Articles, notes, links, and photos in one place.
A great article about why we feel the constant need to be busy.
The situation arises: you enjoy the highs, but you are unable to create enough new to support these highs, so you trick your brain into rewarding you for doing far less – you convince your brain of the dubious value of being busy.
The time has finally come to unveil the newest incarnation of the productivity powerhouse called OmniFocus. The user interface has been remade from the ground up, getting inspiration from the iOS counterparts, most notably the forecast view.
I’m looking forward to see whether anything has changed from the recent line of betas. I’m in particular looking for a faster perspective change, and a small nitpick regarding the highlighted flag perspective1.
The flagged highlight should in my opinion follow the view options and not highlight the flagged perspective if the flagged actions are not available. ↩
Just hours before the official release of OmniFocus 2, The Omni Group launched a new website focusing on OmniFocus and its may workflows. I’m looking forward to reading how people use OmniFocus 2, and what the new version will mean with regards to my own workflow.
I have already written about my initial thoughts of the beta, and it will be interesting to see whether the final version will differ in any way in regards to performance and polish.
Josh Hughes has released a beautiful set of perspective icons for OmniFocus 2 which fit perfectly into the new user interface.
You are an expert in all these technologies, and that’s a good thing, because that expertise let you spend only six hours figuring out what went wrong, as opposed to losing your job. You now have one extra little fact to tuck away in the millions of little facts you have to memorize because so many of the programs you depend on are written by dicks and idiots.
Brilliant!
Extending the functionality of the iPad using external hardware has been done for a long time, and the most popular addon is probably a real bluetooth keyboard. By adding this piece of hardware, the iPad is immediately transformed from a…
Building a solid development workflow is very different now than it was a few years ago1. The biggest improvements of workflow and the increase in quality is probably due to the concept of pull requests2, which has made code collaboration explode thanks to the decreased friction that goes into contributing to a project.
This article describe how to properly do code reviews and working with pull requests. Having a focus not solely on finding errors, but using it as a tool for learning and sharing knowledge, as well as for building a common code quality and coding style for an entire project, spanning all involved authors.
WordPress 3.9 has been released to the world, containing lots of exciting features including drag and drop for images and plenty of eye candy.
My plugins WP Facebook Like and WP Require Auth have been tested on WP 3.9 and should work as expected, but if you do encounter any issues, let me know and I will get them fixed.
Finally! It looks and works fantastically well for a beta.
Heartbleed is the name of a recently disclosed vulnerability in the widely used security software called OpenSSL, which is used for securing web communications.
What makes Heartbleed so venerable is the way it stays completely undetectable and is very easy to exploit. Cloudflare posted a challenge for people to extract the private key from their intentionally vulnerable server, and it was just a matter of time before someone managed to break it.
What makes this possible is the ability to send a malformed request to a TLS extension called heartbeat, which makes the server respond with arbitrary memory data up to 64k. It can contain anything, such as user passwords and even the private keys used to secure the connection in the first place.
xkcd provides probably the simplest way of explaining what the Heartbleed is all about in xkcd 1354.
If you are not running your own site, you won’t have to bother with patching the software and issuing new certificates. You will however need to change your password on affected sites, and Mashable provides a list of popular sites and their current status.
Bruce Schneier writes about Heartbleed and his post contain links for further reading and discussions and is well worth a browse.
This is the first part of a video describing Spotify’s development process and it’s well worth the watch. It addresses challenges facing large scale development teams when using an agile workflow such as scrum or kanban.
Shawn Blanc provides some insight into the history of OmniFocus and how it all started, complete with screenshots.
What is more interesting is that the visual UI has virtually been the same for the past six years. Even though it has started to look somewhat dated lately, it has been fully functional and enough aesthetically pleasing to still be the go-to GTD tool.
I have been fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to try out the new OmniFocus 2 beta which was released a few days ago. I have been using it intimately since the release, and it has of course given me some impressions as to…
The Omni Group just announced that they have resumed public testing of OmniFocus 2. If you already have an account from the previous test builds, you can reuse those credentials to download the new version.
We’re thrilled to resume the OmniFocus 2 Test today! We’ll ship it in June: http://t.co/jkwmMVnbuZ
— OmniFocus (@OmniFocus) March 26, 2014
After having started the application for the first time, things look quite different from the last test. I will dive into the new features and give my two cents as I test the new builds.
What the new Omnifocus 2 beta currently looks like
Comparing the todo list with something familiar, such as the calendar, makes it exceptionally easy to comprehend the core of GTD.
This video illustrates an interview with David Allen where he talks about how to get things out of your head and into a trusted system, making the mind free to focus and be creative.
The new puzzle game 2048 as I mentioned earlier, now has a fork which includes an AI and a hint button. The funny thing is that the AI failed to complete the puzzle when I tried using it.
I can see an algorithm war coming and each contender writes their own algorithm, with an end goal of finishing the game with the highest score possible.
The most addictive game so far this week is without a doubt 2048 (sorry Flappy Bird), a simple web based numbers game controlled by the arrow keys. Swiping on the iPad works excellent as well, making it easier than ever to abuse play all the time.
The main goal of the game is to get a 2048 block which is done by combining blocks with the same number to form a superblock containing the sum of the smaller blocks.
There are striking similarities with the popular Threes game for iPhone, but there are subtle differences as well, making this game all the more entertaining and addictive. When moving blocks for instance, they are always moved to the edge of the screen and not just one block away.
The best part however is that this game is completely open source and available on GitHub to play with.
One of my favorite apps for the Mac has finally released a new beta after a long time, with support for greater control of your day.
The new version of f.lux makes a schedule just for you, so you can use a screen that knows when you sleep, as well as when the sun’s up. We found a way to combine your day with sunrise and sunset.
A part from actually going outside to catch some sun1, this is probably the best alternative to get a natural rhythm.
Winters in Sweden provide little or no sun, which rules this out as an option. ↩
