The Log

The crew at Coudal Partners sure know how to target us...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:17:00 -0800

The crew at Coudal Partners sure know how to target us northerners as we yearn for signs of spring. The latest version of the Field Notes brand plays to that desire: PACKET of SUNSHINE is a nice way to bring in the new season.

TextExpander 3

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:38:00 -0800

A new version of my favourite text utility is now available.

Built-in Dropbox Synchronization
Now you can use Dropbox or MobileMe to keep your snippets synched between your Macs.

You had me at Dropbox.

The Case FOR Flash

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:38:00 -0800

Sebastiaan de With makes some interesting points in favor of Flash. He includes the logic that if your implementation that does not use Flash equates to poor performance, then perhaps a future without Flash does not necessarily equate with progress.

Take a look at the current Macheist page. At the time of this writing, it is using 65 to 70 percent of the processing power in my early 2008 Mac Pro, equipped with eight Xeon cores.

Sometimes it’s easy to don the standards hat and inelegantly state, “Thou shalt never use Flash.” But if Flash is a better solution than all other options, use it. The same goes for tables — there is a time and place. The Machest sites are a good example of this.

Dan Mall said it well in his latest piece on A List Apart titled Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web:

Create something excellent where the technology is transparent, and allow only the curious to look under the hood to actually see what’s going on. JavaScript, Flash, HTML5, tables, Shockwave, Unity—no one cares when people using it can do what they’re supposed to.

Hear, hear.

"I can look past the serial comma (so long as the rule is followed consistently throughout a piece),..."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:31:18 -0800

“I can look past the serial comma (so long as the rule is followed consistently throughout a piece), but a missing comma from a compound sentence downright hurts my feelings.”

- Jen Schuetz in a piece titled Your Friend, the Comma. It’s a good refresher for people who are serious about following the dictates of the English language. I was happy to see that I’m usually in adherence with the rules listed there.

OmniFocus Themes

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:07:00 -0800

While OmniFocus is definitely too detailed for many folks, I appreciate some of the flexibility it offers. As a long time user of Things, I found that I often wanted to simply nest a few tasks rather than create a new project. This lack finally drove me to switch to the more complex OmniFocus.

One feature that I had no idea was included in OmniFocus is theming. Hidden in the Style Preference pane, you can load custom created themes. Now, this is not full extent theming like you see in Growl or Adium. It’s more akin to theming in Textmate, with a focus on fonts, text color and backgrounds.

Still, if you’re an OmniFocus user who doesn’t like the default look, it’s not hard to make it look fairly different. Maybe a little more like The Hit List.

[ via Justin Blanton ]

A few shots from my early morning run. Sure beats running on a...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:54:00 -0800

The melt.

Clear skies.

Blessed quiet.

Racing the sun home.

A few shots from my early morning run. Sure beats running on a treadmill.

"The most effective ads are the ones placed within a permission-based content model, because it’s a..."

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:26:41 -0800

“The most effective ads are the ones placed within a permission-based content model, because it’s a model built on trust. One friend recommending something to another friend is worth its weight in marketing gold.”

- Shawn Blanc gets the virtues of good web based advertising. This is exactly how we want Fusion to operate — we think of ourselves more as a personal recommendation channel, rather than merely an ad network.

The evolution of the hipster. I especially love the use of the...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:26:05 -0800

The evolution of the hipster.

I especially love the use of the infamous 3 wolf moon shirt in 2009. [ via docdez ]

Today’s exhibition Layer Tennis match: Hamid vs,...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:05:52 -0800

Today’s exhibition Layer Tennis match: Hamid vs, Javanrouh. If the teaser image is this good, the match should be downright inspiring.

Productivity as it relates to coffee (via Meagan...

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:56:45 -0800

Productivity as it relates to coffee (via Meagan Fisher)

Everything Meagan touches is gold.

staff: Now testing: Pages You can now add static pages to your...

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:40:00 -0800

staff:

Now testing: Pages

You can now add static pages to your blog, with a few very useful options.

Sure wish I could Like this more than once … great addition to an already stellar platform.

I absolutely love the new design of the Omnigroup site....

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:56:02 -0800

I absolutely love the new design of the Omnigroup site. It’s a very clean design and the header images are beautiful.

iPad Aesthetics

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:46:28 -0800

When the iPad was announced, there seemed to be a lot of people complaining that the UI was a little off and that the icons on the home screen looked a little lonely.

I suspect that a good part of the people making this complaint look at a desktop like this every day:

Or perhaps their iPhone home screen makes the iPad look sparse:

And hey, as long as a person can be productive with that type of setup, all the power to them. But as someone who prefers tidiness and iPhone screen real estate, I think the iPad interface is a step in the right direction:

And one last thought: if there is one thing I can appreciate about jailbreaking your iPhone, it’s that many of the nice themes use smaller icons. It greatly adds to the overall look and feel:

"On the page, the rhythm of the text emerges from both the macro design—the pleasing shape of the..."

