Collin Donnell

A couple of weeks ago I bought a Kindle Paperwhite. I like it a lot. The backlight isn’t so intense I can’t read in bed without keeping myself up all night, it doesn’t get uncomfortable to hold, and it doesn’t give me the option to get distracted and open Twitter.

The typography does indeed suck. None of the typefaces look all great at the size I want to read them at. I keep flipping between Baskerville and Caecilia. I’m gravitating more towards Caecilia because it looks decent at smaller sizes on the lower resolution screen (probably Amazon chose it originally). Anyway, it’s not that bad – I can live with it.

GoodReads integration is cool, although I have no idea why it’s so manual. The Kindle shows me what percentage of the book I’ve read on every page, but for some reason, even after adding the book to GoodReads from the Kindle (why can’t it have an option to sync my books automatically?), I have to go to the GoodReads website to update how far into the book I am there (which I won’t ever do).

This is actually not the first Kindle I’ve owned. I had a second generation Kindle in 2009 (which I stopped using at some point). It’s quite an upgrade in a bunch of ways, although you can tell that the main focus has been making the Kindle cheaper and that making the reading experience better was secondary. The screen is better, but not iPhone 3GS to iPhone 4 better. Not refreshing between every page flip is nice, although I don’t remember that bothering me too much.

One thing that really stinks and hasn’t changed at all is that reading books which aren’t just prose is awful. I’m currently reading The Practice of Programming, and just finished a book called The Next America. The Practice of Programming has lots of code samples, which get formatted badly between pages. The Next America also had a lot of problems. There were a lot of charts in it which rendered at a size I think would be illegible for a lot of people. Still, I’m sick of having to move books around from place to place and the space they take up, so it’s worth it. It’s just surprising that in 5 years they couldn’t make this better.

I guess what I really think is that the Kindle is flawed in a lot of ways, but that it’s the positives – e-ink screen, having every book with me always, not having to own and move a bunch of large heavy books – are so appealing that for less than $200, it’s worth it to own one.

I posted a couple of new tracks I’ve been working on that you can check out on my band site if you’re into that sort of thing. I sort of had the realization that at this point, my issue isn’t that too many people might hear my music, and that instead of sharing what I’m working on privately, I should post everything – demo versions, works in progress, etc – for free and see how people react.

Bob and I are back on a regular for recording North by Midwest. The next episode will be out Friday, but a couple people have told me that last weeks was their favorite so far, so that may be a good place to start listening if you aren’t already.

I’m now the proud owner of a 1988 Dolphin motorhome. I had to fly to Bend, Oregon, and then drive four hours back through central Oregon and over Mount Hood (where it was snowing). Anyway, it was a pretty crazy trip, and I took some photos.

Over the past while I’ve been working with a stronger dedication to finish something I’ve had in mind for a long time: record and release an album of original music. Since I was fifteen I’ve been writing songs, during and after high school I had a band, and I’ve performed solo with varying frequency since then. Recording and releasing music is part of a much larger goal to alongside making apps (which I love and would never stop doing), to make music a large and essential part of what I do. I also decided to give it a name; I’m calling the project Fisherman’s Porch.

The reason I’m posting this now is that a couple of weeks ago I started thinking, “what if I beta tested my album the same way I do apps?” The idea is to put the music I’m working on in front of a group of people and see which songs and see how people react. The music is my own and personal, so I’m not saying I want to design an album by committee (that sounds like a way to make really crappy music), but maybe putting something out there now to a group of interested folks and seeing how people react to everything would be useful.

If you like folky, indie, acoustic music, maybe you can help. If you like musicians along the lines of Death Cab for Cutie, The Avett Brothers, Rock Votolato, David Bazan, etc, this might be something you’d enjoy. You can check out this short video of me performing to get a fairly good idea.

Technically the way I plan on doing this is to set up a Glassboard group and put up links to new tracks as I record them. They could be anything from a fairly produced album-ready version of a song, to live tracks, to something I recorded live into my iPhone.

I’m going to be honest and say that while I’m not looking to just be told me how great I am, I want this to be a positive experience that encourages me to finish the album, I’m really not looking for any negativity or to be told that I suck. If that’s how you feel, that’s fine, but please just keep it to yourself.

