Episode 28 of The B&B Podcast:
Shawn and Ben talk about the adventures of roasting coffee beans in a popcorn popper which leads to the possible invention of a new product (just in time for the holidays!). Then they get to tech topics like shortcuts in iOS 5, iChat and iMessage, Time Machine woes, CDNs for blogs, the October 4th products from Apple, and keeping up with the news and the self-imposed urgency that goes along with that.
A beautiful display typeface at a great price.
Caren is a free site for people who take care of others.
The site offers an easy to use shared calendar and messaging system. You start by inviting everyone who shares in the care of your loved one. Together you can use Caren to schedule and assign tasks that need to be done, talk to each other about care related issues and even keep track of important information like medicine use.
Old school.
I am a freelance designer, hobbyist photographer and musician. I am also the designer behind many ads found on the Fusion Ad Network. Recently I joined the team behind QuickCal as the app’s UI designer.
I’m using a 15″ Unibody MacBook Pro I bought in 2009, with a 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of Ram, and the 500GB 7200RPM HD. At home, the Macbook Pro is hooked up to the 27″ Apple Cinema Display. On your recommendation, I recently purchased the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 3G 115GB SSD. I’ve set up the SSD as my boot drive and use the HDD as my media/working files drive.
I’m using the short wireless Apple Keyboard for typing and the Magic Trackpad for trackpadding. I’ve tried numerous mice over the years, from the Mighty Mouse to the Magic Mouse and even a Logitech MX Revolution. The Magic Trackpad is the first input device that just feels right. For Wi-Fi and Time Machine I use the Apple Time Capsule.
I listen to music through an old Kenmore receiver I bought from a friend for $50 over 5 years ago. Listening to music through headphones for extended periods of time never felt right to me.
I take pictures with a Nikon D90 with a 50mm prime lens. My lighting setup currently consists of an Opus OPL-H250 strobe with a 48″ reflective umbrella, as well as a newly-purchased Nikon SB-600. I trigger my lights remotely using two PocketWizard Plus II transceivers.
Lastly, I can’t write about what I create without mentioning my music setup. I own two acoustic guitars: an old Cort acoustic I bought nearly 9 years ago and a Takamine Steve Wariner Limited Edition a friend gave me as a gift. For my Boss Rebel gig, I go between my white Fender Stratocaster and a custom Telecaster by “Ed’s Guitars”, both of which were purchased from Jonathan Steingard of Hawk Nelson. The signal is sent through my pedal board, consisting of the following pedals:
The signal goes through the pedals to my Vox AC30CC. I use the LS-2 Line Selector to switch between the clean and dirty channels and the OD-3 Overdrive to add a little compression/crunch for solos.
Pat Dryburgh. Photo credit, Edward Platero.
I purchased my first Mac while working at a church. When I started, I was given an old Toshiba laptop that didn’t have enough power to run PowerPoint (in fact, it had been discarded by the children’s ministry for being so terrible). About 3 months into my time there, I bought the 13″ white MacBook and instantly fell in love with the Mac ecosystem.
When I began working in design the MacBook was adequate, but surely not exceptional. I saved up and bought the 15″ Unibody MacBook Pro which was a huge leap forward.
The main reason I stick with the Mac setup is its ease of use and the quality of the software. Software from large companies like Apple and Adobe perform so well on the Mac, and obviously the Mac community boasts some of the best indie developers in the world.
I absolutely love the Mac developer community and use a ton of different apps to make my work and play better.
Design work happens in Adobe’s Creative Suite. Development happens in Coda, though I have been flirting with both TextMate and BBEdit over the last month. Photo editing happens in Adobe Lightroom, which is the only Adobe product I have ever loved.
I write in nvALT, a fork of the brilliant Notational Velocity. This syncs with Simplenote on my iPad and iPhone. I also keep all of my notes as .txt files in a Dropbox folder. Dropbox is also where all of my work files live.
