Things, the GTD app of choice for many nerds has hit version 2.0. From the Cultured Code blog:
Today is a big day in Things’ history. It sees major updates for all our clients, as well as the long awaited Things Cloud release. Many of you have been looking forward to this, and I want to thank you for your patience. We have been working hard on these updates and we are truly excited to be releasing them today.
Allan Odgaard:
I’ve always wanted to allow end-users to tinker with their environment, my ability to do this is what got me excited about programming in the first place, and it is why I created the bundles concept, but there are limits to how much a bundle can do, and with the still growing user base, I think the best move forward is to open source the program.
While Odgaard hasn’t declared this the death of the text editor, it doesn’t give me much hope about its future.
Matthew Panzarino puts all the cards on the table.
Marcelo Somers takes the blogging community to task:
The problem is, we can’t all be Daring Fireball - we can’t get away with posting a witty headline and a blockquote 5–10 times a day. We’ve adopted John’s concept of linking, but not the idea that we need to tell a bigger story on our sites.
Marcelo isn’t saying links are in and of themselves bad, but rather that linking should carry more weight than it does.
Earlier today, Shawn Blanc outlined his backup strategy. I wrote about it back in 2010, and thought that in light of this week’s news, it would be a good time to re-visit the topic.
A good backup solution has multiple layers:
Additionally, as Shawn pointed out, backing up should be easy and automatic. Here’s how I do it for my Mac mini at home. My setup at work is not all that different, however.
Jack Dorsey:
I am pleased and proud to announce that today Starbucks signed up for Square.
Square will be at 7,000 locations across the US. Crazy.
Martin Hering:
We are using a technique known as document storage. Instacast simply saves its state into one single document that is pushed to other devices. Using this document Instacast on other devices can be updated accordingly. That’s the theory.
In practice there are a lot of pitfalls.
This is a great article outlining what it’s like for developers to use iCloud day to day. It seems like the service has a way to go in terms of robustness when it comes to certain use cases.
This week, Thomas Brand joined me on the 512 Podcast, and we talked about Mountain Lion, the Retina MacBook Pro, backups and more.
Wired’s Nathan Olivarez-Giles:
On Tuesday, Amazon handed down to its customer service department a policy change that no longer allows people to call in and change account settings, such as credit cards or email addresses associated with its user accounts.
Good.
MG Siegler:
There is a good argument to be made that it’s actually more beneficial to Google that Apple is no longer including the YouTube app (which Apple, not Google, built, by the way) as a standard part of iOS. For one thing, the app hasn’t really been touched in years, even as Google significantly upgraded the YouTube experience on other platforms (and the mobile web). More importantly, Google was not able to monetize those YouTube app views with ads. With its own app, it will be able to.
In short, oversights in Amazon’s and Apple’s security systems made hacking Mat Honan easier than it should have been. Yikes.
I’m happy to announce that I’ve joined Shawn in curating Tools & Toys, a link blog highlighting products and services for nerds with good taste. If you have suggestions, get in touch!