Domain names are a strange thing. From the original simplicity of .com, .org, .net, and .gov have come so many top-level domains that it's all but impossible to keep up with them all. There's the country specific domains, of course, along with newer full-word domains including everything from .today to .guru.
It's a mess. But then, that's ok. Most people Google websites' names anyhow, and seldom type in the full address. And when they type in your site's address, they'll still assume it's a .com which is why I'll always recommend going for a .com domain whenever possible.
Except, I broke my rule. I just bought a .ch domain (Switzerland's country-specific TLD): techin.ch.
I've considered getting a short URL before, as every self-respecting geek has from time to time, especially when a short URL actually let you fit more into a tweet. That's not quite as important now that Twitter auto-shortens every URL with t.co. But, it's still cool to use unique TLDs to get a fun domain name, and when my friend Phillip Gruneich mentioned that techin.ch was available, and cost less than $15 to register, it was too good to pass up. I considered getting an even more fun URL, such as t”.co using international characters, but that'd be irritating to type at best (seeing as it has to be a closing curled quote, since straight quotes aren't allowed). So techin.ch it was.
What to do with a short URL
But what should one do with a short URL? Ideally, you'll use it to shorten links you're sharing online, and perhaps add it onto your file sharing tool. I use Droplr to share files, and it already lets you shorten links, so that'd seem like the ideal place to use my short URL.
Yet, the most common way to use short URLs is with Bitly, the de facto link shortener of choice today. It's great for shortening links, used by just about everyone from the NY Times to, yes, Envato, and integrates with almost every app. That helps with my ever-present worry about relying on web services that may go away—Bitly is rather unlikely to just disappear anytime soon with that many large companies relying on them, and it already offers an export tool for paid accounts so you can take your links with you. And then, most importantly for my use, Bitly integrates with IFTTT, so my auto-tweeted links can be shortened with my short URL.
And so, I hit a compromise: I'm using techin.ch directly with Bitly for shortening links, and the added the subdomain da.techin.ch with Droplr for sharing files. That's as simple as setting the A-records on Namecheap separately for the domain itself and for the subdomain. Then, on both Bitly and Droplr, I've set the short domain to redirect to Techinch.com.
That's not all you could do. I'm half-way considering using it for my email, but then again, telling people your email over the phone is difficult enough with any domain other than @gmail or something terribly recognizable.
But that's fine. The domain didn't need to do much. It gives me a little bit of custom branding, and made Bitly and Droplr nicer. And it's fun. That's quite enough for a string of 9 characters.
I still have a fear of link rot, that Bitly or Droplr could go away and my shortened URLs would point to nothing. But most things you share on social networks will only be seen now, and won't matter as much even a year from now. That especially is the case with the quick screenshots and such I'm sharing on Droplr. And I happen to think Bitly will stick around, at least as long as my short domain.
At any rate, now that I've got Twitter Cards and a short URL for Techinch, article links from here should look much nicer on my favorite social network. And that's fun.
It's finally published: my tutorial about how to make your own productivity system from OmniOutliner. I had a lot of fun making this tutorial—even though I managed to lose the entire tutorial and have to re-write it from scratch—and I happen to think you'll enjoy it. You just might get tempted to download an OmniOutliner trial if you've never used it before.
OneNote is one of the more unique notebook apps, with 5 levels of note organization and free-form note pages that let you add content wherever you want. That makes it powerful if you like to have your notes organized and want to organize info on your note pages however you'd like, but that same power also can make it very confusing to get start with.
Thus, my new tutorial on Tuts+. It'll take you through the features that are available in all the OneNote apps and show you how to put them to work for you. OneNote may not be perfect, but even Evernote has its issues, and I for one am hoping Microsoft will quickly iterate on the apps they've already released and bring them all to feature parity with the original PC version. But for now, here's what you need to get started.
There's dozens of alternates to Office, but one of the best actually comes from Microsoft itself: the newly rebranded Office Online at Office.com. I've championed Microsoft's Office web apps for many years, and now they're easier than ever to use and have the templates and features that most home users would need for the majority of their Office usage.
That's why on Tuts+, I've written a tutorial to help make Office Online less scary. Whether you've never used web apps or are simply curious about what Microsoft offers in Office Online, go take a look at the tutorial.
Quick question: how many nuclear weapons would you guess the Unites States has today?
I grew up in Knoxville, TN, right next-door to Oak Ridge—the original Atomic City that was the top-secret home to the Manhattan Project during World War II. Some of my earlier memories are visiting Y12, the American Museum of Science and Energy, and other historic nuclear-related sites. I’ve seen countless museum films on nuclear explosions, knew the differences between the two bombs dropped on Japan, and could have drawn a sketch of the guts of an atomic bomb far before I’d entered high school. I’ve read military history books for fun all my life, especially when they’re about espionage, nuclear weapons, and machinery.
