Five of those circles are the result of me selecting a site to visit. The rest are not. Frightening.
]]>Being a conservative, I obviously fall into the prescriptivist camp as a matter of principle, but certainly don’t as a matter of practice. Plus, it’s good to be on the same as DFW,[2] if only in terms of the former. I’m sure his grocery list employed better grammar than anything I’ve written.
I did find it kind of ironic to read about the various arguments between the two camps, especially those regarding the charges of elitism directed towards the prescriptivists, in a magazine that still insists on putting a diaeresis in words such as ‘preëmptive’, ‘naïve’, and ‘coöperate.’
]]>“You know why we have a problem there,” a Democrat said to ABC News. The reporter asked if the Democrat was suggesting many West Virginia voters are racist. Judd is white. “That’s right,” the Democrat said.
Yep. And since this was a closed primary in West Virginia, those racist voters are Democrats.
]]>User-interface design is, in some cases, life or death.
John Gruber is many things. Aircraft pilot is not one of them. A gross oversimplification if I ever saw one.
]]>I’m ashamed that sometimes I still do this.
Then Mark Barrett at Ditchwalk wrote a very long, quite scathing, and very persuasive counter-argument. I can’t resist quoting these three paragraphs:
There is no evidence in the entire history of the universe that using two spaces after a period has caused irreparable harm, gross insult, lasting disease, mass hysteria, or any negative effect on the human species whatsoever. Why would anyone care so deeply about something so meaningless? The first concern would obviously be an undiagnosed disease process of some kind, but I’m not a doctor so I don’t want to speculate about the mental effects of things like, say, syphilis. I do believe I am qualified, however, by virtue of age and experience, to suggest two motivations that might be fueling such rants, neither of which has anything to do with typography or the needs of the vast majority of people who write or read.
First, I am convinced that people who obsess about this issue genuinely feel they are being assaulted when they come across two spaces after a period. Nobody who did not experience a psychic blow when confronted by two spaces would ever make something like that up, for the simple reason that doing so would define them as loony. Assuming that some people do have a violent reaction, then — in the same way a person might recoil at a photograph of a small, harmless, good-for-your-garden spider, let alone the real thing — I think it’s understandable that they might want to prevent such trauma in the future.
Second, anyone who believes that their own irrational beliefs should be universally adopted by others clearly shows a tendency toward orthodoxy. Practitioners of orthodoxy around the world see no problem with bludgeoning others into submission, even as they remain blind to the extremity of their own views. Typographic fundamentalists are no different.
The whole article is awesome, as are the comments. Good on Mark for replying to most of them. Now I am no longer ashamed.
Although I could be a spineless lemming.
]]>When I first ran the script, all of my Pinboard tags then appeared in my Tags browser. And every time I add a new one, it gets saved locally. No chron job required if you are a smart man and use Hazel. Which I do…like Brett.
Yes, I like Brett Terpstra. You should read (and buy) his stuff if you’re a Mac user. And then you’ll like him too.
]]>As a business, Apple has a right to fear that moving the assembly work from China to the United States will entail raising labor costs so high as to make the company less competitive and profitable. But for it to say that it has no obligation to help solve America’s problems is completely unacceptable.
And Hackett’s reply was: “I really don’t know what to think about this article.”
I know exactly what to think. Complete garbage.
]]>I understand that my timeframe for holding out has a limit. I thought that limit would be defined by when Mobile Me goes away at the end of June and its replacement iCloud is Lion only. I only use Mobile Me for syncing calendars, contacts and bookmarks between my main computer and my iOS machines, but that is a big deal for me. Unlike when I was still using a PowerMac G5, and eventually a lot of apps that I used, or wanted to use, became Intel-only, there haven’t been a dearth of Lion-only apps that have caused me to upgrade.
Until yesterday. And now I’m on Lion.
