Old display (Pre 4.0.1)	iOS 4.0.1

To make the change easier to visualize, I did some combo graphics. The first is an overlay where the red represents the new bars and the second is an animation showing old and new states:

Overlay	Animation

Apparently the bars themselves now also represent a more accurate depiction of signal strength. AnandTech has a detailed write up of the changes. I’ve noticed that where I have normally gotten the full five bars at my office, I am now hovering around four, with the occasional 5.

PIE makes Internet Explorer 6-8 capable of rendering several of the most useful CSS3 decoration features. [...] PIE stands for Progressive Internet Explorer. It is an IE attached behavior which, when applied to an element, allows IE to recognize and display a number of CSS3 properties.

Looks great. One of the most challenging aspects of web development has always been designing for the lowest common denominator of browser features. Tools like this help raise the bar for IE in a (mostly) hassle-free, consistent way.

PIE currently has full or partial support for the following CSS3 features:

• border-radius
• box-shadow
• border-image
• multiple background images
• linear-gradient as background image

Spot Color is a simple application that allows you to use the standard Mac OS X color picker as a stand-alone app. This allows you to quickly grab colors without having to be in an image editing app like Photoshop. Since it uses the built-in color picker, you can utilize the system wide color picker plugins and swatches.

It’s just a simple application wrapper that launches the system-wide color picker. The same exact thing can be done with Apple Script but it was way to sluggish to launch and I found I just wouldn’t use it. Besides, Spot Color has a cute icon. And it’s fast and light-weight. (I tried a similar app by Matt Patenaude called simply “Colors“. But it felt a little chintzy.)

The reason this is so useful is that the built-in color picker on Mac OS X is extensible and there are some really great plugins available. These are the ones I use:

• Developer Color Picker: Provides color definitions in a variety of developer-friendly formats including NSColor, UIColor, CGColor, Hex and RGB. Written by Wade Cosgrove of Panic, inc.
• Hex Color Picker: Displays the hex code for any color in a slightly different way than the above plugin. Very useful for web development. If you just need hex values, you can probably get away with just this plugin.
• Mondrianum 2: Loads themes from the Adobe Kuler community.

The source code for Spot Color is on github too, which is always nice.

I also sometimes combine this with Digital Color Meter (found in the Applications/Utilities/ folder on your Mac) since its zoom view makes it a little easier to pick colors from the screen.

This is a pure-JavaScript library that detects whether Flash is blocked on the current page due to a Flash blocking extension. The current version can detect

• FlashBlock #1 for Chromium / Google Chrome (Windows/Mac/Linux)
• FlashBlock #2 for Chromium / Google Chrome (Windows/Mac/Linux)
• FlashBlock for Firefox (Windows/Mac/Linux)
• ClickToFlash 1.5.x (Mac/Safari only)

Pretty cool, but there’s a small catch:

If a Flash blocker is active, your callback function will be called almost immediately. If no Flash blocker is active, your callback function will be called after the 5 second timeout.

(Via Mark Pilgrim.)

HumbleFinance is an HTML5 data visualization tool written as a demonstration of interactive graphing in HTML5. It is similar to the Flash tool on http://finance.google.com/. The tool itself is written entirely in JavaScript, using the Prototype and Flotr libraries. It can be used to display any two 2-D data sets of real numerical data which share an axis.

Between this and gRaphaël I’d say there’s a lot of potential for open technologies to be a real, viable alternative to Flash based charts very soon.

Masonry is a layout plugin for jQuery. Think of it as the flip side of CSS floats. Whereas floating arranges elements horizontally then vertically, Masonry arranges elements vertically then horizontally according to a grid. The result minimizes vertical gaps between elements of varying height, just like a mason fitting stones in a wall.

Came across this for the first time today. Reminds me a lot of the old Grid-a-licious WordPress theme. Also, it’s hosted on GitHub so you can grab it there too.

HTML5 video tags make embedding videos into documents as easy as embedding an image. All it takes is a single <video> tag. Unfortunately, not all browsers natively support HTML5 video tags.

… and that’s where this clever little stop-gap script comes in. It replaces the video tag with a Flash Player if the video tag is not supported natively in the current browser.

As is often the case, Rands nails it in this article from 2008:

The curse of any effective task management system is that you get really good at capturing, prioritizing, and executing tasks. To the point that you start to believe that merely completing a task is helping your career. After a solid decade of rampant task management, I realized I needed to augment tasks with a system that would strategically guide and remind me that my job was not to do things, but to remember the interesting words in my title: manager, engineering, and products. That’s what I do.

