Gimmicks  →

Dustin Curtis:

One of the major manufacturers—Motorola, HTC, Samsung, anyone—needs to sit down their designers and engineers in the same room for a very long time to think about every aspect of the mobile experience, and then just build a generally solid, beautiful, phone, without the gimmicks.

Gimmicks

Tip for Consolidating Your Calendars  →

Up until a week ago I still had all my leftover calendars from my past job. I had unique calendars for: meetings, misc, personal, open work time, and travel. Having a different color for each time of calendar event was helpful for me to quickly scan my day or week to see what I would generally be spending my time doing that week: traveling, going to meetings, open times for working on projects, etc.

But I have no need for multiple calendars now, and so last week I consolidated them all into one. I was shocked to find out that deleting a calendar would mean all of its associated events would be deleted with it, rather than having the option to re-assign them to another calendar. You’ll cringe when you hear what I did: I spent about an hour going through all my repeating and non-repeating events for the next 12 months and assigning them to my personal calendar I was consolidating to.

If I’d had even thought about this painfully-obvious-in-hindsight suggestion form Devir Kahan I could have saved myself a lot of time, and I wouldn’t have lost all of my past events that were on those calendars that got deleted. Live and learn I guess.

Tip for Consolidating Your Calendars

Koombea [Sponsor]  →

My Thanks to Koombea for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

Koombea is a full service design and development shop that specializes in making web and mobile apps. For the past 4 years, we’ve been using agile methodologies to build lean startups. Recently, we’ve taken our same process to public companies to keep them fast and efficient. We’re on the hunt for great new clients looking to build amazing products.

Over the past 18 months we’ve seen our clients raise a combined $50M+ in early stage funding. We’ve seen an even larger figure in acquisitions and other exits. Right now, we’re working with some amazing companies in elite tech incubators such as Y Combinator, TechStars and AngelPad, just to name a few.

We’re Data Driven, Transparent and we have serious Experience building companies and shipping products. We’ve been reading Shawn for a while and getting to know his audience. If we don’t know you yet, reach out and let’s talk!

Koombea [Sponsor]

Shawn Wall’s Jawbone UP Review  →

Shawn Wall was able to pick up a Jawbone UP on Saturday at his local Apple store. If I had known they were out a day early I could have saved myself several hours yesterday afternoon driving around Kansas City to no avail. My local Apple store had none. Nor did any of the Best Buys in the area. About half a dozen Targets in the city had received the UP, but only a small quantity, and they were all sold out by yesterday afternoon. I did finally find a few in stock at the local corporate AT&T store. By the time I got there, however, they only had two UPs left: a small and a large — and I needed a medium. Ah well.

Shawn Wall’s Jawbone UP Review

Andrew Pepperrell’s Sweet Mac Setup

Who are you, what do you do, etc…?

My name is Andrew Pepperrell, and I created Alfred, a productivity and launcher app for OS X. I live and work near Cambridge in the UK.

Previously, I was a Enterprise Java software engineer and believe it or not, Alfred was the first Objective C / Cocoa project I worked on — primarily to learn something new. Luckily, my foundation in enterprise development helped me nail the architecture and performance of Alfred from the word go. Developing for Mac very quickly became a passion of mine and I have been lucky enough to jump to full-time Mac development around 6 months ago.

In my spare time I love models and radio-controlled stuff, spending time fiddling with a few Tamiya cars which are either working really really well or in complete pieces being rebuilt. I also have a radio-controlled helicopter and plane but generally prefer cars as they crash much less catastrophically.

I am on Twitter as @preppeller and look after the Alfred users at @alfredapp.

What is your current setup?

Andrew Pepperrell's Sweet Mac Setup

Andrew Pepperrell's Sweet Mac Setup

Andrew Pepperrell's Sweet Mac Setup

I currently run a 24″ iMac 2.93 Ghz Core 2 Duo running Snow Leopard as my main development machine with 8GB RAM, which seems essential since Xcode 4 and Safari 5 seem to consume most of this during the course of the day. I have a 20″ Apple Cinema Display attached to the iMac, a wireless Mac keyboard and Magic Mouse plus some Creative GigaWorks T3 speakers which sound much larger than they look! I find the stock iMac too tall for comfort, so have it on an Ergotron MX arm which allows me to lower the iMac screen to a very comfortable height.

I also have a MacBook Air 2.13 Ghz Core 2 Duo 256GB SSD with 4GB RAM running Lion. I should have really waited for the i5 but I am still surprised how incredibly snappy the Air is. Battery life and portability are pretty incredible too.

For Alfred’s build server, I have a Mac Mini (Server) with 2 internal 500GB drives in mirrored RAID running Lion. This is protected by some Mr. Potato Heads which I have found significantly more effective than a firewall.

It goes without saying that I also have an iPad 2 and iPhone 4S.

Why this rig?

For a while, I developed primarily on a Black MacBook and while I loved it, the difference when moving to a proper desktop machine with a 24″ screen was amazing. Xcode 4 uses a huge amount of screen real estate, especially with the built-in Interface Builder. I use the external 20″ Cinema Display for everything other than Xcode. I am also really used to the Cinema Display’s colour balance so it helps me know what to expect when deploying anything which isn’t black or white.

