Neven Mrgan is a designer at Panic, Inc. and half of the creative team behind The Incident, one of my current favorite iPhone/iPad games. If you’ve enjoyed the Talking Tools series here (which recently featured Shawn, oddly enough), you’ll definitely find this to a very interesting read (and in no small part due to Shawn being an excellent interviewer).
Talking Tools is an ongoing series of interviews with people whom I respect as creators, communicators and craftspeople. The goal is to dig deeper into how these people work, what their toolboxes look like and how they engage in their own processes.
Today, I’m pants-on-head excited to be speaking with Marco Arment, the CTO/Lead Developer at Tumblr and the one-man band behind Instapaper, a service that allows you to read things later that I use every single day. He frequently shares interesting thoughts on technology (among other things) on his blog at marco.org. He’s a badass. Read on for a riveting discussion of programming languages, text editors and blunt force trauma-inspired career changes.
I work with computers. I spend a staggering number of hours every day seated at a computer. I work for a company that makes a product designed to act like paper, but better. I can type faster than just about anybody I know and my handwriting looks like that of a surgeon who just finished his third martini while riding in the back of Gravedigger. Why, then, do I keep a pen and paper on me at all times and, when seated, open in front of me, ready for input? Because that’s how I have ideas.
I’ve gotten a surprising amount of email from folks asking if they should use Dropbox instead of Evernote since, in their opinion, the services seem to offer the same sort of basic features. The point of this post is two-fold. First, to quell this misconception. Second, to describe just how much I use the *shit* out of both of these services and, up until Evernote hired me, was happy to pay for both (I still pay for Dropbox). Before we get into that, I think it’d be interesting to try to sort out how people arrive at the conclusion that Dropbox and Evernote are similar enough to cause confusion as to which is best to the exclusion of the other.
A few days ago, my two buddies Patrick and Dave were doing this little Twitter thing where they took pictures of what was in their pockets, and I decided to play along. In case it isn’t obvious looking at the photo above, I don’t carry a wallet; I haven’t for several years now, in fact. This is due to my wanting to reduce my walking weight a little and, I think more markedly, due to the iPhone.
When I carried a wallet, it was usually brimming over with old receipts, business cards, outdated photos of my wife and children, various identification cards that I hadn’t needed to produce since acquiring them and assorted other useless crap. Now, it all lives in the computer that I carry with me (mostly in Evernote, naturally). I know is passe to talk about how the advent of modern smart phones has helped us commoners carry less when we walk around, but I’m curious if any of you have an interesting “after I got my iPhone/Droid Whatever/Blackberry, I stopped carrying ________” kind of story.
Oh, and as I mentioned in the original posting of this photo, my keyring holds a LaCie USB thumb drive that I almost never use because of Dropbox and its iPhone client.
How about you?
N.B. - I’ve been using a Field Notes notebook instead of my trusty Levenger Shirt Pocket Briefcase for the last week or so and I’m loving the crap out of it. Frankly, it’s borderline embarrassing how much I dorkswoon over quality paper products.
We’ve all found ourselves in situations where we need to complete a task and the appropriate implement for the job isn’t available. Or maybe it is available, but it’s just not immediately at hand. If I encounter a loose screw on one of the cabinets in my kitchen, my mind immediately tries to recall the location of the nearest screwdriver. When I realize that said screwdriver is on the other side of the house or out in the garage, I then start looking around for a suitable, one-time stand-in like the tip of a table knife or a narrow key. Clearly, I’m not going to use a tool like this to drive all screws from that point forward because it’s inefficient, but it will get the job done in a pinch. Such is my opinion of the iPad for “content creation”.
Talking Tools is an ongoing series of interviews with people whom I respect as creators, communicators and craftspeople. The goal is to dig deeper into how these people work, what their toolboxes look like and how they engage in their own processes.
Today, we’re talking with another of my blogging heroes, Shawn Blanc. His most popular writings deal with Apple stuff, but he’s also got quite a knack for finding interesting content online and sharing it with his small army of fans at shawnblanc.net. I won’t lie to you - I’d cut off my left pinky to write like this guy and I’m crazy excited that he’s taken the time to talk with me.
This is one of my favorite “quick-n-dirty” jQuery tricks. If you’re working on a Web site and you need to add rollover effects to links or other images, you can do it pretty simply with this chunk of JavaScript code and some intelligently named image files. First, make sure you include jQuery if you haven’t already:
Now, include this jQuery code somewhere on your site:
It’s been almost a month since Evernote Essentials first hit the digital shelves and I’ve gotten a ton of requests for an affiliate program. Well, I’m happy to tell you that it’s here and it’s fabulous.
If you’re a fan of Evernote Essentials and want to make some extra cash by linking to it on your blog or sharing it with your friends on Twitter, Facebook and such, then boy howdy are you going to love this. As an affiliate, you’ll earn 40% of the price of each book you help me sell. That’s $10 each and all you need to do is use your special affiliate link. It only takes a couple of minutes to sign up and it’s incredibly simple.
Interested? Visit the Affiliates page for more details on the program and all the info you need to sign up.
Thank you all for making Evernote Essentials such an amazing success. The response has been overwhelming and I’m thrilled to death that all of you kind folks like it so much. I’m in the process of compiling a massive amount of updates and new material for the next version (which you’ll get for free if you bought the current version) and I’m aiming to have that ready to go in the next 2-3 weeks.
Thanks again. You guys rock.
Back to our regularly-scheduled programming.
Photo by oooh.oooh
The ruggedly handsome Dennis of ncaahoops.net asks:
How do you decide whether to group items in a notebook, or to give them a tag and have a saved search? Is this a personal preference, or is there an advantage to either one?
It depends if you’re adding a lot of content on this topic or just retrieving and reading what you’ve already collected. Let’s explore both of these, shall we?
