always trying

Hello, I'm Pierre Wizla. I write, I try, I fail, I win. Sometimes. I'm just a tech enthusiast in this ever-changing world.

[alwtry]

“My Todo List”

I started learning to code a few weeks ago and I've been toying with HTML, CSS and Javascript / jQuery to build…

"A minimalist, flat-like, work-in-progress todo list web app created by a newbie."

The app is available at http://todolist.pwizla.com and you can also check the related Github project.

Learning to code is both extremely fun and sometimes frustrating, but it's really worth it!

[alwtry]

iCloud web apps redesigned, iOS 7-style

A few days ago, Apple started rolling out a beta version of its iCloud web apps. It features a complete UI overhaul, giving it an iOS 7-like look.

First, the new iCloud home page features a subtle dynamic bokeh effect that lasts a few seconds:

All apps now sport the “flatter”, cleaner look taken from Ive’s redesign of iOS, as you can see in the screenshots below (click images for bigger versions):

I like the new look for the most part but it clearly is a radical departure from previous iterations. However, fonts look a bit too big for my tastes with the default 100% zoom.

Microsoft with its Metro/Modern UI and the new Outlook.com, Google with its Gmail redesign in 2011, and now Apple: everyone is moving towards clean, clutter-free, mainly text-based UI these years. You’d better like it.

Does this prefigure changes coming to the OS X version following Mavericks? Time will tell, but I won’t be surprised if the new, minimalistic iOS/iCloud design comes to the Mac as soon as next year.

[alwtry]

Editorial for iPad is out

Ole Moritz's OMZ:software hast just released the long-awaited, game-changing text editor/automation tool for iPad: Editorial.

I won't delve into the details because Federico Viticci has an extremely thorough review of it while I'm just scratching the surface.

Go buy this app now. $4.99 for accessing the future of iOS for power users is a bargain.

[alwtry]

Science, Hope and Tiny Steps

I’ve just stumbled a wonderful, touching story about Carl June’s/Bruno Levine’s/David Porter’s new approach in cancer treatment, which leverages “engineered T-cells” to kill cancer cells. Basically, the patient is growing the drug in her/his own body.

Highly recommended reading.

Science is incremental. It’s a slow and global grind, a steady accumulation of facts wrested from failure. But every once in a while, there really is a leap, and a small group of people can change how thousands think about the possibilities.

Being a scientist myself, I know how true it is.

We are currently developing another approach, this time by using a virus, inoffensive to normal cells, but efficiently replicating up to a million times in the body and killing tumor cells. We achieve similarly impressive results in mice bearing leukemia. Here’s to hope we’ll find enough funds to pursue our research.

Reading this kind of articles — as well as watching movies like Elysium as I did yesterday evening — makes me more aware than ever than my full-time job as a scientist in cancer research is one of the best ever. A challenging one, for sure. A slow-paced, almost steady-state job, but an overjoying journey. And it teaches one of the most important things in life: keep trying, always trying.

[alwtry]

OS X 'Ivericks' concept

The Stu Crew design team has just tried to apply the iOS 7 redesign principles to OS X, giving it the playful 'Ivericks' name.

My favorite is the Notification Center redesign:

While Calculator, iTunes mini player and Notifications look fine, Notes look odd.

I'm not fond of the suggested Finder redesign either. Some good ideas, though, such as the 'Photo Stream' view for the Images folder, and the badge next to Downloads in the Finder sidebar.

What do you think?

(via TUAW )

[alwtry]

Always Clear Downloads in Chrome

If, like me, you're tired of clicking the little cross in the bottom right of Chrome when downloads are finished, this extension should make your day.

[alwtry]

It's the Little Things

Stumbled upon this article from Michael Schechter.

Where I’ve found success and where I believe you can too is in finding more focused applications that work together to make you a more productive and less overloaded person. In getting away from apps that theoretically do everything, you can focusing in on smaller programs that do one or two things really, really well.

Like Michael, I love small programs that do simple things, but do it extremely well (burn in hell, Microsoft Word; hello nvAlt, Byword and Marked). When reading the quoted paragraph above, I figured out that this may be because over the years I’ve been getting used to break projects into small steps. Lessons from my project management courses ;-)

[alwtry]

Shiori

A minimalist, elegant and fast Pinboard & Delicious client with a unique approach. Lets you easily add bookmarks and browse through your full list in a cinch. Highly recommended.

