Want the inside scoop on how we ran giveaways at AppStorm, and how I still run giveaways on Techinch.com? Here’s the secret: a spreadsheet and the =randbetween() function are all you need. Check my new Tuts+ tutorial for all the info you could need to run a full giveaway using social network entries and more, and then simply pick a random winner in a half-second.
And then have fun running your own giveaways!
∞No, the Omni Group hasn’t decided to go cross platform and release their apps for Android, but yes, there’s now a way to get your OmniFocus database on Android: Quantus Tasks. A brand new app that was originally named AndroidFocus that was quickly renamed to avoid confusion, Quantas Tasks lets you view all of your OmniFocus projects and tasks on your Android device, add new tasks, and more. It doesn’t support attachments or recurring tasks yet, but the developer’s promised to add that soon.
It’s not an official OmniFocus app, but works with OmniFocus for iOS and Mac since its file format is open. And that’s pretty neat.
I’m a Mac and iOS user, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, and yet there’s something nice about having cross-platform alternatives to the apps I rely on. It makes it less likely my workflow would break down if I had to switch platforms for some reason, and that’s nice.
So, if you use OmniFocus on Mac or iOS, but use an Android phone, Quantus Tasks is the app for you. Enjoy!
Also, see Sven Flitcher's thoughts on it at SimplictyBliss.
∞We resign to not knowing how to change the oil in our car, replace a busted light switch, or develop that app idea into a real app. “You need to be an expert to do that”, we say. Thinking back to the times I’ve challenged mystery and learned to do something myself, I recall it giving me great satisfaction. And once demystified, those tasks that seemed impossible before now seem trivial.
Sometimes the best way to simplify tech—or anything, really—is just to take the time to learn how to do new stuff. Everything is possible, and you don’t need to be an expert—or you can learn to be one.
Learn something new. You’ll be glad you did, and the world will be a bit less mysterious.
Wisdom to live by.
∞You need a website for your business. There’s no question there. What’s tough to figure out is how you’ll create a website if you’re not already a web developer and have no experience coding. There’s pre-made themes and a number of services to build a site, but most still require CSS and HTML skills to make the site look exactly like you want—and they’re mostly centered around building a blog anyhow.
If all you want is to design a beautiful new site without having to touch code, Webydo is the app for you. It’s an online web design studio that lets you design a real site as easily as you could design a template graphic in Photoshop. In just a few minutes, you can have the site you’ve dreamed of, without needing to know anything about HTML or CSS.
Here’s how you can design your own site in Webydo in minutes.
Webydo’s online design studio lets you drag and drop the elements you want onto a grid, type in the content and add the media you want, and then turns that into a full-featured website ready to publish in a click. If you’re making your own site, you can tweak it until everything looks the way you’ve always imagined, and publish your site all from one place. If you’re a designer, you can use Webydo to build sites for your clients, then let them add their own content and handle the billing without messing up the design. Best of all, you can experiment with Webydo to your heart’s content for free, and only pay when you take your site live with a custom domain.
Here’s how it works. After signing up for a free Webydo account, you’ll be asked to pick if you want to make a new site from pre-made design, a layout that already has a standard structure for your site, or with a blank canvas where you can make anything you’ve imagined. The Design option is the best if you want to quickly make a beautiful site without having to do everything by hand. You can pick one of two dozen pre-made themes, then can tweak every part of the design once it’s open in Webydo. And if you happen to not like the design you selected, you can start over with a new site and pick another one of the designs.
Otherwise, the next best option is to pick one of the pre-made Layouts. These will include a basic menu, image and text sections, headings and more that’ll help you start off your site quicker. You can then move around the sections and resize them you want, then quickly customize them to make the site you want. Or, if you’re really sure you want to design your own site from scratch, you can pick the Blank canvas option for a clean slate where you can add all of your site elements on your own.
Now you’ve got a base to work with: either a theme to tweak, a framework to work around, or a clean slate ready for your ideas. Your site’s in the center of the screen, with layers and elements listed on the left and a Microsoft Office ribbon-like toolbar on the top. It’s time to get to work getting your site looking the way you want.
