I read a lot about Hazel before I even bought the app. My resistance eventually wore thin. So what is Hazel? According to Hazel’s developer, Noodlesoft: Hazel is a System Preference pane that works silently in the background, automatically filing, organizing and cleaning. What’s more, it’s simple to use. Start with...

This detailed tutorial from developer Aral Balkan (@aral) explains how to create a website, starting with a simple plain text file and ending with a site hosted on Amazon S3. I’ve been trying my hand for a couple of years now, but I still find valuable lessons in tutorials such as Aral’s Content Out Web. For one,...

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve favoured my laptop to compose a tweet when my iPhone was already to hand, and all because I wanted to use a character or punctuation mark that wasn’t immediately obvious on the standard keyboard. Nerdy? Maybe. But it doesn’t half make me feel better. This has been my...

I’ve come across some clever apps in my time but nothing quite like Workflowy. The last time I was this impressed by an app was the day I installed Mr Reader, an RSS news reader, on my iPad. Workflowy Workflowy is a list-making app. Lest your interest should wane and the mere mention of lists send you scurrying for...

Okay, so the title of this post might not exactly ring true. But let’s assume I didn’t work in publishing, the reason a number of other apps – Adobe Design Premium, a good text editor, a browser, to name a few – are important in my great scheme. In such a scenario, the app I would live by – although not necessarily...

When I returned to keeping a diary last year, it was my first attempt at doing so using electronic means. It was also my first attempt at doing so in many years. The thought of all those lost years has spurred me on. There are countless journalling apps vying for your money in this arena; I ignored them at first,...

Brain Pickings editor Maria Popova serves up more ‘interestingness’ in Virginia Woolf on the Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary. [M]y belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must...

Offscreen magazine #4, Jeremy Keith interview Offscreen #4 features some fine web folks, including Dave Greiner, Timoni West, Loren Brichter, Brad Smith and Daniel Weinand, but the reason I’ve been so looking forward to issue #4 is the Jeremy Keith interview. Strange then that the mere fact I’d subscribed to this...

Ever since reading Ethan Marcotte’s Sizing the legible letter in 2011, I’ve been taken by the rem as a proportional unit for measuring the size of type. For far longer, I was against using the em, the compounding proportional unit that resets the baseline every time the context changes. But I’m a control freak when...

The thought of making my blog responsive has always struck fear where it wasn’t wanted. Fear, that is, of breaking my blog, discovering I didn’t have the necessary back-ups to reassemble the static status quo, and having to start over. When I went to bed last night, the resulting brain activity didn’t bode well....

In another great guest piece on the I Love Typography blog, Joanne Meister, owner and creative director of Oregon-based designmeister, recounts a chance tutelage under eminent Swiss graphic designer Josef Müller-Brockmann: I still remember [his business] card clearly. It was on light gray paper stock printed with a...

Paperless GTD aficionados will quake in their task managers at the thought, but the new year brings for me a new Filofax. Apps are all well and good, but I’m far from ready to dismiss pen and paper entirely from my arsenal of writing, note-taking – and task management – tools. Filofax Cuban and Parker Urban...