Jamie Thingelstad

I’m writing this post on a plane. I’m drafting with MarsEdit to post later. There isn’t much interesting about that. What is interesting is checking out people looking at my computer screen. Why? It looks like I’ve time warped back 20 years.

I’ve been doing almost all of my writing for the site using WriteRoom. WriteRoom is a Mac application that defers to a simple, distraction free writing environment. They describe it best as:

For people who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world. WriteRoom is a full-screen writing environment. Unlike the cluttered word processors you’re used to, WriteRoom is just about you and your text.

Here is what my screen looks like right now.

Pretty whacky huh? That’s WriteRoom. When you launch WriteRoom your entire screen goes black, and you just type. All of those other applications, and even the user interface of the editor itself fades to black. You just write. So simple it took a decade to make.

There is a lot more to WriteRoom. For example, it never has you typing at the bottom of the screen. Your actual typing is always in the middle. Seems like nothing, but is really nice. In short you can customize the heck out of it and make it the experience you want for editing. If pure text mode isn’t your thing, it even has a minimal rich editor.

Ya know the thing I love about WriteRoom? It’s the same thing I love about Quicksilver. As well as dozens of other applications on my Mac that are written by very small independent software developers. It’s different. It’s elegant. There is so much fresh and new thinking going on in the independent developer world of the Mac. It’s a great time to be a Mac user.

I’m totally geeking over MarsEdit right now. MarsEdit is the desktop blogging client that I recently started using with my site. I’ve considered moving to a desktop blogging client instead of typing in the text field of a web browser for a while. I never made the jump though since I had a hard time finding a tool that I really liked. MarsEdit seems to fit the bill really well.

The first criteria for me was full support for WordPress, particularly the native tagging feature added in 2.3 and thankfully MarsEdit ticked this box right away. The other major editor I worked with at length was ecto and it sadly didn’t do this yet. Tsk tsk…

So why shell out some good PayPal dollars for a desktop blogging client? Here are my reasons…

Editing

Can we really think that editing even more than a single paragraph in the text field of a browser is passable? Even with great add-ons like TinyMCE it really is only workable for a simple comment at best. Using a desktop blogging client I get a much more powerful and workable editor.

It’s not just doing the editing on the Mac or PC either. MarsEdit is using the editor you like for what you want to do. For example, I’m doing almost all of my blogging in the distraction free, completely uncluttered environment of WriteRoom. (I’ll do a post on WriteRoom soon too.)

Next time your typing a post in a text field, try putting in a tab. :-)

Drafting

I’m a big “drafter”. I have 10 or more blog posts in draft status with different levels of completion at any time. Sometimes it’s a title with a three word reminder. I may have a long post that has been refined a few times waiting. I haven’t found any web-based admin interfaces that make working with multiple drafts really nice.

Live Previewing

One of the great features of MarsEdit is the ability to have the text open and editing, and in another window next to it have a live preview of the rendered HTML. This makes blogging in raw HTML actually work.

Why blog in HTML? I shrugged off this recommendation for a long time. My opinion was that I shouldn’t have to write in HTML anymore than I should have to know the ASCII codes for all the letter I’m typing. However, I’m a convert. The control it affords you, and the ability to avoid the damage that a rich editor would do to embed codes is a big win.

Other Stuff

There are other reasons to use a desktop client that are less about writing to me. You can post to one of several blogs you have in one tool. That’s great, if you have multiple blogs. This means I’ll likely actually put something up at MinneLightroom now and again.

I give MarsEdit two thumbs up. If you are a blogger, and you use a Mac, go download the demo and give it a go. As they say, YMMV.

I just finished a pretty long session or upgrades and improvements to thingelstad.com. Here are some new things to check out.

Gravatars

I actually implemented Gravatars a while back, when Automattic bought them. But it deserves a special highlight and I improved the implementation now. If you comment here, register for a Gravatar so you can get your picture next to your comments!

