I was a big MacZOT buyer several years ago. They offered spectacular sales on good software. I’ve really preferred to stick to the app store lately, but every once in awhile they offer something unique and great. This is one of those times.
6200+ royalty free, commercial-use fonts for $50. There are some nice looking fonts in the collection. There’s only 8 hours left on the sale.
Not much more to say. Time for something sweet from Cupcake Ipsum:
“Applicake biscuit danish muffin gummies croissant jelly beans biscuit faworki. Biscuit chocolate macaroon toffee. Ice cream pastry dragée cotton candy ice cream macaroon ice cream apple pie. Pastry cake croissant candy canes chocolate carrot cake chocolate candy macaroon.”
By way of Swiss Miss
Another day, another hosting outage. I suppose it’s time to move to a new host and Squarespace (affiliate link for 5by5) is looking really good right now. It’s a bit more expensive, but I have no desire to learn to troubleshoot WordPress or manage a MySQL database. I have other things I’d rather tinker with and this site is meant to be fun for me, not a chore.
I figure I’ll lose:
I hope to gain the following:
Seems like a good trade-off.
I’m not sure what a move might mean for this site. I really don’t want to put ads on the site because it might start to feel like a job for me. I don’t mind eating the hosting cost right now, because I do get additional value out of the server. It’s something for me to think about.
The iPhone is a beautiful yet fragile piece of technology. I love the feel of it. It has a satisfying heft and the glass allows it to slide easily from my fingers into my pocket. Unfortunately there’s a cost to the sleek design. The iPhone 4(S) appears to have a much greater affinity for the ground than for my hand. The obvious solution is to put it into a protective case.
I’ve used several cases for my various iPhones. My first case was the Vaja case for my first generation iPhone. It was a luxurious case with a leather outer skin and a clamshell design as well as a steep price tag. The biggest flaw was that I chose the optional belt clip connector. That meant that the case had a protruding pin on the back of the case. That also meant that it was a risky endeavor to put the case in my pocket.
The next hard case was a generic polycarbonate case for my wife’s iPhone. Her phones appear to have a much greater coefficient of gravity so she needed a case that could actually protect the phone from a reasonable impact. She liked the case, but eventually decided she did not like the added bulk. I think if someone has a case on an iPhone, the worst thing to do is to take the case off. Once the case is removed, it is quite noticeable how sleek a naked iPhone is. There’s no going back.
So a hard case adds too much bulk. Apple has yet to add a portable force-field generator to the iPhone. I’m sure we will hear about that in the next round of iPhone rumors. Until that day, one option for mitigating the fragility of our iPhones is to reduce the chance that they might slip out of our hands.
While the glass makes for a great scratch resistant surface, it also makes it very slippery. The obvious solution is to make it a little less slippery. A 3M skin accomplishes this very well. The only variations in these skins are in the art work. The material is consistently high quality and bubble free when applied. They reduce the slickness of the phone just enough to increase my grip on the phone, but not so much that it does not easily slide in and out of my pocket.
I’ve purchased skins from Gelaskins and Etsy.com but I much prefer the skins from Infectious.com for their art style. This David Lanham skin is one of my favorites. I also love this Gummi Anatome skin from Gelaskins (also available as a Magic Trackpad and Apple TV skin).
I’ve never been much of a fan for iPhone bumpers. They always felt awkward and seemed to provide little protection. However, I recently purchased the Apple bumper for my iPhone 4S and I am quite happy with what it has to offer. The bumper provides it’s own buttons that interact with the iPhone buttons underneath. This solves one issue that bothered me with other bumpers and hard cases: The solid and high quality buttons of the iPhone were covered with a generally inferior bumper or skin.
The Apple bumper buttons (say that five times real fast) feel like the iPhone buttons. The volume buttons and power button are both covered with a chrome button provided by the bumper. The buttons feel solid.
The bumper itself is very thin and still makes the iPhone easy to slip in a pocket. There is very subtle rubberization to the front and back edge of the bumper but the sides are made of glossy polycarbonate. I can set my iPhone on my slanted surface without it sliding off and crashing to the floor.
The only downside to the bumper is that the headphone jack is slightly more recessed (remember the first generation iPhone). This means that studio headphones will not work while the bumper is on the phone.
You read that correctly. I now have wood covering my iPhone 4S. It’s somewhere between a skin and a case. Slightly thicker than a skin but much thinner than a case. The wood skin is made by Trunket from real reclaimed wood. I purchased mine through Amazon and received it in just a few days for $38 (I purchased the Black Rosewood model and combined it with a black Apple bumper).
The Trunket is very thin for being made of wood. In fact, it’s somewhat fragile until it is installed on the phone. Once installed it adds perhaps 1mm to each face of the device.
Because the Apple bumper fits over the plastic bezel on the phone, it can be used in conjunction with the Trunket. The combination of the Trunket and Apple bumper look completely natural. It looks like it could have been an actual iPhone design.
The phone feels slightly larger. Not much, but noticeable. I’ve been using the iPhone with just a 3M skin since it arrived and I have grown accustomed to it’s svelte feel in my hand.
The home button on the front feels slightly more recessed. It’s noticeable and somewhat distracting. I imagine I’ll get used to in a few days.
I don’t like cases but I also don’t like a fragile piece of wet expensive soap in my hand. It’s all about trade offs and a slight increase in size for a much more durable and manageable iPhone that still easily fits in my pocket is well worth it.
I’m not sure how long this has been available, but Pragmatic Books now offers automatic syncing to Dropbox. That means my Dropbox account will always have the latest version of my Pragmatic books.
I really like the Pragmatic model. They offer print on demand copies of their works as well as early access electronic versions. The books are very high quality and always well written. I only wish that the videos I’ve purchased could also be synchronized with Dropbox for offline viewing and streaming to my AppleTV.
