TweetMarking

I know I haven’t blogged in ages - no idea why really, I just haven’t been inspired.

That is until now. I’ve been using a brilliant service called TweetMarker for a while. I like to read tweets just as much as the next guy but I can never be bothered to ‘remember’ where I was in my timeline. What a pain to scroll back and forth to look for tweets I’ve read or not. I treat my timeline a bit like I treat my RSS feed. I want to be able to read or at least see all tweets that come up - not just the top ones.

Manton Reece has built a brilliant tool that lets you sync your timeline. I read tweets on the iPhone, iPad, the office laptop, my home laptop and occasionally on the web - how the hell would I keep track of where I am without TweetMarker. All the great Twitter apps for iOS and OS X now supports TweetMarker - Tweetbot, Twitterrific etc (for full list see here).

You can donate money to TweetMarker or you can now subscribe to the new service that Manton just released called TweetMarker Plus. It’s a new search and web-based timeline that allows you to see your TweetMarked (making up verbs left right and centre) timeline and most importantly you can search that timeline.
- Ever see something in your timeline and then try to search twitter for it? It’s impossible. Now you can search just your own timeline and get the most relevant results instead.

You can read a much better review of how all of this works over at Macstories.net here.

I just wanted to get the word out - I love it when developers create a great service and charge money for it. I know it sounds strange but that way I feel more confident that I’ll be able to use a great service and not be forced to view ads or worry that it might go away anytime soon. I realise that my $2/month (that’s the subscription price that I’ve failed to mention until now) isn’t enough to keep this guy going but I’m confident that more people will find this service as awesome as I do.

Here’s a link to get to TweetMarker Plus

That’ll be all for now.

Don't Be A Free User (Pinboard Blog) →

minimalmac:

What if a little site you love doesn’t have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn’t take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.

So, today I recorded a future episode of the podcast about this very theme (before I saw this post). I’m a happy paying user of Pinboard, one that even pays the extra money for the archiving feature. Not only do I believe this idea to be true but, as I announce in that upcoming show, I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is by sending, anonymously, cash to a service I use and love daily that has no outward discernible business model.

Here is my idea:

What if, 1% of the users of a particular free service of 36 million clients and growing, were to decide to drop $10.00 cash every month into an envelope and mail it to said service? What if that envelope had no return address? Perhaps there was an note inside that begged them to create a model to let us pay them to use the service. To make sure the service continued on once the bubble inevitably bursts and the VC’s take their payout and fly to the Grand Caymans.

My guess is that such a service would have to keep the money. Perhaps they would go through a couple of months of having their offices flooded with 300,000+ ten dollar bills. This might get to be a hassle so, perhaps, maybe, they finally get the hint and have a few million dollars of starting cash to launch a way for us to pay directly for this thing we use and love. 

Crazy, right? Yep.

So, here is the address I’m sending my unmarked cash with the note in the envelope with no return address.

Tumblr, Inc., 35 East 21st Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY, 10010

I welcome those that care as much as I do to do the same.

Update: Forgot to mention, and I never ask this… Please reblog the shit out of this one.

My new setup

I just started a new job and I could not resist posting my desktop setup. It really is only a picture of what my work desktop looks like but I like it.

It’s clean and distraction free. As my colleagues have noticed I am thrilled about the beautiful screen - it’s a pleasure to work with (and so are my colleagues). The office is great in general - the open space, the wooden floor, the white surfaces. It’s like being back in Sweden.

All thats missing from this picture now is some coffee from North Tea Power - I wouldn’t be productive without it.

For what’s actually included in the “setup”. It’s a MacBook Air connected to a Thunderbolt display. A bluetooth keyboard and trackpad. After growing up with PCs and getting used to the fact that the mouse is always better than the trackpad, I have completely reversed my opinion. As I spend so much of my time at work using a browser I don’t have a need for the precision of a mouse that might be needed in Photoshop for example. Instead the trackpad has proven to be of much better use to me. Instead of having to constantly move my arm around, I can just move the trackpad to a comfortable position for my arm and it will stay there while only moving my fingers and possibly my wrist. The glass trackpad is very responsive and if I ever needed another reason it’s the multi-touch gestures. They are so handy when browsing and managing multiple open windows & apps.

