Paper by FiftyThree on Vimeo.

I should mention, it’s a free app with paid upgrades. Grab yourself an iPad and get drawing on Paper. More info on their website.

Did I mention it’s free?

I hear there are some problems with Lion, but if you follow the trail on the Macfusion Github page it will work just fine. They recommend downloading and installing the only dependency, MacFUSE from this site, rather than the copy from Google.

As a side note, FTP seemed quite sluggish for me, to the point where it was nearly unusable, but when connected with SSH it’s quite speedy,

Tony Riff from itdrewitself on Vimeo.

Check out Tony’s Flickr photostream for more of his great works.

Charlie Hoehn — The New Way to Work

Jenny Blake — The Career in the Age of the App

Since I can remember, I have had to wrestle Apple’s Mail.app to submission in order to get it to work right for me and Gmail. The default settings just seemed clunky; archiving when it should be deleting, multiple junk mail folders, and list goes on. It always worked, but a lot of time I preferred using the Gmail web interface better. But a new player is in town and they are filling that gap quickly.

Just earlier this month Sparrow’s first beta was released and it is already taking over my workflow. Upon downloading and installing the first beta, I was very pleased with its clean iPad like interface, but ultimately had some issues with it. I wasn’t able to see my archived mail, only what was in the Inbox. I sent them my concerns along with a couple of bug reports and have been pleasantly surprised. Within weeks they have already cleared up the bugs I mentioned, and added support for the “All Mail” function of Gmail. Of course I can’t take credit for that suggestion, they were already working on it.

Now in the forth beta of their wonderful Gmail client, the Sparrow team leaves me very impressed. I have been using it for the past few days and have not even looked back to Apple’s mail client. If your interested you too can download the latest beta here.

960 Grid System – 12 Column Quick Reference

I turned it into some wallpapers and have them included after the break.

Desktop / Laptop

iPhone / iPod Touch

iPad

I’m a chronic browser switcher. Yesterday was Chrome and the day before that I liked Firefox. But today Safari 5 is in the top spot. Safari has a great new feature that allows for clutter free reading of most blog articles. All you have to do is click the “Reader” button in the address bar when it appears in a blog article.

A window will pop up from the bottom of the screen containing only the article’s text and pictures. If you happen to be reading this article and using the latest version of Safari give it try. While this feature alone isn’t a deal breaker for other browsers I like it for the other capabilities it has built in as well. If you hover the mouse toward the bottom of the article window a toolbar will appear that allows you to zoom in, zoom out, mail, or print the article. While the print button here is great (it guarantees that you’ll get a clutter free print out) the mail button is the main focus today.

Evernote allows you to email it and automatically create notes. These notes will go into your default folder, so be sure to remember which one that is. I called my default folder “Unsorted” so I can easily remember things that need to be filed. Next, we just need to click the email button in the Reader view of Safari. It will produce an email with the page title as the subject line, a hyperlink to the article and all of course, all the content. All you have to do is fill out the email address and you’re set. Now you may be asking, “What address do I send it to?” And that’s a great question. When you sign up for Evernote, you’ll automatically get an email address that you can send notes to. You can find that address by going to Account Info.

• On a Mac: Open Evernote, go to the menu bar, click Evernote -> Account Info… You’ll see a line that says “Email notes to,” and the address will be under that.
• In Windows: Open Evernote, go to Tools -> Account Info… You’ll see a line that says, “Email notes to,” and the address will be under that.
• On the web client: Sign in, click Settings at the top of the page. You’ll find the email address under where it says, “Emailing to Evernote.”

I highly recommend that you keep this address private, as you won’t want other people to be creating notes under your account. Also, as you can see this is a pretty messy address and is very hard to remember. That is done on purpose for security reasons. I recommend that you add it to your address book. I made “person” in my address book named “Evernote Entry,” and assigned it my Evernote email address so I don’t have to remember it. Now all I have to do is add “Evernote Entry” to my recipients, and click the send button and I get a nice, clean Evernote entry of the article.

A few other things worth mentioning: Evernote does have plug-ins for all the major browsers that allow you to clip notes without emailing them. But this generally carries all of the other graphics, comments and ads along with the article text, which takes up a lot more bandwidth and clutters the note. If you’re like me and have the free account for Evernote and only 40 megabytes upload per month, saving bandwidth is a nice thing to do. I have a couple of samples below, first showing an article captured from lifehacker.com with the Safari plugin. The second screen shot is the same article captured the way I detailed today.

For the minimalist, a blank iPad.

For the precise, an iPad with a .25 inch grid.

And for the detail oriented, pre-imaged with keyboards and status bars in the vertical and horizontal flavors.