WriteRoom 3.0
Somebody should stop me.
Luckly WriteRoom 3.0 is not expensive: $9.99 in the Mac AppStore.
Tablets and News
Stephen M. Hackett quoting a Pew Research Center report:
Consuming news (everything from the latest headlines to in-depth articles and commentary) ranks as one of the most popular activities on the tablet, about as popular as sending and receiving email (54% email daily on their tablet), and more popular than social networking (39%), gaming (30%), reading books (17%) or watching movies and videos (13%). The only activity that people said they were more likely to do on their tablet computer daily is browse the web generally (67%).
The survey also finds that three-in-ten tablet news users (defined for this study as the 77% of all tablet users who get news at least weekly) say they now spend more time getting news than they did before they had their tablet. Just 4% say they spend less time while two-thirds (65%) spend about the same amount of time.
A third (33%) of tablet news users say they are turning to new sources for news on their tablet, sources they had not turned to on other platforms such as television or their desktop computer. And, more than four in ten (42%) say they regularly read in-depth news articles and analysis on their tablet.
These are very impressive numbers when you think that the whole publishing industry is having economical issues.
Technology and Design
Stephen Fry:
Henry Ford didn’t invent the motor car, Rockefeller didn’t discover how to crack crude oil into petrol, Disney didn’t invent animation, the Macdonald brothers didn’t invent the hamburger, Martin Luther King didn’t invent oratory, neither Jane Austen, Tolstoy nor Flaubert invented the novel and D. W. Griffith, the Warner Brothers, Irving Thalberg and Steven Spielberg didn’t invent film-making. Steve Jobs didn’t invent computers and he didn’t invent packet switching or the mouse. But he saw that there were no limits to the power that creative combinations of technology and design could accomplish.
KeyStroke: Customizable Shortcuts for Safari
This is just a fantastic Safari extension. No need to move your hands away from the keyboard anymore. Thanks Brett Terpstra for the hint.
Information: Paper vs Digital
From an old Make issue:
[…] our real challenge today is not to use less paper but to keep less paper.
For ubiquitous capture, planning, and brainstorming, paper’s tought to beat. For storage, searching, and editing, the point goes to digital.
Considering information works the same way as code—written once, read many times—an optimal system should allow the usage of both mediums. For a while I thought Livescribe could be the solution. But in the end it didn’t work for me.
If Google Reader Changes…
Considering there was never an official API, if Google Reader will make radical changes, does it mean that it will break all the apps we came to love—Reeder (Mac, iPhone, iPad), Pure Reader, Mr Reader, River of News? That’ll be just a new way for Google to piss off some more users.
I couldn’t find a better way to say this than MG Siegler’s comment about Google products:
And I’ve spoken with that team a number of times behind the scenes about other issues. Nothing ever gets fixed. In fact, it often gets worse.
Multimarkdown Composer: Yet Another Mac Markdown Editor
If you thought we’ve already got enough Markdown editors on Mac, just add another one to your list Multimarkdown Composer. This one comes directly from Fletcher Penney, the guy who extended Markdown into MultiMarkdown. At first glance the app looks like an extended version of TextEdit with support for syntax coloring and auto-generating syntax. And it integrates very well with Marked.
As a user of a custom Markdown/MultiMarkdown syntax, I’m missing the option to configure MultiMarkdown Composer processor. But I hope it will come with a later version.
Multimarkdown Composer is selling at a special release $7.99 price in the App Store.
How Does Google Make Money?
Dan Frommer:
In a word: Ads.
This past quarter, Google generated $9.7 billion of total gross revenue. […] Google says it paid out $1.8 billion last quarter to AdSense partners, and another $400 million to “certain distribution partners and others who direct traffic to our website.”
Google is making aprox. 5 times more than content producers by indexing their content. It is the living proof that content aggregation can be profitable.
Hidding Purchased Apps in App Store
If you are playing with a lot of applications either on the Mac or your iOS devices, the list of purchased applications just gets longer and longer. But I noticed that you can remove apps from the App Store:
Was this feature there before?
iTerm2 Tips & Tricks
Probably known by many of you, but some of these were new to me:
- Search: Cmd+f
- Autocomplete: Cmd+;
- Paste history: Cmd+Shift+H
- Instant replay: Cmd+Alt+B
- iTerm2 Exposé: Cmd+ Alt+E
- Support for many of the readline bindable commands:
- Ctrl+a: beginning of line
- Ctrl+e: end of line
- Ctrl+f: forward 1 char
- Ctrl+b: back 1 char
- Ctrl+l: clear screen
- Ctrl+p: previous history
- Ctrl+r: history reverse search
- Ctrl+d: delete current char
- Ctrl+h: delete previous char
- Ctrl+w: kill the word behind point
- Ctrl+k: kill text from the point to the end of the line
I’ve also defined a go to beginning/end of a word.
Any other tricks you know?
Growl 1.3 in MAS: Paying to Break Compatibility
Paying $1.99 for Growl 1.3 to break compatibility with quite a few programs.
Trillian needs an update if it’s not working. Also make sure you have the Growl preferences enabled in their preferences.
Skype is going to need an update from Skype to make Growl notifications work again.
The list can go on for a while. And that’s not the only issue with this release.
I went back to 1.2.2.
Update: Just to clarify, I was not posting this because I payed $1.99 or because the new version is basically broken—both these issues would be solved by an upgrade. But the thing that put me off was reading that Growl’s devs consider normal to break the app protocol—Growl is useful only as long as other apps are using it— and release it in the wild without giving a chance to the app developers to upgrade— actually the new Growl SDK is not even released. And all these leaving aside the customers’ experience.