Bottom line, I like my new setup.

Apple practices inception

Let’s try this again. I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to write about my switch from PC to Mac and I’m not sure I’ll ever have this article fully formed. Still, I’m trying once more. I don’t know if it’s maybe this 3 hour long train journey or the amazing album by Mumford & Sons in my ears but I feel like I need to do some writing. I’ve spent the weekend in London and my train is now making it’s way back to Manchester. I’m sitting in a more or less empty carriage with my feet up on the seat in front of me and the iPad leaning against the table. For some reason my motion-sickness has taken a break and I’m able to type away in PlainText for what would be the first blog post in a while. I haven’t exactly taken a break, I’ve just not had my thoughts fully formed and so I’ve ended up with a bunch of partially written posts in my ‘Blog posts’ directory. Yeah I know, I don’t even have a ‘Drafts’ directory… how organised am I?

Voice in my head: “Get to the point Joe”

Right. So what am I doing? Why am I so obsessed with using these Apple products? Why can I not stop talking or even thinking about these way too expensive prices of tech? What’s the matter with me? I don’t know how it started. All I know is that at some point towards my final exams in uni, the newly released unibody MacBooks caught my attention and changed the way I think about computers and computing. It’s worth pointing out that one of the things I love is getting people turned on to (not by) technology. Instead of being in the way of what needs to get done, they can help and make the job easier. I love when that penny drops and someone gets it. And now we get to part of my point. That’s what Apple is doing. They’re reducing that divide between people and technology. I recently re-watched Inception and something they said stuck with me. In order for inception to work it had to be the purest version of an idea. Something fundamental and simple. For me that’s what the Mac (any Apple product really) is going for. The purest idea of what a computer is and what it means to use one. They’re not there yet but they’re trying and it shows - and the competitors are far behind. Take away all the layers and efforts. “Just work”. That’s what stays with the user.

I’m waffling I know but I’m formulating my thoughts here. There’s not much editing going on with my writing. I just want it all out there. Whatever I’m thinking - you’re reading

So why change computer? Why spend so much money on these “expensive” products? Where does all that money go? So if you’re a geek like me then you might appreciate that there is a really great Mac community out there. There’s a culture of people putting great thought and effort into their Mac apps. Words like simplicity and usability spring to mind. Everything I use is made to work really well and is most of the time supported really well. I always feel that if I have a problem or a question about any software that I’m using that I’m only a tweet or an email away. Apps are most often made by smaller teams of people who care about their users - it’s an nice change I tell you. If you’re less computer savvy then you might be comforted by the fact that you can always get help with you’re computer. And don’t mean from some person on the other side of the word, after what would feel like a decade in a phone queue at some inconvenient time. No I’m talking about face-to-face help from an actual human being who can explain to you exactly how to do things and who most of the time will fix whatever problem you have on the spot without you having to send away your precious tech for what’s usually 2 or 3 weeks. No one thinks about that when comparing prices… Then there’s also the little things. Personally I love the MagSafe power connector. For those who don’t know, it’s the power cable for the laptop which connects with a magnet to the laptop. That way, if you trip on the power cord you won’t pull the computer of the desk into an often fatal crash-landing but instead the power cord will just pop out with a most satisfying clicky sound and you can proceed to pretend that you meant to do that tripping movement and act cool. I mean how freakin’ clever is that. Little things like that makes you appreciate how much thought has gone in to every single detail of you laptop. That makes me feel confident at least. Knowing that it’s all so well thought out. And if you actually do a side by side comparison, matching each component on a PC and a Mac you’ll find that there’s not actually that big of a price difference.