And yet somehow, I would have guessed that maybe, at most, the US had a few hundred nuclear weapons, and would have absolutely trusted that they’re securely under the control of the president’s nuclear football.
Turns out, I was wrong. Dead wrong. According to Eric Schlosser’s book Command And Control, the US currently has 4,650 nuclear weapons, an absolutely staggering number when one considers the destructive power of just one atomic bomb. And yet, that number is far, far less than the US had during the Cold War, not to mention the countless thousands of nuclear weapons possessed by the USSR.
And my feelings of safety about the US’ nuclear devices? Those were equally incorrect. Nuclear bombs have been accidentally dropped in the Appalachians and Iceland, burned to a pile of slag on runways, and killed scores of soldiers—during peacetime, at that. There have been so many accidents with nuclear weapons, the document Schlosser obtained about them from the armed forces ran 245 pages long.
Command And Control is perhaps the most fascinating and hair-easing nonfiction book I’ve read, as it weaves the stories of accidents and issues with America’s nuclear stockpile with the detailed account of how a Titan II missile with a nuclear warhead actually exploded in Arkansas after a technician dropped a socket during routine service. To get a taste of the book, take a minute and read the excerpts from it that have already been reprinted in a number of magazines:
Scary stuff. As the book quoted General George Lee Butler, “we escaped the cold war without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.” And so we did.
And yet, here we stand on what some are calling the brink of a new Cold War, as Russia has annexed Crimea. There’s sanctions, accusations, and standoff between the West and Russia, and rightly so. Surely some will call for increased weapons spending, perhaps with new missiles in Europe to keep the Russians at bay. Perhaps that sounds sensible if you’re wanting to stave off WWIII.
So go re-read those links above, or dig into Command And Control itself. That’s the madness of arms races simply for the sake of one-upmanship.
Command And Control was published just before protests in Ukraine took over our newspaper front pages, and far before Russia seemed like it was trying to put the USSR back together. And yet, as I read it this past week, it felt like quite the timely reminder that weapons of mass destruction are just as likely to kill us as they are to protect us.
I don’t know the solutions to the world’s problems, or how to get countries to behave sensibly. But I do know this: nuclear weapons are far more scary than you’ve ever dared to imagine, enough so that simply hearing the plans the US had for using them against the USSR made both Carter and Reagan call for a reduction of nuclear arms and better ways to bring peace. And that was without knowing that the USSR had essentially a doomsday device in place that would automatically rain nuclear bombs on the US if it was attacked by a nuke.
There’s a place to right the wrongs in the world, but I do not believe we’ll ever right them by having enough weapons to destroy the world over and again. That just doesn’t seem sensible.
For all its faults, Microsoft still has a few products without rival, ones that people actually want to use. The most well-known would be Excel. There's dozens of other spreadsheet tools, but there's only Excel when it comes to the most advanced spreadsheet uses.
Then, there's OneNote. This freeform notebook app that was first introduced in 2003 seems to be the original embodiment of Bill Gates dream of a TabletPC years before the iPad was released. It lets you type notes and add images and other attachments anywhere on a piece of "digital paper," and included quite nice handwriting and OCR support. There's no forced structure, so it can work just the way you want. It can be a mess, but that's the point: it's the place for your unstructured notes.
And people loved it. Sure, Evernote and other notebook apps are still far more common, but the people that love OneNote really love it. There’s every other notebook app that treats each note like any other digital document that’s structured in lines of text, and then there’s the freewheeling anything-goes OneNote. It’s crazy, but in the best possible way.
That craziness was kept confined to the PC, though, for some unknown reason. Even though there’s been Office:Mac longer than there’s been Office for Windows, OneNote never made its way over to the Mac. Word for Mac has included a “Notebook Layout View” with support for audio and more, something its PC counterpart never had, but it still wasn’t OneNote. Then OneNote came out for iOS, and Android, and finally yesterday was released for the Mac—along with a new OneNote API that makes it easy for other apps to integrate with OneNote the way they already do with Evernote. OneNote’s now a platform for notes that essentially runs anywhere, albeit with a more limited set of features than the original OneNote for Windows.
So here’s everything you’ll find in OneNote for Mac—the good, the bad, and the things I hope will be added soon to make it at least have feature parity with OneNote for Windows. Because really: OneNote for Windows is actually pretty nice (and is now free, too, of all surprising things).
