Weekly Sponsor - Igloo
Work isn’t a place – it’s what you do.
And you might work on a lot of devices – a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad – in a lot of places. You might work on the road or maybe from home (with your Aeropress and clickity keyboard). And that makes it hard to securely use a shared drive, coordinate with clients and collaborate with your team.
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Igloo has a space for your team. Each team gets dedicated file sharing, Twitter-like microblogs, activity streams and a host of other collaboration tools in one cloud-based platform. Plans start at just $4/user/month.
Work better, not harder.
Enter to win an Aeropress and try Igloo free for 30 days.
Kirby
Interesting looking (simple) CMS from Bastian Allgeier. There are days when I wish for something less complex than EE and with slightly more configurability than Tumblr. There are a few simple blogging tools available now, but Kirby is the one that intrigues me most.
May 15, 2012
Spent a beautiful Mother’s Day having coffee & cakes with friends and family amidst the apple trees and gardens.
May 14, 2012Why My iPad Is Not My Laptop
John Carey writes the blog post that has been sitting in my head for a while. While the iPad is a marvellous device that can do more each passing month, it’s still limited to being a consumption device for so many creatives. There’s been more than enough posts from writers extolling the virtues of the iPad as a complete work environment. As John points out, while true for writers, it’s not so much the case for most others.
Shawn Blanc has written recently about his Macbook Air being his desktop and his iPad being his new “laptop”. I run the same hardware as Shawn and for me, the iPad is a peripheral — it’s great for reading, planning and organizing. But for web design and development work, I bring around my Air.
Shawn does a good job of listing the advantages of the iPad, but John does an even better job of illustrating how this doesn’t apply beyond writing. Of course, we all know this will change as the iPad — and the software available for it — matures. But for now, the iPad is not my laptop.
May 8, 2012
Weekly Sponsor - Minigroup
An Atlanta design firm uses Minigroup to work smarter and keep its clients happy
Braizen uses Minigroup to manage projects and collaborate and communicate with their clients.
A minigroup is a private, secure online space where members communicate with posts and comments, share large files, and manage projects.
Braizen uses one minigroup like an intranet, to discuss business and assign tasks. They also create separate minigroups for each client, where employees working on various accounts present comp designs and drafts.
“Telling potential clients that we use this tool, where we’ll keep in constant contact with them, definitely helps seal the deal,” says Tyrie, the copywriter at Braizen. Watch the full interview with Braizen.
Minigroups start at just $3 per year for owners, with plans up to 100 minigroups and 100GB of storage. There are no user/member fees.
Find out more or try it free for 30 days.
A big thanks to Minigroup for sponsoring the feed this week.
Apr 25, 2012“Your most reliable work will always be within your range. Go just a bit outside of that to show your passion and stretch yourself. But go too far beyond that and you’ll be so strained that ultimately the work will suffer.”
Pat Dryburgh Apr 23, 2012Fanfare for the Comma Man
Do you care about your English? If you do, chances are this piece will interest you.
Of all punctuation options, I find the comma to bring the most flexibility in my writing. The placement of one comma can change the overall tone of any statement. This piece gives a nice overview of the history of the comma and the mistakes people with it (yours truly included), but the author gives room for the idea that language changes over time based on how people use it, not placing to much emphasis on strict adherence to rules if no one follows them.
Fascinating stuff.
Apr 23, 2012Information Buckets
After my post on Pocket as a save-anything-for-later bucket, a distinction is needed. I received a few questions about whether Pocket would replace Gimme Bar for me. The answer: an emphatic no. Pocket is to save for later, Gimme Bar is to save forever.
Forever being a relative term aside, I see Gimme Bar as my permanent archive location for things on the web. It has been designed and developed with this purpose in mind (as described in Orbital Content). When you save items to Gimme Bar, the app does its best to save the content itself, rather than just a pointer to a web page. With the life span of internet items being brief, a tool that can save items for longevity is needed.
Pocket makes a great inbox due to its inclusion in so many apps on iOS, but the items saved there are meant to be processed. Pocket and Gimme Bar may work well side by side.
Apr 23, 2012
Our son Matthew turned six this month. When asked what he wanted to do for his birthday, the answer was play hockey with his friends. True Canadian.
Apr 20, 2012Content Everywhere
This week’s news of the launch of Pocket — a compelling rebrand and slight change-of-focus of Read It Later — caught my attention. Like all the recent chatter on Instapaper and Readability, Pocket touches on a subject dear to my heart. It’s not surprising that these tools generate a lot of opinion and discussion — services like Pocket give us more control and access to the content we consume and share via the Internet. And we care about that content.
Regarding Pocket, there was plenty of both discussion and opinion on launch day. Federico gave a good overview of the redesigned service. Ben Brooks lamented that we see another free service trying to get users first and profit second (and this one changed from charging to not charging). Marcelo Somers and Kyle Baxter also chimed in.
What excited me about the news was not the monetizing strategy or the overall execution of the design, although I’m not yet sold on the former and the latter was well done. Rather, I was very impressed with the focus on the save-anything-for-later concept. This is an idea that has been on my mind the past year, as there has been a gap in the services available to us.
