Quarterly continues down the path that services like Letterly and TinyLetter championed: consume less information, surrounded by less noise, delivered in less distracting ways by people with more meaningful things to say.
The awesome, inevitable future of touch input.
(Applied Sciences Group: High Performance Touch at MicrosoftResearch)
For slashram. I never would’ve done anything this complex in Photoshop or Illustrator, at least not without a $1,000+ Wacom Cintiq.
I find drawing imprecisely with the iPad and learning to compensate for the imprecision far more enjoyable than clicking and dragging a mouse pointer around in a desktop app.
Encyclopedia Brown and @kvstevns are so similar.
Movie adaptation, please. There’s no excuse anymore, Hollywood. You have all that you require.
Another thing scribbled with Adobe Ideas.
Yummy delicious Carol Lee Donuts.
Some of my first few doodles in Adobe Ideas.
Sketched the microphone sitting next to me in Adobe Ideas, using Allen’s Cosmonaut stylus from Studio Neat, on a first-gen iPad, in a handful of minutes.
I was skeptical, but now that I’ve got a hang of layers in Adobe Ideas, I’m beginning to imagine what it’d be like to do thumbnail sketches for comics this way. That could be really cool.
10.0.0.110flix
When I saw that Downcast could stream video podcasts, naturally the first thing I wanted to do was use that for something it was never intended for.
So I turned on Web Sharing (System Preferences → Sharing), put some iOS-friendly encoded episodes of One Piece in my ~username/Sites folder, and built an XML file pointing to all of the files using Podcast Maker.
The result is a very hacked together Netflix-queue-like list of episodes in the folder that I can stream from my computer to the iPad.
A little hacky, and I already know there are much more effective ways of streaming media to iOS. But for something I threw together for fun in ten minutes to see what Downcast would do with it, it works very well.
Launch.scpt
I posted a simple AppleScript for launching menu bar items to GitHub. This is how I maintain an obsessive degree of control over the order of my menu bar items, since you can’t drag to reorder the third-party ones, and controlling the launch order is impossible from the Accounts → Login Items preference pane.
It also significantly decreases my boot time when I just want to get the computer on to do one thing, and not wait for ten things I don’t need yet to start up.
To prevent apps from “helpfully” adding their menu bar tools to my Login Items, and to avoid having to open up Preferences and delete the same handful of them repeatedly, I just disabled Login Items completely.
In Finder, I went into Username/Library/Preferences, found loginwindow.plist and renamed it to loginwindow.plist.bak in case I change my mind later. Then I created a folder, and named that the same thing. This prevents the operating system from writing any data to it.
When you reboot and go to System Preferences → Accounts → Login Items, it will be completely empty and no apps will be able to add themselves there at all. Forever. Or until you put that loginwindow.plist file back the way it was.
No more junk, no more trips to the Accounts preference pane to delete things I didn’t ask for, and Launch.scpt can do its job while I get a glass of water if I do want all of those menu bar apps running after all.
