I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role of delight in application design and how it relates to (and sometimes trumps) efficiency. I wrote a small piece about this and Macworld published it today.
MPU 192: iOS Picks
In Mac Power Users episode 192, Katie Floyd and I share some of our favorite iOS application picks. In the midst of it all, we had an interesting conversation relating to read it later services and the sometimes-fallacy of “efficient” software. Enjoy.
Fixing Word Crashes with “Smart” Copy and Paste
I vented my spleen a bit on a recent Mac Power Users episode about instability in Microsoft Word on the Mac. I received a lot of email about that and it appears I’m not alone. I did, however, also receive a very nice email from listener Don that explained how he made Word crashes go away by unchecking Word’s “Use smart cut and paste” feature. I’ll try anything once so I went ahead and unchecked it a week ago. I’ve got a big “thing” at the day job starting Monday so I’ve been working in Word most of this week. Guess what? No crashes. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ll be knocking on a lot of wood.
MPU 191: Sparks-Floyd Methodology
Katie and I are finding a rhythm with the monthly live feedback shows. Don’t believe me? Check this out.
The Little Duck that Could
I’ve written about DuckDuckGo before. It’s an alternative search engine that has, as item number one on it’s white board, “don’t track users”. My searches really aren’t all that interesting but I don’t like becoming a Google product all that much either. DuckDuckGo isn’t as fast, or frankly as good, as Google but it is narrowing the gap. They continue to evolve and most recently announced a redesign that you can try right now at next.duckduckgo.com.
The search results, show in the below gallery, are very attractive and pretty good. I’m back to using it full time and it’s not annoying me. The features to search images, videos, and the dictionary are very clean. Best of all, I’m not anybody’s product. If you’ve not tried DuckDuckGo in awhile, go back. You’ll be surprised.
My Meeting Tips Article in Macworld
I recently published an article at Macworld on a few tricks I use to set and keep meetings. I didn’t realize it had already published. You can check it out here.
New PDFpen Scan+ Screencast
Here is my latest screencast demonstrating PDFpen Scan+ 1.3. This new version has a lot of improvements on both the front end (with a new iOS 7 friendly UI) and the back end (wait until you see how good it is at edge detection). This is my favorite app for turning bits of paper into digital PDF files full of OCR’d bits of awesomeness.
WeMo Long Press Contest
Did you know the gang at Belkin has added a “long press” function to the WeMo switch. Now when you long press a WeMo light switch, you can fire off an IFTTT function. This is actually kind of awesome. For instance, your could have a long press send your significant other a text message that you are home safely.
Moreover, Belkin is giving away some switches to people with interest and fun public recipes. Get the details at the Mac Power Users.
Mingle, A New Take on Contacts
I’ve been playing with Samir Ghobril’s new contacts app, Mingle (website)(iTunes). The application breaks the usual “tap to view” paradigm of a contacts app. Instead, you swipe a contact and it gives you several options, including email, Twitter, call, and chat. This is not unlike some of the email applications that give you multiple options when you swipe an email message. I still find it fascinating how developers are innovating some very traditional categories of software (like contact managers) now that we’ve got these new interfaces. Mingle is definitely worth checking out.
MPU 190: Workflows with John August
John August is an impressive guy. He writes movies, develops apps, and podcasts all with an eye to attention and detail that is to be admired. This week we interviewed John on the Mac Power Users to find out what tools he uses to be so productive.