Very glad to see David Sparks join the The Syndicate.
The Syndicate now reaches over 100,000 daily readers and a 1.5 million monthly page views. If you’re looking to book a sponsorship in 2012, now would a great time. Looks like there is still one available spot in January.
Reddit member “iansmith6” did some power tests to see why chargers can’t keep up with the Galaxy Nexus when it’s using 4G data.
Josh Farmer:
This was a great year for type. Apple got a bit more serious about their font choices in iBooks. Adobe acquired Typekit. Hoefler & Frere-Jones set to slabbing Gotham for President Obama’s second presidential run. Individual foundries stepped into a new level of webfont prowess. Codex magazine was released. 8 Faces continued its solid run. Typekit partnered with WordPress to add a “customize” feature for type choice, and they made sure to steer the average blogger toward appropriate typefaces for their needs. Matthew Carter’s seminal web typefaces, Verdana and Georgia, received solid updates. Gerard Unger partnered with Type Together. Many familiar families received updates or had more styles and weights added. And some newcomers were given a chance to shine. Here are the typefaces I think are really worth a serious look — my favorite typefaces from 2011.
This is not your average bullet-point list of notable typefaces. Reading Josh’s descriptions of each typeface is better than seeing what he chose as his favorites.
If The Great Discontent isn’t a regular read for you, you’re missing out.
The 70 resolutions of Jonathan Edwards.
Just a few of the best things in 2011 that either came across my path or that I was able to put my hand to:
Best new gadget: The 13-inch MacBook Air
Best article I wrote: “Great Expectations”
Best review I wrote: Of Android 4.0 and the new Galaxy Nexus
Best new website: SplatF
Best new way to make coffee: AeroPress
Best new Mac app: Hmm. This is a toss-up between Fantastical, Byword, and Reeder
Best new iPad app: Instapaper 4
Best new iPhone app: Another toss-up: Tweetbot, Instacast, and Path
Best new vocation: Writing this website full-time
The best readers: You guys, of course
Looking at this list I realize that many of the best and most-important things of my life — both personal and professional — have been written about in some form or another on this site. Thank you guys for reading and for letting me write about my life and dreams and passions.
Have a very happy new year, and God bless.
— Shawn
Who needs a mobile website when you have a clever writer instead? (Via Adam Banks.)
This is the “awesome” site, by the way.
Ben kicks off the show by asking me four questions about this past year and the upcoming year. We discuss MacBook Airs, iPads, and iPads with keyboards, including kicking off the rumor mill for what we may or may not see in 2012. I also shared some of the thought and research I’ve been putting into a potential redesign of this website.
Brought to you by Instacast.
Dan Frommer writes some of the best list posts in tech. In today’s post, numbers 2 — Apple is happy to go a whole year without a major hardware design revision — and 3 — Apple isn’t tied to its once-a-year, at-the-same-time-every-year product cycles at all costs — are what stand out the most to me.
Perhaps because what these two things really boil down to is that 2012 will be a good year for those in the market to buy a new gadget or 3 or 4 (see number 10 on Frommer’s list).
And but so that also means 2012 will be an exciting year for those unnamed individuals who like to nerd out and write about this stuff in far too much detail for what may be considered normal by any reasonable citizen, but so what because maybe we just can’t help ourselves and who defines what’s normal and reasonable anyway?
My thanks to Omni Group for again sponsoring the RSS feed this week.
Creating in OmniGraffle: a five-step introduction attempt in less than 140 words.
Desired outcome: a new mockup of WebsiteThing.
It’s all possible on the iPad, too. If you’d like, explore a bit more.
Rated as the number 1 favorite for barbecue but also as the 6th fattest city in America.
It’s episode 39 of The B&B Podcast and Ben and I talk about the ins and outs of writing a website and we answer a bunch of listener-submitted questions. Also, Merry Christmas.
Brought to you by this month’s sponsor: Instacast.
Nice chart.
Stephen Hackett:
iCloud may become a direct competitor of Dropbox’s, but at the purposes of the services are different at this point.
On iOS the file system is abstracted away altogether. Bringing iCloud to the desktop Mac is just the next step towards abstracting away the file system on OS X as well.