OneNote Goodness on Mac, at Last
The best news is the most obvious: it’s OneNote, on the Mac. That means you’ll have unlimited notebooks with their own sections and pages—three layers of organization that should please the most visual neat freaks. It means you can click anywhere on the screen, and start typing right there, just like you can start writing anywhere on a piece of paper. You can resize sections, move them around at random, and generally make your notes entirely your own. That’s OneNote’s uniqueness, and it’s here in full on the Mac.
And honestly, the basics of using OneNote for Mac work quite well for the most part. Almost all OS X text editing keyboard shortcuts still work, including the text navigation shortcuts like CMD and ALT+arrows. OneNote will automatically turn dashed and numbered lines into lists, and you can drag-and-drop list entries around between levels to quickly rearrange your outlines. Type text and hit tab, and it’ll automatically turn that text into a table just like in OneNote for PC. There’s even sensible keyboard shortcuts for OneNote-specific features: CMD+number will add a tag to your text section, and CMD+Alt+Number will switch text to the appropriate heading style. Search works as great as you’ll remember from PC versions: you can select a search result and see that note without losing the list of other search results, as a quick way of filtering down to what you were looking for.
Then, there’s OneNote’s newfound online integration. OneNote for Mac is 100% based around OneDrive, Microsoft’s online storage service formerly called Skydrive. Your OneNote notebooks are saved there by default, so you can see anything you put in your OneNote notebooks and edit them online at OneNote.com/Notebooks or by browsing through your OneDrive storage. Microsoft’s opened the OneNote in OneDrive up with the new OneNote API that apps are already using to integrate with it. You can now email info to your OneNote notebook by emailing me@onenote.com, and can save stuff to OneNote with a bookmarklet or its new IFTTT, Doxie, and other apps integration. That’s a major new feature that’ll help OneNote actually be a drop-in replacement for Evernote and more.
Last but not least, there’s sharing. You can share any notebook with anyone by inviting them via email or just sharing a link with them, and they can then sync the notes with OneNote on their devices or just collaborate with you online. The OneNote web app is especially great for this: you can send a link to someone else, and seconds later they can be live co-editing your note document with you. OneNote marks the changes by the author, so it’s easy to see what’s what. Full read/write note sharing requires a Pro account in Evernote, so this is a tiny advantage for Microsoft (albeit not that huge since you could, alternately, just share a Google Doc and co-edit it in real-time already).
Wait, Really?
That’s the good parts. Then there’s the bad parts. As you may have just noticed, OneNote for Mac is cloud only, and there’s no way to open local notebooks or make new offline notebooks. You can use the app while you’re offline, of course—it’s not a web app by any means—but you’ll have to be online to make a new notebook, and OneNote will sync everything to OneDrive by default. That wouldn’t be so bad if the entire UI didn’t freeze whenever its contacting the server to create a new notebook or unlink an existing one, but that’s exactly what it does. It’ll sync notes just fine in the background, but add a new notebook and you’ll get a dreaded grey dialog while it’s contacting the server and doing its business. And, on the same note, you can’t delete a notebook in OneNote for Mac—you can only unlink it (you’ll have to go to OneDrive online to actually delete a notebook).
There’s also the bugs that’ll keep you frustrated if you’re picky at all. You can’t move a notebook page or section to another notebook. You can change the font of a section of text, but 9 out of 10 times when you type new text after that, the new text will be in the default Calibri font instead of the font you picked. Then, you can paste an image or plain text into OneNote for Mac, but paste formatted text and it’ll lose all of its formatting, and it will act like you did nothing if you try to paste anything else. You cannot, for instance, paste cells from an Excel spreadsheet or a chart into OneNote—something that makes its App Store marketing pictures look downright deceptive. And, to complete the pasting trouble, if you copy text out of OneNote and paste it into another app (Word, say) that text will also lose its formatting. It’s a rich text app that inexplicably acts like it can only input and output plain text.
Most frustrating are the missing features. Shockingly enough, you cannot drag-and-drop an image or other file into a OneNote note. You can manually insert an image from the ribbon, but that’s about it. No audio or video recording, or any other multimedia integration. There’s no handwriting support—and definitely no option to turn handwriting into typed text—and no OCR support on images. In OneNote for PC, these are some of the best features. You can drag in images and it’ll automatically OCR them for search and even let you copy the OCRed text out of an image. It’ll do the same for on-screen handwriting. But on the Mac, these and so many other features (such as the option to have a small OneNote notepad hover over your desktop, or the note history viewer) are missing. Even the export features are missing, with the only option of sharing a PDF locked into emailing a PDF—and that doesn’t even work with most Mac email apps.
OneNote on Windows is packed with great features. The Mac version? Not so much.