So if you’d like to be hear what I’m working on, it’s really easy. All you have to do is use this link to join the Glassboard and check out the tracks that I’m going to start posting. Really excited to see how this turns out.

There was a really good post on the Black Pixel blog by Rich Wardwell about the implications of capturing self in Objective-C blocks which Brent Simmon’s posted a response to on his blog. If you’re lost, I’m talking about doing this sort of thing to avoid retain cycles:

__weak MyClass *weakSelf = self;
self.someObject.blockProperty = ^{
    weakSelf.someProperty = something;
};

Brent’s thoughts/rules for blocks partially mimic my own¹. I never use -[NSNotificationCenter addObserverForName:​queue:​usingBlock:]; I just don’t see the benefit. Unlike Brent, it’s not uncommon for me to copy a block and assign it to a property, but usually if I start having more than one or two somethingHandler blocks, creating a delegate protocol is a better fit most of the time (this code also tends to be easier to debug). I also agree that thinking about if self really needs to be used in the block at all is a good practice (Rich also mentions this).

I can’t say why exactly, but whenever I have to the whole weakSelf thing, it feels like I’m doing something wrong – it seems like kind of a code smell. That’s not to say I never do it (I do it all the time), but my general feeling is that if I need to, I should probably think about if I’m approaching this from the right angle.

I pretty much never never want to “Search This Mac” if I’m starting from a Finder window.

I have a new music thing I’m trying to get started called Fisherman’s Porch. Here’s a video of me performing some songs a couple of weeks ago at an open mic in Portland.

Nilay Patel’s review of the Pebble Steel is pretty good, but I did have two thoughts after reading it.

• If the Pebble Steel was rated an 8.5, does that mean that the best a smartwatch released with current technology could have only possibly been 15% better?
• It's worth considering that you're potentially taking fashion advice from someone who, in the featured image for the article, is also wearing a weird studded bracelet of the type a teenage girl might buy at Hot Topic circa 2005.

Stringing your guitar this way will help it stay in tune by preventing slipping. Worth knowing how to do right.

Diagram found here.

This ad for Infinity Augmented Reality is super creepy and awkward. It plays to someone with the fantasies of a junior high school age boy: put on your smart glasses, hop in your Ferrari, do a little day drinking, hit on a random woman at her job, and then drive to your next appointment. Are men really so bad that this works on them?

The part that bothers me the most is at 1:34 when he starts using his glasses to hit on the bartender. Take the creepy glasses out of the equation: why do companies in 2014 think it’s okay to portray women as sex objects? Was the extended shots of the woman licking her lips really demonstrating the unique benefits of the software? It’s gross.

I don’t know how many women would be excited for the kind of future where a guy they never gave their name to adds them on Facebook and invites them over for some Sauvignon Blanc and casual sex the same day, but I feel like not many. Women all ready have to deal with guys pulling creepy and inappropriate shit in the real world. Garbage like this, booth babes at conferences, and everything else that tells men it’s okay to look at women like a subspecies isn’t helping.

Stuff like should be offensive to women and men. For women, it portrays you not as an individual taking equal part in an exciting future, but as sex objects and exploitation targets. For men the message is clear: if you’re interested in technology it’s because you’re a sex crazed loser who never learned to see women as people, and who can’t get laid without magic glasses.

If you’re a man and this appeals to you: grow the fuck up.

Sticking large blocks of static content directly in code is a bad idea, but I see it all the time. You keep your image data separate, so why have a 2000 word privacy policy stuck in the code directly? Loading content like this from static text files, as an HTML string into a web view, or keeping configuration data in a property list is a much better choice, and what I do pretty much anytime I can.

If you have code like this in your app, you’re doing it wrong:

self.titleLabel.text = @"Privacy Policy";
self.lineTwoLabel.text = @"Really private. So policy.";
self.paragraphOneLabel.text = @"<600 words of body text>";
self.paragraphTwoLabel.text. = etc...

