Alex Payne, who is working at Twitter, maintains a soup.io tumble blog called “Minima - A record of applied simplicity.“, which is really worth following. Short posts on all things simple and minimal. From Minimal Techno music to architecture and decent furniture designs, as well as Mac applications.
If you use a Mac and do web development you’ve most likely heard about Coda, Panic.com’s lovely one-stop solution for web developers.
Until Friday, they sell Coda (as well as their other apps) for 50% off the regular price. That’s quite a bit of bang for your bucks, so you should head out and grab a copy before it’s too late!
Just a few days ago I bought the amazing new album of Anja Plaschg a.k.a. soap&skin, a young girl from Austria. It is called “Lovetune for Vacuum”
and has climbed up my personal 2009 album charts quickly.
All writing, recording and production has been done by herself at first, later on adding some professional support for her first album at Pias Recordings.
If you can stand a little melancholic sound and are into stuff like Portishead or Radiohead, this one might be for you indeed, although I wouldn’t want to draw a direct line between each of those three artists, as each of them stands for their very own with a truely distinct sound.
This entry was written by Dennis Kirschner, posted on March 25, 2009 at 5:53 pm, filed under Music and tagged Music, soap&skin. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Over the weekend I tried out Touch Physics by Gamez 4 Touch and Node Thirty Three and have to say I am amazed. The game concept is pretty simple: Move a little, purple circle towards the level’s goal, indicated by a yellow star. Obstacle: you are forced to obey the laws of physics, thus you can only draw objects that behave physically correct, in order to push or move the little purple circle towards it’s goal.
For all who don’t understand my gibberish, just check out this movie:
There are many topics each of us has or wants to follow. My feedreader (I use NetNewsWire) is bursting under the heavy load of way more than 100 feeds that I subscribed to. I keep them organized by sorting them into different priorities: Daily, Weekly, Whenever. That way, I don’t waste too much time skimming through articles each day, but can catch up on the less important stuff whenever I find myself willing to do so, e.g. on lazy weekends.
A tool I find to be very handy is Yahoo Pipes if I’d like to keep up with what’s happening around the web on a certain topic or term.
I simply create a new pipe and feed several search engine’s result feeds into it, e.g. Technorati, Google News, YouTube and some German blog search engines like blogato; all evolving around the same search term(s).
Combining the ouput of all the search queries on these sites into one RSS feed in a Yahoo Pipe, it’s pretty easy to keep an eye on a topic that may appear on all kinds of sites, either in the form of articles, images or videos. You’ll catch most of it, using this little helper.
Lukas is hinting on some strategies one should follow during the process of designing an application’s appearance:
When it comes to Safari’s new tab interface, which pretty much ressembles Google’s Chrome, I still didn’t really get used to it, but Lukas makes the valid point that, logically, the new design makes more sense, since it actually follows a more intuitive hierarchy of UI elements.
I am test driving the Safari 4 Beta as of today; first impressions:
The way tabs are implemented is lovely. I guess it’s somewhat like in Chrome, but as I’m Mac-only, I can’t tell for sure. Any Chrome users here?
I am Not sure if I like the startpage with those PicLens-like thumbnails of the most visited pages… I think I prefer a blank page, have to find out if it can be disabled. Aside from that, it feels pretty fast and responsive, I like it. BUT: TwitterFox, SearchStatus, Delicious, plista and all the other plugins that make up a substantial part of my daily browsing experience will probably hold me back from switching to Safari.
Let me know what you think of it in the comments or on Twitter!
This entry was written by Dennis Kirschner, posted on February 24, 2009 at 4:29 pm, filed under General, Safari and tagged Safari. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
As Google Mail is down _right now_, just some random thoughts on the downsides:
- you’re really f***ed if it goes down
- it definetely goes down more often than my actual email provider (which had zero unplanned downtime in the past few years)
- there is NO _proper_ way of backing up your emails
- I am realizing that my email setup is far from being sufficient; I should think about stepping away from Gmail again
- I think Google should focus more on availability issues as well as security/backup-solutions (integration with a service like Dropbox, S3 or any other cloud storage, or just offer a simple “download ZIP archive of your mails” feature)
- odd IMAP behaviour, which makes setting up GMail on most mail clients a real PITA
Of course, the huge amount of storage, great user interface and feature set weigh in heavily on the other hand. But I will definetely go back to a setup that holds an offline copy of all my mails, where web-access via the Google interface is optional. This seems to be a good compromise, I think.
So, wie alle ca. 6 Monate aus irgendwelchen Gründen: neues Wordpress, gehe zurück auf Null.
Aber da das hier ohnehin mehr Spielwiese als ernstgenommenes Blog-Projekt ist (da gibt’s andere), sollte das ja kein Problem sein. Allerdings möchte ich hier trotzdem gern mal wieder Apple- und IT- und Musik-lastigen Content hinterlassen, bevor es mir meinen ursprünglich gar nicht mal so üblen Page Rank komplett versaubeutelt.
Und bis ich dazu mal wieder Zeit finde, teste ich ab heute zumindest mal ein Twitter Plugin.
This entry was written by Dennis Kirschner, posted on February 23, 2009 at 10:05 am, filed under General. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Living in Berlin, Germany. Working for plista and studying Business Informatics. Former co-founder and CIO of sportme. Meet me on Facebook, Twitter, Xing, Flickr.
kcon.net
Is my private weblog on random stuff I'm into, like Apple, music I discover, and all things Internet. Though I try to write most articles in English, it happens that I post German things occasionally.