I think I need to wrap this up. This article isn’t meant to make you change your mind here and now. I’m just venting some of my thoughts on this subject and if I don’t post this then I’ll just keep bugging my friends & family about this subject forever. I won’t write some fancy conclusion, I’m just going to stop writing now. My train should be getting into Manchester soon. I’ll post this in the morning. But think about Inception - watch the film again and see if you can’t appreciate the idea of the purest form. The most basic idea. A computer shouldn’t be this rough tool that you have to train yourself to use and be an expert to make use of. It should be easy, simple, fun, and for everybody.

You can find me on twitter, I’m @jszotten and if you want to comment on any of my writing, grammar or other I’ll be happy to hear you out, 140 characters at a time.

Out of touch

I realise that I haven’t posted anything here in quite a while. For the last month or so I have been working abroad in Denmark and so I haven’t had much time to spend on the writing. In addition, I have also moved from one flat to another and so I’m having trouble taking my internet with me. This doesn’t really affect my writing or posting but it does mean that whenever I come home on the weekends I spend less time on the computer and so there are fewer things like news are events that inspire my writing. It’s not as if I’m completely cut off from my internet addiction. I still have my iPhone and I did go out and get a 3G stick for those times you just have to use the internet on a laptop…

Either way, excuses excuses. Main thing is, I have not been writing even though I would like to.

I will do better, I will make an effort.

Keep this site in your feed reader and you’ll see it will eventually start populating your feed with articles. Just have some patience.

iPad app recommendations

It was brought to my attention that with my unnatural love for the iPad i’ve still not written anything much about the apps that I use. There are guides all the time but each is different depending on the different ways we find this £400 piece of glass and aluminum useful.

So let’s first point out a few things. Even though I still have a laptop I’m finding myself using the iPad more and more. Now that I’m going traveling with work for a fair few weeks we’ll see how it holds up as a laptop replacement, as opposed to just an accompaniment.

Reading

In my spare time I read a lot of feeds and I’m not sure I would if it wasn’t for the great experience I get on the iPad. I much prefer it to the laptop. So i use Reeder for iPad. It’s sold separately from its iPhone brother for the very reasonable price of £2.99. It sports a grid view where all your feeds are displayed as thumbnails. Once you’ve selected a feed, you’re presented with a two pane view (in landscape mode). You can select an article to read and when you get to the end you can keep scrolling and it will nicely switch to the next article. When you’re done with your particular feed or folder you can pinch it and it will go back to the grid view. If you pinch-open a folder it will animate similarly to the Photos app when you open an album. This is good for when you want to quickly check which feeds are in a specific folder. If you do the same to an individual feed you will instead see a small list of the latest articles, similar to what you will be presented with once “fully” selected. Reeder is fully integrated with Readability and it also supports Instapaper and loads of other great services.

My second most used app is Instapaper. All the articles I find but don’t have time to read I save to Instapaper. There [used to be] a free version for the iPhone app but the paid one is universal and still very affordable (£2.99). Not only does it keep your saved articles for offline reading in a distraction free environment, it now also has a social aspect where if you’re looking for new articles to read you can find out what you’re friends are reading and there’s an Editor’s Choice full of interesting reading material. It was as if Instapaper and the iPad were made for each other.

Writing

Now if you instead of reading want to do some writing then I can recommend PlainText. It’s a free app with an un-intrusive ad that can be removed with an in-app purchase. It keeps your text documents fully up to date with Dropbox sync and the interface is once again very distraction free. It’s good for both long form writing and quick note-taking. One of my favorite functions is a small and seemingly insignificant feature but I absolutely love it. As you probably know if you’re reading this article, the iPad doesn’t have any navigation keys and that’s normally ok. However when typing a lot it can get tedious using your fingers for correcting minor spelling mistakes mid sentence. PlainText solves this by using the white space on either side of your text. Tap on the left hand side and the “cursor” moves to the left and same on the right. This can save you a lot of grief instead of using the sometimes annoying magnifying glass, accidentally selecting text etc. I love this feature. There are some standard features like word count and AirPrint as well as TextExpander support.