Read my complete review.

[alwtry]

Stumbled upon this great short essay by Jack Cheng via the great blog of Tulio Jarocki.

Required reading.

This:

Email, after all, is turn-based communication, and our email inboxes are probably one of the biggest sources of Fast Web distress.

and this:

The randomness and frequency of the updates in our inboxes and on our dashboards stimulate the reward mechanisms in our brain. While this can give us a boost when we come across something unexpectedly great, dependency leads to withdrawal, resulting in a roller coaster of positive and negative emotions. The danger of unreliable rhythms is too much reward juice.

are moments that instantly made me see the world in a different way.

It does not happen often. Excellent piece.

Also, this particularly resonates with my email workflow:

[…] most email productivity systems are concerned with a form of moderation: standardization. They encourage you to standardize the size and demandingness of the interaction […] and standardizing the frequency.

On a side note, this mind-changing piece of writing lead me to add "These days", a novel by Jack Cheng, to my Amazon wish list.

[alwtry]

Feedly: the next Google Reader?

I discovered feedly a while back, I think it was in 2007, when I was still using Firefox on my Windows XP machine. Since then, I’ve seen this little Firefox-only add-on grow bigger and bigger. It quickly became available for Safari, Chrome. Then for mobile devices: iPhone, iPad, Android smartphones and tablets.

Right from the start, I found feedly to be the most innovative and beautiful approach to delivering your RSS content. Over the years the DevHD team never stopped iterating, tirelessly providing users with new content layouts, new themes, new options at a fast pace…

When Google announced in March the closing of Reader, thousands of users around the world were shocked. And soon began to look for alternatives. At that time, I already found feedly was the best one. My thoughts are now re-inforced by the latest announcements:

the DevHD team has entirely built from scratch a clone of the Google Reader API (what they called the Normandy project, now simply known as feedly cloud)

you can now access feedly as a standalone web app (no browser extension required), which means you can now access your content on Internet Explorer and Opera, too

they partnered with some of the best mobile and desktop “news readers” out there, on almost any platform [1]: Reeder (iOS, Mac coming soon), Press (Android), NextGen Reader (Windows Phone 8), Meneré (Windows)

they now provide access to the feedly cloud API and IFTTT already has you covered

So feedly is now not only a news reader (with a seamless transition from Google Reader) but also a cloud syncing solution and a platform with a widespread ecosystem around it. What else?

Long live, feedly!

Linux excluded, though you can of course access the web app in your browser  ↩

[alwtry]

Attention is the new gold

I disable every possible notification on any machine I own. OS X Notification Center turned off.  No Growl notifications for Twitter DMs or mentions. No sound for incoming emails. No red badge on my Mail.app dock icon. No red badge on my iPad home screen —  except for that one coming from App Store for which I don't have a choice.

On my phone, the only sound notifications allowed are for incoming calls and SMS. And that's only if I did not set my phone to Airplane mode, which happens regularly: at night, when I'm watching an interesting movie, when writing, in fact whenever I need to focus or just do not want to be disturbed.

Does all of this make my smartphone a dumb phone? Does that make my computers less connected? No, but it avoids them being turned into attention-vacuums.

Does all of this make me less connected? It all depends on what you want to be connected to. I think it makes me more connected to the present time, to what's actually happening right before my eyes, to what I'm hearing, smelling, feeling and experiencing right now.

Don't take me wrong: smartphones are great inventions. But because you have an over connected device in your pocket, on your desktop, your coffee table or wherever does not mean you must be turned into a slave. These devices were only designed to help you and entertain you when you need it. Nothing more.

I write allowed — and not enabled — on purpose. In today's world, it's easy to drown in a constant, overflowing wave of distractions. It's up to you to allow all of this to get in your way, or not.

[alwtry]

Evernote adds Reminders to your notes.

Federico Viticci has published a nice — and, as usual, extended — review of it.

You can get more info on the official Evernote blog

I still have not really decided what place to give to Evernote in my digital life. The introduction of this new feature will probably make me reconsider Evernote... again.

