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Sponsor: A World Without Pens

I knew I was going to love Spike Jonze “Her”, but I didn’t know that my first opportunity to watch it was going to be on a long transatlantic flight where I’d be able to watch it… multiple times. Like three times. In a row.

There’s a longer article to be written about “Her”, but right now I want to bitch a bit. Jonze imagines a not-to-distant future where our operating system are becoming sentient. It’s not a science fiction movie because Jonze doesn’t get lost in in the science, he worries about how science might affect us socially. So, it’s a social science fiction movie?

There are small touches throughout the movie to remind you of this not-too-distant future. People dress like dorks, video games are awesome and immersive, and the denizens have strange new jobs appropriate to this future. Our protagonist writes personal letters for other people. Correction: he dictates these letters because in this future dictation is perfect and the need for keyboards has apparently vanished.

As I binged on “Her”, I became increasingly concerned about the absence of keyboards. I realized that if we had no keyboards, what happened to writing utensils? Pencils? And pens?

Look around where you’re sitting right now. Reach for a pen and something to write on. Sign your name and tell me how it feels. How does the pen feel in your hand? Too heavy? Too light? How does the ink land on the paper? Too thin? Too heavy? It’s probably been a long time since you’ve obsessed about a pen, you’ve taken it for granted. Now imagine a world with no pens.

What a fucking nightmare.

Jonze’s movie is about how technology is changing our relationship with each other. It’s funny, insightful, and often stop-you-in-your-head brilliant. Watch it. Watch it twice. Watch how in the future they never write, they just talk.

In the present, take some time to be aware of when you write. One of favorite ways to write is with a Zebra Sarasa 0.5mm black gel pen. It speaks to me. For the next two weeks, JetPens.com will throw this amazing pen into any order over $25 when you click on this coupon. This means there might be a great pen in your future.

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The Diving Save

Angela quit. She walked in on a Monday morning, went straight into Alex’s office, resignation letter in hand, and said, “I have a great offer from another company that I’ve accepted. My last day is a week from Friday.” Alex reacted. After listening to Angela’s resignation, he told her simply and clearly, “I know you… More

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Protecting Yourself from Heartbleed

Earlier this morning, I tweeted:

This is not actually good advice. You shouldn’t be changing your password on a server until the server administrator has confirmed whether their servers were affected and, if so, whether the server has been patched.

Mashable appears has an up-to-date breakdown of the most popular services out there and their disposition relative to Heartbleed.

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Presentation Design Joy

As appears to be tradition now with the iWork suite of applications, Apple is slowly updating the applications to both address minor issues as well as introduce functionality that was removed in the most recent major update.

As is now custom, I keep the old version of Keynote around to compare and contrast feature set because while Apple’s “What’s New in Keynote” is useful, it often neglects to mention interesting changes to functionality and design.

The headline is: nothing earth-shattering has landed in Keynote 6.2 that is going to affect my presentation design workflow. To determine this, I compared toolbars, preferences, inspectors, and menu bars between Keynote 6.1 and 6.2. It’s not an exhaustive comparison, but this is where I tend to spend my time and any improvement has potential to increase my presentation design joy.

So, yes, the toolbar is updated. Keynote 6.1’s toolbar is on the top, Keynote 6.2 is on the bottom – click to see a larger version:

keynote toolbars

This adds a button I don’t need – add a slide – because I’m a keyboard guy and Cmd-Shift-N works great. They’ve also changed the Setup “inspector” to Document which makes sense in my head. These palettes remain frustratingly docked in the main window. As I’ve written about before, I’m uncertain if this is usability improvement, but I’m about to enter a presentation heavy lifestyle over the next three months. I’ll have a better sense of the use of these embedded palettes.

Preferences were mostly unchanged. They added the ability to show slide layout names which I have not figured out. I can display ruler units as a percentage. Ok. Great?

Animations received love with the addition of new transitions and builds. They also added motion blur to the animations which is is a slick visual flourish you’ll never actually see, but will appreciate. Magic Move adds text morphing which means it will continue to be one of my go to animations as my presentations tend to be text focused1. Magic Move is still baffling to set-up and remains fragile as it relies on multiple slides to be… just right, but I’m happy to see it’s evolution.

Presentation view, I believe, remains functionally equivalent to the prior version, but did receive design love.

keynote-design-love

In both practice and play mode2, the presentation view now shows you when you’re ready to proceed with a clear green bar across the top of the view. When an animation is running, this bar is red which is handy. All of the buttons at the top of the window have been increased in size, altered in color, and have better placement to make your presentation practicing easier. Lastly and most importantly, while you still can not perform free form layout of the presentation view, Keynote does allow you to change the style of the presentation notes on a per slide. I’m not sure when this handy feature landed, it wasn’t Keynote 6.2. You still can’t change the presentation notes style at the master slide level which would be convenient and efficient at making sure that presentation notes are optimally sized while in the presenter view.

According to the What’s New update provided by Apple, there are many other new features: Alpha image editing, media browser improvements, custom data formats, improved AppleScript support, support for animated GIFS (yay?) and others. Again, nothing earth-shattering, it’s a house cleaning release and it’s going to take a few weeks of regular use to see if they’ve increased my presentation design joy.

  1. EDIT: I originally thought this was the returning of the same old text transforms. I was wrong. ↩
  2. EDIT: There was some stop/advance visual cue work in Keynote 6.1 in real presentation mode, but it appears they flushed it out and finished it in 6.2. ↩
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20th Anniversary of Netscape

I was part of the Netscape Navigator engineering team. Lots of great stories regarding the early days of the Internet. One of my favorites was the origin of the hand icon for links:

Even small innovations at the time seem bigger in retrospect. For example, it was Mittelhauser who came up with the hand icon for links: “It was really, really easy to change the icon on Windows. It was a single call. So, I’m like, “Oh, when it goes over a hyperlink it’s sort of Windows standard; you change to the hand icon to indicate you can click on it.” That was five minutes of work. And then of course that forced everybody else to go do it because it was a good idea and it was popular. There was often a competitive aspect of trying to come up with the cool thing; get it done first.”

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