Category: Blog

Inbox Whack-a-Mole

Maintaining inbox zero is like a game of whack-a-mole. For every email deleted, organized, or responded to, another one pops up in its place. However, that only happens if your email is always open. By just opening up email and responding to it at set times during the day, you can process messages in batches and be much more productive. When you finish, close your email, and get to work.

I don’t have to check email as much these days as I have in the past, but I check it anyway if it’s open. I check it even when there’s nothing new in there. Ideally, there could be a notification when the inbox has 10 new items, or email could launch automatically two hours from the time I closed it.

by Jonathan Frei

Nice try, Facebook

Is this a deceptive or just poorly worded error message? Also the ‘Visit Website’ link is broken. I’m pretty sure there’s some way to get Twitter working on my phone. The other apps at the bottom of the page work just fine.

Twitter and Facebook don’t have to play nice together, but if Facebook is going to show Twitter in its App Store, it should probably just let Twitter tell its users if if works on my phone or not. Getting into the habit of telling your users what your competitors are capable of is often bound to make you look like you don’t know what you’re talking about.

by Jonathan Frei

Glow bike

This isn’t the right bike for my current riding habits, but it would be very cool to zip around town on one of these at night. The Pure Fix Glow Bike has a clean simple look to it during the day, but lights up with an alien-green glow in the dark.

The bike is coated with a solar-activated paint that absorbs sunlight during the day and glows at night. They say an hour of sunlight will give an hour of glow, so you’d have to park it in the sun during the day if you’re planning a night ride.

It’s probably not important to have the whole bike light up. You could probably find glow paint you could use on an existing bike frame to achieve a similar effect.

by Jonathan Frei

New Flickr app

Flickr released a new version of their iOS app today. So far I am very happy with the features of the app and the results it has produced.

Flickr followed the lead of Instagram and the thousands of other copycat apps by adding more filters and gimmicky features, but they also added some very useful and professional editing tools that allow for and encourage more fine tuning of images.

I have intended to post more photos for a while. Especially now, with the new baby, I should be snapping away every day and capturing as many of these early memories as possible. Looking back on old albums has always been such a joy. I’ll have to collect these photos now so my kids and I can enjoy looking back on them in the future.

Matthew running

by Jonathan Frei

Practical typography

I recently finished reading Butterick’s Practical Typography, a short web book by Matthew Butterick. It is filled with many practical rules and tips for producing professional-quality typography with common tools. The book starts off with a short chapter called Typography in ten minutes which offers some simple rules to fix the most common typographic violations (it’s a great place to start).

I’ve made several minor design changes on this site over the past few months, primarily focused on improving the typography and visual layout. Butterick’s book showed me a few other areas where I could improve. After reducing the size of the header tags and making some of the typographic elements on the page more subtle, I think it is getting closer to the clean and clear look I’m after. There does not need to be such extreme contrast in the elements on the page, especially since it should be primarily about the words.

by Jonathan Frei

I forgot my phone




I Forgot My Phone – YouTube: Written by/Starring Charlene deGuzman and directed by Miles Crawford.

This video shows me. And probably lots of us.

Far too often, I find myself absorbed in the action of a 4-inch screen instead of seeing the real world unfolding around me. I’m not going to throw the phone away or retire it when my contract is up, but this video has inspired me to try to put it away when there are others around.

The girl in the video is visibly frustrated when her friends are paying attention to their phones instead of to her, but there is no evidence that she is more interesting than what her friends are looking at. The first step to fixing this problem it to put the phone away. The second is to surround yourself with people more interesting than your phone (and to be more interesting than your friends’ phones).

There is a time and a place for reading and exploring the universe from a tiny screen and a time to find it in its physical form. Occasionally forgetting my phone at home will help.

by Jonathan Frei