Other apps I use that are worth mentioning:

Flipboard(free) - a beautiful social media magazine which presents all you’re different feeds in a magazine-like interface where you can flick through pages of your Twitter, Flickr or Instagram feed as well as some nicely curated Flipboard feeds.

1Password Pro(£8.99) - Keeps all your passwords, logins and wallet items close at hand while still being password protected and encrypted. It syncs nicely with it’s Mac or PC equivalent and it even supports Dropbox sync.

Epicurious(free) - A well designed cookbook and recipe finder with beautiful pictures and the ability to create shopping lists from recipes. If you want to be able to sync it with it’s iPhone counterpart, you can pay £1.19 for that as an in-app purchase.

Tripit is great if you travel a lot. You send all your booking confirmations to this app and it will keep track of them for you. It will give you all and any details you can think of regarding your trip including a map of how and where you’re going. The app is free in the app store.

Prompt - If you’re a geek like me and spend some of you’re time in a terminal then this is the app for you. Brought to you by the guys at Panic, some very experienced developers have definitely made this app with the right mindset. It’s simple yet powerful. Set up of your favorite connections is easy and you can even set an initial prompt at startup. It has a keyboard where you can customise 4 of the keys to your most used characters that might not be a part of the main keyboard. Get it for £2.99.

Tiny Wings - For the casual gamers who might be tired of Angry Birds this is for you. It is an iPhone app but it scales remarkably well on the iPad. Fly through beautiful landscapes and complete different objectives along the way. Try it for £0.59 - It will hardly break the piggy bank.

I think I will leave it that. You’ve now got a pretty good idea of what I use on a daily basis. Apps are very subjective but for me the criteria is pretty simple. Does it do what I need? Does it look good while doing so and most of all, is it useful not just from a functional point of view but is it easy and comfortable to use? As you might notice almost all of these apps are paid apps. I’ve found that when you’re looking for quality in function and design you almost always have to pay some kind of premium and I’m quite happy to do that. For more details I refer you to my What would I buy first post.

Pablo(g): Differences between the UK and Sweden, part 1 →

Pablo writes about culture clashing in UK. A lot of his points might be specific to the north but it’s a funny read.

TV or Monitor? Let’s erase that line

So it has now been a few weeks since I bought my first TV¹ and I thought I would share my initial thoughts.

Apart from image quality and my screen size preference I had a few simple criteria. I wanted to be able to play video from a USB device and obviously I wanted to be able to connect my laptop via HDMI. Lucky for me these are the most standard attributes for modern TVs so I would not have a hard time satisfying my geek needs.

I wanted share my thoughts and experiences about how I’ve been using the TV since I got it. Firstly, I contemplated not even buying an areal cable and I’ll tell you why. I can’t remember when it was but at some point I just stopped watching television. The constant interruptions bothered me too much. Don’t get me wrong, I love TV shows, mainly fiction but I don’t mind documentaries. I know there is more… There’s news, talk & game shows but most of all there is reality TV. And there we have it - my worst (to use Siracusa’s words) peeve with TV is reality TV. It’s even higher on my hate-list than TV ads and thats saying something. It is all that is wrong with TV summed up in one massive genre. I could go on forever about the subject but I won’t. Instead I’ll say that if it was up to me, there would be no areal connected to the TV in my apartment. However as it is I’m not living here alone so it’s there. Personally I’m happier with less cables and I wouldn’t have to think twice about chucking out the areal. Me? I just want to be able to watch downloaded and steamed media and that’s it. If I want to watch a TV series I will download it or stream it. iTunes rentals would be perfect if my internet connection would permit it but for now I’m ok with lesser quality steaming. I connect the TV to the laptop as an external monitor and I can watch whatever I like whether it’s YouTube in a browser or a film on my hard drive. Either way, if it was up to me the TV’s built in digital HD box wouldn’t be anything more than a spec in the information booklet. Mind you, that wasn’t what I thought when I bought it. I thought I’d be so happy about being able to watch Full HD TV and that would dazzle my eyes - How wrong was I.

