Shawn Blanc

Stellar article by Michael Lopp.

Speaking of Mac utilities, this new Menu Bar app is pretty cool. It’s basically a Menu Bar folder, where you can store away some of the Menu Bar apps which are necessary evils. I’ve got a few apps living in my Menu Bar that I keep running but which I don’t need to see. Bartender hides them for me.

Bartender is currently in public beta, so it’s free to try out and if you buy a license now it’s half the price that it will be once it reaches version 1.0. My only quibble with Bartender so far is that the icon options are all blurry in the Menu Bar. If you’re going to have just a single Menu Bar icon, it ought to be crisp and well-designed.

Update: Here is a nice replacement icon by Adam Betts.

(Via MacStories.)

Here’s a great deal for what is probably the most-used utility application on my Mac.

Aaron Cohen, who was guest-editing for Jason Kottke over the weekend, asks the following question in his link to Jason Pontin’s article about apps and publications:

What’s the best way to use new technology to build and sustain an audience?

A lot of people are trying to figure that out. There is no one right answer, and there a lot of factors which come in to play. As someone who is making a living from publishing this website I do have a few thoughts.

Ultimately it boils down to one thing: make your content as easy to access and read as possible.

Not as fun, or unique, or feature-rich as possible. As easy.

Jeff Atwood:

Getting the details right is the difference between something that delights, and something customers tolerate.

Here’s a random way to think of it: every user is a princess and every poorly-implemented detail is a pea.

I like the idea of skipping Episode One all together, even though it does feel like cheating. Sure The Phantom Menace is by far and away the worst of all the episodes and pretty much adds nothing to the storyline nor does it provide any entertainment value. But: it is still one of the six episodes, and I hear kids love it.

Amazing. Works great on the iPad and iPhone, too.

I wrote this nearly a year ago. It’s still relevant (even more relevant now that the new iPad has a Retina display) and is related to the last link.

Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review:

The paid, expensively developed publishers’ app, with its extravagantly produced digital replica, is dead.

I’d say that the magazine app was only alive for about one issue (if that).

I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.

The magazine app seemed alive only during that brief moment when the iPad was brand new and it was a novelty to have your favorite magazine available on your new tablet. But then you realized that it took up a lot of space, was slow to download on demand, and was not as easy to read as an article in Instapaper.

Speaking of The Avengers.

The Avengers brought in just over $200 million this past weekend, setting a new box office record. And, as Jonathan Weilbaecher writes for The Flick Cast, “it was the original Spider-Man movie in 2001 that was the first to breach the $100 Million Dollar plateau.”

Seth Godin:

The tipping point is the sum total of many individuals buzzing about something. But for an individual to start buzzing, something has to change in that person’s mind. Something flips from boredom or ignorance to excitement or anger.

This morning I brewed a cup of coffee using the recipe that Charlene Debuysere used to win The Gold AeroPress in this year’s World AeroPress Championship. It was delicious. It was also a nice change of pace as it’s quite different than the espresso-like cup that I normally brew with the AeroPress.