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 10:00:00 -0800

“On the page, the rhythm of the text emerges from both the macro design—the pleasing shape of the page, the proper amount of thumb space—and the micro—the right amount of leading, the evenness of the word spacing, the correct break of a line. On the screen, the rhythm of a text encompasses all of these things and more—the placement of a link, the shift from text to video and back again, the movement from one text to another. The rhythm becomes more complex as the orchestra gets larger, but the desire for rhythm does not subside.”

- Mandy Brown

Create a simple timer using LaunchBar and AppleScript

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:11:40 -0800

Create a simple timer using LaunchBar and AppleScript:

Speaking of elegant Applescripts, Justin Blanton has a great one for creating timed reminders.

[ via Shawn Blanc ]

Improvements in Character

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 06:17:20 -0800

One thing I neglected to add to my post yesterday on counting characters was that there is most likely various different ways to achieve what I did with Applescript and Automator. That’s another sometimes positive, sometimes maddening aspect of OS X — there are so many different ways to fiddle.

Along with that fact, I should have added the caveat that there was no doubt a more elegant possible use of Applescript to achieve my desired final result. And there is — reader Jay from The Practice of Code sent me a version that is so much nicer and cleaner than mine. His does not make use of the clipboard, as you can see here:

This was originally how I wanted the script to work. I didn’t want to use the clipboard, but hunting through the library in Applescript did not yield the simple “input as text” I needed. If interested, grab the code here.

Thanks Jay for sharing your knowledge. And thanks to many others who passed on their suggestions. All were good, but Jay’s was the best.

Stand Up While You Read This

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:55:53 -0800

Stand Up While You Read This:

No surprise here — standing appears to be healthier than sitting for long periods of time. Forget that Herman Miller Aeron, get a standing desk instead.

Counting Characters

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:41:49 -0800

When a client sends in an completed ad to the Fusion mailbox, they include the accompanying text that sits beside the ad graphic. Because we allow a max of 80 characters, care has to be taken to ensure that there is no more than 80 characters included. It sounds obvious, but from time to time, a customer forgets the limit.

And so there are many times when I’ve eyeballed the text and thought, “That looks a little large.” At this point, I have no desire to squint at the screen and count characters. Normally I would copy and paste the text into another app, such as MarsEdit or WriteRoom. Apps such as these have the ability to give you a character count, which is great when you are writing and already using the app.

But it was enough of an inconvenience to me to have to open one of these apps to paste the text into. When I’m in the middle of an email session, those apps are never open. What I needed was a way to simply select any block of text, hit a key combo, and get a message with the text stats I desired.

Ah, the joy of being a Mac user …

System Services

Applescript is definitely a little weird and quirky, but it’s also flexible. A quick search on the Net found the following script by Rob Griffiths:

set myCount to count (the clipboard)
set myWords to count words of (the clipboard)
set myParas to count paragraphs of (the clipboard)
display dialog “Characters: ” & myCount & ”
Words: ” & myWords & ”
Paragraphs: ” & myParas

This would be best to create as a system wide service, accessible via a keyboard shortcut. I created one right away in Automator and it worked okay. But I first had to copy the text to the clipboard since the script accesses the text from there. Typing CMD + C is not a big deal, but it still felt awkward and unneccesary.

To get around this, I had to add the following Apple code to Automator:

on run {input, parameters}
tell application “System Events” to keystroke “c” using command down
return input
end run

This would not work within the same script that calculates the text statistics — it had to be added separately. Here’s how the service looks in its entirety.

And this is the result:

This is why I love being a Mac user. Solving your own problems is often possible, and usually fun.

You Want to Eat It Too?

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:38:55 -0800

While discoursing on the subject of Flash again, Gruber says this about Apple:

It boils down to control. I’ve written several times that I believe Apple controls the entire source code to iPhone OS. (No one has disputed that.) There’s no bug Apple can’t try to fix on their own. No performance problem they can’t try to tackle. No one they need to wait for.

Yet Apple has shown no concern in this regard for the developers of the applications for the iPhone. The current App Store infrastructure is not set up so a developer can quickly fix a bug. Unless he/she works for Apple.

He says later in the piece:

I say what Apple cares about controlling is the implementation.

Maybe, but I would say they only care about their implementation.

Crush + Lovely launched a redesign of their site today and...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:30:15 -0800

Crush + Lovely launched a redesign of their site today and it’s worth a look. I especially love this piece, created by Meagan Fisher I do believe.