- HOW TO: Get your web browser gestures back in OS X Lion
If you’re like me and have a magic mouse and use the internet much, you’ve probably gotten used to using the two-finger swipe to navigate forward and back in your history in Firefox and Chrome instead of using the back button. Apple has changed the default behavior in OS X Lion to swipe between fullscreen apps. Which means suddenly when you’re trying to go back to the previous page, you end up looking at your dashboard or something dumb.
To get your two-finger swipe navigation back, just go into the Mouse preferences and over to the More Gestures section. Change the first option (Swipe between pages) to use two fingers.
This will disable the full-screen swiping and get you back up and running. Doing the same thing on your laptop should work as well, except you’ll pick three-finger swiping instead of two.
Enjoy.
- Four Steps to Turbocharge Rails + AJAX Development with Nginx and Foreman
If you’re developing a chatty AJAX app on Rails and using a single mongrel to run it on your workstation, you probably are a bit annoyed with delays waiting for requests to be fulfilled one-at-a-time. So, here I’ll walk through the steps to run your own “cluster” on your OS X workstation using Foreman and Nginx.
In the course of building the frontend application for Earbits, I’ve been constantly annoyed with the responsiveness of my local development server. As a pretty complex AJAX application, there are lots of little (and some bigger) calls to the Rails backend APIs to do lots of potentially slow things. This means that there are lots of calls that are originating in the browser and being served by one mongrel, so the server ends up handling requests too slowly. Which leads to me being frustrated. Which leads to me finding a nice solution to the problem.
- FolioHD 2.0 is the online portfolio for you
Yes, I’m a bit biased, but now that we’ve launched our new version 2.0 of FolioHD I have to brag a little bit. Our goal with FolioHD is to create the best possible online portfolio for creative people of all types to showcase their work to the world. Simplicity and elegance were our top priorities, because artists shouldn’t have to waste time with technology to create a portfolio online that compliments and shows off their best work.
The biggest change in this new version is our improved Portfolio Manager which makes it super-easy to manage all your images and galleries in one place quickly. Uploaded images instantly appear in the gallery and you can easily drag images to change the order or to move them between galleries on your portfolio. If you’ve ever seen an easier portfolio manager, we want to hear about it!
We’ve also made some improvements to the themes and our theme builder tool to make it easier than ever to choose a theme, color scheme and title font for your portfolio to give it that custom look. Hooking up custom domains and email forwarding is similarly simplified and can be set up in just minutes.
Finally, for all the people out there who have a bunch more images to showcase, we added the huge Pro account that allows you to upload 2,000 images to your portfolio. I wish I had more than 100 awesome examples of my work to put in my own portfolio, but I’m sure that many of you do. So now you have that option and still at a price that is hard to beat at any of our competitors.
Of course, you can still create a free portfolio to get started and show off up to 36 photos. And as always, we’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Version 2.5 is already in the works with a great list of new tools and improvements!
- Whirlfood – social suggestions for food & nightlife [beta]
Well, this is the site that I’ve been working on in my learning Ruby on Rails series. It’s called Whirlfood (pending a better name) and it is going to be a social suggestion site that helps you pick places to eat and where to go out with friends.
But while we’re working on the algorithm, it just does some neato analytics on your data. We’ll be adding more analytics once we get the friend import stuff working – we we can analyze how you interact with your friends and look for trends. Then we’ll really start to tackle the suggestion engine. We have what we think are some pretty cool ideas for that part.
Stats Dashboard 
Fullscreen Map View 
This is just a quickie screenshot set of what the stats look like for me (and I’ve only been using Foursquare for 2 weeks while building this app). If you want to sign up and play with it, let me know and I’ll get you the link to the beta site!
- Chart: A Very Productive Evening
This is what learning a new language looks like: 50% time writing code, 25% time using chrome for research, and 10% time in firefox running and debugging the app.
Clipped from RescueTime which is a fantastic freemium app that tracks everything you do on all of your computers and then does analysis of how you spend your time.
Pretty cool, huh?
- The Building-Learning Paradox
If you want to learn a new langauge or framework you need a good project idea as the basis for what you’re building as you learn. But if you have a good project idea to work on, you want to get it to market as soon as possible. I present to you The Building-Learning Paradox.
I conjecture that this paradox is the reason that highly motivated people tend to learn in smaller incremental steps rather than diving head-first into a new technology. It’s basically impossible to satisfy both these main motivators at once. Not 100% sure what I’m going to do for this project I’m working on right now, but I think I’m going to sacrifice speed in order to learn something new. We’ll see if I can keep that up for very long.
How do you deal with this paradox? I’m curious.
- TalentScan – it’s like mint.com but for your employees!
We’re in beta testing and preview period for our new product at Humantelligence that we’ve dubbed TalentScan. Simply put, TalentScan makes it drop-dead easy for any business owner or group leader to analyze their people and find ways to improve efficiency as well as foster communication and understanding among their workforce.
If you picture a cross between Mint.com and Google Analytics, but instead of looking at your bank accounts or your web stats, we’re looking at the motivators and behaviors of the people you work with. TalentScan gives you really interesting information about your employees that you probably didn’t know. It discusses their dominant workplace motivators, workplace behaviors, ideal workplace and life priorities. And that’s just for starters. Plus, it’s totally free to try it out and get quite a lot of useful information without even giving us your credit card info.
Planning to unveil all the details over the next few weeks as we march towards the public launch, but you can get a quick peek and register for notifications over at TalentScanApp.com and we might even squeeze you in to our beta test group!
Update: It’s now a public beta open to the public!
- FolioHD – Free Online Portfolio
For those of you who are interested in a super-quick way to create an easy online portfolio, I recently launched a site called FolioHD to do exactly this. We’ve had about 100 people sign up so far and had over 2GB of images uploaded already. So, yeah. If you need a portfolio site, you should try this free online portfolio site and tell me what you think!
We timed it and it only takes 60 seconds to sign up, upload some pics and have your site live. Beat that with any other site and I’ll be surprised…
- The Maker’s Schedule Explained
Another great essay from Paul Graham of Y Combinator about the differences between “managers” and “makers” and how they schedule their day.
I’ve personally found that most non-makers are completely oblivious to how much having even short meetings during the day can disrupt our work process. I can’t remember where I read it (maybe Joel Spolsky) but I recall a discussion about how if it takes 15 or 30 minutes for a developer to “get in the zone”, a couple 15 second distractions can ruin a whole day of productivity.
When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. [...]
I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.
On a related note, why in the world does Paul Graham not have an RSS feed for his essays?? Dave Winer needs to make that happen.
- Motivation and Innovation
I have done nothing truly innovative in the first 155 days of 2009.
This is what I have come to recognize as the cause of my current state of discontent. I have been doing a lot of self-reflection lately, which of course only happens when I have too much time for self-reflection. My preference is to occupy myself with exciting (read: cutting edge, innovative) projects rather than silly introspection.
Now, it’s true that I have done several things this year with which I’m quite satisfied. I’ve started making some good friends here in LA as the two-year anniversary of my moving west has come and gone. We added the Atlanta Braves as yet another flagship Photocore client. I was involved in launching a free career assessment aimed at helping young people understand themselves and find their ideal job (more about that later). But none of these satisfy my basal thirst for innovation.
