Thursday August 9, 2012

I’ve enjoyed shouting at my Kinect to play that next episode of The Office, but always been frustrated that when it comes to the browser experience, I’m left having to manually play the next episode. I know; first-world problem. Nonetheless, I’m still excited to see this long-wanted feature available today!

Granted when Amazon Prime Instant introduced the full West Wing series, I started leaning heavily towards their services. Unfortunately, Amazon Prime Instant provides an incredibly lackluster experience when watching TV from my browser and Google TV. It’s not existent on the Xbox 360, so that’s a non-starter. Netflix has consistently won in the experience department and today’s enhancement further extends their lead.

Back to enjoying a wonderful user experience on Netflix.

Tuesday August 7, 2012

I come back from the office and throw open my personal email to see what’s going on. And the first email in my inbox:

I mean, I’ve been busy with work and other obligations. I meant to call the other day but I lost track of time. My phone didn’t have reception on the way back from the office.

I’ve been spending more time reviewing newsletter that actually catch my attention. I ask myself:

• Why did it catch my attention?
• Was the initial reaction a desire to read the email or a desire to unsubscribe?
• If I open the email, what am I looking for?
• Do I find what I’m looking for?
• Do I want to unsubscribe by the end of the email?

I’m a sample size of one, but I got to start somewhere. If I want to write great newsletters, I’ve got to make sure I’m able to answer these questions about each one I write.

Sunday August 5, 2012

For the past year I’ve been using Espresso 2 as my default code editor. It’s a powerful app written for Mac users that I’ve loved. Of the many features it includes, I found myself enjoying:

• Clean, simple design
• Straight-forward projects
• Auto-publish local files to remote server
• Work with remote files directly

It’s worked well and I hadn’t really gone out to look for a replacement to Espresso. But last week, I found myself at the office needing a powerful text editor. Espresso was installed on my personal machine, but not my work machine so I went looking out in the wild. I remembered checking out Sublime a long time ago, so I wanted to see how much progress it had made.

I pulled the latest version (2.0.1) and started getting to it. The first thing I realized is that much of Sublime’s power hides behind cmd + shift + p. You’re given an input where you can filter through the various commands available to you. If that’s not enough, a quick install of Package Control will let you access a whole list of additional plugins and snippets written by the community.

It took me about a week to adjust my workflow for Sublime, but I’ve grown attached to so many features:

• cmd + shift + p is the handiest way to run commands
• Necessary packages: TrailingWhitespaces, HTMLTidy, CakePHP API/Book Search….and so many more
• Instant file switching

Saturday August 4, 2012

For a long period of time this site was dead. It happened because I couldn’t ever find a worthy topic to write about. But again, as always, the situation has changed.

There may be no specific topic to write about, but writing for the sake of writing has become a necessity. Maintaining, developing, and improving my copywriting skills is the goal. Readers will be few; Commenters will be none; writing will thrive.