WTF? Well, Brett Terpstra released version 1.4 of his Markdown preview app, Marked. Marked is a great app, that I don’t even use everyday, but the new feature set is incredible. If you write anything in Markdown, you should be using Marked. And that alone was enough for me to sit down and upgrade my machine to Lion. After about a day, here are my initial notes:
As for Mountain Lion? Definitely don’t need anything there…
]]>I’m 100% sure that airline pilots don’t have ejection seats. If they did, trust me when I say that you don’t want to fly on that airline.
]]>Yeah…how is that “dream” and “promise” working out so far? Oh, wait, I think another green tech firm just went bankrupt.
]]>I would pay a not-insignificant amount of money for an single app that I could open up and it would refresh Reeder, Tweetbot, Mail, Facebook, Instapaper, Longform, Readability, Flipboard, etc. One button…then take a shower, get dressed and the iPad is ready to go for hours of reading at work. Ahem, I mean when I’m on a plane or something.
I’m pretty sure even the capability to do this doesn’t exist in iOS, but I would be a happy camper if it did. If every text editing app can incorporate Text Expander snippets, surely this is in the realm of possibility.
I’m serious. I would pay serious coin for this timesaver.
]]>
Five of those circles are the result of me selecting a site to visit. The rest are not. Frightening.
]]>Along those same lines—the NCAA is an utterly corrupt organization that needs to be crushed— I stumbled upon Joe Nocera’s blog at the New York Times where he writes about this topic often.
I’m starting to feel a bit guilty about all those games I went to back in college.
]]>And Dan Lyons, formerly Fake Steve Jobs, just posted a doozy of a post where he calls Siegler:
“Matty the Angry Chihuahua”
“…a nasty little ankle-biter who has developed some level of expertise in launching ad hominem attacks”
“…by far the biggest click-whore in all of tech blogging, a guy whose only real skill, in fact, is the kind of page-view-chasing he now derides.”
“a laughingstock who is constantly mocked by readers who regard him as a laughable troll — a mean-spirited, egomaniacal buffoon who is not very bright but thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room.”
Lyons closes with this:
This is what now passes for “journalism” in Silicon Valley: hired guns and reformed click-whores who have found a way to grab some of the loot for themselves. This is perhaps not surprising. Silicon Valley once was home to scientists and engineers — people who wanted to build things. Then it became a casino. Now it is being turned into a silicon cesspool, an upside-down world filled with spammers, liars, flippers, privacy invaders, information stealers — and their grubby cadre of paid apologists and pygmy hangers-on.
It is sort of odd for Lyons to use ad hominem attacks to degenerate Siegler for the doing the same, but his overall argument —that Siegler and Mike Arrington are complete poseurs for pretending to be journalists when they write about companies they invest in — is a pretty strong one.
Siegler and Arrington brought this Lyon’s hate down by attacking the journalists that wrote not nice things about one of their companies (the whole Path controversy).
I’m curious to see if Siegler’s acolytes come to his defense as well.
UPDATE (15 Feb):
MG Siegler responds, but spends most his post lamenting about how irrelevant Lyons is these days. That could be true, but does it make the crux of Lyons’ argument any less so?
Michael Arrington responds also. Lot’s of “I’m the victim”, both before and after stating he isn’t the victim.
And this take by Tech Vibes is quite humorous, if you are in the Lyons camp in this whole throwdown.
* There’s Daring Fireball, DF — whose tiffs with Dan Lyons go waaaay back — again, Ben Brooks, Gruber yet again, Marco Arment, and both Marco and Shawn Blanc linking to one of Sieglar’s posts that was probably the straw that broke Lyons’ back and set him off. And that is just what Reeder still has in the last 12 days.
]]>
I’ve spent a fair amount of time the last few weeks testing different note-taking apps for the iPad. You can’t swing a dead a cat in the iTunes music store without hitting one these days, but I’ve done my due diligence and looked at most of the major ones. I’ve broken them down into two categories: notebook/sketchpads that can be used with a stylus (or your finger) and straight-up text editors.
TL;DR version: Noteshelf is tops in the ink category and both Nebulous Notes and Writing Kit are excellent text editors, especially if you are a Markdown user. All the app links below are to the developer’s websites, not the iTunes Store. That annoys me too.
