September 2010
50 posts
New York Times: Left hand, meet right hand →
Brief and to the point. Too bad MacJournals’ updates are always so scarce.
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Cameron Moll:
[…] I am personally requesting your help one final time to contribute to the Authentic Jobs charity: water campaign. Almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. And it’s a necessity so basic, so essential to human life.
[…]
Our campaign concludes Monday, October 4 (listed end date is currently incorrect). Give $1 if that’s...
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Disable Ping Dropdowns in iTunes 10.0.1 →
Another useful tip from Mac OS X Hints for those who, like me, don’t give a damn about Ping and don’t want it all over the place.
Using a Skim-annotated PDF on an iOS device →
If you regularly read or skim (no pun intended) all kinds of PDFs on your iDevice, this may be a useful hint.
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“Monumental. It is considered a bad word, isn’t it funny? When you think...”
– Philip C. Johnson (1906-2005)
“To have a blog is to have some portion of your brain assigned to monitoring your...”
– Jake Lodwick, announcing the end of his blog.
“In things that are tender and unpleasing, it is good to break the ice by some...”
– Francis Bacon, 1625.
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Reeder for iPhone turns one this weekend →
Silvio Rizzi, developer of Reeder:
To celebrate, the iPhone version will be only 0.99$, only this weekend!
Reeder is a very nice feeds/news reader for iPhone and iPad (and a Mac version is in the works). I am a Byline aficionado, but I took advantage of this $0.99 (0.79 Euros) offer to give Reeder a try. I will write a post here or on The Quillink Observer, comparing the two apps.
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Small tip: Install Flash the Mac OS X way
I know, I know, maybe you — like me — would rather not install Flash at all. And I’m also aware this isn’t a fresh tip, but since I had to reinstall Flash Player on my Mac, I just remembered this tip I read somewhere some time ago.
If you want to install Flash without having to deal with the ugly Adobe Installer, just do this:
After downloading the Flash .dmg file and...
Mapping Stereotypes →
Europe seen from many different (stereotyped) points of view. Illustrations by Yanko Tsvetkov. Enjoy.
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A 102-year old lens on a Canon 5D mkII →
Tim Civan:
This is a circa 1908 Wollensak 35mm F5.0 Cine-Velostigmat hand cranked cinema camera lens. […]
My friend, a Russian lens technician, who loves nothing more than to frankenstein equipment […] called me into his store on NYC. […] He found in a box of random parts, hidden inside another lens, this gem. A circa 1908 (possibly earlier) 35mm lens. Still functioning,...
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Lukas Mathis interviews Chris Clark →
Amazing and mandatory read. I’m not a developer myself, but I appreciate good design and usability, and not superficially. So I kept nodding when I read some of the pieces of advice Clark gives when Mathis asks him “Any examples of the kinds of things we should not do?”:
[…] Avoid copying other people’s designs until you understand why they are the way they are, and...
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“But of course [poetry] continues out there in the world living its own...”
– Thom Gunn, 1974.
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Dark Patterns →
A site dedicated to “user interfaces that have been designed to trick users into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise have done.”
If you start reading the examples in the already submitted categories, you’ll surely have the same déjà vu feeling I had.
[via Design Dare]
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Six Reasons Why I’m Not On Facebook, By Wired UK’s... →
All good points. I think I like #6 most: why should we let businesses privatize our social discourse?
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“If the creative processes that result in a poem are mysterious, they’re no...”
– Norman Mac Caig, 1974.
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“Why does Twitter work better for news than Google Reader? Simple, Twitter gives...”
– Dave Winer: How to reboot RSS (via marco)
I don’t agree with Winer. I don’t have to ‘hunt around to find the newest stuff’ (a) because all the feeds that are in my feed reader (be it Google Reader or NetNewsWire or whatever) are meticulously picked subscriptions, so I always...
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Kindle 3 first impressions →
Great hands-on review by Marco Arment. Thoughtful and detailed, as usual.
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Self-Employment, 12 Months Later →
Cameron Moll:
Let’s be honest: To remain focused on the work at hand requires an incredible amount of discipline in today’s always-on, always-accessible, Growl-enabled, tabbed-browsing, mobile-alerting society. What compounds this issue, however, is that “the work at hand” is rarely discrete and singular.
