7 handy text manipulation tricks in Sublime Text 2 →
If you use Sublime Text 2, mastering keyboard shortcuts is essential. Programmer Josh Earl’s primer is a great start; if you’re a CSS guy, Sublime’s shortcut for swapping lines saves massive time.
CEO Dave Lee on productivity system Getting Things Done (GTD):
Though I still appreciate some of GTD’s principles (next action, desired outcome as project, brain dumping, etc), I think the system can actually work against the creative innovator. It boggles down the innovator with a flood of tasks, when the innovator needs space and room for experimentation and discovery.
Dave’s argument has grown on me recently. I’ve been a hard core Omnifocus GTD user for over a year, but at some point I started to lose it in terms of all the options, settings, and perspectives Omnifocus offered. It just felt like overkill. So several weeks ago I just deleted Omnifocus everywhere and shifted my workflow to a bunch of flat lists. I now use TaskAgent, Cheddar and Due to handle my productivity workflow. So far, so good.
If you use Sublime Text 2, mastering keyboard shortcuts is essential. Programmer Josh Earl’s primer is a great start; if you’re a CSS guy, Sublime’s shortcut for swapping lines saves massive time.
Critic Todd VanDerWerff nails the unevenness of “The Phantom”:
Some of what hampers “The Phantom” is, surprisingly, Weiner’s direction. He’s done such a fine job with all of the previous finales—even nailing the tricky tone of “Shut The Door. Have A Seat”—that I’m surprised at how weirdly flat this episode feels, confined by lots and lots of unimaginative shots and brusque directing that might have been standard on any TV drama. The pacing is all off in the first half of the episode, as everything jumps between storylines somewhat haphazardly, and though Weiner comes up with one magnificent image toward the end—the five partners of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce in their new office space, looking out toward what’s to come—so much of the rest of the episode feels like it’s trying to fit three or four episodes’ worth of plots into one hour and just barely pulling it off.
There were clearly some highlights – Roger’s mixture of happiness and genuine melancholy with Marie, Pete’s final speech to Beth – but I found this to be a pretty unsatisfying finale. Compared to the eloquence of Season 1’s “The Wheel”, or the surprise and movement of Season 3’s “Shut the Door. Have a Seat” and Season 4’s “Tomorrowland”, it was a pretty tame episode.
I read all the time how the cable, TV and movie industry will collapse under the weight of the internet and other new tech…but, as analyst Dan Frommer writes, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. (It’s all about who holds the content.)
Tim Stevens likes it, but there’s a problem:
The primary Apple apps — Safari, Mail, the address book, etc. — have all been tweaked to make use of all these wonderful pixels. Sadly, little else has. While we got assurances that third-party apps like Adobe Photoshop and AutoCAD are in the process of being refined, right now, seemingly every third-party app on the Mac looks terrible.
Yes, terrible. Unlike a PC, where getting a higher-res display just means tinier buttons to click on, here OS X is actively scaling things up so that they maintain their size. This means that non-optimized apps, which would otherwise be displayed as tiny things, instead are displayed in their normal physical dimensions with blurry, muddy edges.
This is a serious issue, one I hope Apple makes easily correctable for Mac developers. A even bigger issue is web imagery; i’m seeing many designers on my Twitter feed complain about the sharpness of web images up against well defined text.
Tech news moves fast but some discussion topics are timeless. Copyright and digital ownership is one of them and the Vergecast podcast covered it in depth on their episode two weeks ago. I really enjoyed listening to hosts Josh Topolsky and Nilay Patel break down where the movie, TV and music industry have to move to stay competitive. It’s all clustered at the beginning of the episode through roughly the first half hour.
Great creative commons licensed icon font. I can see this really coming in handy on some future side projects.
While on the subject, if you’re in the market for web page icons (with flat colors and no fancy treatments) bundling them in a single font is often the best way to go. Fonts are vector based, making them infinitely scaleable for multi-resolution displays and you get a single http request to pull in the full icon list. This really played out well with the Climacons Font on my Blue Drop web app.
Famed game designer Peter Molyneux:
You’re presented with this white room. In the middle of the white room is a black cube. If you touch on that black cube, you’ll zoom into it. This black cube is made up of millions of tiny little cubes. You can tap away at that cube.
As you’re doing that, these words will come up: ‘Curiosity, what is inside the black cube?’ That’s when you realize it’s not just you tapping away at that black cube, it’s the whole world. The whole world is tapping away is revealing layers of this cube.
So so Molyneux to run a project like this. Here’s hoping it translates into a kick ass game.
Pay what you want and get four highly regarded games – Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery, Limbo, Amnesia and Psychonauts – for Mac, PC and Linux. Pay a bit more (about $9 at the time of this writing) to unlock four more games, including Bastion and Super Meat Boy. If you’re at all vaguely interested in PC or Mac gaming you’ve probably heard about this. It deserves the hype. I’m generally not much of a Mac gamer, but the chance to catch up with Limbo, Braid and Super Meat Boy for bit more than $10, much of which goes to charity, is a no brainer.
Act soon – there’s only one day left in this offer.
The Verge’s Paul Miller wrote a solid article on how the big three console companies will evolve:
In the game world, where the topic of “casual” vs “hardcore” gaming is still a hot-button issue, Microsoft has side-stepped and pulled its chips off the table: it’s just mainstream. When Microsoft and Sony built Kinect and Move, respectively, to compete with the then-dominant Wii, they were both making a casual play. When the backlash came a year later, as hardcore gamers felt like they were being abandoned, Sony was quick to shore up that fanbase, but Microsoft kept it casual.
I wouldn’t quite go so far as saying Microsoft is “just” mainstream but Paul is on the right track. You can substitute ‘mainstream’ here with ‘evolving’; Sony is steadfast on 3D and the hard core market while Nintendo has a multiplayer network out of the 90s and regurgitating IPs from the 80s. Only Microsoft acknowledges the mobile elephant in the room.