Noteshelf
If an app is going to simulate writing on paper, it needs to feel like putting actual ink on paper, and Noteshelf is excellent in this department. It also has the most ink options with 17 colors and 21 pen widths. In addition, there are multiple highlighter options, and the ability to enter keyboard text and images. Noteshelf has also has an abundance of paper choices (to include an online store to purchase more) and the ability to export notes as either images or pdfs to multiple destinations, including Dropbox and Evernote. There is not an option to automatically sync notes to either.
Penultimate
Penultimate is one of the more popular note apps, and for good reason. It’s gel ink “simulation” is superb and it is the hands-down winner in terms of resembling actual paper. I also like it’s easy cut and paste function: just draw a circle around something and then move it (or copy) to another place on the page.
The app does sync to both Dropbox and Evernote, but my biggest issue with Penultimate is wrist protection. Most apps here use a draggable panel from the bottom that you can rest your wrist on (Noteshelf’s is excellent in that it automatically moves down as your writing does). Penultimate attempts to do this intelligently, based on the user’s setting for wrist position, but I still sometimes find myself erasing “smudges” from my wrist when I rest it on the screen.
Penultimate doesn’t have the features of Noteshelf—no keyboard input, no text zoom for writing smaller, no highlighters, and only three pen widths, the narrowest of which is a bit too wide for my taste—but if all you want is the best digital replication of writing in a Moleskin or Field Notes book, Penultimate, with it’s clean and unobtrusive UI, is still an excellent choice.
Notability
Notability is another popular app with a ton of features: multiple paper types and ink/highlighter widths and colors, text entry that includes a keyboard row with unique functions, a “smart eraser” that can recognize the entire stroke, robust note management options (categories and subjects), three interface themes, figure and web clip boxes and audio notes.
My biggest issue with the app is due to the very high ink and paper bar set by both Noteshelf and Penultimate. There is no texture to the paper and the “ink” strokes are pixelated, like they were drawn with Mac Paint, whereas the aforementioned look like you are writing with a gel ink pen. Your needs may vary, but this almost a deal-breaker for me.
Update (11 Mar 12): Notability just released an update that addresses its ink appearance. A huge improvement that makes this app a contender.
Notes Plus
Another ink, keyboard + audio notes application with Dropbox syncing. Its stand-apart feature compared to the rest is an integrated browser that allows for very easy clipping of elements from a web page for integration with your notes. It also has handwriting recognition capability available for an extra in-app purchase that should allow for your scribbles to be translated into text. I say ‘should’ because I did not pony up for it. Once cool feature is the app can recognize certain shapes and then convert your scribbled line, ellipse or polygon to nice actual shape, but this only worked about 50% of the time for me.
While Notes Plus does have a gel ink appearance, I found the writing engine to be not as responsive as the others. The app has some other unique innovations that I actually found distracting. Shapes converted as mentioned above can’t be erased with the eraser tool (which is the worst of the lot, and there is no way to clear an entire page.). You have to circle the entire shape, and then select delete from a pop-up menu. One more supposedly neato feature is the ability to line through a line of handwritten text and it will be automatically deleted. In my experience, this didn’t work, and I was left with crossed-out text that then had to be manually erased.
I not a fan of the Notes Plus UI either. Selecting tools from the toolbar is a hit-or-miss affair, and I don’t like the app’s silver-colored user interface or the choice of Optima (I think) as the UI typeface.
Note Taker HD
I have read numerous app reviews where the the quality of an app’s icon receives somewhat significant attention. I usually scoff at this level of pretension, but then I saw the Note Taker HD icon. Duuuuude. A poor artistic rendering of a hand against a puke green background. I can’t wait to finish this post so I can delete this off my iPad.
Note Take HD is another (pixelated) ink + text + graphic app with nothing stellar over the others except for its note management tools (tags, flags, etc) and wide variety of shape options, including built-in flowchart and architectural symbols, but if that is a significant portion of your work, I think they are better apps dedicated for that purpose. The app’s clunky UI leaves a bit to be desired as well, and it does not sync with Dropbox.
