Allison House:
Beginners often hear fake it ‘til you make it, but scrappiness and transparency count for a heck of a lot. My mantra was whatever it takes. With an iterative approach and non-stop communication, newness wasn’t a stumbling block—it was just another creative problem to solve along the way.
I’ve always hated the faking-it approach. It’s hard to live that way and still enjoy the work.
From Om Malik:
Did you know at the time of signing up for Strava, that lovable cycling and running activity tracker is sharing real time user data and selling that to municipalities for 80 cents a year. In what universe does it make sense for the company to do that without asking, and have a company spokesperson blatantly admit to a Forbes reporter that, the default is opt-in — a malaise popularized by Facebook.
Katie and David were generous enough to invite me on Mac Power Users to talk about being saddled with a PC at work but using iOS and a Mac the rest of the time. Multi=platform work is a pain but there are great services that reduce the burden. I think it’s a common problem and I don’t have all of the answers, but I’ve lived that life for a decade and I’ve developed workarounds that I think are generally applicable.
I’ve written about this Sublime Text plugin before but it keeps getting better. Beyond the basics, like sending notes from ST3 to Evernote, this plugin will also list, download and convert to Markdown for editing. Two way syncing and editing of Evernote meta data likes tags is also supported through YAML headers. It also provides support for attachments. Since I last posted about it, now you can add attachments, autocomplete metadata, and search a note.
I switched from LaunchBar 5 to Alfred 2 almost 18 months ago. I like the convenience of creating custom actions in Alfred but I missed LaunchBar’s file actions. Now I’m a man caught between two worlds. LaunchBar 6 brings a nice redesign and a huge number of built-in actions. It also brings an opportunity for custom extensions.
The first custom extension I really found useful was Jay Gillibrand’s Pinboard actions. This extension adds global search, lookup by tag, list 25 most recent, and list all unread bookmarks (see screenshot above).
I liked the NYT summary of how crazy the Supreme Court is. It’s more neutral than I am.
You’ll probably want the next Field Guide by David Sparks. I like the new design and it’s about a topic that most people struggle with. There’s so much bad presentation technology out there. David has a lot of experience presenting and I suspect he knows a thing or two about doing it well.
I also really love that Apple recognizes how unique and thoughtful his work is. What an awesome URL.
I was given an opportunity to write about some things I really like over at 27goodthings.com. It’s a neat idea. Pick three of the best things from three different categories. I like cartoons, science fiction and being a total nerd. I think that came through.
I seriously love Eddie Smith’s writing:
I’m convinced the worst part of drowning is right now—the fear of it… the conscious mind’s simulation of the process of drowning. This uninformed, and hence fearful mind, imagines a frantic fight to stay above an infinitesimal line at which the bottom-most layer of our atmosphere sits on the top-most layer of water—that dividing line between the future, rising up infinitely high overhead and the deepest, darkest depths below.
Clark Goble has a quick summary of his thoughts about Swift:
Here are my initial thoughts. First it has most of the features I’d want in a language. It also incorporates a lot of C++ features like generics and overloading that I think can be abused. However overall I’m very excited about the language. More significantly it really allows a degree of interactive development in Xcode that is startling. (Going by the keynote demo and not anything NDAed)
