Kenny has a nice post over the Blue Flavor blog detailing a bunch of reasons why TextMate rocks our socks off. I sort of hate to admit it as someone who identifies as a designer moreso than a coder, but TextMate is probably the single most-used and most important piece of software on my Mac. I use it for everything. Visit site »
Steven has a great piece on how the iTunes App Store is simultaneously the best mobile application distribution platform ever and downright scary for developers who want to make their stuff available from it. Visit site »
A very interesting-looking product that adds a ton of codec support and some other features to your AppleTV. I’m a little scared to try it, but it looks awesome. Very tempting… Visit site »
Nathan Smith gets input from several buddies of mine, including Anton Peck, Jared Christensen, Patrick Haney, and Jenna Marino, on their preference for either Fireworks or Photoshop. The comments are definitely an interesting read, so I encourage you to check it out. I think it’s important to keep some perspective, though: the only people who really care whether you use Fireworks or Photoshop are other designers. Clients couldn’t care less. Debating the pros and cons can be fun for us design nerds, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter what you use — keep that in mind. Visit site »
John Allsop wonders aloud whether or not most iPhone native apps should be web apps, instead. Although I don’t really share John’s lack of enthusiasm for native iPhone apps in general, I definitely think he has a point. Many of the best apps on the iPhone are simply interfaces to web content. Many of them don’t offer any real advantages over a similar web app. Developers would be wise to still consider the web app direction as a possibility, unless they specifically need to access native functionality such as the camera or location data — web apps are more compatible, more distributable, and arguably easier to develop. Visit site »
The Brightkite team says their native iPhone app will be out by the end of the month. Great news, because so far, I’m not very impressed with Loopt or Whrrl. Brightkite’s iPhone web version defeats both by a long, long longshot. Visit site »
Ever since I tweeted that I have installed iPhone 2.0 and downloaded apps from the app store, I’ve gotten countless IM’s, DM’s, and e-mails asking me how. It’s been all over the Internet all morning, so it’s no secret, but Wired has now published a comprehensive, step-by-step guide that is probably the simplest to follow that I’ve seen. So, get on it. Visit site »
Another Mac SVN client. This one, at a glance, looks more interesting than Versions, to me. Visit site »
Qik, which is totally rad, is now on iPhone. It looks like it’s just a demo of an unofficial app for jailbroken iPhone, but it’s probably safe to assume a more “legit” version will be coming soon. Awesome. Visit site »
I had been excitedly awaiting Versions for a long time, until I gave up and declared it vaporware. Now, it looks like it may be for real. This preview is very enticing. Want. Visit site »
It’s great to hear that Cultured Code is working on an iPhone task management application — assuming Apple doesn’t do one themselves, this will no doubt be the single most-wanted type of application from third parites. Competition will be stiff, I’m sure. But, we know from Things that Cultured Code is able to do these things well. They have a great sense of UI design, and make things that are very Mac-like. However, like Things, if it doesn’t integrate with OS X’s system-wide to-do service, I’m going to have to consider it useless. I want to love Things, but I just can’t, in its current state. I hope the iPhone version doesn’t have the same limitation. Visit site »
Two words: Hell. Yes. Visit site »
I’ve had this one in my “to watch later” pile for several weeks, and I finally got around to it last night. Cabel’s one of the more entertaining speakers I’ve ever head the pleasure of seeing in person, and this talk about the development of Coda certainly lives up to that. He’s insightful, funny, and interesting. Check it out. In my opinion, Panic is still synonymous with great Mac software — even as I was never the target market for Coda and Expan drive has largely made Transmit unnecessary for me. Visit site »
The new Safari build includes several items of interest to cutting-edge web designers and developers: CSS animations, HTML 5 audio and video elements, and downloadable fonts. Visit site »
For those of us who didn’t make it to the ElisLabs sessions at SXSW. Visit site »
Chris Wilson and his team at Microsoft release a “readiness toolkit,” for IE 8, which includes (among other things), a beta of the application and a new debugging tool long the lines of Firebug. Nice.
As of today, the Web Standards movement is over. We won. Visit site »
As much trouble as I’ve had with sshfs being slow as balls, I think I’m going to splure for this $29 app, which Gruber gives a glorius review. Visit site »
Wired’s story on 37signals is a good read — fair, balanced, and interesting. There are a few factual inaccuracies and a few odd comments (like “they would rather fail than adapt,” in the last paragraph), but overall it’s quite well-done. Visit site »
I love that these guys are putting a design face on top of Subversion. There’s a tendency amongst designers, it seems, to think, “version control is just for coders,” when in reality version control is something everyone ought to be using for all sorts of files. Beanstalk looks like they’re making it easy to do just that. Visit site »
Silverback, from our friends at Clearleft, is a really nice new Mac app for usability testing that makes uses of Macs’ built in iSight, the Apple Remote, and more. It’s a simple app, but it’s extremely well-designed (as you’d expect from Clearleft!), and appears to do what it does very elegantly. If you do usability testing with live subjects, you really should check it out. Also noteworthy to an animals lover like me: Clearleft is donating 10% of the profits to saving the gorillas. Awesome. Visit site »