Instead, if you’re just talking about static text with some styling, you could keep all of that in an HTML document and do something like this:

NSString *privacyPath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"lovely_terms_of_use" ofType:@"html"];
NSString *privacyHTML = [NSString stringWithContentsOfFile:privacyPath encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:nil];
[self.webView loadHTMLString:privacyHTML]

Let’s say you had a list of documents like this you needed to display, like terms and conditions and about, which were all listed as rows in a table view. Instead of coding what each row is, you could save a lot of code by putting that information into a property list. If you store the info for each document as an item in array – with keys like title and documentName – you can load that array in your view controller and then pretty much automate this whole process with two classes and a few lines of code.

On top of getting clutter out of your code and saving the amount of code you write, there’s other nice things you can do now too. For example, maybe you want to be able to update any of these documents remotely. All you need to do is check a URL, download a copy of the files into your cache directory, and check for if there’s a match there before you display the one you bundled with the app.

Getting a feel for where you can get static content of out of code and into external resource files lets you not only write better code, but less of it.

A friend who wanted to sound proof the garage at her new house, so that her band could use it as a practice space, was asking for advice for how to do that cheaply via Facebook. The recommendations she got were to put up acoustic foam or egg crate material on the walls, and that’s totally wrong. The misconception people have is they don’t understand the difference between sound proofing versus treatment.

When you see a picture of a recording studio with acoustic foam on the walls, what that’s there to do is to cut down on uneven reflections and make the room sound better when you’re in it¹. What foam or other acoustic treatment does not do is keep the sound in the room from escaping to the outside. In order to sound proof a space, you need to add a lot of mass – as in concrete or brick walls. Anyone who tells you something different doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Everyone knows that distractions are productivity killers. But I’ve also started to become aware that all of the vibrations and dings going off in my pocket and on my desktop all day aren’t just distracting, but that every time they go off, I also feel just a little anxious. There’s a tiny bit of stress every time I hear or feel a notification that takes me away from what I’m doing.

I have no idea if I’m the only person to ever feel this way, but I don’t feel like it can be that uncommon. We just aren’t built to have our concentration broken in that way so often. So, in order to be more productive, less anxious, person I’ve decided to do a few things about it.

Deleting Noisy and Useless Apps

I had a bunch of different social apps on my phone I didn’t need: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Path, Foursquare and Tumblr. Of those, I use Facebook to keep up with people who I don’t have a better way to track, and Tumblr for browsing and time wasting. Nothing has ever happened on any of these that needed my immediate attention, so I deleted all of them from my phone.

The social apps I kept were for Twitter, App.net and Instagram. For Twitter and App.net, I deleted the desktop clients I had and decided to only use them from my phone. I kept Instagram because I like some of the pictures I take with it, but I may change my mind on it too.

Any apps that I don’t use on at least a near-daily basis, I also deleted. If they’re that important, why do I have them buried in a folder on my third home screen? For any apps I use, but that send notifications for things that aren’t time sensitive (e.g., Instacast for new podcast episodes), I turned off notifications all together.

Dealing with Mail

Mail is one case where sometimes I might get something kind of urgent, but that most of the time is just buzzing away annoying me for no reason. I moved it to my second home screen, and turned off notifications and badges for everything except VIP. I also removed a few people from VIP that didn’t need to be there.

Using Do Not Disturb

The last thing I’ve started doing is keep “do not disturb” active on both my phone and computer whenever I don’t want to be bothered (which is a lot). On your phone, you can set it to always let certain people and repeated calls through, but I turned those off too. If I need to focus, nothing is so urgent that it can’t wait for a little bit.

Last week, the Internet exploded when the website for Information Architects new app, Writer Pro, mentioned the company filing a patent on a feature called “Syntax Control.” What the feature does is use Apple’s NSLinguisticTagger class to highlight syntactic components of your document (adjectives, nouns, etc), to help while editing. I’m not a patent expert, but based on what understand, I don’t believe in them. I’m willing to be flexible, but the point is I wouldn’t have filed for a patent if I were them, and I understand what everyone was so upset over: patents can be used for extorting other companies, and we all hate patent trolls.

One part of the reaction I don’t understand is those who say their patent is more invalid because it’s based on an Apple class. The building blocks for anything you want to do exist. What’s patentable is the specific way in which you took those building blocks and made something with them. Whether those building blocks got you 10% or 90% of the way there is immaterial. How you execute is all that counts. Since I don’t like any patents, it’s bad either way, but the idea that the technical difficulty to implement something matters doesn’t make sense to me.