Tasks and projects are managed with Things. I’m still waiting for over-the-air sync.
I work with a great team of guys to develop an app called QuickCal, which lets you enter events and to-dos into your calendar with plain English, and then it gets out of your way so you can get back to work. The version I am working on will be out soon, but you are more than welcome to buy the current version now and receive the next version as a free upgrade.
I use Quicksilver to launch apps and trigger keyboard shortcuts. TextExpander expands common snippets of text. Droplr lets me share screenshots, images and bits of text with friends easily. Pastebot is an incredibly easy way to share text between my Mac and iPhone. Caffeine keeps my monitor awake when I’m watching video. Seamless helps me keep my musical groove when I leave my desk. Take Five pauses my music for a few minutes if I need to take a quick call. 1Password keeps track of my passwords and credit card info securely. RSS feeds are read in NetNewsWire.
OS X strikes the perfect balance between giving you what you need to do your work, while also getting out of your way if you want to go a different route. The developer community that has formed around this platform is second to none and I owe much of my gratitude to them.
Other than anticipating what the next 15″ MacBook Pro will look like, I’m pretty happy with my current setup. Oh, maybe a Gibson ES-137.
Pat’s setup is just one in a series of sweet Mac Setups.
This evening I’ll be taking my first crack at roasting my own coffee. I’ve got a some Guatemalan Chajulense fair trade organic, my Craigslist-find West Bend Poppery, and this Sweet Maria’s tutorial. I’ll report how it goes tomorrow morning on Shawn Today, and no doubt Ben and I will talk about it a bit on The B&B Podcast.
Trent Walton:
I have a big monitor that sits on a big desk, which is littered with stacks of paper the same way my iMac is littered with stacks of apps. I see corners of windows everywhere, peeking out and siphoning shreds of attention away from the task at hand. This need to navigate from one app to the next has facilitated my evolution into a multitasking machine. Not since the arcade edition of Street Fighter II have I mastered so many gestures and key commands. Utilities like Mission Control, Alfred App, and Better Touch Tool, summoned by various combos of taps and swipes, have become key to the way I work. Emails get answered while to-do lists are created while graphics are exported while sites get updated. Notifications pop-up, and I suppress them. I am master of my desktop environment, and it’s wearing me out.
In general, she doesn’t like camel case.
Moritz Resl shows us what a font would look like if it consisted of a mashup of all the typefaces installed on his system (over 900, including the ugly ones). (Via Kottke.)
Below are listed the proper spellings and capitalizations of certain tech names which are commonly capitalized incorrectly.
Download and import this TextExpander snippet group to help you properly capitalize these names for the times you accidentally miscapitalize them.
Neven Mrgan on labeling the Back button in iOS apps:
The Back button should never show the text “Back”. […]
This is redundant and it provides no context. Note that Apple never does this, not in any app. Instead, they provide either the full title of the previous view, or an abbreviated/truncated version of it.
Another way to think of it: why label a button with the word “Back” when the button itself is already shaped like an arrow that is pointing back? If Apple wanted that button to be labeled “Back” then they would have designed it as a square button with rounded corners like the “Edit” button is.
If you’re still discovering ifttt, Jon Mitchell has a nice writeup at Read Write Web about how to use it to pretty much automate the backing up of your entire online life. I don’t think I would ever take the time or energy to go this far with the service (I’m anti-digital-packratiness), but this does give a nice idea of just how powerful and versatile ifttt already is.
Darrell Etherinton reporting on this slide deck from Distimo:
Free apps with in-app purchases made up 48 percent of total App Store revenue according to Distimo, while paid apps with in-app purchases accounted for 24 percent and the remaining 28 percent came from paid-only apps.
And get this: only 4 percent of apps in the App Store offer in-app purchases.
When Jim Dalrymple confirms it, you can count on it.
(Personal note: October 4 is the day Anna and I find out if we’re having a boy or a girl, so I’ll be out of the office most of the day.)