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Canned – iPhone App Designed by Sky Balloon →
Send a canned message in under 2 seconds!* It’s as easy as launch, select, send!
We have all been in the situation. Perhaps while driving (which I in no way advocate), or in a meeting, you need to send a quick text message to someone. Usually, it’s the same person or group of people – your spouse, your daycare, your team. Usually, it’s the same message – “Stuck in traffic, running late.”, “Stopping at the store, what do we need?”. You get the picture.
Canned solves just this. Set up pre-addressed and composed SMS messages to save, select and send. Either to one person or a group. It does one thing and it does it well. Also, it’s only 99 cents. This is a home screen app for sure.
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What’s in your Simplenote?
Some of the old timers may remember one of Apple’s most famous ad campaigns – “What’s on your Powerbook?”. In it, celebrities and some regular folk were pictured with their Powerbooks and revealed in text were some of the things they used it for. Even back then, I was highly fascinated by the tools people use and how they use them and this fed that crave quite nicely.
With the new release of Simplenote, I thought it might be fun to list just a few of the notes I have in mine with the hopes that others will share theirs as well. If you do decide to post yours up somewhere, @reply me your name and a link to your list on Twitter and I will update this post with it as my time allows. Sound fun? Great, here we go…
What’s in my Simplenote?
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Bits of words and wisdom – Where I keep nice phrases and well written sentences I run across on the Internet.
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Yay me! – Where I keep a little list of meaningful accomplishments. I look at this whenever I’m feeling down about myself. It also came in handy for performance reviews back when I had a “real” job.
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Home Stats – Any measurements I take around the house I keep in here so that, for instance, I always know how big the dining room is or the cubby holes in my office desk hutch. Things like that.
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My wife’s standard order at Chipotle – So I don’t have to call first if I’m picking some up for dinner or lunch.
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My personal manifesto – Things I believe in.
OK, your turn. What’s in your Simplenote?
Jack Mottram (who, as usual, displays mad ninja skills)
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@home
Submitted by Taras Kalapun.
The funny thing is, as beautifully composed as this shot is, I’m most interested in the chair. Looks like a beautiful chair.
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Episode 20- The Air Has Overheated - The Bro Show - The Bro Show →
Instead of getting into the nitty gritty of of my recent return appearance on The Bro Show podcast, I’m going to attempt to explain why I love this podcast so much.
These are two young guys who are truly passionate about the things they discuss and that really comes through in the show. I mean, seriously, go listen to last weeks episode and tell me you know any two guys more passionate about the Scott Pilgrim series and film, or BBCs Sherlock Holmes series, or, well, anything they discuss. The only thing they are more passionate about is having a great podcast that earns any recognition they may get.
Not to mention, they are the epitome of the archetype British gentlemen. They are unflinchingly gracious, professional, a bit cheeky, and very smart.
So, go take a listen and subscribe while you are there. While this week you get to listen to me blather on at tedium, the coming weeks you get to hear two fine young gents who believe in things, and such qualities are increasingly rare these days.
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Function Vs. Form : fiftyfootshadows.net →
Wow. Great read. John Carey hits it beyond the bleachers with this piece. Many, many things that resonate here with me, I’m not sure I know where to start. I’m just going to pick out a favorite bit or two:
I find that I sit somewhere between the ultra minimal lifestyle that many tout on their blogs and social networks and those attached to older, kitschy nostalgia. I like having old books on my bookshelf and small trinkets from my travels scattered around my living space. I like both the minimal forms of modern trends in product design and the warm feeling an old wooden bookshelf can bring.
Yep, same here. While people who don’t know me would peg me, based especially on what they see here, as a modernist/minimalist, they may be surprised to find me spending hours each day at my treasured old-fashioned cherry wood desk. I love it. I’m a writer and when I first saw it I thought to myself that it looked like the desk of a writer. Lots of cubby holes for pen and paper stuff. To me, it feels like a place where serious work gets done. Then there is this:
So when it comes to buying into new products I feel its good to look at things in a really obvious way, why do I think I need this and what do I need it for, which leads me to also picture what I DON’T need within the product as well. All too often a product will stretch itself way to thin by trying to accomplish too much. When you boil down a need to its essence you will more often than not discover you can usually do more, and be happier with less. When you simplify your desires it leaves room for you to actually enjoy the results of your labors.
