behind the Twitter account @AppleSpotlight, where I write and link to stuff that I find useful or interesting.

What is your current setup?

Rob's Sweet Mac Setup

For my Mac setup, I use a 27″ iMac at my desk and an 11″ MacBook Air on the go. I can’t type that well, but I can touch type on a number pad. Therefore, I opt to use the Apple keyboard with numeric keypad. I use a Magic Mouse in one hand and a Magic Trackpad in the other for double the magic.

My iMac sits on a huge 3ft by 6ft desk from Design Within Reach, and I sit on a Herman Miller chair. I listen to JBL Creature speakers, which look super cool and sound just okay. My MacBook Air travels in a Tom Bihn bag and usually sits on a coffeehouse table.

As for iOS, I have the iPhone 5 and 3rd-generation iPad. I prefer my iPhone naked and currently use a sleeve by Richshaw for my iPad.

The iMac (and I suppose the cloud) is the hub of my setup. I treat everything else as a satellite device.

That said, this is how I spend my time by device (most to least): iPhone, iPad, iMac, MacBook Air.

Why this rig?

I was a little too early to the desktop-plus-laptop setup. In the early 2000s, I was using a Power Mac G4 Cube and a PowerBook G4. I wanted the power, storage, and larger screen of a desktop while in my office and the portability of the laptop while away. The experience of keeping things in sync, however, wasn’t ideal. Remember, this was before the days of iCloud, Dropbox, et al. So as a compromise I switched to a laptop-plus-display setup — a series of Powerbooks and MacBook Pros with a Cinema Display.

My current rig, along with the right software services, finally delivers on what I was hoping to achieve in the early 2000s.

There is no other tool in my life that I use more than iPhone, so I typically upgrade with each new version. Although upgrading gets expensive, all the improvements in each new model really add up when reaching for my iPhone several dozens times each day.

I love the feel of the iPad mini in my hands, but for now I prefer the larger, retina display and the larger keyboard.

What software do you use and for what do you use it?

There are so many great apps, but here are a selection of the ones I find particularly useful:

  • Tweetbot is my primary Twitter client.
  • Dropbox keeps my world in sync.
  • 1Password makes the hell that is passwords a little more tolerable.
  • Things is the task manager that helps me get things done.
  • Focus Time is a nice little iOS app to use with the Pomodoro Technique (if you haven’t hear of the Pomodoro Technique, it’s worth checking out).
  • Reminders is the place for my simple lists, like books I want to read, and shared lists, like the Whole Foods Market list that I share with my wife.
  • Simplenote makes it easy for me to take and find all of my notes.
  • Evernote is for those things that don’t fit in Simplenote, such as notes with photos. Although I’m not a fan of the interface.
  • Instapaper is the black hole where I store things that I rarely have time to read. I’m starting to play around with Pocket, however, and I really like what I see.
  • TripIt is awesome for organizing trip details. Don’t leave home without it.
  • Pixelmator on OS X is what I use to remind myself that I don’t know much about image editing.
  • SuperDuper is what I use for full backups.
  • CrashPlan is what I use for cloud backups.

How does this setup help you do your best creative work?

This setup is not only about having the best tool for the job but also about having the best tool for where I am. It is also about having access to nearly all of my data and apps, regardless of where or what device I’m using. Apple and the strong Apple development community have made all of this simple and a joy to use.

How would your ideal setup look and function?

I think my current setup is near ideal, but I have a feeling Apple may have something else in mind for me.

More Setups

Rob’s is one in a series of sweet Mac setups.

The Sweet Mac Setup of @AppleSpotlight

The Great Discontent Interview with Adam Lisagor  →

A great interview talking about creativity and entrepreneurialism:

When somebody has high standards, it’s because they’re obsessive about the things they’re making. What sucks about that is that obsession is painful. When you’re obsessing about things, you’re subjecting yourself to the experience of being disappointed many, many times a day. It feels like that even with these videos we make. Each one is a monumental set of disappointments and figuring out problems that need to be solved in order to make something that’s presentable and not going to potentially ruin your career. At some point, you just want to relax and have it work.

