Posts tagged: geekery
I can’t tell you how much I love Dropbox. It is probably the single most useful service/piece of software I’ve used in the last two years. I was just reminded of its awesomeness this weekend when I had to restore to a previous version of a file that I had inadvertently mangled. The ability to painlessly revert to the correct version of a file is something that you just can’t fully appreciate until the moment when you really need it. Coders do this all the time with SVN or Git, but those are just FAR too complicated for most normal non-coders. So for this reason alone, I highly recommend Dropbox to everyone I know who has a computer.
Designers, writers, coders, artists, whoever… go get Dropbox and start putting all your crap into it. You’ll love it and it will save you hours of your life.
If you click the link above, you’ll get an extra free 250 MB of space when you sign up.
Let me start by saying, this is not an announcement of a redesign or feature upgrade; this is a look at the forthcoming re-envisioning of our website and our business. … Our new mission is much more focused: The new Virb is one of the easiest and most affordable ways to build an elegantly simple website. That’s it.
This is such great news. I’ve been saying for a while that Virb needed a fundamental retooling. It was hopelessly lost somewhere between Facebook, MySpace and Tumblr. I had fallen in love with it as an alternative to MySpace back when MySpace was “a thing.” It was well-designed, clean, minimal, extremely flexible, and had a great community (all the things I love about Tumblr nowadays). Over time though, things changed and Virb just didn’t feel relevant anymore. Like, at all (at least to me). They tried “re-launching,” but I don’t think anyone really cared. Despite all that, I was sincerely rooting for them. They are brilliant designers and craftsmen and they seem like good people.
I’m excited to see what they’ve come up with. I think there is a definite niche in the market if they hit the sweet spot. And frankly, I like that they are charging for it. It means people will take it seriously and it will hopefully turn into a nice sustainable business. (sidenote: I’m still curious to see what David and the Tumblr gang have up their sleeve for eventually getting this thing to pay for itself. I have no doubt they will, just curious to see what form that will take.)
Anyway, GOOD LUCK VIRB!!
Dear Apple,
Why have you not already used just a tiny fraction of the engineering horsepower you no doubt posses, to make iDisk what it truly ought to be? What? What’s that?… “what should it be,” you ask?… Well, funny you should ask; let me tell you what iDisk should be, in a word: Dropbox. You may have heard of it? It’s this little upstart-turned-juggernaut in your backyard that has made you look like a crotchety old fool, sitting on your decade-old WebDav technology and forcing people to hate you whenever they try to use it with any degree of efficiency or reliability. A few bullet points might be in order here to quantify the ways in which Dropbox embarrasses you (or ought to):
- Speed. There is simply no comparison. I put a file in Dropbox, it’s in my friend’s dropbox in seconds.
- Ease of use. I never think about Dropbox. It is as if it isn’t there. Except that it IS there, making my digital life easier. Dropbox is transparent. It’s just there, and I just put crap in it. iDisk acts like a poorly written third-party plugin. I can store important files, even application settings, in Dropbox and KNOW that they sync-up. Every. Single. Time. iDisk makes me cuss and I don’t trust it (based on experience).
- Versions. I deleted something the other day from Dropbox that I shouldn’t have. Oh wait—no I didn’t. Dropbox had a nice “restore” button happily greeting me and welcoming me back to sanity. Alternatively, iDisk announced to me today (via a fit of archaic error codes) that I could not even delete a file that I WANTED to delete. So that was fun.
- Sharing. Interesting that although you control the entirety of the operating system and the MobileMe experience that supposedly integrates with it, you still can’t quite manage to make, oh say, sharing a file with a friend, easy to do. I have to go online, log in, go find that file, hit the “Share File…” button and hope. Dropbox version: right-click, “copy public link…” This is getting laughable.
- Space. For $100 a year I get 20GB of all of the garbage I’ve been describing with iDisk. For the same $100 I can get 50GB of versioned, scary-fast, easy-to-share, pain-free, I-never-even-think-about-it Dropboxy goodness.
- Speed. Did I mention that yet? Let’s make it perfectly clear: iDisk is slower than shit and Dropbox is faster than shit. So in the Shit category, Dropbox is The.
In closing, I propose two solutions:
- Take a fraction of your mountain of money, and buy Dropbox outright. For any amount they want. (Fine — feel free to apply your gorgeous user-interface to the web app, just don’t mess with how well it works.) Rebrand it as, gee whiz, how about “iDisk?” Continue to offer a free plan. Continue to develop (with your newly acquired Dropbox staff) the Windows and Linux versions. Don’t make it all “Apple-only.” Just replace the backside of iDisk, with Dropbox.
- Make your own damn Dropbox. Just make it as awesome or better than the current one. The only requirement: START OVER.
Sincerely,
Ben Delaney
My workday yesterday. The dots represent “pauses.” If you want to try this, download the little java app from the guy that made it. (if you’ve got one too, share it with the photo reply!)
The development of Twitter, visualized and awesomized by Code Swarm. Icons represent developers, and particles represent files added or modified.
This is the kind of thing that means almost nothing (except “ooo, pretty!”) to most people, but to anyone who works with code day in and day out this is mind-blowing.
Fascinating. Especially if you look at text all day.
On Adobe’s PSD format. This is hysterical. It’s especially funny knowing that it’s written as a comment in source code. (I’m sure those of you out there who deal in source code know what it’s like to get a little loopy in the comments… at least I do.) :-)
Enjoy. (click the image above for full res image… original text here.)
(via esbueno)
My new Helicopter should arrive any day now. Ordered it because our new office space is enormous (30ft. ceilings) and it would simply be wrong NOT to fly helicopters in it. Can’t wait.
Announcing Simpletweet
A while back I realized that I wanted a cleaner, simpler way to view my Twitter posts. So, partly inspired by Justin Ouellette’s very nice I Hardly Know Her Flickr viewer, I made a little app that grabbed my Twitter stream and spit it out in a nice, clean way. I figured some other people might find this useful as well.
Some examples of why this is handy:
- A Twitter-based time log. I personally have a private Twitter account that I set-up for my self, where I merely record what I’m doing throughout the day at work. Then I just load it up in Simpletweet, and I can quickly go back and view all of those log entries as a list and print them out.
- A great way to print your Tweets. Some people want/need to print their Twitter stream for various reasons. Simpletweet has a great print stylesheet.
- It’s just nice-looking. Sometimes it’s nice to just be able to view your tweets without all the clutter.
At some point, I may add more functionality to it, but for now it is what it is. A simple way to view Twitter tweets.
To use it, just put your Twitter username after the slash… like http://simpletweet.com/YourUserName. To view just a certain number of tweets, just add a number after your username… like http://simpletweet.com/YourUserName/12. You can also change the number by entering it in the box near your name at the top-right.
Enjoy!
Parity!