Sitecake is completely free as of today. In case you are not familiar with it, Sitecake is one of those nifty web page editors that allow people to edit the contents of their websites right on the page itself.
I am not really that smart, I just sit with problems longer than most people do.
Albert Einstein. The quote is from a Google+ post by Kent Fenwick about his experience while learning iOS programming from scratch.
This is beyond awesome, and thanks to Kickstarter for making these kinds of things possible.
I don’t consider myself to be one of the people that are always testing new apps, and getting to the next hip thing as soon as possible. There are certain categories of apps where I am constantly looking for something that will better fit me, and I will switch to a new thing in a heartbeat (migrating my data like it ain’t no thang), but the rest of the time I like to get the most out of the standard, built in apps; whether it’s my desktop computer, or my phone.
I am a to-do list freak. You only need to lose your mind once over a million things that you need to get done, before you start obsessively filing every little thing into some kind of a system. Trust me. I consider myself to be pretty acquainted with this type of software, so I can kind of tell if an app will fit my personal workflow or not really quickly. I’ve also helped design one that’s pretty cool if I can say so myself.
To–Do lists are definitely a category of apps in which I will try out anything that promises to fit my—extremely simple—personal task management system. When I got the new iPhone 4S I was really pumped about the Reminders app, and it turned out to be shit. Typical for Apple’s native apps (I’m looking at you, Notes). Then I found Pocket Lists for iPhone and I can say that I am really happy with how it works. The location based reminders are what did it for me. It’s a killer feature, and I’m beyond ecstatic that it’s even possible to do things like that in this day and age. Also, the natural language features are great; being able to write “Buy milk mon 12:30pm” and the app remove the “mon 12:30pm” bit from the task name and schedule it for me is nothing short of amazing.
A major plus is that it syncs with Google Tasks (and now even Toodledo), but now I need to find another app for my desktop computer that will let me handle my tasks comfortably while at the computer as well.
Another category of apps I am always on the lookout for are note taking apps. I was a sworn user of Simplenote, but I’ve moved on. I feel like the developers are putting their efforts somewhere else (maybe it’s text synchronization?) instead of improving the service. I’m now using Evernote, but I would be happy to move on to something else since this still feels really clunky. I’ve even ventured into making my own app but that ended as a disaster, so I’ll stick with other people’s software for now.
Recently I’ve made a big change in my life and got into exercising. I’ve also stopped shoving crap down my throat, and started watching what I eat. I’ve been looking for some way to track my meals, and tried out a couple of apps. Man, calorie counting sucks! It’s laborious, and requires much more discipline than I have, I’ll tell you that. Then I stumbled upon The Eatery—instant hit. It lets me snap a picture of my food, and roughly rate how healthy it is. That’s all I need! Additionally, other people can rate your food, and you can rate theirs as well, and the that flow has been designed is brilliant, it’s like crack cocaine. Hats off to the designers.
This is the one category where I think there still isn’t even an acceptable app, in terms of quality. Each and every app I have tried has me feeling like I’m doing chores when I want to log my workouts. I think there is room here for improvement, especially in the aspect of usability and user experience. I’d love to get a chance to take a crack at it (wishful thinking).
This is an excellent read for anyone who has anything to do with user experience, or anything to do with users/customers at all.
I am terrified of producing a lousy advertisement.
Letters of Note: I am a lousy copywriter by David Ogilvy. This really resonated with me, as my biggest motivator for work is the fear of failure.
Hastebin generates random URI slugs, however the algorithm doesn’t just spit out a hash of random characters, but a slightly more pronounceable string of consonant–vowel pairs. Very nice touch.
Also, if you didn’t know, Hastebin auto–detects the language you are typing (or pasting) in, however you can change that by adding an extension to the URI, so if you would want to look at my document in HTML, you would just replace .md with .html in the URI, and that’s it. The browser’s address bar is it’s main interface, how cool is that?!
A very useful list that will hopefully get updated often in the future so we can rely on the accuracy. For instance I didn’t know that vendor prefixes are no longer necessary for the border-radius property, and now I do.
The Verifiable problem still exists. It hasn’t been solved. There’s still chart junk. It’s got to be easier. But Verifiable was something I thought the world needed. SaneBox was something the world was asking for.
This is still one of the hardest things to make a decision on, for an entrepreneur: whether an idea is actually worth pursuing, or if it’s just something it would be interesting to work on.
I believe that the problem is that every email that comes into your inbox is painful because it is associated with an unknown amount of work, and you don’t know the amount of work until you open and read it.
“Your email is your to-do list” on Hacker News, quote is by Amy Hoy.
Web design isn’t about technology. Web design is graphic design, built on a interactive platform. It is graphic design with limitations, but mostly graphic design with endless possibilities. A graphic designer needs to understand the web. Information Architects states that web design is 95% typography, purely because web design is the same as graphic design – to present content the best way possible. The last five percent you ask? They’re about having a unison mindset, and being able to design for all surfaces.
Web design is graphic design.
Now we’re talking. Reformat. (via jarredbishop)
Excellent, well researched and backed up piece on error messages and their microcopy. What I took from it (and it’s a general rule I use myself) is: be witty when the stakes are low, take it seriously when they are high.
I can see this working like wonder with Workflowy. If only there was some way to sync these two.
via onethingwell.
Probably one of the most useful tools for anyone who designs for a screen. My favorite tool is the grid because of it’s ability to save gridlines to a file so you can share them around and bring up whenever you need them. Also, it’s just $19.99 in the App Store, go get it.
There is so much to be said in these pictures. The fight. The fear. Resignation. A realization that the work is harder than you thought, longer and your fatigue deeper. The realization that you chose this. Sought it out. Fought for it. That you are here. Now. And all that is left to do is press on.