[alwtry]

My only iOS 7 wish

iOS 7 is coming. Hence the related current waltz of predictions and wishes. With Jony Ive now in charge of the software design, lots of people expect an overhauled, so-called flat UI. Federico Viticci has an impressive list of wishes. Ben Thompson doesn’t word any wish at all.

I’m sitting in between and have just one: auto-update apps.

I mean: come on, Apple, it’s 2013, why on earth should someone still have to manually install updates? I only have, say, around 40-50 apps installed on my retina iPad and there’s not a single week where I don’t have to tap that App Store icon, wait for the App Store to launch and display the available updates (which already takes too much time), and tap on that “Update all” button without ever reading all the descriptions of updates (don’t have time to / don’t want to). Don’t get me wrong: some descriptions are still worth it, some others are even fun. But far too often, I have to launch the App Store just to read “Bug fixes”.

It’s been six months I’ve switched to Android for my mobile phone, joining the ranks of Andy Inathko and Guy Kawasaki, among others. And I must admit: it is a pure joy, a relief, really, like getting out of a digital jail. Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean are mature — despite their names — and polished mobile OSes. And above all, Android apps can auto-update (you choose, on a per-app basis). It’s the kind of features you won’t think you would need until you have them. There, you look back and say: it’s obvious that every modern mobile OS should have it.

I hate badges on apps. I hate real time notifications. In fact, I hate everything that interrupts me, everything that stoles my attention. This red badge on a blue icon is annoying and unnecessary. It’s the protruding, intrusive sign of a forthcoming time waste.

So yes, Apple, it’s OK if you want to put a fresh layer of painting on the walls of your old (yet still functional) house, it’s OK if you want to add some features that won’t be helpful before at least a year or would even fall into oblivion at worst.

But please, if you want your OS to look like something, not even futuristic, but just actual, at least let the apps update by themselves. My attention will thank you.

[alwtry]

A new start

I promised myself a lot of things in 2012.

Almost one year and a half later, I'm still true to my convictions. I've made some progress towards my goals, but I'm still far from reaching them.

One of the things I'm most proud of is having been chosen to write for Mac.AppStorm in the mean time.

But that's just the start.

This blog will be the place for articles that don't fit anywhere else (yet?), either because they are too personal or too geeky, or both. I don't know where all of this is heading, but does that really matter?

“Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it.” (Greg Anderson)

Welcome back here, fellow readers, let's have a nice journey together.

[alwtry]

7 very personal advices about dealing with email

While drafting a new, long blog post that will probably be entitled 'This is how I deal with email', some little, general ideas popped into my mind. I don't think these little things need further explanations. At the same time and in my humble opinion, I consider these to be worth a little post on their own.

So here they are, without further ado:

Turn off all notifications.

Check your email whenever you choose to do it.

The purpose of these two first advices is to restore order : You check your mail, not the other way around. Does your real, physical inbox at home yell "HEY! LOOK AT THAT AWESOME AD FOR ALL THAT STUFF-YOU-WILL-NEVER-BUY-ANYWAY! REALLY, YOU SHOULD TO!" at you whenever someone puts a letter in it? Does it have a flashing red light that won't stop blinking until you empty the box? Probably not (else, I really wouldn't like to be your neighbor. Nothing personal, you know...) So why would you let your email client do that?!

Don't feel guilty about deleting an email.

Don't feel guilty about not deleting an email.

Don't feel guilty about not replying to an email within the five minutes it was sent to you.

Feel guilty about not replying to an email within 4-7 days if the email did not require you some specific action other than just replying to it.

Feel even more guilty about not replying to an email that just requires a casual, 2-line answer. Because you should have replied to it as soon as you've read it. Why? Because if you don't even have time to write a 2-line email, you should not be checking your emails right now because you have a lot more urgent things to deal with!

[alwtry]

New name. Brand new UI. Same usefulness, even better.

[alwtry]

Hazel is one of the third-party apps I install first when I set up a new Mac, among others like Dropbox, TextExpander and LaunchBar.

Hazel just got updated to version 3.0. Having been a beta tester of version 3.0 for nearly a year, I have to say this is a rock-solid update with a core rewrite, a refreshed UI, and tons of new features.

I'll write a more in-depth review of this essential, quite magical tool, soon. But for now, just go and give it a try now, you'll be amazed. (and for Hazel 2.0 licence owners, the price drops from $25 to just $10).