The other thing I don’t get is why I saw no one commending acknowledging iA for this¹:

We will drop our patents pending. Thank you @dhh for clearing our minds.

— iA Inc. (@iA) December 27, 2013

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

So, what happened is:

1. A company did something a lot of people didn't like.
2. Those people voiced their opinion.
3. The company listened and corrected what everyone was upset about.

If a company does something you don’t like, you speak out, and they correct it, that means what you did worked. It means you got what you wanted. Isn’t the right thing to acknowledge them for it? If you don’t, why would anyone listen to you the next time?

Most developers I know do work for other people, either as a contractor or an employee. Two things that have taken me a long time to understand when working for others – but that I’m becoming more certain of – are that you shouldn’t work for anyone who doesn’t treat you with respect, and it’s up to you to make those you work for understand that they need to.

The software industry is full of young overworked, overstressed people. Often they also hate confrontation, and have limited skill or comfort expressing themselves. That applies to both the people signing and cashing the checks.

Because of this, if the person who’s hired you has something that’s bothering them, they’re likely to keep it to themselves until they feel it’s reached a head, and explode with emotion. If you’re not comfortable dealing with people like that – even if you know you’ve done everything right – you’re going to defer, apologize and back down. And you have good reason to be that way; they’re paying you and you want that money.

The problem you’ve created for yourself is this: you’ve now demonstrated to this person that they don’t need to talk to you in a business-like way if they’re feeling frustrated. And once someone loses respect for you, you never get it back. There’s no amount of money that’s worth working for someone who doesn’t respect you, and really, I don’t think most people are going to fire you because you showed that you have dignity.

One way to deal with situations like that would be to explain the first time it happens that you understand they’re feeling frustrated, but that your business relationship doesn’t make talking to you anyway they like all right. A better way would be to set things up from the beginning so that you the situation. Usually the problem is that people weren’t communicating, so make it as easy as possible to communicate with you.

If the people you’re working for don’t have an issue tracker – bring your own and have them use it. Explain how you want to receive feedback on your work at the start, and avoid getting it through email, because it’s really easy for others to abuse. Also, if you’re remote, avoid it being team chat if you don’t want to work the same hours they do. You want to pick something everything about the status of the project can go into it, and everyone can check at anytime.

You’re not going to fix anyone, and in software you’ll always have stressful situations. But you can do better than letting your work become a place you’re constantly disrespected.

As much as I love computers and technology, I use paper a lot. I’ve used it for writing song lyrics most days since I was fifteen, blog ideas, sketching and a lot of other things. Systems and special ways to get things done are great, but not sustainable. The tools I’ve stuck with a long time are simple, and some haven’t changed since I was a freshmen in high school (I hope what I make with them has improved).

When I was a kid, I carried around a notebook from the drugstore I’d write lyrics for my band in. When I filled it up, I moved onto another one. When I felt I had reason to (sharing with others), I’d type them into the computer as a text file. It stayed that way for the next several years. Today is the same, except I might replace a text file with Evernote for some things, and I’m consistent about getting things into my Mac where they’re backed up.

Notebooks

What notebook or pen you use isn’t important if you like using them. I like a notebook with thick paper so that ink won’t bleed through, and impressions won’t show on the next page. Moleskine notebooks have thin paper, and they’re expensive, so I don’t use them.

There’s two notebooks that I use for capturing whatever I need to. A big one for when I’m sitting some place like my desk or a table at a coffee shop, and a small one that I carry in my back pocket.

Since I don’t have it with me all the time, the big one gets less use. What goes in it ends up being stuff like lyrics or sketches where the extra space is helpful. I carry a bright orange Rhodia notebook that I like a lot because it was affordable, the paper is nice, and it looks kind of cool. Expensive notebooks made me anxious to write in them, so I don’t buy them.

My small notebook gets all kinds of stuff put into it. Ideas for blog posts, grocery lists, sketches of app ideas. Most of it’s temporary, but some things like app sketches I might take a picture of and add to Evernote. When I fill one of these, I throw it into a drawer and start a new one. I’ve carried Field Notes for years. They’re kind of expensive, but not crazy, and they’re the perfect size to fit in my back pocket.

