Several weeks back, I wrote about Apple being [unapologetically different][https://techinch.com/blog/apple-unapologetically-different]. Apple's choosy in what they'll release, and they tend to stick by their choices and lead the industry. They're opinionated, in their software choices, in their devices, and in the way they market and deal with the public. It does its best to seize the future in the way it deems best.
Microsoft has long been accused of simply following — then near-monopolizing — market trends, from their user interface to their browser and more. Yet, with their Metro (now called Modern) UI design launched in Windows 8 is a distinctive style that's [boldly different][http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-windows-8-approach-bold-arrogant-or-both-7000013905/] than any previous version of Windows.
Bold changes take determination, and they don't always take off. But Microsoft needed to try something drastic — anything, almost — and Windows 8's design is a defining change that's attracted grudging admiration from even Microsoft critics. Windows 8 looks and feels new, and while it copies from competitors where it makes sense — with its own App Store, "natural" style scrolling, minimal scroll bars, integrated spell check, and included internationalization, all like Mac users have expected for years — it's different enough that Windows 8 feels fully unique.
If you approached Windows 8 as a brand-new operating system, sans-desktop and legacy apps, it's very interesting on its own right. But Microsoft decided to leave the desktop in, apparently to cater to their primary customers — businesses that have stuck to XP and have grudgingly at best adopted Windows 7 — while still trying to win the future in tablets and mobile. They took out the start menu, moved most settings and commands — including shutdown — to the new style of Windows 8, but left traditional apps running in a stripped-down Windows desktop that looks like Windows 7 with less features and a broken Aero interface.
Of all weird things, Office 2013 — quite an ambitious release in itself, one that's strongly integrated with the other half of Microsoft's future: the cloud — is only for the traditional desktop aside from a separate OneNote app. Office 2013 should have been the strongest supporter of the new Windows style, and here it sits in the now old-fashioned desktop. And that's not all: the Windows Live suite of photo and video editing apps are still in the desktop, as are the bundled apps like Paint.
It's like Microsoft got a solid vision for the future, went far enough with it to shake up their whole OS strategy … and then got cold feet and backed up. The market's done the same: Windows 8 has incredibly low adoption rates, and complaints from users and the press continue to roll in.
The word now is that the next release of Windows, so-called Windows Blue or Windows 8.1, will include new ways to customize the new Windows 8 start screen and have more of Control Panel moved into the new Windows Preferences, but will also include options to boot to desktop and possible see a return of the iconic Start button. There's also word — possibly — of an update to Office 2013 that'll bring it to the Start Screen as a modern Windows app.
On the one hand, it sounds like they're doubling-down on the new design, working to fix the problems many have complained about in it. But at the same time, they're making it easier to stick with the old Windows desktop, which now doesn't look like it's destined to as certain a death as it did in Windows 8's initial release.
Microsoft, you need to make up your mind. If you want to cater to those who don't want to move forward, release a new version of XP. The market would love that, I'm sure. But if you want to win the future, do everything you possibly can to make the new Windows 8 interface the very best it can be, with the best apps your teams can put out. Make stuff to showcase its power. And move legacy apps to the new interface; surely you can flip a Win32 window boarder switch to make the old apps fit in the new start screen sans their normal title bar and exit/minimize/maximize buttons, albeit without being customized for it.
Make up your mind, stick to your guns, and be opinionated. We might not all agree with the choices, but we'll sure respect you for it.
Yup, another article of mine you should check out, this time reviewing a great new way to view your Google Analytics data: Handsome Stats. It's really good, even if a tad lite on the features.
Check out the full review for more details. It's nice.
I just reviewed a new app, My Files, on Mac.AppStorm. It's an attempt to make it simple to store files in cloud storage services without taking up local space on your Mac.