I also saw a few comments yesterday that don’t make a lot of sense. Ben Brooks couldn’t see how he needed a service like Pocket. Ian Hines felt it was targeted completely at women (á la Pinterest). Ian is just off base — having women in the video doesn’t mean they are excluding the tech-savvy nerd-centric folks from their target audience. As for Ben’s opinion, this could not be less true for myself.
Some Backstory
The lack of a service like Pocket is one I’ve felt for some time. Because of the rise of iOS, plus services that allow me to find new content, I’ve needed an anything bucket for the cloud. There are several requirements that a service like this needs to fulfill:
- easy capture
- items are capture-able from multiple sources (Twitter, RSS, Safari, email etc)
- ubiquity, meaning access from multiple services, apps and devices
- logical organization structure
There are a few other items that would be nice to have, but are not necessary:
- a nicely designed view of your content
- an optimized reading layout for text
Services have come that fit many of these criteria. Instapaper is a good example. It allows for easy capture. It has a good reach across the iOS landscape (what I mean by ubiquity) — I can save items from all the best iOS apps like Reeder, Tweetbot and Flipboard. It has a nice structure, gives a decent interaction with saved items and of course, and gives a lovely view for reading your saved articles.
The issue is that none of the services I’ve seen fit all my requirements. Instapaper is primarily a tool for reading later. Same for Readability. But I come across items on my iOS devices that require another look when I get back to my Mac. Items to archive (whether in Yojimbo, Pinboard or my bucket of choice, Gimme Bar). Designs to explore further. Videos to watch. Technical resources to investigate, then archive. Apps to purchase.
The internet brings me many forms of content, and they do not all require the same action from me. So an anything bucket that lived on the web, with the potential for native interfaces, gets me really excited.
Then, Pinbox
I believed in this idea so much that I took steps towards building my own service. Titled Pinbox, it was an anything bucket that would pull in items from your various streams and services. Likes or faves from the services you specified would show up, as would emailed items or items viewed in Safari and triggered with the Pinboxes bookmarklet.
The most difficult aspect of this project was deciding how to start. There were so many services that come close: Gimme Bar, Stellar.io by Jason Kottke, as well as Instapaper and Readability. The aspect of having so many similar services, combined with the knowledge that that’s a very good chance that someone else is currently working on a solution like this, can be daunting when starting out. But none fit my needs exactly, so I moved forward.
I eventually decided to actually build the service on top of Gimme Bar. After a discussion with Cameron Koczon, I started working on my idea, building out some rough browser mockups to flesh out the concept further.
The overall idea of Pinbox was this: it was a place to capture items from various sources, then to process them. It was not intend to be a permanent storage location. It was an inbox, and inboxes are meant to be cleared out, at some point.
I’m excited about Pocket. Something nicely designed and backed by real money — with a plan for earning revenue as well — will fit nicely in my tool belt.
As I mentioned above, a service of this type needs to be accessible everywhere you access content. With Pinbox, because a brand new app like this would not start out with deep integration in the iOS landscape, I chose the route of pulling in Faves/Likes. But Read-It-Later already had the traction of being included in the major iOS apps. Pocket has a great head start on any newcomers to this space and makes a compelling case for using the service.
As for Pinbox, it’s not going anywhere. Despite having API access to Gimme Bar and a developer friend ready and available to build it out, I decided to shelve the project before Christmas. After the sale of Fusion, I had to decide which projects to pursue. And friends, like many of you, I have way more ideas than time to allot to them all.
At the end of the day, I wanted to spend time making something that aligns tightly with the priorities in my life. A tool that keeps people connected and online more doesn’t quite fit. It’s still a need, and I’m happy to see something like Pocket become available.
I’ll happily use the service while I work on projects that are even closer to my heart.
Apr 19, 2012Weekly Sponsor - World War Hack
Inspired by true events, World War Hack is a graphic novel that tells the story of how the U.S. Government gathers top computer hackers from around the country, under the guise of a hacking competition, to unknowingly help solve a pressing national security crisis. Little does the government know that eighteen-year-old hacker, Wyatt Dyer, is both the cause and solution to their crisis.
As a special offer for the readers of this site, you can preview the first full chapter online for free. Pre-order before May 6 and you’ll also receive free shipping.
Thanks to the folks behind World War Hack for sponsoring the feed this week. I had a chance to read the first chapter a week ago and really enjoyed it. I’ve since moved on to the rest of the book and it’s a fun read.
Apr 18, 2012
We adopted a 7 year old female rottweiler/lab cross, mostly to keep on eye on the kids due to all the wildlife around these parts. Say hi to Nach (as in, nachoooo!).
Apr 17, 2012Lifestyle Business
This talk by Matt Haughey is spot on. I love how he describes conversations he has with VCs, comparing the usual Valley model of business to slow growth with a business like MetaFilter:
I’ve had discussions with VC investors where they hear about my business and dismiss it as “just a lifestyle business” and I’ve come back with “hey, it’s a pretty good lifestyle, probably a better lifestyle than yours, probably a better lifestyle than if I accepted five million dollars from you.”
I’d be happy with “just a lifestyle business”. It’s also the kind of business I want to support with my consumer dollars. Read the whole piece.
Aside: big bonus points to sites that provide a transcript for talks, sermons etc. Reading these kinds of content seems so much more efficient than audio or video.
Apr 12, 2012