Pens

I carry a Fisher Space Pen clipped inside my front pocket when I’m out doing things. It’s wet where I live a lot of the year, I end up writing into my small notebook outside a lot, and the ink doesn’t bleed when wet. It goes great with the cool waterproof Field Notes I got last year. When I run out of those books I may need to find a replacement brand with the same paper I can use.

The space pen is good because it’s durable and portable, but I like something smoother when sitting at a desk. I started using the Uni-ball Jetstream in November, and I like them. You can get a three pack for $13 on Amazon. I used to use Pilot G2 pens, but these are better.

Someone on Twitter the other day sent me a message asking me what tools I was using when making apps for things like issue tracking, testing, managing tasks in a project, etc. I don’t know if I’m the best example of anything, but I can tell you what’s worked and not worked for me in the past.

You Need to Write Things Down

The biggest issues I’ve had working with others have come when the team isn’t on the same page about what everyone needs from everyone else. Having a daily check-in where everyone gets together isn’t a bad thing, but it’s not a replacement for having an issue tracking and project management system in place.

If you’re thinking this can all happen in email threads: you’re wrong. An email thread is a terrible place for this sort of discussion to happen. People don’t respond, everyone has different habits when it comes to email, and people inevitably mix up 10 different topics into one thread that goes on for weeks. You need a system that allows you to create a task, assign it to someone, and have running commentary on the same page.

The best place to do that is in a dedicated issue tracker, maybe a project management tool, and a good chat system if you’re working with other people.

Issue Tracking

The issue trackers I’ve used and liked are GitHub Issues and Lighthouse. What I like about both of them is that they’re both extremely simple, reasonably freeform, and let you enter enough detail into your ticket to explain what’s going on. Some people like other tools, and that’s fine too, these are what’s worked for me. As a general rule if something gets very complicated I’ll stop wanting to use it.

Both of these will integrate with your source control repo, let you tag issues with whatever you want, create milestones (v1.0, v1.1, etc), comment on existing issues, and assign them to team members. Speaking of teams – you should be using an issue tracker even if you’re just one person. Apps like OmniFocus are great for runway level tasks, but bugs and enhancements are usually more than just a task, and you want to be able to get an idea of how they connect.

What’s great about GitHub Issues is that it’s free if you’re all ready using GitHub, and it does most of what you want. What’s better about Lighthouse is that it does everything Issues does, but a project in Lighthouse isn’t tied to a specific GitHub repo. You can’t have Issues without a repo, so if you have a project with more than one repo (e.g., web backend and iOS app), there’s no way to track things across the two.

I’d recommend giving GitHub a try until you feel yourself bumping up against the walls, and then try Lighthouse.

Project Management Tools

Project management tool like Basecamp or Asana can work well when you have a team and you need a 10,000 foot view of what you’re working on. For individuals or even small teams, I don’t think you always need one. For one person writing their own apps, I’ve only seen these used for procrastination and the kind of task shuffling that distracts people from actually making their thing.

On the size teams that I usually work with, I’ve rarely felt a dedicated project management helped up get anything done faster. Maybe for non-technical project managers, but those people are usually a net negative as well¹. I imagine when a team gets to a certain size you need something like this, I just don’t generally work on teams of that size, so I don’t know.

In my experience a good issue tracker can take the place of a dedicated project management app, but not the other way around. The reason is that project management tools usually have a concept of tasks, but usually don’t have the right fields to put in all of the detail you need when tracking new features and bugs.

Group Chat

If you’re working with a team, you should have a persistent chat system. I’ve used Flowdock, HipChat and Campfire. Hipchat has the best native apps, but I prefer Flowdock because it was the easiest to integrate with other things like GitHub, was the hardest to lose track of things in and has the least ridiculous annoyances and limitations.

Meslo is a tweaked version of Apple’s Menlo font which fixes what I think has always bothered me about it – small vertical line spacing which makes it feel really cramped. Meslo also changes the alignment of the asterisk, which wasn’t bothering me as much, but is fine this way too. It comes in three varieties so you can pick the amount of space you like best. I’m giving 11pt Meslo LG M a try and it’s a nice improvement.