See, cloud storage for the most part is a catch 22: it's billed as a way to make up for smaller amounts of storage on your devices (Hey, don't worry your phone has so little storage, it comes with 25Gb of Dropbox storage), but then that storage either takes up an equal amount of space on your computer or the files are difficult to access. My Files attempts to blur the lines by letting you see and search through all the files you've saved in your cloud storage accounts, without syncing the files themselves to your computer until you need them.
It's a great concept, but right now, it's little more than a proof of concept. It's clunky and prone to crashes. Check my full review at Mac.AppStorm; it's still worth downloading for some, but likely not something you'll use that much for now. Here's to hoping it improves — drastically — going forward, because it's an app concept I'd really like to see done well.
You might have already noticed, but over the weekend Techinch.com got a little new update in the form of a new logo. It's not tons different from the old text-only logo. This time, though, it's got a bit of Metro styling to the text, and a ruler under inch, a change I've wanted to make for some time and finally was able to thanks to the design work of Jaume Estruch.
There's also new social network and favicons, all using a variant of T" as shorthand for the Techinch brand. I've thought of just using those two letters (or rather, one letter and one quote) as the logo, but am happy with the way the current name+ruler logo turned out.
I'm picky about my email apps. I've stubbornly clung to Sparrow on my Mac even though it's not supported now, waiting on the hope that something (.Mail, perhaps?) will come out that's a better replacement for it. But on iOS, it's the default Mail app that I've stuck to. I didn't buy Sparrow, which worked out, and the Gmail app — while nice — never really fit like a glove for me. And I found the whole waiting-in-line part of Mailbox to be foolish, and didn't even download it.
Because, you know what, Mail worked for me. Here's how I usually use email on the go on the iPhone: I check my mail, deleting everything that's unimportant and quickly replying to the stuff that's quick, and then leave everything else in the inbox so I'll deal with it when I'm at my Mac. It lets me achieve Inbox Zero simply, and lets me keep email from being overwhelming. Mail works for that.
But there's a new app that works better: Triage. After hearing about it from Federico Viticci at MacStories, I knew I had to try it out, because for once, someone had made an app that perfectly fit my workflow and looked like it'd actually speed me up.
Here's how Triage works: you add your email account (Gmail, Yahoo!, iCloud, and IMAP accounts all welcome), and Triage will check for mail. It'll then show you a stack of little cards that show a preview of your email. You can likely know, based on that preview, whether you want to keep the email or delete/archive it. So, that's what Triage is designed for. You just swipe up to archive the email (or delete it — Triage archives by default, but you can switch that in the settings), or swipe down to keep the email unread in your inbox. Get through them all, and you'll have an empty Triage inbox — faux inbox zero, if you will, since there are still "unread" emails in your real inbox that you can deal with when you get to your computer or take time to sit down with Mail.app on your iOS device.
You can tap to see the full email, and you can reply or forward emails straight from the mini-card view or the full expanded view. Full HTML emails render perfectly, so no problem there at all. And the reply screen is delightfully minimal as well.
Fits Like a Glove
There's more, too. You can have multiple accounts - though unfortunately, you'll have to switch between them. I'd love to have a unified inbox of sorts in Triage, though it's not too frustrating to switch between accounts. You set the up-swipe setting per-account (which lets you either archive, mark email as read, or delete), which is nice, since I delete on my personal email and archive on my work accounts. Oh, and one other thing: deleted emails are marked as read, which is nice to see (and something some email apps I've used don't do unless you open the email first).
Now, hardly anyone could use Triage as their only email app; that's not what it's designed for. It's designed to help you clear out your inbox so you can focus on what's really important when you fire up your more powerful email app. There's no push notifications of new emails, and no Exchange ActiveSync support right now, so if you must have those, you'll need to stick with Mail.
For me, though, Triage fits like a glove. Its workflow perfectly fits the way I already used email on the go, and just makes it faster and — if anything — more fun. For $1.99 on the App Store, Triage for iPhone is an app I'd heartily recommend if you'd like a new way to clear out your inbox on your iPhone.