Before you jump in, the first place you should check is your basic site settings. Click the Site Presets link in the top menu, and then you can set your site width, the main theme colors you’ll use throughout your site, and pick a page background. For the background, you can easily upload a background pattern image, pick a color, tweak opacity and more. Then, with the colors, you can click each color to pick the color you want or enter its hex value. That’ll give you the base you need for a consistent design.
Now, it’s time to add the content you want and get it looking the way you want. You can select any element to replace it with the images and text you want, drag them around to the position you want, and resize them just like you would in Photoshop or any other graphics app. Move an element around, and you’ll see alignment guides appear to help you keep everything aligned along the grid for your site’s layout.
Then, it’s time to get everything looking just the way you imagined. You can select an element and tweak its font, color, alignment and more from the top menu. Or, depending on the type of element you’ve selected, you’ll see a properties panel on the right. You’ll be able to tweak the shape, color, and font in menu elements—set them once, and all menu elements will get the same design.
Or, you can drag in the gallery or blog sections instead of manually adding each element. Just like with the menu, you can tweak the design of one of the included elements once, and all of the other elements will gain the same design. Do note that everything in Webydo is based around pages, including the gallery and blog elements, so the elements in them will link to new pages with the content you’re sharing—unlike a traditional blog where blog posts are separate from your site pages.
One of the nicest design elements is the built-in integration with Google Fonts. You can pick from hundreds of fonts by default, or you can search through the entire Google Font library, find the typefaces you like, and add them to your design. It’s simple, and makes it easy to get your site customized without any code.
It’ll take a bit to get your site looking just like you want, but within minutes you should start having the site you’ve always dreamed of just by dragging and dropping elements. If you really want to dig in deeper, or add more features from external services, you can use the code editor to add HTML, CSS, and more to your site, but there’s no reason to have to use code. That’s the idea behind Webydo: you can get a beautifully designed site without having to worry about code.
There’s more than just pages, though. You can also add a store easily to your pages with ecwid, or bring along your videos and more. You can add a pre-made contact form so your site visitors can email you without leaving your site, or add a widget to embed another site or any HTML embed code from another app directly into your new site. Each of these elements can be resized and positioned as you’d like, and you’ll still find the same stroke and fill tools in Webydo to customize those elements as with everything else. And, coming soon, you’ll find even more features, including Parallax Scrolling, and you can suggest and vote for new features you’d like to see added.
Once your site’s finished, there’s one more thing to focus on: your site’s mobile design. You can click the smartphone icon in the top right of the Webydo app, and then you’ll see your design shrunk down to a mobile size. You can then tweak the design to fit your style, with the most important elements at the top and extra touch-specific features to let your mobile visitors get the most from your site—from Google Maps integration to an option to tap-to-call your business directly.
And with that, your site’s finished. Tap the Publish button in the top right corner, and you’ll be ready to share your site with the world. You can then come back and update your site anytime, or if you want others to be able to help you edit your site, you can add them as a CMS user from your Webydo dashboard. That way, they’ll get a special login that lets them edit the text, images and more on the site, without being able to change the actual site layout and design. They’ll still be able to see the full layout in their browser as they’re editing the content, just as you do while tweaking the design.
With a bit of tweaking, you’ll have a beautiful new site online that looks just like you want in minutes without any coding. You can start with a nice theme, add your own stylistic touches and tweaks, and in no time you’ll have the site you want online.
Need inspiration? Check out some of the beautiful sites that have been built with Webydo, then signup for your own free trial and give it a spin. And have fun!
When you first learned how to read, your mom or teacher likely had you hold your finger under each line as you were reading. It helped you focus on the word and sentence you were currently reading, without being distracted by all the other letters on the page. But then, as reading went digital, you can’t realistically keep a finger under your text when you’re reading on your Mac (and even on a tablet or smartphone, you’ll end up tapping something you didn’t mean to if your finger actually rests on the glass—and you’ll go insane holding your finger in the air forever).
Writing app developers solved this several years ago with single-sentence focus mode. Apps like iA Writer (now Writer Pro) and Byword let you focus on just one sentence in its focus mode, fading the other sentences to a lighter color and leaving only the sentence you’re currently writing in the full dark font. Ulysses III added an option to highlight the current line to help you focus. But when reading, in a dedicated reading app or your browser, the only way to keep your focus on the line you’re reading is by dragging your curser under the text, or obsessively selecting text while you’re reading (something I’m apt to do).