UPAD
Another unspectacular app with poor ink, no Dropbox syncing and not much else to offer, other than it also handles PDFs and makes photo frames.
Nebulous Notes
Dropbox-based text editors are almost as numerous as ink-based note apps, but writing in plain-text, even lengthy articles, is becoming more popular. Most serious writers that use plain text write it using Markdown, and Nebulous Notes has some outstanding tools that make plain-text editing easy on the iPad. There is an Markdown preview that can use custom CSS, Text Expander integration, 20 fonts (of which six are fixed-width) and a full-screen mode since those are all the rage these days.
Nebulous Notes’ best feature is its additional keyboard row that adds multiple text cursor navigation options, tabs, special characters, etc. These tools are configurable with a multitude of included macros, and users can add their own. I added the hash (#, used to denote headings in Markdown) and labeled it ‘H’, which is normally a “three tap” process with a normal keyboard. This row of macros and tools is scrollable as well, so you can add as many as you need and keep the most-often used macros on the left side and scroll right as required.
Writing Kit
The developers of Writing Kit had Markdown in mind when they wrote this app. Its Markdown preview mode (with custom CSS options) is the best I’ve seen and it includes a document outline based on headings. In addition to Text Expander support and 16 interface themes (with 13 fonts), Writing Kit has a great feature to navigate the cursor. Single taps in the left or right margin move the cursor by letter left or right and double taps move by word. There is an integrated browser that greatly aids in conducting research and this browser includes Instapaper integration. The app can export text files to a myriad of destinations, including Evernote, Tumbler, Pinboard and OmniFocus, among others.
Writing Pad has a keyboard toolbar as well, and it is tailor-made for Markdown editing. It includes shortcuts for headings, strong and emphasized text (note for the semantically pure; they are labeled ‘bold’ and ‘italic’), links, images, code blocks and blockquotes. The last two are for unordered and ordered lists. The only real down side here is this toolbar is fixed and not user-configurable. Even so, everything a Markdown writer would need is prety much there.
Daedalus Touch
Made by the same folks that make Ulysses for the Mac, Daedalus is a somewhat unique text editor, but not really appropriate for those that write in Markdown. There is no preview and while it has a configurable keyboard toolbar, it’s tools are things like tabs, semi-colon, slash, and forward delete, among others.
What separates Daedalus from the other apps here is it does away with the entire concepts of files and folders, and uses a stacks concept instead. Stacks have a title page and unlimited pages after that, although each page can have it’s own title. You navigate stacks by swiping left and right and pinch to drill down into stacks and pages. While this concept is novel, I actually found it distracting and more work intensive to get where I needed to go.
Notesy and Elements
I include these two together, since their feature sets are almost the same. They are both rather basic DropBox syncing text editors with Text Expander integration and Markdown previews. Neither have a keyboard toolbar or any other features that set them apart from Nebulous Notes or Writing Kit, other than both also have corresponding iPhone apps (of which I own both, but never use, as I use Simplenote for ultimate cross-device of small text files)
Whew. Time to delete some apps …and a bunch of folders from my Dropbox. After using all of these, here are the keepers:
*UPDATE (16 Feb): After spending some time getting a bit smarter on MultiMarkdown, I went back and looked at the Markdown previews of Nebulous Notes and Writing Kit for MMD-specific features such as cross references, footnotes and definition lists (I did not test tables.) Nebulous Notes ignored all three and Writing Kit missed the cross references and definition lists, but handled the footnotes like a champ.
*Because I wrote this one on a MacBook Pro using Byword and Marked, then posted with MarsEdit.
]]>Nate Anderson thoroughly disassembles RIAA CEO Cary Sherman’s New York Times op-ed, a blabbering, rage-filled diversion-fest so badly conceived and written that it makes me question the editorial standards of The New York Times.
Welcome to the club. We have T-shirts.
]]>