This is the part of Cameron’s post I can relate to most, but of course the whole...
“I write poems because it pleases me, very much - I think that is true. In any...”
– Robert Creeley, 1962.
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Adobe Lightroom 3 Review →
Not a fresh link, but in case you missed it, it’s a great in-depth review by Barnaby Britton at Digital Photography Review.
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App Store Instant →
Oh, this is useful, and makes more sense than Google Instant.
(via Daring Fireball)
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'Mad Men' recaps →
I found George Lang’s blog by pure chance, and if you want to read well-written, insightful recaps of Mad Men episodes, you should really add George’s blog to your bookmarks.
An iPad Buyer’s Guide and Other FAQs →
Handy and informative post by Shawn Blanc. Not surprisingly (for me) is reading what Shawn likes about his iPad — the same things I would like if I had one.
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The (almost) Complete iTunes History, from... →
If you want to have a general idea of the evolution of the iTunes interface and looks (and its icon), this can be a handy reference.
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Dynomighty Design - Mighty Wallets →
This super thin wallet is made from the same material used to make express mail envelopes. This water-resistant, stain-resistant and tear-resistant wallet comes in several unique graphics, including our famous air mail wallet, making them the best wallet choice for cool wallet designs, and great gift idea for men and women alike.
Ingenious indeed.
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William Gibson on 'Zero History', Paranoia and the... →
Fascinating interview on Wired.
Here are two things Gibson said which I feel the same about. The first is on writing about the future:
Before I started writing science fiction, my theory was that every fictive, imagined future can only be understood historically within the moment it was written. Because nobody really writes about the future. All we really have when we pretend to write about...
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Mission-critical Newton →
You’re surely aware of the serious earthquake that struck New Zealand a few days ago. I was concerned for the safety of an active member of the NewtonTalk mailing list, Tony Kan, who lives in…
“If there’s something the French know how to do well, it’s give themselves a...”
– Slowing Down: The Art of the Apéro in Paris
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Complete iOS 4.1 Walkthrough →
Mark Grunman provides a complete walkthrough of the new features in the upcoming iOS 4.1 release. As an owner of an iPhone 3G, there isn’t much in store for me — most new features only work on the iPhone 4. But I’m really hopeful as regards to performance improvement, especially after reading Mike Keller’s piece on Macworld UK, where he says that iOS 4.1 on iPhone...
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Small is Big, but maybe awkward
Patrick Rhone at minimalmac:
Now I have had some time to digest all of the announcements at Apple’s Music/Media Event held yesterday. I took the time to watch the keynote and have read several news and pundit posts about it. One thing that stood out to me is how much “small” was promoted as a feature. […]
There are many reasons why small matters. The one that immediately pops to mind is...
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Visual Differences Between iTunes 9 and 10 →
Garrett Murray:
A year ago, I compared the then-brand-new iTunes 9 against its predecessor. New year, new version of iTunes, so here’s an updated comparison. It’s amazing to see just how much visual tweaking Apple does with each new major version of the application.
I’ve also slightly redesigned the whole thing this year so that you can easily view last year’s comparison, and a fun 8 versus 10...
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iTunes: New and Old →
Shawn Blanc has created a flickr set with side-by-side screenshots comparing some of the UI changes introduced by iTunes 10 over iTunes 9.x.
I’m really baffled by the questionable choice of removing the title bar and repositioning the familiar red yellow and green buttons vertically. I’m still not sure about the graphical changes of the media capacity colour-coded bar (see picture),...
Rolling Stone: Inside 'Mad Men': On Set and Behind... →
An amazing gallery of 20 black & white photos.
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SpamSieve 2.8.3 is out
The best email spam filter program for the Mac, SpamSieve, has been updated to version 2.8.3.
Here’s a list of changes:
Adjusted SpamSieve’s tokenizer to improve the filtering accuracy.
Improved compatibility with pre-release versions of Apple Mail.
MailForge now works with SpamSieve, as described in the Setting up MailForge section of the manual.
Made some changes to better support...