Feed Improvement

Nothing too big here, but you will now see tags and related article links in the RSS feed. I know a lot of people use that feed exclusively so I think that may prove useful. (Thanks to Simple Tags.)

Ratings

You can now rate all posts on the site using a 5-star scale. You’ll see the rating tool around any posts. Just click to give it a rating. Go ahead and start with this post. Top rated posts are highlighted on the front page. (Thanks to Lester Chan’s WP-PostRatings.)

Articles

I setup an article page on the site where certain posts are highlighted and called out. This allows me to give special positioning to certain things I write. (Thanks to Alex King’s Articles Plug-in.)

Polls

I’ve added polling functionality, which I used to have a long time on my site. It isn’t going to be permanent in the sidebar, but instead just embedded into different posts. (Thanks [again] to Lester Chan’s WP-Polls.)

Theme

The hardest maintenance item you won’t even notice. I updated the theme I use, blog.txt, from 3.1 to 4.1. I don’t think there is any noticeable impact visibly. I had to go in and rehack in all my theme customizations though. I really wish WordPress made that easier. Thanks to Scott Wallick for making such a great theme. I really can’t say enough good things about this theme.

Filling Out Tags

Last is a bunch of manual labor. I’m slowly getting tags applied to my archive. There are hundreds of posts that were made before my blog had tagging. This is getting filled in slowly but surely.

Enjoy the updates!

It’s the holiday season and along with that comes the time for everyone to make wishes for gifts. Along those lines, I put together my Top 10 Apple Wishes. With Leopard out now and there all kinds of new things to play with. But I want more. As I wrote this it seems that it’s really a list of wishes related to the iTunes, iPod, iPhone and Apple TV world. Perhaps I’ll write again with my Apple wishes in other products.

Front Row for iPhone

This may seem like an odd one, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted this. My iPhone only has 8GB of memory, and my media library is huge. I regularly use my iPhone at home and would love to just launch Front Row on it and connect to my massive library on my Mac Pro. This should be totally simple. Obviously only for WiFi. If it could somehow work outside of your house that would be killer, but I’d be happy with just local access for now.

iTunes In My Car

I already wrote about this, and I think it would be a killer product. C’mon Apple, you could get into a new market with car modders!

Play Internet Radio on Apple TV

Another area where the gap seems so obvious. iTunes has a list of radio stations and I enjoy listening to MPR online in iTunes. Why I can’t do this on an Apple TV makes no sense.

Apple TV without the TV

Apple doesn’t have a product that can compete with network music players like the Roku or Squeezebox. The Apple TV is really nice, but it has no display and thus is a deal breaker for a music only device. It would be great to have an Apple TV that had it’s own display that could be used where a TV is not welcome. Maybe even just use the USB port on the existing Apple TV units to attach a display?

eBooks via iTunes

Looking at a PDF file on an iPhone is really amazing. It just works, exactly like you would hope. I would really love to see Apple add a Book channel to iTunes and deliver eBooks (probably not as a PDF) to a Reader application for the iPod Touch or iPhone. Amazon Kindle beware. If this were available it would be hands down better.

Flickr for iPhone and Apple TV

YouTube gets all the love with a special pre-installed application on the iPhone and AppleTV. But no Flickr? C’mon! People take plain old pictures too!

Multiple Video Formats

I have to think too hard when subscribing to a podcast and wanting to watch it on Apple TV or iPhone or iPod. iTunes needs to just handle the bitrate and playback issues seamlessly. Download three copies of the same thing and then dish out the one needed. iTunes already has the “Convert for iPod” functions but then your left with a video that looks bad on your TV.

