… Zip drives ate floppies. CD s ate Zips. DVD s ate CD s. SD cards ate film. LCD s ate CRT s. Telephony ate telegraphy. Text messaging ate talking. Tablets are eating our paper … Imagine a table: Hundreds of meters long and wooden. Worn and oiled. Old and knotted. Wide enough for a person. Now —…

Recently I’ve read a few new articles about scaling back from Twitter and RSS. This is a common theme, especially amongst the group of bloggers I follow. And I’m glad that it’s a common theme because things like scaling back, clarifying our goals, identifying distractions, and the like are all…

There has been yet another mass shooting, something that now seems to occur on a monthly basis. Every time another tragedy like this occurs, gun advocates make the same arguments about why we can't possibly do anything to restrict the weaponization of our culture. Here's a guide to what they'll be…

IN the harrowing aftermath of the school shooting in Connecticut, one thought wells in my mind: Why can’t we regulate guns as seriously as we do cars? The fundamental reason kids are dying in massacres like this one is not that we have lunatics or criminals — all countries have them — but that we…

I got my first iPhone in the Fall of 2008. Going back through my iTunes Purchased history, I see 1Password was the ninth app I downloaded from the App Store. I’ve been using 1Password for as long as I remember having a Mac and iOS device, and I’ve come to rely on it – to trust it – as the only piece…

With the sudden availability of touchscreens in the form of smartphones and tablets, the LCARS interface is ripe for a second go 'round as a user interface. While we're unlikely to get a full-fledged Star Trek PADD complete with LCARS everything anytime soon, you can at least get a serious doseage…

Mailbox was shut down on February 26, 2016. For more information, visit our blog. We’re deeply grateful to everyone who helped bring Mailbox to life, whether by spreading the word, letting us know what you liked (and didn’t like), or just by using the product and teaching us through your actions.…

(This post is a part of a series on Keyboard Maestro, see more here .) As a blogger (I’m sure this applies to others) there are a lot of times when I am writing and need/want to grab a lot of source material to use. For me this typically involves a lot of copy and pasting and command-tabbing between…

A couple of weeks ago I chided The Next Web on App.net over their (then current) design. I like The Next Web , but I’ve never been a fan of their site design. In fact: most sites that I like and read have a pretty poor design. I get a lot of new writers asking me where I got my design (I made it)…

Over the last several months, the number of projects I’m overseeing at work has changed more times than I can begin to count. One of the many side effects of this is that my OmniFocus project list — and overall organization — went to hell pretty quickly. About a month ago, I reverted to using…

Fantastical for iPhone is available today. You’ll probably be hearing a lot about it, and the good words are merited. I’ve had it on my iPhone’s first Home screen for the past 6 weeks. Right now it’s $2 in the App Store , and I wholeheartedly recommend it. There are two headline features: (a) The…

I saw Skyfall last night, and after breaking it down, I can come to only one conclusion: this is the Bond film in which it is revealed that James Bond is a Time Lord. Bear with me here. In high school, my friends and I had a pet theory that James Bond wasn’t one man, but many. “James Bond” was a…

A rather lengthy comic about being a content creator. The Oatmeal Share this

Venice Under Water: http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/11/venice-under-water/100403/ I love shots 7 and 14 -- businesses just carrying on but with galoshes.

Automating iOS: How Pythonista Changed My Workflow http://www.macstories.net/stories/automating-ios-how-pythonista-changed-my-workflow/ 10,000 words on how my workflow changed in the past year.

Call it the ultimate absentee ballot. NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station have the option of voting in tomorrow's (Nov. 6) presidential election from orbit, hundreds of miles above their nearest polling location. Astronauts residing on the orbiting lab receive a digital version of…

Sit your butt, in a chair, and write. That’s it. That’s all there is. Take your hind-quarters and, with purpose, plant it in a seating utensil of your choosing. Preferably, with something to write with. That’s step one (Well, not really. There’s actually a whole lot that has to happen before that…

Some years ago , I sat on a stone-cut bench in a dark chamber in the catacombs of Paris wearing a headlamp and muddied boots, and listened to the strange story of Félix Nadar, the first man to photograph the underground of Paris. In 1861, Nadar invented a battery-operated flash lamp, one of the…

Following my review of Letterpress , I sat down with Loren Brichter to chat about his latest effort, developing for iOS, other mobile platforms, and spitting into microphones. In reality, I was still in Italy and our interview was conducted on Skype, but Loren says the part about spitting was real.…