”I don’t want [open standards] because I love open standards, I want them because they are brilliant means to an end.” –

http://waffle.wootest.net/2014/08/31/the-new-old-world/

And the best way to start is just to start. Things to avoid is a mindset that ”I have this great idea for an app and if only I had time to work on it it would be a big success.”

More often than not, in my experience going to NS Coder night meeting lots of people, it is not so much a question of time so much as it is a question of eagerness, of motivation and it’s easy and nice to have kind of this unicorn off in the distance that you can say ”if only I had time I’d be very successful, my app would be awesome and that would be great” because it’s easy to then sort of neglect all of the work and effort and the challenges that you would hit between starting and finishing that project.¹

It really felt like David Smith was talking about me in episode #60 of Developing Perspective. The ”unicorn” metaphor seems very appropriate and applicable to a lot of things in my life. ”If only I had more time I’d write more songs.” ”If only I had the time to complete my unfinished master studies.” ”If only I had more time so I could make that great iOS App/Web Service that would be a great passive income.” and so on.

This, all these ”great” ideas that never really gets executed, is one of my least favorite things about myself. It’s something that I really need to sort out. I need to get on with what I want to do, start executing on it and then actually complete it.

Case in point; this post is an almost a year old draft that I for some reason didn’t post back then. Likely there was something great I should add to it ”if only I had more time”.

In a real-world test (”clean build Adium”) my 2.7Ghz i7 Protina just bested my 3.33Ghz 6-core Westmere by 2 seconds.

Holy. Shit.¹

Holy shit, indeed.

I believe a good critic is a teacher. He doesn’t have the answers, but he can be an example of the process of finding your own answers. He can notice things, explain them, place them in any number of contexts, ponder why some "work" and others never could.¹

This quote is from film critic Roger Ebert and to me it perfectly explains what a critic should strive to be, and why.

I found the quote via The Ihnatko Almanac, another one of the many great shows on the 5by5 podcast network. It is hosted by Andy Ihnatko, who I’d managed to never heard of before Ihnatko Almanac launched. If you haven’t either, head over to Andy Ihnatko’s Celestial Waste of Bandwidth, or start listing to the podcast to get to know him.

Ihnatko is an interesting part of the 5by5 Network because he tends to be very humble, in a way that my other favorite hosts (John Siracusa and Marco Arment) are not. He seems more thoughtful, less focused on being right and more open-minded. Siracusa’s show Hypercritical is still my favorite podcast, but Ihnatko Almanac is a welcome contrast.

Until recently, the Pictionary-like game had only run spammy banner ads in its free mobile app that, including the paid no-ads version, has amassed a staggering 50 million downloads in five months. Now, with a direct-sales force that’s been on the ground for a whole eight weeks, Draw Something is inserting advertisers’ paid terms into the game for players to literally draw brands.

Here’s how the game works: Pick a word from a list of three, then create a drawing so a Facebook friend can guess that word and you can win points. For the ad product, imagine inserting words like "Doritos" or "Coca-Cola" in among "golfer," "bikini" or "fireworks."¹

I played Draw Something quite intensely for a few days some time ago, but it’s been lying dormant on the springboard since then. Now this news definitely makes me feel that me and Draw Something is not a suitable match.

The only question is whether I should just delete the app or launch it one last time to attempt to remove my account.

Imagine Facebook already trading on the Nasdaq; how would the market react? Would analysts and pundits send the stock upward, praising Zuckerberg’s swiftness at securing FB’s position? Or, to the contrary, would someone loudly complain: What? Did Facebook just burn the entire 2011 free cash-flow to buy an app with no revenue in sight, and manned by a dozen of geeks? Is this a red-flag symptom of Zuckerberg’s mental state?¹

An interesting read. Monday Note currently seems to be the most interesting commentator on Facebook’s future and its acquisition of Instagram.

Apple will sell a few to its fans, but the iPhone won’t make a long-term mark on the industry.¹

With five years worth of hindsight (well, one year would’ve been sufficient) this is just hilarious reading.²

The very worst thing you can do with frequently asked questions is make a list of them on your web site. Frequently asked questions are bugs, and the only satisfactory answer to them is to fix the problem so the questions don’t get asked again.¹

One of the great things about the month of december is the wide array of awesome advent calendars for geeks. This year I added PHP Advent to my list of essential reading. However december was one of those months where I barely had time to sleep, let alone actually read, so a lot of articles were left in my Instapaper cue. A few days ago I read through one of them and found this great quote from Drew McLellan. The whole article is very well worth a read.

This review was written and edited exclusively in Byword.

I began this article on a Tuesday night from my iPhone around 11:30 pm while my son, Noah, was up for his late-night feeding. On Wednesday morning I picked up where I left off by opening Byword on my MacBook Air while in my office. After lunch, I grabbed my iPad and a Bluetooth keyboard and visited my favorite local coffee shop where a latte accompanied me as I finished the article.

This is exactly the sort of writing workflow that I’m looking to adopt.¹

This workflow appeals to me as well. I like being able to work device agnostically. Especially I’d like to be able to seamlessly work on blog posts from my computer(s), iPhone and iPad.

Since the blogs publishing interface is web based it’s possible, but that is not the way I’d like to write. I find myself being much more productive in something like Byword than in the WordPress Admin panel. Therefore I think I need to bolt some hacks together to be able to write in whatever application that I want, save the result in Dropbox and have the blog itself pick up the articles from a certain Dropbox folder and publish them. I’d like it to be like the post workflow in Marco Arment’s Second Crack², but still using WordPress as the CMS.