The MacBook Air allows me to work on the go and, as everything I do is version controlled, my development environment is comfortably mirrored between the two machines. I have found it to be so light that on one occasion, I left the house thinking that I had it in my bag but realized later I had left it at home — d’oh!

The build server could be seen as unnecessary as I could deploy from my iMac, however I feel I have a responsibility to Alfred’s users to build and deploy something that I can happily know is free from any potential nasties. As such, the Mac Mini server has absolutely nothing installed on it other than what is necessary to build and deploy Alfred, and is only used for this purpose.

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

On Mac:

  • Xcode is the main piece of software I use, and use it every single day… Naturally I use this to develop Alfred and a few other secret projects I am currently working on.

  • Fireworks CS5 for screen mockups and general design work. I love the vector as bitmap non-destructive workflow which feels very natural to me. I don’t like how sluggish it feels compared to more native Mac apps.

  • Pixelmator for photo editing, however I am really looking forward to the vector tools in Pixelmator 2 and part of me hopes this will allow it to replace Fireworks CS5.

  • ColorSnapper for quick and easy colour capture and copy colours with a hotkey – perfect for my workflow.

  • Coda for web development. Oddly, before I downloaded ColorSnapper I would open Coda just to access the OS X colour picker panel — weird workflow.

  • TextMate for quick and dirty text and code editing… sometimes vi too depending on where my fingers lead me.

  • Twitter for Mac… no need to explain this one, I spend way too much time watching the Alfred stream.

  • Safari for the majority of my surfing. However, I am trying to go “Flash free” so sometimes I have to revert to Chrome if I am watching YouTube.

  • Evernote because it’s like my secondary brain.

On iOS:

  • Reeder as it’s the nicest way I have found to read my RSS feeds.

  • Calcbot for a calculator as the iPad doesn’t have one. Also use this on my iPhone for consistency.

  • Evernote because I generally need to carry my secondary brain around with me.

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

For starters, using a Mac gives me the reliability I couldn’t dream of during my past of using Windows machines… Being a Mac developer means I naturally have to use Mac, so this is definitely a good thing. Having my main iMac display dedicated to Xcode alone allows me focus much more easily.

Having a tidy desk and a distant view outside my window along with BassDrive internet radio playing really helps me remain creative during the day.

How would your ideal setup look and function?

I would quite like a bit more space in my office… I work from home and therefore am confined to the smallest back bedroom for my permanent office. A larger room for my office would allow me to have all of my radio controlled hobby stuff permanently set up for working on. I could also fit my Yamaha CP300 stage piano in too, which would remind me to practice more.

From a technical point of view, I would love a faster main machine, however, I am reluctant to upgrade at the moment as the current iMacs and Mac Pros all feel a bit mid-to-end cycle… Ideally I would love a 27″ iMac 8 core without a chin (looking more like the current Cinema Displays) and a 15″ MacBook Air… Did you hear me Apple?? I would like those… asap! chop chop.

More Sweet Setups

Andrew’s setup is just one in a series of sweet Mac Setups.

Andrew Pepperrell’s Sweet Mac Setup

Thoughts on Apple’s Cards App and Service

At first glance, Apple’s Cards app seemed a little dorky and silly to me. But, as I thought about it for a few minutes, I began to like the idea.

So, when iOS 5 shipped I ordered a card and had it sent to my wife. Here is what stuck out to me:

  • The iPhone app is pretty tiny to navigate. I don’t understand why it’s not a Universal app. With Photo Stream, the pictures I take on my iPhone are being downloaded to my iPad anyway, and so why not have an iPad version so I can order cards on my iPad instead? The larger screen would serve this app much better.

The flip side of this argument is that nobody should be making cards using the photos taken with their iPad. Maybe Apple is saving potential card recipients from receiving a card that has a horrible image on the front which was taken with an iPad’s camera. Perhaps the iPad 3 will have a significant camera update, and around that time the Cards App will get an update to be Universal.

  • The card arrived with an actual postage stamp. Not bulk mail, or business class.

  • The card is printed on thick, quality cardstock. It feels like 110# cover, or so.

  • The print quality of the picture on the front is fairly good. It’s not photo quality, but it’s not poor. It looks like a high-quality ink jet printer.

  • There was not a lick of Apple advertising anywhere to be found. I thought for sure there would be a little Apple logo on the back of the card, where a Hallmark logo would have been, but nope. Nothing.

  • I always try to buy “blank inside” cards because I much prefer to write my own thing than to write “Dear So-and-so,” before the inspirational, pre-written poem. And so being able to write the words I want on the inside is very convenient for me.

  • $2.99 is a steal — you can hardly buy a card and a stamp at Walmart for that price. And with the card at Walmart you certainly aren’t going to be able to customize it and send it from your couch.

In short, I’m impressed with everything about the Cards app except for the app itself. But that’s a minor issue. With a kid on the way whose grandparents live in another state, the Cards app will be getting regular use from the Blanc household.

Thoughts on Apple’s Cards App and Service