Overlays!, a new Mac app from Albelardo Gonzalez—the developer who made the OpenDyslexic typeface to help those Dyslexia have an easier time reading—is an app to solve the focus problem in any Mac app. It gives you a floating see-through bar that’s tied to your mouse cursor to highlight or hold under any text on your Mac. You can pick the color, size, and level of transparency, and turn it on or off from your menubar.
And then, whenever you’ve got any text you need to focus on, you can just turn on Overlays! and get a little bar that’ll help you keep your reading position. It’s the digital equilivent of the old finger-under-text trick, and it works great.
If you’re always randomly selecting text while you’re reading online, or worse are always losing your place and getting distracted, Overlays! is a little app that just might simplify on-screen reading for you. Plus, it’ll help support the development of the OpenDyslexic typeface, which is a nice little extra.
For fans of the Kirby CMS, the flat-file Markdown-powered CMS that I love and that’s powered Techinch.com for the past two years, there’s something exciting and new to play with: a beta of Kirby 2. It’s got a beautifully light new Panel, a nice new default theme, and tons of new core features including multi-language support, easier core access, and more.
You won’t want to switch your blog to it just yet, but it’s nice enough that you’ll want want to go play with it—and if your blog’s still on WordPress, it’s the perfect time to start plotting your escape to Kirby.
∞You've read Edward Tufte's books on visualizing data, seen the popularity of infographics and the horrors of misleading charts, and followed along as Nate Silver turned political predictions on its head with data at The New York Times and then spun his work out into its own news project, FiveThirtyEight. Big data's the name of the game for IT, but it's equally the future of journalism as every possible thing in the world is quantified and tabulated. There's stories in numbers.
Finding those stories, and effectively telling them, is the challenge of the day, and O'Reilly's new Data Journalism Handbook follows in Tufte's steps by telling you how, in today's world, to let raw data tell a story—and shows the best examples of organizations that have put data journalism to work. It's a great read for anyone in journalism, and since it's free online, it's a no-brainer read.
Here's your chance to inspire yourself to make better stories from the numbers that are all around us today.
∞There’s nothing like history to make the present clear. It’s true with governments and wars and religions (want to understand Ukraine or the Middle East? History is your friend, far more than the news of last week) and it’s true of everything else, including companies.
Most of us know Apple’s storied legacy, folklore, and everything about Steve Jobs from the way his dad focusing on how the back of a cabinet or a fence looked to his personal dietary choices. Google might not be the focus of as many books, but there’s still a pop-culture awareness of their culture and history, and Steven Levy’s “In the Plex” brings as much insider info to Google as most could hope to know about 1 Infinite Loop. But when it comes to Apple’s most direct competitor, Samsung, they’re little more than a name. We know of Samsung, but we know precious little about Samsung. Even if you’ve read everything there is to read about Samsung, you’ll know about their reboot when their chairman burned all their electronics and decided to make better devices, but that’s about it.
That’s where Kurt Eichenwald’s “The Great Smartphone War” piece for Vanity Fair comes in. It takes apart the Apple and Samsung litigation, looks at Samsung’s history of patent violations (in hardware, not just user interfaces and software) and lawsuit settlements, and how they use them to take over markets. If you want to make more sense of the smartphone/tech world of today, it’s a must-read.
∞Got a great app or service you know Techinch readers would love? Then here's the cheapest way to promote your app: sponsoring Techinch for $50/week.
Starting next week, Techinch.com will have a sponsorship post each week, featuring an app or service that'd be something I'd recommend otherwise. They'll include a couple paragraphs about the app and an image or video. And they're just $50/week, far cheaper than most online sponsorships. If you'd like to promote your app, head over to https://techinch.com/sponsor and book one of the open weeks today or get in touch for more info.
For everyone that reads and subscribes to Techinch, I'll do my very best to make sure the sponsorships are relevant enough that hopefully you'll actually find them interesting. If not, do let me know as well.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming...
Looking for new chat app for your team? There's a ton of great options, from the brilliant new Slack to the incredibly popular HipChat and everything in between. I've worked with the Zapier team this month to put together an in-depth comparison of the best team chat apps for their blog, along with tips on getting the most out of your chat app.
It's got everything you need to find the perfect chat app for your team, one that'll fit your budget and have the features you need, so be sure to check it out!
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