Jumpcut
Jumpcut is a little menubar/hotkey OS X app that expands your clipboard to up to 50 items. Extremely simple, eminently useful.
What's in my Menubar?
Starting from the left…
Sparrow
The primary mail app I use on both my Mac and on my iPhone.
Hazel
It's my digital Roomba! Automatically cleans folders (such as your overstuffed Desktop and Downloads folders) based on rules you choose. Tons of hooks to customize exactly what you need.
Fantastical
Awesome little app that gives me pretty a full-featured Calendar complement right from the menubar. It uses natural language input and does a fair job at parsing values into fields such as even location, start and end dates, start and end times and invitees. I've had minor quibbles at times with how it works with Exchange mail, but overall it's quite solid.
Codekit
If you're a front-end web developer who uses CSS preprocessors such as SASS or LESS, this is for you. Set watch folders to automatically compile your LESS files, minify your JS and optimize images, as well as a range of other automagical stuff.
Slingshot
I must use this app about 30 times a day. Here's what it does: Click the menubar icon, choose Capture Screenshot, then draw out a rectangle on your desktop. It automatically saves the screenshot as a PNG, saves it to a preset destination in Dropbox (or Imgur, up to you) and populates your clipboard with the publicly sharable link. Yes, a ton of other apps do almost the same thing, but this one does it the best, as far as I'm concerned.
Dropbox
Essential. Enough said. I pretty much use this as my cloud drive for all my documents.
CloudApp
This one is similar to Dropbox and Slingshot, except it works slightly differently. With CloudApp, I can drag a file or group of files to the menubar icon, at which point it starts uploading the files to the service. The cloud icon acts as a progress indicator and a bell rings when the upload is done. At that point, you again get a publicly sharable link that populate your clipboard. CloudApp also has a companion iOS app to access uploaded files. It's the easiest way to quickly share a file with someone that's NOT a screenshot.
Transmit
My FTP editor of choice, by the fine folks at Panic. Despite minor quibbles, I wholeheartedly recommend it over any other OS X FTP client.
Tunnelblick
I frequently need to use a VPN, and Tunnelblick is the best OpenVPN GUI I've found for OS X.
Guiding Users From Your Site to Your App
Simple provides a smart way to guide a user from your app's marketing website to the app itself – offer to text the app store link to their phone.
Web Typography Links
A few typographic resources for web designers and developers have caught my eye recently.
Beautiful Web Type
A very convincing showcase of the best that Google Web Fonts has to offer. Yes, Google Web Fonts has a ton of crappy fonts available, but this site will help you see through the debris and find the gems.
Fonts in Use
A website and app that acts as a collective gallery for typography specimens found in the wild. Categorized by industry1, format, and typeface. Recently they've added the ability to create your own custom collections as well as upload your own specimens.
FitText
A jQuery plugin by the nice guys at Paravel. FitText makes font-sizes flexible. It is especially useful when attempting a fluid or responsive layout. It enables you to achieve scalable headlines that fill the width of a parent element. I used it recently on a project that will be released soon.
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I wish more web design galleries were more industry focused. I tire of seeing galleries all stuffed full of portfolio sites. ↩
The Answer is Yes
I think an even better solution would be to remove the password completely, allowing users to login with only an email address. Each time a user needs to login, they enter their email address and receive a login link via email.
Interesting solution by Ben Brown to the problems with traditional log-in system for web applications. Essentially, the flow would go like this:
- Enter email address or user name 1
- Email is sent to the the user's email address with an authenticating log-in link
- User clicks link and is logged in to the application.
Read the full article since you inevitable have a litany of "what ifs" running through your brain now – most of mine were considered and answered.
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This could be a typeahead search in many cases, since usernames are public information in many social web applications. ↩
Irrelevant Flea Market
The Mac App Store is in significant danger of becoming an irrelevant, low-traffic flea market where buyers rarely venture for serious purchases. And I bet that’s not what Apple had in mind at all.
