Aaron Isaacs’ honest thoughts as a new OmniFocus user:
It just presents it in a way that is harder to ignore your tasks, and also lets you look at things in a way that doesn’t make tasks and projects look overwhelming.
That sums up perfectly why I use OmniFocus.
A moving post from Jorge Quinteros. Now I know a little bit more about why I love his photography so much.
Noah Brier:
…one of the product development things that bugs me most is building for a new medium in an old way.
Macminicolo.net offers a high-end data center to host your Mac mini. Low cost. High performance. It’s the perfect Mac server.
A great overview of what gear is and can be involved in producing a podcast. I use a Blue Yeti microphone and Wire Tap Studio for recording Shawn Today.
If you’ve been tracking with me on Twitter over the past week you already know I’ve been working on a review of LaunchBar that has now grown to include a serious look at Alfred as well.
Last Tuesday I downloaded Alfred (and bought the Powerpack of course or it wouldn’t be a fair comparison against LaunchBar), and have been using it exclusively ever since for the sake of research. (If you’re going to really write about software you need to live with it for a while, you know?)
One of my favorite things about Alfred is its usage report. It’s a needless geeky feature that tells you how often you’re using the app each day and what your daily average usage is. Over the weekend the developer, Andrew Pepperrell, began work on improving the usage report to include how often you use the clipboard history and how often you use the app to control iTunes.
The added reporting has not yet been rolled out to the public, but it is a great example of something I’ve noticed about Andrew and the Alfred team: they are committed to making the best application launcher available for Mac OS X, and they sweat the details. I can’t say that I’m ready to give up LaunchBar (I’ve been using LB for almost two years and am quite fond of it), but that does not mean Alfred is anything less than a great app.
Many thanks to Navel Labs for sponsoring the RSS feed this week to promote their iPhone app, ReadMore. It doesn’t matter if you read a lot or a little, ReadMore is a clever app that keeps track of your reading habits. It has all sorts of stats and facts that help and encourage you to actually read more. Because I’m assuming you do want to read more often, right? I certainly do.
And ReadMore is currently on sale for just a buck in the App Store.
Ben and I talk about which apps we would choose if we could only pick 5 apps to have on our Mac (and the OS counts as 1). Sponsored by Notesy.
For the latest of their Bootstrapped, Profitable, and Proud series, 37signals profiles Coudal Partners.
It’s a great story of how Coudal went from doing primarily client work to instead selling their own products (Jewlboxing, The Deck, and Field Notes). I thought this quote from Jim sums their attitude towards business up quite well: “Maybe you don’t have to sell to everybody. Maybe there’s enough people like us.”
Speaking of the new definition of “portable”.
It used to be that you’d have two computers because a laptop wasn’t powerful enough to be your main computer. But then, as the power of laptops grew and the price of them shrank, we began using laptops as our only machines — solving that horrible bother of with keeping the two machines in sync. But now, as it’s getting easier to keep things in sync (if our stuff isn’t all in the Cloud already), it seems there is this a migration back towards having a desktop and a portable.
Also worth noting is that the definition of “desktop” and “portable” is changing.
Last week Austin Kleon posted an article titled, “How to Steal Like an Artist (An 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me)”. There are things you read where you learn something new, and there are the things you read which shed a new light on what you already know and believe in. For me Austin’s article is the latter. And it is one of the best things I have read all week.
However, keeping with the Wil Shipley analogy of farming vs. mining, a better title for Austin’s article would be something along the lines of “How to Be a Farmer.” Because Austin primarily discusses getting off your butt, ignoring your doubts and insecurities, and doing the work you love to do.
As I was reading it I was getting all sorts of little lightbulbs and connections going off in my mind. Here are a few of those items:
One of my Shawn Today episodes called “Aren’t we all just 8th graders” on the topic that many of us feel like we’re just faking it and that’s okay because we’re all just folk.
Wil Shipley’s article on Farming vs. Mining and the difficulty of plowing a plot of land and slowly developing a strong and profitable foundation rather than trying to make a quick buck and then moving on to the next thing before what you made falls apart.
Merlin Mann and John Gruber’s SXSW session: “HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility!”
John Gruber’s corresponding article to the above SXSW session: “Obsession Times Voice“
You see, there are those who look at a building a website (or a software program, or a business, or fill in the blank) as a way to make money. The project is simply a means to an end, and that end goal is bucketloads of money.
And then there are those who look at building something because they want to do what they love. And for them money is a tool. Instead of money being the end goal, money becomes the means to a goal — and that goal is doing things they love and creating something they’re proud of.
One of the new features of the site Inkstagram is that it’ll now generate a Twitter background for you based on your Instagram pictures. Very neat.
Today is the one-year anniversary of The Bro Show and I had the privilege of being a guest on episode 52. Myke, Terry, and I finally get to talking about Android, Amazon, and iOS miscellany after I chatter on for 20 minutes about things related to me taking shawnblanc.net full time this week.