Add Star Ratings via Apple TV (and volume)

It seems criminal to me that I cannot rate a song while listening to it on Apple TV. I can do it on an iPod, so you know that iTunes has all the brains to do this. This just needs to happen. And while they are at it, how about adjusting the volume. I realize the whole HDMI thing with the TV may cause some challenges, but this really needs to happen.

iTunes Social Edition

I wrote in some detail about adding P2P functions to iTunes as well as a friend network. I want iTunes to do more heavy lifting for me sharing music with my wife on her account and exchanging home movies with friends and family. Embed the BitTorrent DNA product into iTunes and let it roll!

iPhone SDK

This isn’t really a wish now that Apple has confirmed that we are getting an SDK, likely at MacWorld in February. The wish is really that Apple not get in the way of innovation on this device and hopefully other upcoming touch devices. The touch interface of the iPhone is one of the most groundbreaking, and most intuitive, things I’ve seen come out of a company in a long time and I’m mad that Apple has kept it jailed up. Get out of the way, open it up, and let people make great products!

That’s mine. What’s your wish?

Our annual holiday party at the office is coming up this weekend. It has been a tradition for many years to have a theme. There was a black & tie year. There was a year you came as a favorite figure in history. There was even a cowboy year that didn’t go over so well. This year the theme is 70’s Disco – and Tammy and I are going all out. Here is a sneak peak!

Get ready to boogie!

Rays of Sunlight on Artists Point in Grand Marais.

I mentioned in another post how much I’ve been enjoying iTunes. A few weeks ago I extended my Apple TV coverage to the family room and it just hit me as I was looking at my iTunes window how fully evolved the iTunes ecosystem has become. From one application I have all of my music, podcasts, home videos and soon all my DVD’s available on iPods, iPhones and couches. This convergence has been promised for so long, and it’s great to see it finally delivered.

The ecosystem is not without warts. iTunes needs to get much better at sharing my library with friends and family ala the Social Edition I wrote about earlier. I also think that the entire ecosystem does a very bad job with video. It makes no sense that I would subscribe to an “Apple TV version” of a podcast, and separately to an “iPod version”. C’mon guys! Figure out a way to put multiple bit rates and file sizes in one package. It’s akin to putting Intel and PowerPC, 32-bit and 64-bit applications in one package. Do this for my videos in iTunes and then just put whatever version makes sense for that device on it.

I expect there will soon be a 3rd Apple TV in this world, and hopefully something for my car too. Once movie rentals are added to this and I finish my massive winter DVD ripping project it should be almost entirely complete. Oh, and I need Lightroom to automatically expose collections of photos to iTunes please. :-)

At our office we have a long running joke about the men’s bathroom. By long running I mean several years. There is always something wrong. Flooding. Broken knobs and handles. Atomic flushing. I’ll leave it at the pleasantries. A couple weeks ago I walked in and saw a nice note on the door to one of the stalls.

The sign on the door reads

STOP USING HAND TOWELS TO WIPE YOUR ARSE. THEY DON’T FLUSH!!!

Really, it’s a privilege to work with people that can throw out an “arse”.

I made a pie! That’s right! A whole pie, from scratch, the whole deal. I made the crust. I steamed the pumpkin. No canned pie filling here! I ground my own fresh nutmeg!

The image originally associated with this post was lost when I deleted my Flickr account. I’ve searched but I do not have a copy of the photo in any of my archives. I believe I took it with the Flickr app on my iPhone and it didn’t save a copy to the Camera Roll. I deleted my Flickr account when Yahoo! bought them and didn’t realize I was “hot linking” some of those photos on my blog. My last hope was Internet Archive, but the Wayback Machine excluded Flickr photos from archival. 😞

I realize that many people do this all the time without thinking of it. However, I have tried to make a pie crust before and if you haven’t done it yourself try before you dismiss it. Rolling out that dough into a thin crust is tempting disaster. At any moment it may stick to the rolling pin and fold in on itself, like space collapsing in an episode of Star Trek. You may not get it quiet right and think you can just finagle it a little more here or there, and boom you have a torn wreck in front of you. I nearly lost this one at the end, trying to get fancy, and was able to save it and roll out enough dough to make it work.

The pie is baking right now. I’m so proud.