Another year is coming to a close and a new beginning for all of us is on the horizon. 2013 was a big year for me with helping launch 1Password 4 for iOS and 1Password 4 for Mac, taking my first trip out of the country, buying a house, and watching my son start Kindergarten.
I can't wait to see what all 2014 has in store. Happy Christmas, friends.
Lately I have had conversations with a couple friends after I expressed rage frustration at how quickly my Apple Wireless Keyboard chews through a pair of Eneloop AA's1. Naturally, once I began to resent one thing, I began to notice the rest of its flaws compared to the modern state of other Bluetooth keyboards. What follows are my gripes with the Apple Wireless Keyboard, and how they should be fixed.
Tim Cook, if you're reading, I would give my kingdom for this keyboard.
AA's, while fairly universal, are ridiculous in this day & age of Apple devices. The iPad and the MacBook Air get amazing battery life. I'd like to see Apple bring their expertise in battery tech to their peripherals. Ditch the tube shape on the back that holds batteries, and go to a MacBook Air-like wedge shape with a good sized internal battery. Recharge it via a Lightning cable when needed, and have it still usable while plugged into your Mac.
Also, I imagine moving to Bluetooth 4 would help with energy usage, and every new Apple device in the past couple years has come equipped with that.
If you've been paying attention to any of Apple's portable Macs in the last few years, you'd know that the white keys of the Apple Wireless Keyboard look like a turd compared to the elegant black keys of portable Macs. Can you imagine how mismatched this keyboard looks next to the new Mac Pro?
Another thing Apple could borrow from the MacBook line is backlit keys. My proposed wedge shape, which could accommodate a nicely sized rechargeable battery, with a more energy efficient Bluetooth 4, could hopefully handle powering backlit keys. It's darn near 2014, it is time to have black, backlit keys on a wireless keyboard.
The Logitech K811 keyboard is almost the keyboard of my dreams, except it is a little on the ugly side with that black stripe across the top. It has black, backlit keys, an internal rechargeable battery (but over the sucky micro-USB), and this amazing ability to switch between a Mac, iPhone, & iPad with the press of a button. They call it EasySwitch for a reason.
When one of Apple's main goals is to get you to own a Mac, iPhone, & iPad, they should be selling a keyboard that gives extremely low friction in using it with all three devices.
There are some really great keyboards out there that are close to my dream keyboard, the aforelinked Logitech K811 being the closest, save for being a bit on the ugly side. I want Apple to step into this decade of technology with their keyboard, and utilize many of the technologies they've been pushing forward.
So let's recap what the next Apple Keyboard should be like.
And hey, while we're at it, let's update the Magic Trackpad with the wedge shape, internal battery, Lightning port, and Bluetooth 4.
Again, I'd give my kingdom for peripherals like this.
It is widely believed Apple uses relabeled Eneloops for their rechargeable battery kit. ↩
A good handful of great iOS apps have banded together for a one week sale over Christmas. Some of my favorites that I use a whole heck of a lot are 1Password (naturally), Delivery Status, Day One, and Clear+.
Definitely check it out and support some independent developers this week.
It's been quite a couple days for me and my team at the old day job. Yesterday, 1Password 4 for both iOS & Mac were honored with the prestigious Eddy Award (note: there's an autoplaying video at the top of the page). And today, we were honored by Apple to stand with many other amazing apps as one of the Mac App Store's Best Apps of 2013.
I can't express how happy I am to be a part of what 1Password has become, and of the fantastic folks I work with. It's been a great year, and I cannot wait for the coming one.
We've all been there. The awkward teenager who wants to be left alone at family events. Head buried in whatever our passion is. Family thinks — may even say — "I wish they would just interact with the rest of us."
I've been there. I'm pretty certain you were, too. What we both may have missed out on is secretly doing something amazing in our solitude for the good of others.
It's an ad, but its the best kind of ad. It tells a story that warms your heart and wets your eyes. Time and again Apple seems to be able to use their technology to touch our lives, and truly give us delight.