What I needed was a guiding force behind these tasks, a way to remind me that I was pushing towards a goal and defining and refining a strategy.

He calls this a “Trickle List” and I highly recommend you read the entire article for a clearer picture of what exactly it is.

The problem, for me, with a Trickle List was just that I’d forget to mark stuff off since my list wouldn’t be with me all the time and having to build the list every day (on paper!) becomes a chore. Just yesterday an iPhone app was released that aims to fill this gap digitally. It’s called Daily Deeds and it has a super simple, clean and usable interface.

I still use Things as my task manager, but Daily Deeds seems to fit the bill as a Trickle List replacement very nicely. It’s a great (albeit simplistic) app that allows you to set daily “habits” that you can check off as you do them. Having it on your iPhone means that you have your list with you all the time and adding new habits can be done right away. (By the way, I love that they chose to call them habits since essentially that’s what I’m trying to form by using this app.)

At first I thought that I might want to see finer grained control over the time-frame for habits. Say, I only need to do something once a week, or once a month. After giving it some thought though, I’m inclined to think that those tasks should stay in my task manager as recurring tasks. Daily Deeds is better suited for just that: things you’d like to try to do each day.

One thing I would like added is the ability to see some stats about my habits. On average, how often have I watered the plants? There’s a nice calendar view that helps in this regard, but having some cold-hard stats would help define the things I really need to work on.

Nathan Smith posted a Gist with a terminal command that will filter out Foursquare and Gowalla Tweets:

defaults write com.atebits.tweetie-mac filterTerms -array “@gowalla” “http://gowal.la” “@foursquare” “http://4sq.com”

It’s basically doing a string match for tweets that contain the above terms and excluding them from your stream. Really though, you can add any string of text to be matched and it’ll get filtered out just as well. There’s more info (and a few more examples) at the official Atebits Posterous.

I do my best to sift through the noise, but the best way to get to the signal is just to cut out the noise as much as possible in the first place. Social media presents an interesting challenge. Sites like Twitter and Facebook are constantly vying for our attention and unfortunately, using email as a medium to do it.

One solution that has been working well for me is using iPhone apps as replacements for email notifications from these services. I find that a push notification to my device is much less invasive than an email and there are a number of cleverly crafted iPhone apps that make use of push notifications and simple “dashboard-style” overviews which make it easy to keep from resorting to email.

Here’s a quick list of services who’s notifications I’ve turned off and the corresponding iPhone apps I’m using instead:

Twitter

1. New Follower Emails: Email when someone starts following me
2. Direct Text Emails: Email when I receive a new direct message

I’ve replaced new follower emails with BirdBrain. It’s probably my favorite app of the bunch. Not only does it tell you who has recently started following you, but it gives you a ton of useful statistics and information for pruning your Twitter social graph. (Including my favorite, the “Nonreciprocal Following” list.) This app also makes it almost comically easy to see who the “I’ll follow you if you follow me” people are.

Direct text emails are a perfect candidate for Push notifications. I use Tweet Push which has the added benefit of sending me notifications for @replies. Boxcar is similar app.

It should be noted: You can set up twitter to send your phone SMS messages for direct message notifications but, like email, these come into an “inbox” that has to be viewed and marked as read, which is what I’m trying to avoid. Also, before I finally succumbed to an unlimited text messaging plan, I found that Twitter was eating into a significant amount of my SMS message quota.

Facebook

1. Messages
2. Wall Posts
3. Friend Requests
4. Friend Confirmations
5. Photo Tags
6. Events
7. Comments

I’m not a big fan of Facebook and hardly use it, but I still want to know if someone’s trying to get in touch with me through the service. Sadly, the Facebook iPhone app only covers a handful of the (numerous) notifications they send, but it in practice it does a nice job of cutting down on the email that’s sent.

Flickr

1. When people comment on your photostream
2. When your contacts upload new photos or video

This one’s a bit of a cheat. In conjunction with the (very decent, but ultimately insufficient) official flickr app I’ve subscribed to an RSS feed of all comments on my photostream as well as all uploads by my contacts. (The links are in the account page.) Since they’re just Google Reader subscriptions, they come up in my iPhone’s RSS reader: Byline.

Moving Forward

With just these email notifications turned off I’ve significantly reduced the noise in my email inbox. I’m constantly looking for new apps to add to my arsenal so if you know of any other iPhone apps that can be used in a similar fashion, let me know in the comments!