The Great Discontent Interview with Adam Lisagor

Scheduling Do Not Disturb Mode for Notification Center on Your Mac  →

This is a clever trick (via Patrick Welker) for setting up a Calendar-alarm automation so you can set predetermined times for when Notification Center is enabled and disabled on your Mac. Just like how Do Not Disturb mode works on your iPhone.

I set it up and it works like a charm. But soon after, I realized that I don’t need an automated time when “Do Not Disturb” mode is active for me. Rather I just need to fiddle with my Notification Center preferences and remove a few apps so their alerts don’t interrupt me. Primarily: Mail.

The other notifications which like to distract me when at my Mac are DMs from Tweetbot, new instant messages, calendar alerts, and software update alerts. The first two are easily handled by simply not having those apps running during times when I don’t want to be disturbed by them. Calendar alerts are important and wanted. It’s the App Store update alerts which drive me nuts — I wish I could remove them as they’re the primary reason I mute Notification Center in the first place.

But when I have Notification Center set to not showing any notifications at all, I also lose notifications from Hazel, MarsEdit, and Transmit — three apps I use quite a bit and for which I want to see notifications from, letting me know of a successful file upload or blog post.

So, if there were a “Do Not Disturb” trick that applied only to the App Store update notifications, well, that would be wonderful.

Scheduling Do Not Disturb Mode for Notification Center on Your Mac

Snow Day

Snow Day

It’s mid-morning here at shawnblanc.net HQ (a.k.a. my house) and outside we’ve already got 8-10 inches of snowfall. And it’s still coming down.

The Internet has been down since at least 5:00 am, (I’m posting this via my iPad’s LTE hotspot), and it may be only a matter of time until we lose power as well (though I hope not). Unfortunately, many in the city are already without power — the snow is so thick and wet that tree branches are snapping and ripping down power lines.

Now, by no means am I trying to paint this as a dire situation. Quite the contrary. We’ve got plenty of hot drinks, snacks, popcorn, and ripped DVDs.

As president of shawnblanc.net I’m declaring it a snow day. Regular posting will resume tomorrow.

In the meantime, I’d like to take this opportunity to remind you that the 2013 Membership Drive and Giveaway ends this Friday at midnight. There are over $3,000 in prizes. And, for new and current members, today would make an excellent day for perusing past episodes of Shawn Today while trying a new coffee recipe.

Snow Day

One Year Later

A year ago today, Noah Blanc was born. Being a dad is the most wonderful, amazing, exhausting, disruptive, heart-melting thing in the world.

Two years ago — before we were even pregnant with Noah — is when I decided to quit my day job and take this website full time. One reason for the transition was my strong desire to be present and available as a dad. Anna and I were not yet pregnant, but we were ready to start a family, and I wanted a job that was more flexible than the one I was currently in.

But the second, and perhaps “real” reason I took this site full time, was that I didn’t want to be the sort of dad who set an example of playing it safe, avoiding risks, and not pursuing his dreams. I want my kids to grow up in a home where they feel empowered to take risks and try new things and safe to fail.

I knew that the example I wanted to set needed to start before Noah was even born. It was a good time for me if I was going to take the risk of taking this site indy, and so I went for it.

That was in 2011. A year later, Noah was born and I am so glad I’ve had the opportunity to work from home and set a schedule that allows me to take an active and involved role in his every day life.

I love my son, and he’s growing up faster than I thought he would. Over the weekend we had his 1st birthday party. And now we’ve recently found out Noah is going to be a big brother…

Noah is going to be a big brother

Blanc Baby Number Two, due August 31.

One Year Later

App.net’s Free Tier  →

Today, App.net opened up a free-but-invite-only tier. So, if you know someone with an App.net invite (not me) then you can join and use the network for free.

The limits imposed on free users strike me as extremely generous. For example, users at the free tier can follow a maximum of 40 people. I currently follow 73, and it wouldn’t be too painful for me to unfollow a few folks and land myself into the free tier by the time my paid membership expires. (Though I don’t intend to do that because I’m a fan of paying for the products and services I use.)

Anyway, I think this is a smart move by Dalton and his team, and I hope it brings some more of you cool kids over to the network. I’ve been on App.net since the beginning, and I really enjoy it.

My ADN client of choice is Riposte. I’ve been using it since it launched a month ago, and just recently it went free.

And, side note, shawnblanc.net is now on ADN.

App.net’s Free Tier