Studio Neat has unveiled a new Glif. The Glif is a fantastic little tripod mount, originally for the iPhone 4/4S, and it has a second generation for the 5/5S. The former Glifs had a couple drawbacks: you needed a new one whenever Apple changed the iPhone design, and you needed to remove your case if you had one.
The new Glif is adjustable. It can accomodate not just an iPhone in a case now, but any phone within a reasonable size limit. Better yet, it looks a lot more secure than the previous Glif design. I loved my Glif for the iPhone 4, but never got around to buying one for my iPhone 5. Seeing as how this should be future-proofed for a good long while, it was an insta-order. Apologies to relatives who already find me hard to shop for.
Once it arrives, I'll see about posting a review of how well it works.
My favorite recipe app for the iPhone and iPad, Paprika, got a huge update the other day, bringing an iOS 7 design, autocomplete for when you are adding recipes, AirDrop support, and much more.
Best thing is Paprika is on sale for the rest of November. I have it for iPhone, iPad, & Mac, and their custom sync engine is top notch. If you have any interest in having a digital recipe box, Paprika is hands-down the app to get.
Whenever I need to know what the best in a certain class of hardware is, I turn to The Wirecutter and if I need some household goods I turn to their sister site, The Sweethome.
Now I have a place for where to find the best apps out there for Mac & iOS. The talented Shawn Blanc has essentially taken the concept of The Wirecutter and The Sweethome and applied it to software.
Today he launched The Sweet Setup. The goal is not to cover the newest apps, but the best apps.
Seeing picks like 1Password (yeah, yeah, I work for them), Byword, Check the Weather, and Dark Sky reassure me that I have good taste in apps, as all of those have resided on my devices for quite some time.
I really cannot wait to see how The Sweet Setup grows over time, and which amazing apps I should be using that I would never have known about otherwise.
When I was younger, it was very hard to pull me away from my colored pencil set and a good sketch pad. Then college came around and my time was consumed with writing papers all the time, and sketching fell a bit by the wayside.
Now, my five-year-old son loves to draw and sketch and I am reminded of my youth. While pencil and paper is still the best way to sketch, in my opinion, the day & age of being able to do so digitally on an iPad is also so much fun.
While I still do not sketch often (I can keep blaming time constraints, right?), I do enjoy seeing what is possible on my iPad. Naturally, I reach for Paper, by FiftyThree.
I also use a Cosmonaut stylus on occasion, and I love it, it does have some inflexibilities. I love the weight, the feel, and just generally how it handles. The tip is a bit broad, though.
Today, FiftyThree announced the Pencil, a perfect complement to Paper. It looks superb, and looks to be very versatil, as it has a bluetooth connection instead of being a passive hunk of rubber-coated aluminum. The only thing that is a bit of a downer for me is it looks like it only works great with Paper, and not other apps. I may be wrong there.
However, I adore their video to introduce it. Some friends of mine did not enjoy the motion in it, but I think it is a clever, fun, and delightful amount of whimsy.
When I launched techese, I had been yearning to get away from the likes of WordPress. I had settled on Squarespace back then and have been with it ever since. I still wholeheartedly recommend Squarespace to folks who ask me what they should use to create a site.
One thing I have always had issue with was their iOS app. It wasn't all that good back on Squarespace 5, and since Squarespace 6, it has been a bag of hurt.
Thankfully, Squarespace has released two new apps to handle the crowded functions of the previous app.
Blog handles the writing and posting part while Metrics handles all your stats. Both apps are gorgeous and work really well. These were worth the wait. I'm really happy that Markdown is a first-class citizen in the Blog app.
I have two issues which will hopefully be taken care of in updates. The first is that the Blog app is missing the social sharing toggles of the web interface. If it had those, I could truly do everything I wanted with posting from iOS, which would rock.
The second issue is that Metrics doesn't have an iPad UI, so it scales up in the ugly 2x mode.
Beyond those two omissions, the apps work great, are fast, and chock full of the feature set you would expect. I hope Squarespace treats these apps as first class, iterating often, instead of letting them languish as the previous app did for so long.