I agree with Marco that the way the sandboxing rules are implemented seems to be doing much more harm than good to Apple, Mac developers and Mac users. I think he's especially right about the potential effects on iCloud adoption:
This even may reduce the long-term success of iCloud and the platform lock-in it could bring for Apple. Only App Store apps can use iCloud, but many Mac developers can’t or won’t use it because of the App Store’s political instability.
Personally, I think iCloud is a confusing mess. Laudable in its aims, but shoddy in its implementation. Apple has traded one problem (the average person's perceived lack of comfort with the file system) for another (a system where there is no canonical location the user can access).
Sometimes a Moped is the Right Vehicle
The Nexus 7 is the best of its breed, but it also doesn't give me any evidence that the breed is one that really holds all that much promise. Aside from reading books, I think it's pretty clear that a 7-inch tablet is not preferable to a larger one like the iPad or the upcoming Microsoft Surface. It's like comparing a moped to a car. Both get you from point A to point B, and it's not bad for what it is, but they're not really at the same level as far as capabilities go.
I haven't used or seen the Nexus 7 in person, so I don't have any personal feelings based on actual usage regarding the Nexus 7, but the size of it is most of what appeals to me.
I find the iPad to be too big and too heavy for what I typically want to use it for—reading and gaming1.
To carry the car/moped analogy, sometimes a moped is the best form of transportation when you value efficiency, fit, and maneuverability. Mopeds go places cars can't either2.
I'm hoping the iPad 7" rooms are true, because I think there's something to that form factor.
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Browsing the web on the iPad is great, though, especially with Reeder. ↩
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I live on an Island that is served by a ferry system where mopeds always load first and cost less than vehicles. I'm guaranteed to be on the the ferry no matter when I arrive, whereas cars have to wait up to two or three ferries during rush hour. ↩
Sublime Text 2 Pro Tips
Great tips from Alan Meier. Some of these are pretty well known, but some are gems I'd never figured out, like this one:
Duplicate current line: “Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+D duplicates line/selected text”
This one:
Jumping between word segments: ”If you hold down control, you move by word segment - this is camel-case (and underscore) aware. So, if I am at the front of the word “cakeParty”, I can move to between ‘e’ and ‘P’ by holding control and pressing the right arrow key.”
And especially this one:
Quick word editing: “Cmd + d selects the current word. Subsequent Cmd + d presses will select the following instance of the word for editing. Makes it easy to do things such as renaming a local variable or changing both the opening and closing element of a HTML tag.”
Tattly Turns 1, Lessons Learned
Never hesitate to challenge a status quo of a product or service that already exists. Put your own spin on it, stamp it with your personality and you might redefine an entire industry.
Great reminder. There are so many industries ripe for disruption — even cottage industries like temporary tatoo makers aren't immune to this fact. This should be incredibly motivating to anyone with even a slight entrepreneurial spirit.
Airplay and Airport Express
At about 9pm tonight, Devon and I sat down to watch a movie we rented on iTunes. Our set-up consists of a projector with a Mac Mini attached via HDMI. Across the room, we have an Airport Express connected to our sound system.
We start up the movie and I look for the Airplay icon to send the audio to our sound system via the Airport Express. When I click the button, my Airpot Express is nowhere to be found. Huh?
A couple hours of Googling and forum-reading later and I find that it is no accident. Apple does not support sending movie audio from iTunes to an Airport Express.
For us, this means either stretching an audio cable 12' across our living room to plug into the Mac Mini, or completely changing our furniture around to physically locate the amplifier and speakers close to the Mac Mini. Not acceptable.
You might think Airfoil, from Rogue Amoeba, which lets you stream any system audio to Airport Express, would be the solution. Airfoil is a fine app that has proven extremely useful to me over the years. However Apple adds a two second delay to audio tracks for video playback. Airfoil compensates for this delay with their own video player, however, iTunes DRM content (like the movie we rented) isn't supported.
It's now 1:00am and I'm back to square one. I cannot play my iTunes-rented movie using my Mac Mini or Apple TV while sending the audio to my Airport Express, and there seems to be no good technical reason why this shouldn't work, especially considering how much hype Apple has given Airplay.