Now apparently TVs these days come with LAN ports and mine was no different. When I asked in the store about it I was told that I needed to purchase an extra £50 WiFi adaptor just to be able to use it. That wasn’t worth it for me but that didn’t stop me trying to just plug in a cable from my router just for kicks. Well it turns out that worked perfectly fine. The TV comes loaded with the standard YouTube, Twitter and Facebook “apps” as wells as a few streaming services that I’ve never heard of. It also comes with BBC iPlayer. That was a pleasant surprise for me since it’s yet another TV “channel” that I can watch without interruptions or ads - Perfect I thought.

Well it turns out that after all these things that a TV,can do I still hardly use any of these functionalities. When I set up the TV I plugged in an external hard drive via USB. It has some movies and series on it and I’ve never bothered loading it up with new stuff. I plugged in an HDMI-to-mini-display cable which connects to my computer when I feel like it and finally there’s an audio cable for my “superior” stereo sound. That’s it! Satisfied!

I haven’t been hooked on the latest “I-think-I-can-sing-and-dance-so-I’ll-make-a-fool-of-myself-on-(inter)national-tv show”. If I’m bored I don’t turn on the TV to watch the constant re-runs of Friends. I don’t even watch the news on TV. I spent a night watching Million Dollar Baby, a really good Clint Eastwood film but it took freakin’ ages to finish it because there was a commercial break every 10 minutes.

Screw that, my TV is just one big-ass external monitor. And when I can afford to buy all my films and TV shows on iTunes I’ll hop down to my local Apple Store and get myself an Apple TV and stream the whole lot instead. Hopefully by that time there will be a LoveFilm app and my life will be complete. I won’t have to buy content, I can just stream it live - legally. As my good friend Mikki would say, “Result and a half!”.

Don’t spend your free time watching reality TV and advertisemenst. Find yourself some quality films or shows and enjoy.

If you need tips or inspiration why not check out my friend Pablo’s site. He’ll point you in the right direction.

UARRR Logo →

I love the logo on the UARRR.org website.

Too bad he writes in german, I would love to know what he’s writing about.

Sharing the iPad

As the iPad is slowly (or not so slowly?) creeping into the average persons living room it has been said that in a lot of ways it is replacing the average persons laptop. Many of the standard uses such as email, browing and watching videos all work great on an iPad. Even simple word processing work well and if you have a bluetooth keyboard you could even knock out a few essays. The one thing that has been mentioned against the iPad as a replacement to the home/family computer is how it’s not really made for being shared. An iPad is connected to one iTunes account, contacts are synced with one computer or MobileMe account and you can’t have doubles of any one app.

So why am I writing about this then? Well since I got my iPad 2 I have been the primary user however one of the first thing I did was to create a special folder just for my girlfriend. First off was email. I realise you can have multiple email accounts so technically she could have her own but it would mean a lot of confusion using the same app for both of us. I got around this by just creating a homescreen shortcut in her folder for gmail since that’s what she is using. This worked ok for the most part however since I’m also using gmail and for sure other google services, whenever I use the browser for any of those services I have to log her out and myself in, and she is faced with the same problem when accessing her email. Just in time for this problem to arise, my attention was turned to a new iOS browser called Terra. It has loads of great functions but most important it keeps it’s own data, meaning no more logging out and in for either of us. The browser solves the majority of our problems but it doesn’t have to stop there. Pretty much every basic function on the iPad has been solved similarly or better by another app. There are calendars and address books etc etc.

Another example is RSS. Me and my girlfriend have very particular interests and obviously we really want to be reading each others feeds. Instead we have an RSS reader each¹ - problem solved. Obviously if you like the same reader app you’ll have to fight for who gets to use which but if at least one of you isn’t fussy (not me) then you’re golden.

Fair enough, you have to buy/download more apps and both of you can’t just use it out of the box but still. The app market is filled with some amazing tools that can make your iPad a family tablet and not just another personal belonging.