Writing is hard. It’s also true that the only way to get better is to do it a lot. No amount of time I’ve spent thinking or reading what others say would count for anything if I didn’t put it into practice. The thing about practice though is that practice doesn’t make perfect: practicing the right way does. You can do the wrong things over and over again and ever get as good as you could have been. To get better you have to learn from others, and then also use what you learn.

However much I improve – however more clearly I can organize and express my thoughts – I don’t think that I’ll ever be completely satisfied with how I write, but I don’t want to stop trying. These are a few books about writing that have helped me maybe get a little better. They’re probably three of the most well read books on writing, but if you haven’t, I recommend them all.

The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr. & E. B. White

Short and pretty terse, Elements of Style is full of practical rules and guidelines. It won’t tell you how to be a good writer, but it might keep you from embarrassing yourself too much. It’s kind of like K&R of writing books. I keep meaning to re-read it.

On Writing Well, William Zinsser

The first part goes over the basics and general writing topics, and there’s lots of good stuff in there. Later on it talks about specific kinds of writing: travel, sports, business, memoirs etc. The title gives it away – On Writing Well is about learning to write non-fiction well.

On Writing, Stephen King

Sort of half about writing and half about Stephen King’s life. Both parts are great. It’s worth reading for anyone because it’s entertaining and funny, but it’s also got lots of tips about how to suck less at writing interspersed.

I’m not sure in what way my brain is broken to cause this to bother me so much, but I’ve often found myself staring at Xcode after a long time, fixating on the antialiased text being hard to read. I’m pretty sure a retina display would solve the problem, but that isn’t an option for my iMac or MacBook Air. Instead, what you can do is pick a font which has bitmap versions included for small sizes¹ and type this into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dt.Xcode NSFontDefaultScreenFontSubstitutionEnabled -bool YES
defaults write com.apple.dt.Xcode AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 24

Restart Xcode and the slightly fuzzy antialiased text will be replaced with slightly pixelated non-antialiased text.

I was looking at the page in Feedpress¹ today which breaks down subscribers by which RSS reader they use, and it seemed worth sharing. I don’t know if my results are normal or not, but my stats looked like this:

• NewsBlur: 34%
• Feedly: 16%
• Feed Wrangler: 14%
• Google Reader: 13%
• Feedbin: 8%
• NetNewsWire: 4%
• Other: 11%

The readers which were only a couple of percentage points that I grouped into other were: Fever, The Old Reader, Bloglovin, SimplePie, Apple-PubSub, Shrook, NewsGatorOnline, Tiny Tiny RSS, Stringer, Reeder, feedzirra, rss2email, UniversalFeedParser, Downcast, and throttle.²

A few things jumped out at me:

1. NewsBlur is more than double the next closest with 34%, but the top few seem pretty competitive.
2. I thought Fever (what I'm using right now) and The Old Reader (because I'd heard of it) would be higher, but both had just a few people using them.
3. I have no idea why Google Reader still shows up, but it's a pretty high percentage. I guess that means the number of subscribers is 13% lower than what's reported since Google Reader is shut down.
4. For an app that's still in public beta and doesn't have any syncing, NetNewsWire did surprisingly well.
5. A small group of people are still reading RSS in Safari/Apple Mail, which was removed in Mountain Lion.
6. I'd never heard of a bunch of the readers in the "other" category.

I’d be interested to see other peoples stats to figure out how typical my results are. My entirely unfounded guess is that these numbers are not typical for some reason due to who my subscribers are or where they came from. I see people talking about all of the top three or four in roughly equal balance, so it’s hard for me to imagine that NewsBlur isn’t just a little more popular, but more than twice anything else.³ I suspect that if I had a Daring Fireball sized audience the numbers might be distributed a lot more evenly, but I could be wrong.

If you haven’t been to the Safari Extensions Gallery in a while because it was terrible, never updated and impossible to finding anything, check it out again. Apple updated it at some point recently to make browsing categories and finding extensions easier. It only took them several years to do it. Of course there’s still no search, so it’s a little more like a feature page for a product than The App Store, but hey, maybe by 2016 or so we’ll get there¹.

As happy as I am that Apple did update their site, I’m sort of surprised they bothered. The dearth of good Safari extensions compared to what Chrome has is a good example of Apple’s tendency to get something going, get kind of sidetracked and then not give it the attention it needs to succeed. FaceTime being pretty much stagnant since day it came out — besides the horribly named “FaceTime Audio” — is another good example. Why doesn’t FaceTime support groups? It seems a little odd it’s missing useful features that iChat video conferencing had ten years ago.

