Arteliance

My mom’s old typewriter box and my new iMac box stored side by side in the garage.

tech ronin: Leopard on iMac 24 2.8 - Bliss

This is my first iMac. Who knew I would love the integration and simplicity? I am beginning to see things Steve’s way on this. It’s so easy. So elegant. Sometimes options are more trouble than they are worth. That’s the religion you get with the iPhone…. I’m being corrupted but perhaps for my own good.

redhat.com | Intro to design thinking

David Burney: Design thinking is a term being used today to define a way of thinking that produces transformative innovation. While the term feels trendy, the way of thinking is hardly new. One can think of the cave painters in Lascaux 25,000 years ago as design thinkers— they first began to collect data about the world they experienced, express that data by creating visual stories, document those stories in a way that could be shared into the future, and use that data to create new and innovative ways to solve their problems. The creation of alphabets thousands of years later is an example of design thinking.

Blast from the past? Coldest winter in 15 years, Environment Canada says

Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips said the trend in recent years of uncharacteristically warm, short winters will be wiped out by a chilly reminder of what a real Canadian winter feels like.

Since getting my new iMac over a month ago I have been downloading and installing every new piece of donationware I see. So far, some of the “keepers” are:

• AppDelete Most of the software I download gets deleted and this does a pretty good job of it.
• Cyberduck Set the timeout to 60 sec. to get it to work with the site I update every month
• Firefox ‘natch
• Gimp Not Photoshop but so far surprisingly capable
• Growl May just be distracting
• iGTD Started using iGTD this week and its been really effective so far
• MacJournal261 its a toss up between this one and Journler right now - Journler has a lot more features but MacJournal is effective and simple
• NeoOffice all I need for an “Office” type program at the moment
• NetNewsWire Lite I used to use Bloglines all the time but lately it has been giving me the same posts over and over and over again so I’ve been using Google Reader a lot after using NNW for nearly a month. Yesterday I downloaded the latest NNW Lite version and am giving it another go
• Quicksilver This is probably the first thing every new mac user should download and learn to use - amazing.
• Snitter I am torn between this and the free (ad-supported) version of Twitterific right now. Twitterific is prettier but I like the larger text entry area of Snitter
• TextWrangler Using this until I upgrade my old BBEdit license (which, btw, Bare Bones was very helpful in finding for me and isn’t expensive) along with scripts from VormPlus Webtools
• Thunderbird Email has been probably the most disappointing aspect of my leap to OS X (Tiger). I looked at Apple Mail of course as well as Eudora/Penelope which was disappointing as I’d used Eudora on OS 9 but the icons in this version are just too ugly. I think what I really want is something that looks like Mailsmith in Classic and also displays the HTML emails my friends send me while filing eveything in a completely predictable way. When Gmail came out with IMAP Access, Thunderbird won. Add-ons: Quicktext

Yesterday’s blog post got me thinking about “feature creep” and how often I started using a web app only to have to abandon it a few months (or weeks) later because new features rendered it unusable on an older operating system. One piece of software that has (so far) managed to avoid this pitfall is Todoist. An elegant and simple task manager that’s no more complicated than it needs to be. I have been using it for nearly a year now and its still usable and useful on both my old and my new computer.

Some further references on feature creep:

Why Does Software Spoil?

Feature Presentation

Feature creep on Moleskine City Notebooks?

My first