So very, very true. Also, don’t be fooled. He does dig deep and peel back some layers on overdoing it with the minimalism for its own sake. That said:
Happiness is easier to find when you don’t fill your life with all that clutter and that is the reason I have been thinking about all of this lately. It feels all too daunting to live a life so crammed full with information and constantly changing standards to keep track of. I search for ways to find a balancing point, a calm among the madness of life spinning around me.
Me too, Brother John. Me too.
Also, make sure to check out his desktop pictures while you are there. I’ve featured them here before and they are killer.
(via shortsweettothepoint, which is proof that I do, in fact, look at the submissions.)
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Evom, a simple drag ‘n’ drop video converter and downloader for the Mac.
(via saramdle)
Works as advertised. Very niffy little app.
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Simplenote Gets Updated, Stays Simple
I have been a dedicated user of Simplenote for quite some time. Almost everything you see here on the site is either synced to it via Notational Velocity or written directly in the iPad or iPhone app.
The new version was just released and it is nothing short of amazing. They have chosen just the right features to add, and the right polish on the UI, while still maintaining what brought its users here in the first place — Simplicity.
Some of the new features that matter to me are the ability to “pin” notes you select to the top of the list, word and character count, full screen mode on the iPad version in landscape orientation, and versioning.
Seriously nice work. If you have not tried it yet, well, I’m rather surprised you have bothered reading this far.
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I forked the excellent (open source!) Notational Velocity app, and hacked in a third pane that shows you the note you’re viewing as rendered by Markdown.
I just did a search while working on something else and was aghast at discovering I had not linked to this before. It really is a simple as the blockquote above. For those of us who write (or increasingly, live) in Markdown, being able to see your markup rendered in real time is a godsend. Seriously, go and get it. If you need to focus and not see two versions of what you are writing, simply slide the Markdown pane out of the way. It’s what I use and it’s really, really great.
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Great quote from Frank which mirrors one I have posted before.
Also, if you are not reading Frank Chimero, I’m likely to trust everything you say just a little bit less.
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Via: The Endangered Species
I want to talk about something very important. Something that, I feel, has gone increasingly unnoticed – in fact abandoned in many cases – on the internet today. It’s increasing disappearance is akin to that of an endangered species. It’s so small that, when its population dwindles, people stop noticing. Pretty soon, we will look up one day and it will simply be gone. If we do not take action now, only those of us who remember the early days of the Internet will remember it. Then it will be too late. For this reason, I plan to take drastic action now. What is this rare yet important part of the online ecosystem?
Via
The “via”, as we online writer types call it, is what you see at the bottom of a post giving attribution to the source where you found the link. For instance, take a look at the recent via I gave for this link to Scott Adams’ The Less Feature:
(via Chris Nuccitelli)
Not only did I acknowledge who pointed me to the article. If you click the name, I link directly to the exact place and words he used to point me to it. Obviously, I can’t do that in every case. But where I can, I will.
Here is another example from one of my other websites, The Random Post:
(Though I saw this in my own feed, I’m giving the via to Randy Murray, who linked it on Twitter and reminded me I had something to say)
I made it very clear the events that happened that led me to not only the link, but also the fact that I initially saw it and passed it over but then, thanks to a trusted source linking to it, gave it secondary consideration.
Then, there are cases like this:
(via Ben Kogan who, despite my offer, said it was not necessary to link. He was just excited to share it.)
Ben sent me the tip off for the link via email. Therefore, I could not have linked to the exact source. Even though I asked if he wanted me link to his personal site or some other place when I gave him the via, he told me he did not. Guess what? I still need to make it clear why I am not linking to the source.
Attribution and acknowledgement of sourcing are not only the right thing to do, the honorable thing to do, they are the very strands in the thing we call the web. They are what connect it all together. They help to explain how I got here from there and why. They also help you navigate back down that thread and, hopefully, onto other places filled with wonder, curiosity and delight.
Many on the web have become far too relaxed at doing the simplest of vias:
(via Minimal Mac)
I wont call out any specific examples. It really does not matter. What does matter is that I not treat my vias with the same lack of care. Therefore, I feel I must overcompensate for my own transgressions in this area. To make it up not only for the ones I have failed to do, but to make it up for the rest of those who do not. Especially those who fail to link this site in that chain of knowledge, thus potentially robbing their readership of examining the threads herein. Therefore, you will be seeing a lot more hyper-explanatory vias from me. I will not be perfect at them. I will forget and fail. In fact, the iPhone photo from my friend Jorge that I linked earlier failed to receive a proper via. It will go like this:
(via Ian Hines. Despite Jorge being my friend, and I a reader of his photoblog, I failed to see this photo before)
See, one less missing via. Baby steps.