With extensions, if Apple thought they were worthwhile beyond claim feature parity for their browser, they would have launched them with a “Safari Extensions Store” that had the kind of search and curation their other stores have. Without at least that, they were never going to get the kind of massive third party community that other browsers have.

What makes Apple outstanding as a company is their ability to focus. What holds some of their products back is that the level of focus they have can mean things which aren’t considered central to their current plans or business get left to stagnate.

As disappointed as these things can make me, the truth is I know the reason Apple can make things I like so consistently is because of that focus. I know I prefer how they are to the spastic way other companies seem to always be doing fifty things at once. It would just be nice to see a little more interest in these semi forgotten products that they’ve already released.

DragonDrop has been out for a while, but I still get asked about it whenever I use it during a presentation. Let’s say you’re dragging a document (an image for example) from one app or Finder location to another, and the thing you’re dragging to is obscured. Without DragonDrop you may be able to do some trackpad acrobatics, enable Expose and make it work without losing the file. If you have the app though, you can just give your mouse a little shake and a small window like this will pop up:

Then just drag your file onto the window, and it becomes a floating panel that sits above other windows:

Now you can move over to the app you were working with before and drag the files onto it from DragonDrop. I use this all the time when I’m adding files to Xcode, or when I’ve grabbed an image from online that I want to send to someone in an iMessage.

There’s probably a way to achieve a similar effect with LaunchBar or other similar apps, but DragonDrop is perfect as an app that does one thing really well. Plus it’s only $4.99, so why wouldn’t you have both? You can get it on the Mac App Store for $4.99.

Aside from occasionally becoming obsessed and bingeing on entire seasons of a TV show, I wouldn’t say that I watch a lot of TV. I’ve never had a cable subscription as an adult – or even seriously considered buying one – and didn’t even own a TV until the Apple TV 2 came out. I think I mostly bought one the 32” Panasonic (for about $400-500 in 2010) that I bought at that time so I’d have something to hook the Apple TV up to. The living room in my old apartment was a bit smaller, so at the time 32” was fine. In my new place though it was small enough to be hard to find a position for it where it wasn’t hard to read, so I recently upgraded to a 50” Samsung Plasma (which seems huge).

Requirements

I knew what size I wanted, and that I wanted it to look good. Since I didn’t really want to spend more than about $500 though, I needed to prioritize what was important to me. To get the size and quality I wanted, I came up with a few guidelines:

No apps or similar bullshit

I wanted the closest thing to a dumb screen I could get. It’s going to be hooked up to an Apple TV all the time, so there’s no value there for me.

Plasma

Plasma is supposed to have better picture quality for the money. The only serious issue I could hear about people ever having with was screen burn in, and everything I found said that it’s not an issue with newer models.

720p

I’ve never owned a 1080p TV, but everything I read said that you have to sit really close to a 50” TV to tell any difference between 720 and 1080. Since I knew I wouldn’t be, there didn’t seem to be a value for me.

What I Chose

The model I landed on which fit was the Samsung PN51F4500, which The Wirecutter also picked as their choice for a $500 TV a few weeks after I bought mine. The speakers aren’t great, but it hasn’t really bothered me. I figured that if I really wanted good sound I’d have to buy speakers eventually no-matter how much I spent on the TV. The 5.1 sound bar system that Vizio makes looks pretty sweet and isn’t too expensive if it really starts to bother me.

The TV definitely looked better than my old one as soon as I hooked it up, but I knew the out of box settings are not what you’re supposed to use at home and that I should change something. The problem was that I had no idea what to change. Last week I heard about the THX app for calibrating your TV from John Siracusa on the Accidental Tech Podcast and bought it. It took about ten minutes to go through all of their calibration steps, and the difference was immediately obvious. If you’ve never calibrated your TV, you should get the app and use it. I also turned off every setting I could find that sounded suspicious like automatic brightness and some things that had to do with audio delay.

I don’t know if my specific case is useful to anyone else, but I’m happy with my choice, so maybe the little bit of research I did can save someone some time.