Clarity
Jason Fried, on the 37 Signals blog, sums it up in What clarity is all about: Lots of people think simplicity is the opposite of confusion (“It’s confusing, let’s make this simpler”). It’s not. The opposite of confusion is clarity.
Markdown Quick Look
If you use markdown like I do on a Mac, you may notice that Quick Look does not render .markdown files as documents, instead providing an icon only. If you have tools like iAWriter installed (I used to), they install a Quick Look plugin, and the markdown is rendered readable. For the rest of us, Brett Terpstra of Marked and nvAlt fame has released an update to Fletcher Penney’s Quick Look generator.
2012 iPad Essentials
Editor’s Note: This was written way back in March 2012 with the launch of the iPad 3. For updates see 2012 Year End iPad Essentials. The new iPad arrived yesterday. Instead of restoring from a backup, I decided to build it clean and install only essential apps. Here are the ones (excluding games) that made it in the first 24 hours, pretty much in order of addition: iBooks - I read a lot of ePub books on the iPad, and the new retina text rendering is so great.
With In-App Coins, We're all Losers
There are a lot of games on the iPhone App Store that offer in-app purchases of game currency in order to enable players to either speed up the game, or to buy their way to higher levels, without adding additional content. Many of these games are offered free (the freemium model), but make it difficult to play unless you buy these in-app coins.
If you do this, you are a loser.
If you do this, I too become a loser.
And I don’t like being a loser!
First impressions of the new iPad
In short, between the iPad 2 and the new iPad (retina): Weight: Same Thickness: Same Screen: Yowser! The old screen looks pixellated and blurry, the new screen is brilliant. Also a lot warmer. Performance: Same Between the original and the new iPad (retina): Weight: Oh, so much lighter Thickness: Oh, so much thinner Screen: As above, but the original was warmer than the iPad 2. Performance: Blazingly faster, yet the original is still no slouch.
My Blog Writing Workflow
With the release of Byword for iOS (iTunes app store link), my blog writing workflow has come full circle. All posts start as ideas and notes jotted down in nvAlt, Brett Terpstra’s fork of Notational Velocity. I like this product because the search and use of notes is fully integrated, and it supports markdown. I have set it up so that all notes are stored as markdown files in a Dropbox folder and Byword has been set up as the external editor.
Get to read quicker
People come to hiltmon.com to read, and occasionally to comment on the writing found here. Statistics show that no-one uses the social icons to tweet, Facebook or Google+ the articles. The average page loads in 2.53 seconds and makes 84 requests. Thats a long time for readers to wait, and a lot of requests. So I decided to check out what is going on. The basic page requires 29 requests and takes ~800ms to load (when the cache is clear).
Not Your Free Tech Support
Friends, family, colleagues, I love you all, but I am not your free tech support guy. Computer programmers do not exist to fix your computer, printer or network problems, we don’t even fix our own. Do us all a favor, and stop asking us to fix your things, or worse, just expecting us to do so. We’re not interested. It’s not what we do. Move along. In the last week, I received the following requests (reminding you I work from home, alone):
Top of the Line
I’m not rich, but when I buy technology, I always get the top-of-the-line model within my product range. Why? Longevity and Productivity. I choose the range to suit my needs and skill levels. And the long-term benefits of productivity and time savings way exceed the short-term incremental cost. All my devices last forever because I purchased the top-of-the-line within the range I needed. In 1998, I purchased the best Dell Inspiron laptop, it lasted until 2003 when I moved to the best Titanium PowerBook, which lasted until 2009 when I acquired my current MacBook Pro.
Writing on the iPad
This comment by JohnDoey (reproduced in full without permission) on the Asymco article The new feeds and speeds: iPad vs. MacBook Air and iMac sums up the iPad writing experience beautifully (although I think the iPad is a good production system too): I’m a writer also. You missed a key point about writing on iPad. Writers who are using iPads are not using them like Macs (or Mac clones,) they are using them like typewriters.