Sunday, December 16, 2007
This has been quite the productive and exciting weekend: I’ve seen Alissa’s play again (this time with Jesse and Brenda), taken interesting makeup photos with Jessie (see above), learned bucket loads about SQL, and released an early alpha of Traskpro.
I’m feeling surprisingly good given that I didn’t have much downtime this weekend. Having a personal project like Traskpro has re-energized me. I’d forgotten how fun coding can be - particularly with tons of small rewarding features to work on. I feel like I’m using agile with a 2 hour sprint!
Traskpro is finally feature-complete enough to stand up to day to day use. I still have a TON of work left to do on it, but that can happen over the next few weeks. Go in and check it out - updates from now on will be pretty much transparent to the users. The temporary production location is at Traskpro.com - I’ll be getting a more official URL for it shortly.
Update: Changed the URL above to the actual production URL. No more temporary URL’s for me baby!
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
I saw this and it made me smile.
Via Photododo
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Things have been pretty crazy of late and I’m stressed out as a result. Work has been and explosion of activity and my personal life has been busier than I would like. It’s all added up to me being stressed out. After last week I decided I needed a plan to get things back under control at work, as well as a plan for getting better control of my other commitments.
My boss has been somewhat unhappy with the performance of the team. I’ve decided the only way to make things better is to reapply myself to my job and focus on keeping my eye not only on the project’s current status, but also looking ahead a release or two making sure we don’t paint ourselves into a corner or repeat old mistakes.
I’m making a few modifications to my typical productivity style and adopting some of the more extreme GTD behaviors to try and better segment my time and plan better. I’m also going to get more into my backpack for tracking little tasks.
Luckily I have a few things to keep me distracted. Earlier in the week I purchased all 5 seasons of Mythbusters on iTunes and am slowly perusing it on my AppleTV. It’s funny that these days a single click can cost $100 and take 2 days of bandwidth on my fast connection to deliver 58Gb of content. 48 hours might seem like an excessive download time, but for perspective bear in mind that my Mythbusters collection spans over 80 hours of content so leveled out to be nearly a twice-realtime media acquisition.
Super Mario Galaxies came out this week for the Wii. It’s a load of brainless fun and in typical Nintendo fashion it’s quite rewarding for the player. The spherical level concept is fresh and new - a blast to run around the puzzling little worlds finding the start that rockets you to the next one.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
While at the Leopard launch last night Mike picked up an 8Gb 3rd generation iPod Nano for his daughter. While over at their house this morning I was amused to see he was having trouble registering the Nano. Every time he tries to sign in with his Apple ID he gets the puzzling error “This person record requires harvesting.” (click the image above for a full sized view).
While I’m sure it has a valid technical meaning it’s a strange message to show to an end user. It almost makes me wonder - what kind of harvesting is Apple talking about here, a kidney or a crop?
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Gmail is getting IMAP support and I need it now! I already have switched my whole life over to Gmail and the thought of having IMAP access to Gmail for my iPhone gives me tech-wood. Turn it on for me Google, I love you long time!
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Wow, simply wow - Quickpack, an elegant fusion of Quicksilver and Backpack. Quicksilver now not only rocks the OS X application management and work flow automation, but now it’s also my key information capture action. With a few keystrokes it’s easy to add a note or list item to any page in your backpack. I run my life out of lists using a semi-GTD approach and being able to add list entries quickly and without effort means I can keep my momentum going on tasks as new ones pop into my head.
YAY! My life is better having discovered QuickPack. Go technology!
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Since discovering NetNewsWire shortly after (re)discovering the Mac platform I’ve been a pretty vocal advocate of the application and its slick swiss-army knife approach to tackling mountains of information piling in via RSS. When NetNewsWire was purchased by Newsgator I started using the sync features which greatly simplified my multi-computer lifestyle.
Strangely enough I think NetNewsWire has just left my life as suddenly as it came to it. More and more I found myself using Newsgator as a reader rather than NetNewsWire. I really like the slick interface NetNewsWire offers, but the overhead of opening and syncing it with Newsgator combined with the fact that I don’t always have a Mac handy combined to limit it’s use to a single big post reading session in the evening to drive my unread count down to zero for the next day. I mainly read RSS in tiny chunks I squeeze in here and there throughout my day as I can spare the time, so entirely web based solutions make it easier to do from whatever computer I happen to be sitting at without having to worry about clients, syncing, or application state.
I just discovered my new reader of choice Google Reader (yeah - I know, I’m really behind the times) and I have to say I’m 100% impressed. Just like Google revolutionized the concept of web-mail using a fresh new Ajax approach Google Reader has done the same for RSS. Reader dynamically loads your stories in the background and provides a configurable view including my all time favorite - the never ending scroll of articles that I can slide through as I get the time.
Google Reader performs a great little trick by automatically marking posts as read when they scroll up the screen leaving me with fewer actions than with Newsgator where you see 50 articles at a shot (not configurable) and have to click a link to mark them as read and to pull up the next batch. Another nail in the coffin of Newsgator was that some of the Javascript they used had issues and would occasionally fail to respond to clicks and have to be reloaded.
To seal the deal Google Reader has amazing keyboard shortcuts. While in the application simply hit the ? key to bring up a semi-opaque cheat sheet. The keyboard shortcuts are intuitive and make navigation, triage, bookmarking, and reading very efficient. After less than 20 minutes of use Google Reader became an entirely keyboard based application for me, and one rivaling the functionality of most thick-client RSS readers.
At this point my only gripe with Google Reader is it’s iPhone experience. Newsgators was worse, but the iPhone version of Google Reader is very static and really fails to capitalize on the rich Javascript capabilities the iPhone bestows to offer a experience that matches the desktop browser experience in functionality while being tailored to the user interface limitations of the iPhone.
Sorry Brent - I still love NetNewsWire and have a special place for it in my heart, but the cloud is calling!