It took me way too long to try it out, but I just added the Kirby Panel to Techinch. It gives you a web UI for your site, letting you create new pages/articles online, or tweak stuff you've already published right from your browser. Yes, this is something that's standard in most CMSs, but here, you're editing your plain text files from your browser.
It's simple to setup, and all you'll need to do is to make very simple blueprints for your templates. The best thing about that is, you can add any fields you're using in your templates — so, say, adding support for link posts is as simple as adding a new Link text field to the template. Check out the Panel Blueprints documentation to see how simple they are to create; they'll likely only take you a couple minutes to put together. It's as simple as coding with the rest of Kirby.
There's a basic file uploader, too, so you can add pictures or other files to your posts. There's also a URL option that'll let you change the permalink — which also changes the folder name that your article's saved in.
The new articles or pages you create in your browser are saved, by default, as a draft post, so you'll need to drag the post up from the Invisible Pages section of the sidebar to the Pages or Visible Subpages section, depending on how your blog is setup. Kirby will automatically add the correct number to the folder to keep everything in order when it's added to the visible pages/subpages, too, just as you'd expect.
Now, my favorite thing about Kirby is that it's built on flat files, and I can quickly whip up an article from my favorite text editor (even quicker with my Kirby Alfred 2 workflow) with Markdown formatting and FTP it up to my site. But the panel is a nice extra, giving you a way to publish or edit from anywhere, right from your browser, and is a very nice option if you're building a site with Kirby for clients that might not be so excited about dealing with plain text files.
Oh, and the best thing? Kirby 2 is coming soon with a rewritten core to speed things up, new page filter methods, Exif data parsing, and more, in a totally free upgrade. It's also got a brand new panel coming that promises to be even more impressive. So there's no better time to build a great Kirby-powered site today, start using the panel, and then expect more great things from Kirby soon :)
I just published my Mac.AppStorm review of AeroFS, the new self-hosted file sync tool. It's cool, though extremely similar to Dropbox in most ways (its tutorial is an exact ripoff of Dropbox' tutorial). And, due to the way its designed, it doesn't let you access your files online, which might be a pro for some looking for more security, but it'd break the way I use Dropbox as an off-site backup and way to grab files from others' computers when needed. Team pricing would make it almost as expensive as Dropbox for teams, again without the web interface. No iOS apps makes it even more of a non-starter.
And that's sad. I'd like to see it be a stronger competitor to Dropbox, but instead it feels like a near-clone of Dropbox, stripped of some of its features. A clone that's sold on the promises of cheaper and more secure since your files aren't on Dropbox' servers, rather than unique and better features. Plus, 3% of my CPU when the app is idle is far too much for my taste.
Here's to hoping that it matures — and improves — from here.
"We end up with a diminished perception of reality because we’re more concerned about choosing a good Instagram filter for our meal than we are about how it tastes. We become Martian rovers, trundling around our environment, uploading data without the ability or desire to make any sense of it. Ultimately, we end up externalizing our entire lives."
I just wrapped up my review of the brand-new Ulysses III on Mac.AppStorm. It's awesome, and won my heart already. Really. Check out the full review at Mac.AppStorm for an in-depth walkthrough of its UI and how it works for real writing and publishing.
Now, it's a "heavier" app than the writing apps like iA Writer that I tend to prefer, but in this case, it's heavier in ways that make sense — like letting you quickly jump between documents in a set, add Markdown formatting with simple and obvious popovers, and beautiful PDF exports of groups of documents. It's my new app of choice for writing long articles, and I expect I'll put it to good use with my upcoming magazine as well.
It's just $19 this week, 50% off for its launch sale, so grab a copy of Ulysses while it's hot if you're a serious Markdown writer. It's the best Markdown plain-text editors have to offer, combined with serious document management and export tools.
"There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating. We can contrast this with technologies that do have learning curves, but pay off well and allow users to become experts (for example, musical instruments, writing, bicycles, etc. and to a lesser extent automobiles)."
