Once again Federico Viticci shows why he is one of the best out there. This is probably one of my favorite things on the internet now.
EVERYTHING You Need To Know About Working Off An iPad
Chris Lawley’s latest Youtube video
As someone who has seen a lot of Christopher’s videos and also co-host on a podcast with him, this is by far his best work.
Don’t Moleskine your blog
Nitin Khanna writing for nitinkhanna.com:
I’ve never been able to buy a Moleskine notebook. I’ve often come across them in shops and stores, but every time I flip through the well weighted, elegant pages, which can give you paper cuts all day, I realize that I’m not worthy of a Moleskine. My handwriting is terrible. My ability to sketch wouldn’t save my life! Besides, the most important thing I want out of any notebook is the ability to scribble random ideas, or write small notes into. I want to just dump chicken scratch and small paragraphs in, without having to worry about elongating, or writing perfectly. Do I furiously scratch out words as I’m writing? All the time.
Would I ever want to use a Moleskine for that? No.
I recently came across this post by Jeff Perry –
It got me thinking – do we sometimes treat out blogs as Moleskine notebooks? Do we worry that we must only present our best writing on them, instead of just putting our ideas out there, perfection be damned? Yes, we do. We write entire posts and then save them in drafts, only to forget them forever. Either we’re not proud of our writing, or we’re not sure if it’s the right time to publish them, or we’re unnecessarily being perfectionists. Whatever the reason, what happens when you open your blog the next time? You come to the homepage, or the admin dashboard, and what do you see? The drafts? No. That’s a hidden page somewhere, totally ignored. So we move on to the next idea, and then the next, until our creativity is stifled and our spirits dampened by the lack of publishing. Why do we do this? Because the home page of our blog, at least in our minds, is a public space, and on it, only our best work should be displayed. But this is not true. CMSes allow two states – logged in and logged out. When you’re logged in, your blog’s home page is, in fact, not a public space, but a private one. Most of us do not realize or understand this, let alone capitalize on this simple idea.
I learnt about this problem in 2017 and solved it for myself. I want to share the idea with you, dear reader, so you can also stop moleskinning your blog. I’ve alluded to me writing this post before, specifically mentioning a key aspect of my solution – that when you see my blog’s 2018 archive, you see 25 posts, while I see 59. Yes, that’s thirty four posts that are not sitting tucked away in a drafts folder, but active and alive on my blog, albeit only for me.
Nitin has a really interesting way he treats his blog, and I think I may start using it myself. It may not be the perfect solution but it does seem to allow me to “post” without it being totally public. Even if he hadn’t mentioned me on this I think it would have been something that would grab my attention.
I also have been doing a lot of thinking after relistening to John Gruber’s episode on Mac Power Users from 2015 on how he got started with Daring Fireball. He said, I am paraphrasing of course, that he first wrote feature articles meaning it was all his own writing without link posts or anything. Eventually he found he couldn’t keep up with his consistency and started link blogging. I think I am in the same boat now that he was in back in 2004. Which is why you will probably see more link posts like this from Rocket Panda. That doesn’t mean I won’t be posting original content, it just means I will have more posts regularly in between the original feature posts I write.
Gawker 2.0 Implodes as Its Only Reporters Quit
Maxwell Tani writing for The Daily Beast:
The two reporters said they decided to leave the new Gawker after Bustle Digital Group—which bought the shuttered Gawker.com domain and its archives in a mid-2018 fire sale—refused to oust Griffith over offensive workplace comments about everything from poor people to black writers to her acquaintance’s penis size.
Kosoff and Breslaw said they met with human resources to complain of several instances in which they felt personally uncomfortable working with Griffith.
In particular, Kosoff—a former colleague and personal friend of this reporter—described to human resources an incident in which Griffith forwarded an unsolicited chain email showing the editorial director’s friends boasting they knew the penis size of a prominent businessman.
“My one good memory from the…trip (besides meeting carson) is him in a swimsuit,” one of Griffith’s friends wrote, according to a copy of the thread reviewed by The Daily Beast.
“Hung?” another friend asked.
“Ha! Omg I feel like that is a question Carson would know :),” Griffith’s friend responded.
The two reporters also relayed to human-resources instances in which they believed Griffith—who holds a management role at the site—expressed an uncomfortably negative attitude on issues related to workplace diversity.
In a Slack message reviewed by The Daily Beast, Griffith seemed to brag to Gawker staff that she had gotten them out of a company-wide diversity training session, though neither Kosoff nor Breslaw had asked her to do so. The two ended up attending.
During one of Breslaw’s interviews for the job, Griffith mentioned the snack selection at the office, and noted that she had a snack saved in her pocket.
“That’s so poor person of me,” she joked.
Kosoff additionally told HR of an exchange in which Griffith took a dismissive stance towards the recruiting of a writer who identifies as non-binary.
Kosoff, who was tasked with recruiting some new editorial staff, wrote in a Slack message that she was going to meet with a potential staffer “who is a person of color and nonbinary (uses they/them pronouns).”
When she returned from the meeting two hours later, Griffith initially laughed off the preferred pronouns.
“lol is [name redacted] a girl?” Griffith asked.
I wish I could say that this surprises me, but nothing about Gawker shocks me anymore. I hope both Kosoff and Breslaw find better work elsewhere.
As for Griffith, I am sure she is happy with all this attention. Most villains in media are when they get attention, good or bad.
Things 3.8 Brings Dark Modes to the iOS Task Manager
Ryan Christoffel writing for MacStories:
This fall when macOS Mojave introduced a systemwide dark mode feature, Things added support for the new mode in version 3.7. The iPhone and iPad versions of the app, however, were left out. A lack of feature parity across platforms is always unfortunate, but that was especially true this time around because our John Voorhees highlighted Things as having his single favorite dark mode implementation.
There’s good news though: we didn’t have to wait long for Things’ dark mode to make its way to iOS. Launching today in version 3.8, Things has added two different dark modes on both iPhone and iPad, one of which is suited particularly well to OLED iPhones.
Cultured Code has been on my list for a while of developers that make the iPad great. Things 3 adding dark mode is one of my favorite things to see with Things 3. Sadly, I am still going to keep using OmniFocus strictly because it is the task manager that I consistently go back to when I am no longer “on the market” for task managers.