My tall, new friend Scott McNulty interviewed me yesterday for TUAW's Macworld coverage -- unintentionally providing me a fine bully pulpit from which to perpetuate my baseless theories and half-baked forecasts about how Apple might eat the lunches of about three different industries over the next couple years.
If they can pull it off, if they can fix .Mac, and if they have the vision to re-imagine themselves as the company who makes your entire digital world safe, fun, ubiquitous, and flawlessly integrated.
Anyhow, on with the motley, but stay tuned after the jump for value-added hand-waving.
So, exactly what the hell nonsense am I talking about here?
The Omni Group - OmniFocus - OmniFocus 1.0 officially hit the streets this week. So proud of all my hard-working OmniPals, who've made the app I always wanted. Kudos.
RulesofThumb.org - I loved Parker's RoTbooks, and the site looks like a fun, user-driven collection of these bite-sized bits of wisdom. - [via BB]
Things - task management on the Mac - Haven't spent much time with Things yet, but this looks like a beautiful and promising-looking app for doing GTD on your Mac. Very pretty.
ThinkGeek :: SnūzNLūz - Wifi Donation Alarm Clock - "...everytime you hit the snooze button, the SnūzNLūz will donate a specified amount of your real money to a non-profit you hate." You have to respect a Rube Goldberg device that's attached to your personal sense of outrage. [thanks, overhang]
Products [Merlin Mannerism Widget] - "The Merlin Mannerism Widget provides a different Merlin Mann quote each day from 1 Jan 2008 through 4 Jan 2009." Oh, lucky you. [thanks, hongkongphooey] That said, if you enjoy this sort of thing, you can also get up-to-date (and very economically worded) Mannerisms from my Twitter posts. On the other hand, if you don't enjoy this sort of thing, I'm sure you're not alone.
I was delighted to see my favorite OS X writing app, Scrivener, turn up in today's "The Medium" column of the New York Times Magazine. I reviewed Scrivener about a year ago, and still use it whenever I have to research, plan, and draft anything more complicated than a blog post. In fact, as luck would have it, I was actually working on my upcoming Macworld talkin Scrivener when I took a break to read the paper and saw this article. Kismet or something.
Columnist, Virginia Heffernan, notes the app's beloved full-screen capability:
To create art, you need peace and quiet. Not only does Scrivener save like a maniac so you needn’t bother, you also get to drop the curtain on life’s prosaic demands with a feature that makes its users swoon: full screen. When you’re working on a Scrivener opus, you’re not surrounded by teetering stacks of Firefox windows showing old Google searches or Citibank reports of suspicious activity. Life’s daily cares slip into the shadows. What emerges instead is one pristine and welcoming scroll: Your clean and focused mind.
High fives to other great apps mentioned in the article, including Ulysses, WriteRoom, and Nisus Writer. Slightly lower fives go to Microsoft Word, which, once again, takes its usual drubbing as The Application Everyone Wants To Get Away From™. Poor Microsoft Word, the mascara-smeared Gloria Swanson of word processors.
1Password to Rule Them All at LifeClever - Chanpory reviews the game-changing 1Password. I think I've tried to make it my Pick of the Week on MacBreak Weekly about 3 times now. One of the truly indispensable OS X apps, and Chanpory shows you why. (Loving the graphical password strength meter in the latest beta)
TVShows automatically downloads your favourite shows If you don't mind getting your IP address stuck in the door (and, IMO, you should), bit torrent can bring much bounty to your Mac. This OSS app grabs the torrent for your favorite TV shows (not the actual video file) then passes it along to your BT app to complete the work on your dirty little scheme. Neat idea. [via JimRay (but you didn't hear it from me either)]
San Francisco Storms | Ask MetaFilter - I'll admit that San Francisco's lack of real weather has made this Florida boy into a nervous nelly; we're headed for supplies at the Home Depot this morning...because it might be a little windy. Friends back in Tallahassee are surely pointing and laughing right now. As is appropriate.
Will You Look At That - Until I do that long-overdue post on "Amazing sites I look at all day but that you may not know about," enjoy entry #1: this nicely-curated collection of cool photos from Flickr.
This review of two recent dietbooks underscores what most of us already know all too well: while it's easy enough to drop a few pounds for a short while, it's nearly impossible to lose a lot of weight for a long time.
What caught my attention for anyone wishing to apply some fancy book-learning directly to the affected area was this chunk of insight on eating mindfully -- alongside a smart bit of life-hacky weight loss advice:
Having noticed Google's new "Newbie Central" site, Google Blogoscoped's Philipp Lenssen posted a swell pile of his own best tips for improving AdSense performance on your site. Linked here because (at least IMHO) it's depressingly rare to find useful, non-douchey advice about making money with a website.