My eBook purchases are always valuable to redownload through the Web site. However, my current copies could be out of date so I must remember to go get the latest versions.
However, once I configure Dropbox syncing, a folder is created in my Dropbox account
And after a bit of a delay, all of my eBooks are on all of my devices.
I’m a huge fan of my ScanSnap scanner from Fujitsu. I’ve had mine for about 4 years and it’s still working great. Fujitsu just announced an update to the ScanSnap line that allows it to scan documents to their new cloud service. There is also support for SugarSync now too. Pretty nice for a 4 year old scanner.
It’s on sale right now for $20. That seems like a good deal if you don’t already have Audible credit to use.
I tried using the Newsstand app on iOS 5 last week. I purchased one issue of a Mac centric magazine. It was a disgusting mess that quickly reminded me why I prefer Instapaper, Zite and my RSS feeds over reading on glossy paper. The Newsstand “magazine” was slow to render and was 50% ads. By slow to render, I mean that after a page turn, there are several seconds where the facing pages are too blurry to read. Eventually they pop into focus as if I had just uncrossed my eyes.
The ads. Oh the ever loving ads. It was overwhelming. Every other facing page was an ad. Ads were also interspersed with the content. Now, in a technology magazine, ads can be informative, especially in a Mac magazine. It’s often the best way to keep on top of what software is up and coming in a commercial sense. But there is a limit. Did I mention that the ads repeated?
It appeared that the publisher took almost no effort to reformat their periodical for the new reading mode. It looked and felt like a PDF with hyperlinks. Text was too small and required zooming to read accurately. The images were low quality and there was no multimedia present. I spent maybe five minutes trying to read this months subscription. I’m not sure if I’ll dedicate any time to the next installment. In this case, I think Apple needs to be a bit more selective about the content they want to display in their app.
This is the future of warfare, not dirty bombs or military invasions but crumbling infrastructures tied to computers.
By way of Everything in the sky.
I’m giving Fletcher Penny’s new application MultiMarkdown Composer a spin. It’s great but I like the dark black styling provided by Byword. Luckily, it’s dead simple to create a new style sheet for MMD Composer.
Just create the following folder if it does not already exits
~/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown Composer/Styles/
Now create a new style sheet and set the colors and formatting to something you like better. If you want to start with my template, you can find it here. Save it as a “.style” file in the folder mentioned above.
Here’s what the new style looks like:
UPDATE: If you need a good source for hex color codes, then visit December.com
I’ve been doing this trick (from TUAW) with my wife for the past week. She doesn’t have an iPhone 4S (yet) but she prefers the reminders app to any other option, including a list on the refrigerator. Siri makes it all that much easier for me to add things to the shopping list while I prepare meals (I do the household cooking and my wife does the grocery shopping).
Keyboard Maestro macros can be executed several different ways. There’s the common hot-key trigger and text snippet trigger. These are great but sometimes I need to run a macro when I’m not sitting in front of my computer. That’s where the KM Webserver trigger and Keyboard Maestro iOS apps come in handy.
This a somewhat understated feature of Keyboard Maestro. I can configure the application to expose a webserver running on a specific port. Selecting a Webserver trigger will expose the macro through a web page to anyone on a browser via my local network. That’s pretty nice, but I also expose my server through the internet. That means with the proper port forwarding I can make macros available over the internet too.
I’m smarter than I look, so I don’t just allow anyone to run a macro remotely. On my server, Keyboard Maestro requires authentication through the web page to run a macro. Additionally, most of the macros are relatively benign.
One, more sinister, macro I built could come in handy if my Mac every went missing. As long as the account is online, I could trigger a macro to take a screenshot as well as snap an iSight photo. Both are added to my Dropbox account. It’s also easy enough to have it send upload a text file with IP and location information through Dropbox. I’m sure I could think of a number of other mean spirited things to do too, but honestly, this was more for proof of concept. I don’t anticipate ever needing to use it.
To build this macro, first create an Automator workflow for grabbing an iSight photo and saving it with a date and time stamp to the appropriate Dropbox folder.
Next, create a short macro that activates the screensaver and then turns off the volume (so they do not hear the audible countdown) . Finally, the macro executes the Automator workflow to grab the screenshot.
All of these activities happen when triggered remotely by the KM webserver.
Stairways Software makes a barebones iOS companion app. It’s pretty useless without the Mac application. However, it’s a tremendous tool when it is combined with the Mac application.
The iOS app performs two simple functions, provide the full list of macros available on your Mac (support for multiple machines too) and the ability to execute any macro displayed.
Before you get too excited, the KM iOS app doesn’t suddenly give you a bunch of text conversion macros or quick access to the pasteboard on iOS. It is more of a remote trigger for the macro as it would run on your Mac. So if your macro is set to paste a bunch of text into the front most window, that action will happen on your Mac, not your iPhone.
While KM on iOS will not replace TextExpander Touch or Pastebot it does provide for some very interesting options. You know those old-timey apps that could only sync from your iPhone or iPad to your Mac over wifi. It sure is a pain when I try to sync those apps and realize they are not currently running on my Mac (I’m looking at you Bento). KM to the rescue.
I configured a macro to start the application on my Mac and sibling macro to shutdown the application. If I try to sync Bento on my iPad and realize that it’s not running on my Mac, I can just fire-up KM on iOS and run the macro to launch Bento. Voilà, Bento is now ready to sync.
This trick is also handy for those times when you sit down to stream a movie to the AppleTV and realize iTunes isn’t running. And Now that iTunes can sync over the air with an iPad or iPhone, it’s more important than ever to remotely start iTunes.
