Daily Links
Copycats
Matt Gemmell writes about trend of copycats and examines why its done. I particularly like how he looks at what "innovation" actually means in the industry.Most Popular Hashtags In 2011
Via Twitter's year in review, its the hottest topics of the past year, 140 characters at a time.Seth Godin on the Erosion of Old Media
As a result of these three factors, there's a huge sucking sound, and that's the erosion of mass as part of the media model. Fewer people buying movie tickets and hardcover books, more people engaging in free media.
Seth has a post up about how he sees the old media world - the one where everyone pays for everything and a select few companies that don't really do anything ride along and make money - crumbling as new media takes over.
24 Ways
The seventh annual advent calendar of web design and development articles and tutorials.Daily Links
Windows Phone 7.5 Mango UI demo on iPhone or Android
Microsoft has released UI demo of their latest Windows Phone 7.5 OS aka Mango for preview on mobile devices in browsers. The demo is slick and responsive. For "fullscreen" experience save the page as "Add to Home screen" and then open it as a web up.Speeding Up Things.app
Things.app, from Cultured Code, is great. I have been using it to track my to-do items for over 2 years now. When I first got it, it had just been released, but it contained all the parts I needed in a list manager. A nice interface, a desktop client and iPhone app. It was also fast, well designed, and easy to use which is always awesome.
However, lately I have noticed that it sometimes took several attempts to launch it. When it would finally launch, it would be next to unusable. Adding an item to my list would take anywhere from a second to 20 seconds. The quick dialogue box would occasionally show up. Sometimes it wouldn't show up at all. Things, my go to app for my day-to-day tasks, had become a hinderance towards getting things done.
After hitting the Cultured Code Support Forums, I found out that has been a pretty common occurance. One of the suggested fixes was to clean out the logbook where all your completed to-do items live. Since we like to try and audit our work flow from time to time, flat out deleting all of my logged to-do items wasn't really an option. After a little more digging, I found an AppleScript that would export completed logbook items to a CSV file and then move them to the trash. This sounded like just the thing. I had at least a few completed items for every working day since 2009.
Here is what I did BEFORE I ran the script:
- read it. It helps if you know a little about AppleScript. You should always read free scripts to make sure they are not doing anything nefarious.
- back up your computer (time machine works just fine - see the cultured code wiki for info on Things backups)
Now that I was confident that my to-do list wouldn't vanish if the script accidentally ate it all, I got set to run the sript. On first run, it warns you that it might run a little slowly. This was the understatement of the year, likely due to my having 1000s and 1000s of logged items. To save you some time, here is what I did to approach this grinding script.
- empty trash in Things.app
- run the script
- check Things.app occassionally to see if I had passed 400 items in the trash
- if there were more than 400 items in the trash, then stop the AppleScript
- verify my CSV file contained data
- clean out trash in Things.app
- run script again from the top and have it write to a new file
I'm happy to report, that after dumping out over 3000+ logged items into a growing list of CSV files, Things.app is now awesome and speedy again! Hopefully this helps someone else out there.
NOTE: This is internet advice, we are not responsible for any damage, loss of data, etc... Use at your own risk.
Daily Links
Feedly 8
Feedly 8 has just been released with a slew of new features including tags and infinite scrolling. This is the first I've looked at Feedly for my RSS needs, and I must say it's easy on the eyes!Daily Links
A Book Apart Holiday Bundle
If you are involved in making the web, and you haven't bought these books yet, you can now save 30% on the entire series to date. They are fantastic little resources for guiding your development. Visual Lizard recommends them highly! Five stars!Brinicle of Death
I can pretty much watch anything narrated by Sir Richard Attenborough, but this is pretty awesome. Super salinated brine sinks and because it is colder than the surrounding water, it freezes as it falls. It makes an icicle, which looks like the boney finger of the grim reaper, and kills everything it touches.Daily Links
Neat Set of Command Line Uses for Siege and Curl
I didn't know about Siege and using curl with ifconfig.me is pretty nice.Language May Have Evolved In Unexpected Ways
Instead, language seems to have evolved along varied, complicated paths, guided less by neurological settings than cultural circumstance. If our minds do shape the evolution of language, it's likely at levels deeper and more nuanced than many researchers anticipated.
I've always been fascinated by languages, hence the programmer in me, and this article from Wired discussed some new possible considerations in the evolution of language.