¶ Three Years

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It is a little hard to imagine that in a short three years how much the iPad has changed the world. It almost feels like it has been around much longer than three years.

I remember not knowing exactly why I needed wanted an iPad, but venturing out to look at one anyway. Of course, I ended up buying one. And I remember finding that oversized iPhone to be magical.

In these past three years I have owned four — count ‘em, four — iPads. The original, the iPad 2, The New iPad (or iPad 3 in regular person speak), and the best of them all so far — the iPad mini.

I still think that not even Apple knew exactly what the iPad would become when they launched it. And the truth is, it becomes whatever app you are currently running. It can be a book, an instrument, a race car, a movie studio (or movie theater), or be the future of communication drawn into the present.

The truly great thing is the amount of creativity the iPad can unleash in a person as the barrier to interact with a computer is broken down to simply directly touching the thing you are creating.

With each iteration of the iPad, my favorite has been the concentration of it to the lighter, more portable iPad mini. And I can’t help but feel that if we have come this far in three short years, how much further will we be in three more?

iOS 7 Settings→

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Louie Mantia imagines what iOS 7 may look like from the Settings app. I love his use of Avenir, a font that I have absolutely fallen in love with. I use it in any app I can (e.g., Day One and Twitterrific 5).

Louie makes a lot of other smart decisions, and I think I would love it if iOS got a bit of a makeoverin this style.

Some related reading would be Chairman Gruber's little birdies.

techese 4.0

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If you checked out the site in the past 24 hours, you may have noticed that things seem a little different. It’s a subtle visual change, as the general design stayed fairly similar, but this is definitely a brand new techese.

Without further ado, welcome to techese 4.0. This is the first real visual refresh since November 2011.

But it is so much more than a visual refresh. There are plenty of functional updates as techese has been updated from Squarespace 5 to Squarespace 6.

Here are a few of the changes you’ll enjoy:

  • Responsive design for mobile devices (!!!)
  • Linked List items will now use Daring Fireball style title links. These are signified with an → to the right of the title. (I’m not updating the back catalog, so this is from now on).
  • Simple liking of a post is now available using the little heart below each post.
  • Images now use a lightbox if you want to see them larger.

And a couple things to note:

  • Permalinks are found below every post by clicking the date.
  • The RSS feed has changed to http://techese.net/articles?format=rss, which I have done a 301 redirect for. In my testing, things like the soon-to-perish Google Reader made the switch just fine, but you may want to update the address anyway.

That’s all I have for now. Enjoy the update.

Twitterrific 5.2 Gets Pushy

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Ever since Iconfactory released a long awaited rewrite to Twitterrific last year, they have been hard at work on bringing the classiest Twitter app out there to being extremely powerful.

Their previous update, 5.1, added Muffling, which is muting for users, hashtags, and links done with a spin that only Iconfactory could come up with. And when 5.1 was released, the release notes subtly teased the next update with an auspicious phrase:

Ollie will return in…OCTOPUSHY

Today’s 5.2 update to Twitterrific features Push Notifications. You can receive notifications for Direct Mentions, Replies, Mentions, Favorites, Retweets, and Follows. They even have fantastic little color symbols that show in the notification itself, which I have found handy to know the type of message at a glance.

Right now Iconfactory is launching Push as a beta, with only the first 1000 accounts gaining access today, though they will be rolling out availability over the next couple weeks. This is being done to ensure their servers are able to handle the load. If you weren’t able to activate push yet, try again the next day to see if you can. Once your account is enabled, it can be enabled on any other number of devices.

There are all sorts of other updates in 5.2. A couple other new features are profiles now show Twitter’s banner images (and look great!) and discussions can be shared via email or Storify.

Some of the improvements are that the timeline can now show 600 tweets at a time up from 400, improvements to username autocomplete, and the load more button now animates as loads, along with a laundry list of other improvements and fixes.

If you are looking for the friendliest Twitter client out there, you need Twitterrific. Everyone’s favorite blue bird costs just $2.99 in the App Store.

Innovation Through Simplicity

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Chairman Gruber:

The utter simplicity of the iOS home screen is Apple’s innovation. It’s the simplest, most obvious “system” ever designed. It is a false and foolish but widespread misconception that “innovation” goes only in the direction of additional complexity.

I use a lot of complex software and tools. I can say from experience that the ones that I most enjoy are the ones that work towards simplicity over time.