The nearly Office 2010-style ribbon interface promises so many features—but go past the first tab, and you'll find that it might as well only have the first tab's options. There's hardly anything else. OneNote for Mac has feature parity with its web app counterpart—but its bugs if anything make it as frustrating to use as a web app, if not more so. And that's sad. There's so much promise, but for now, it's unfulfilled.
Conclusion
OneNote for Mac on its own feels like a beta—and compared to its PC counterpart, feels like a buggy demo app. And yet, it still has a lot of nice features and a nice enough port of the ribbon UI to the Mac that I’m hopeful Microsoft will rapidly improve it and at least bring it to feature parity with the PC. The PC version, combined with the new OneNote API-based integrations, is more interesting than ever, and we can only hope that the Mac (and tablet versions as well) reach feature parity soon.
And yet, even if it was a perfect copy of its PC counterpart, OneNote still isn’t for everyone. Its free-wheeling style has some neat uses, but it’s still something to get used to, something that can easily feel more confusing than the standard, orderly notebook apps that treat notes like every other structured document. I’d still likely end up using plain text files for notes, perhaps in Simplenote, and would supplement it with Evernote for clipping rich text and links.
If you’ve been dying for OneNote to hit the Mac, go download OneNote for Mac today. It’s free, and at least covers the basics. And if you’re curious about OneNote’s free-form notetaking format, it’s worth trying as well. But if you wanted offline notes, or OCR, or handwriting recognition, or easy ways to make rich notes with Office info and more, you’d be better off waiting to see if Microsoft improves the Mac version. And either way, be warned that everything’s not going to work quite right.
The good parts of OneNote for Mac—the fact it even exists, and looks decently nice—make me excited to see what Office:Mac 2014 will bring. The rough edges and dropped features, though, make me worry that Microsoft is treating the Mac like another tablet (read: light, feature-limited) OS that doesn’t need full-featured PC apps. That’d be a troubling future for Microsoft on the Mac if so.
Typeform is a really, really great way to make online forms. So great, I just wrote a tutorial on Tuts+ that takes you through every feature in Typeform and shows you how to get the most out of your online forms. You'll learn how to make picture choice options, theme your form, add multimedia, and get beautiful reports and detailed analytics from your forms automatically.
So why wait? Go learn how to master Typeform—and get an exclusive coupon for 4 months of free Typeform Pro.
As usual, Stack Overflow has the answers you need when you need help with something geeky—this time, on removing old sites from your Google Analytics account. I've been annoyed with the old, now-dead sites that have filled up my Google Analytics front-page for far too long, and the option to remove them felt too hidden for me to find, even as a guy who teaches people how to use software for a living.
Thus, this tutorial. Stack Overflow user1997781 saved my sanity. And if you need to remove accounts from your Google Analytics, it'll save yours.
Considering switching to the Kirby, the flat-file CMS that powers Techinch? Then you'll need a new theme. And if you don't want to handcraft one—or want a clean theme to start out to make it easier to tweak it to your style without coding everything—then getkirby-themes.com is what you need. It's a directory of all the best Kirby themes—free and paid—and you're more than likely to find something there that'll strike your fancy.
Or, at least, you'll find inspiration for that perfect theme you're planning to build.
And if you're wondering, I'm still loving Kirby. Just can't wait for v2.0 and the new panel!
It’s one thing to know the differences between Arial and Helvetica, but crafting your own font? That takes it to another level entirely. It’d be a daunting undertaking simply to draw glyphs for every letter and character in an average font, much less to make italics and bold and other variants of each character needed to build a full typeface. And then, the tools you need to make a font are expensive—there’s the relatively cheap Glyphs Mini for $45, but then the full version of Glyphs will set you back $300, and the more well-known FontLab Studio costs $649.
And then there’s Glyphr, a free HTML5-based vector editing tool for making your own fonts. There’s editing tools to create complex vector shapes with beautiful cubic Bezier curves. You can make the shapes you want, move, resize, and then reuse shapes across all of your characters. There’s even detailed settings for the size for the em width of each character’s spacing. You can open the default demo font and tweak away, or start your own from scratch. And despite the complexity of making a perfect new font on your own, Glyphr’s tools actually give you quite nice results with less effort than you’d think. It’s a really cool tool.
You won’t make the next Helvetica in Glyphr—it only lets you add each letter of the English alphabet and standard punctuation to your font, among other limitations—but to try out your font ideas and perhaps make a new logo font, it’s incredible. And you can even download the HTML and run it right from your own browser, offline, for free, or tweak the code to your liking. That’s pretty exciting.
Crafting each character in your font will still be a daunting challenge, but now, the tools to experiment with your font ideas are free and relatively easy to use. Have fun!