Also, if you mind using someone elses iTunes account why not just create a new one with a “family” credit card or just sign up using an iTunes gift card. It’s not as easy as account switching on a Mac but hey, it’s only been a bit more than a year. The tablet market is young and we’re not sure how we’ll be using these devices in the future. Perhaps in a few years everyone will be walking around with a tablet and this problem will be non-existant.

Until then, share the fun and enjoyable experience that is the iPad.

How Osama Bin Laden Changed America →

John Gruber:

“Speaking of The New Yorker, David Remnick’s piece this week on Bin Laden is the best take I’ve seen.”

Well worth a read

via Daring Fireball

I Love Stars | Potion Factory →

I want to thank minimalmac for introducing me to this great little Mac app.

minimalmac:

This helpful little utility does One Thing Well™. When a song is playing in iTunes, it displays in the menubar and allows you to adjust the rating of the current song playing. Stop playing the song, the menu stars disappear. A fantastic friction-free addition to the thoughts outlined in my previous post. Only $0.99 in the Mac App Store.

(Hat tip to Matt Christensen on Twitter for pointing me to this.)

Also worth mentioning is that even though this app lives in your menu bar you can set it to hide while not playing music. A great way to keep your menu bar free from unnecessary clutter. You can also tell it to notify you if a song that you’re listening to hasn’t been rated yet. Thanks again Patrick Rhone from minimalmac. If you haven’t yet checked out his site then I recommend you do that as well.

Hidden Instacast feature

I recently switched from using iTunes podcast subscriptions to Instacast. Instead of having to connect my iPhone to my laptop every time I wanted to sync podcasts, Instacast can download them automatically via WiFi and 3G and they have their own podcast player built in.

This probably isn’t much news to most people but I wanted to share a neat little trick that the developers told me about. Until now, if I loose my connection and my download stops I have had to restart the download from scratch. This isn’t necessary, “If the download is loading, swipe to the right and the cancel button toggles to a pause button. Swipe again and you get the cancel button again.” With the pause button you can keep what you have downloaded so far, pause the download and continue it when you have connection again. For most people this might not make a big difference but I often have unreliable connections that just leaves the download with an ever increasing download time. Now I can just hit a quick pause and then un-pause when my connection is up again.

I love how developers find these neat tricks to solve rare but annoying problems. It might have been useful to provide some kind of “documentation” for these kind of features but I think a quick email response will suffice for now. Well done Vemedio for providing good support and a brilliant app.

You can get the Instacast app for $1.99 here

Update to Reeder for Mac →

If you haven’t yet downloaded the beta for Reeder for Mac then go ahead right now. If you like to read your RSS feeds on your computer then this is the only app really. It syncs with your google reader account and it really is a joy to use.

“Reeder for Mac retains an iOS-like feel that’s even more visible in today’s beta.”

If you’ve used it on your iPhone or iPad you’ll feel right at home with the Mac app and if not then go get them now. You will find any excuse to read your feeds with Reeder. The new release comes with some great tweaks to the UI including the ability to modify the colour scheme and a new “minimized mode”.

Download the beta here

What would you buy first?

In response to Ben Brooks post What would you buy first.

I have only recently got to the point where I feel comfortable to pay for good software. When I was in university I had the philosophy that cheaper is better. This is far from the truth. Sure, sometimes there are good things that are also cheap (or free) but it’s far from always the case.

Firstly, I am so much happier using apps or services which aren’t supported by ads. The question you have to ask yourself is then, if you don’t want ads, how will this app maker get to keep making this app? How can the app/service ever get improved or how will those awesome improvements ever be implemented if there is no revenue stream. No - I’m happy paying for something that I like. Just earlier today I was listening to Build and Analyze with Marco Arment and Dan Benjamin and Marco had a great point (I’m paraphrasing freely) “If you use something a lot and you like using it then make sure you have the best of that think and if that means spending money on it the so be it”. Marco was talking about a chair or a table but I think it applies to everything and in this case, good software. This was a long intro to just respond to Ben’s post with my list of apps that I would buy if I needed to buy them all over again.

Here’s my list:

• Reeder
• Divvy
• Calendar Bar
• Daisy Disk
• Seamless