Devir Kahan

On July 27, 2010 Apple released the Magic Trackpad, the first radical new pointing device in a long time. Instead of dragging a mouse around your desk, you simply have a slanted metal trackpad that you drag your finger around on. Push down to click and the feet beneath the trackpad create a true ‘clicky’ feeling. All the multitouch gestures found on the iPhone and iPad can also be found on the Magic Trackpad, especially when used in conjunction with Mac OS X Lion. You can pinch, rotate, drag, flick, and more. It’s like a touchscreen computer, but better.

The Advantage

For the longest time people have been speculating that Apple would release a touchscreen desktop computer. When Steve Jobs announced the Magic Trackpad though, there was no loner any speculation. Apple’s stance on touchscreen desktop computers was clear. It was the Magic Trackpad.

How so? As Jobs went on to explain, a touchscreen desktop requires you to keep your hand in an upright position pointing forward the whole day. It causes fatigue and becomes difficult to use after a short time. In a word, and in my opinion, it’s ridiculous. I dreaded a day when Apple would create a touchscreen computer for those very reasons, and I’m so glad that we now know they never will.

Instead, they proposed the Magic Trackpad. It presents a touch based interface to interact with your computer, but is at the level of your hand. All the advantages of touch - fluidity, ease of use, simplicity, power of multitouch - without all the stupidity - fatigue and all that goes along with it, mainly - associated with an actual touchscreen desktop. Best of both worlds, right?

Kindda.

My Thoughts

Backing up a bit, the Magic Trackpad really isn’t quite that radical. We’ve had them on laptops, also due to Apple, for years. It’s bringing that model to the desktop that is so radical. It was right in front of us all, but I would have never thought to use a trackpad to control a desktop. But it does make sense. A lot of sense. We’re clearly moving in the direction of touch interaction, and a trackpad is far and away better than reaching forward all day to tap a screen. I still can’t believe that anyone thinks that’s a good idea. The Magic Trackpad is indeed how touch should be, but that’s not to say I don’t have my issues with it.

The Good

It’s Magical

Say what you will about Apple and their recent use of the word ‘magic’, the Magic Trackpad is indeed somewhat magical. The way in which you can manipulate the screen using just your fingertips is, well, there’s just nothing else like it. Except for the iPad. I remember the first time I saw the iPad demoed, and how ‘magical’ I thought the way you interacted with it was. Specifically the photos app. The pinching and rotating. With the Magic Trackpad you get the same magic on your desktop.

Gestures and Speed

Gestures are what make the Magic Trackpad. They truly do speed things up a ton - once you know how to use them all. Some are more gimmicky, and some are impossible to live without. The best resource I found to learn just about every gesture there is is this article over at Macworld.

Also, a word of caution, many gestures were switched with the move to Lion. The most noticeable of which is the Exposé gesture which is now enabled by a three finger swipe up as opposed to the four finger swipe down of old. On that note, most every gesture is highly customizable in System Preferences.

The Bad

Slow

I’m just going to cut to the chase here when it comes to the downsides of using the Magic Trackpad: I feel like it’s far slower than a mouse. I tried using only the Magic Trackpad for weeks, and while it did get somewhat better, it still didn’t feel nearly as good or as fast as a real mouse. Nor, by the way, did it feel as accurate.

Maybe it’s the strangeness of not actually physically moving anything while using the Magic Trackpad. Maybe that’s just how it is supposed to be. But as John Siracusa has said, I feel like I would be able to beat anyone using a Magic Trackpad with my Magic Mouse on both accounts of speed and accuracy.

I feel impeded slightly with the Trackpad. Slowed, hampered, if you will.

Hovering

I actually find the Magic Trackpad less ergonomic than my mouse. I think it has to do with the fact that I feel the need to hover the rest of my hand over the Trackpad so that I don’t accidentally hit it, and make a move I did not want to make. It’s one big slab of touch sensitivity - it feels far more likely to do something by accident than a mouse. Regardless of whether or not that’s actually true.

Laptops

What’s super interesting is that I never felt any of this with the trackpad on my MacBook. I never felt slowed, nor the strange ‘don’t let another finger touch the trackpad’ phenomena.

Maybe it’s the positioning, or the size of the smaller trackpad and the size of the smaller screen. I’m just not sure. But to me, the trackpad feels best suited for a laptop.

Misc.

Tap To Click

I have Tap To Click on. This way I don’t actually have to press down on the Trackpad to make a click. Just tapping will do. Just like on an actually multitouch device. I just find it easier this way.

Battery Paintings

If you look on the underside of the Trackpad by where you insert batteries after the cap is removed, you actually can see two small painted batteries facing the direction they need to be placed inside. It’s a real nice touch. Love it.

For Who?

The Magic Trackpad is clean and people really love it. It truly is magical, fluid, and just downright cool. For me though, at least for now, my Magic Mouse remains my primary pointing device. I do still keep the Magic Trackpad on my desk to use on occasion, and would recommend that anyone do at least that. It is the future, like it or not.

And again, that is not to say that I don’t like it. I just don’t love it - and definitely not as much as I love my Magic Mouse. And you see, I get the Magic Trackpad. I really do. But I still just find it a tad slow for my taste for speed.

The Magic Mouse is the perfect cross between a plain old mouse and the Magic Trackpad, just like the Magic Trackpad is the perfect cross between touch desktops and mice. I guess I hope they both stay around.

If you’re a guy, you no doubt carry around a wallet with you. In fact, you probably have a large bulge in your back pocket from said wallet right now.

Yuck.

That bulge is not only a big no-no in the fashion world, but I just flat out hate it. It’s annoying and looks terrible. I’ve always been one for thin wallets. And I always thought my wallet was pretty thin until I heard Ben Brooks talk about the JCrew Magic Wallet one day.

Ordered

I had wanted to get the Magic Wallet since I first heard Mr. Brooks talk about it, but only recently got around to it. It came the other day in a nice little envelope. Reaching inside I was super surprised and excited at just how darned thin the thing really is.

Plus, the package came with preprinted return labels in case there were any problems. Big brownie points for JCrew there, but there’s no shot in heck I’ll be returning it.

Come to think of it, as it’s a rather old item on there site, I should probably order more before they discontinue it.

A Magic Wallet

The Magic Wallet is not your typical wallet. Yes, it is wafer thin, but that’s not what makes it special - or “magic”. Rather, the magic is in how exactly the wallet holds your cash. You see, in any other wallet there is a large pocket for you to stash all your money. Not so with the Magic Wallet. Instead, with the magic wallet, there are simply intelligently placed elastic bands that wrap around the whole thing. Simply lay your (thin) wad of cash on the bands, close the wallet over it, and the next time you open it you’ll find that the bands have moved along with the wallet, slipped around the money, and are now snugly strapping your money down to the inside of the wallet. Magic.

Now I know this concept is rather hard to visualize and truly understand through the written word. Trust me, I had no clue how it would work until I first tried it, which is why instead of continuing with the written word - as this is the internet - I’ll just show it to you:

In the words of Steve Jobs, “Pretty cool, huh?”.

Apparently the concept for this is of French origins, and I actually remember having a magic trick years ago that used the same method.

At First

To be honest, the magic wallet was a little difficult to figure out at first, and it came with absolutely zero instructions of any kind. After a tad bit of tinkering though, it became super easy - but keep in mind that I had that magic trick to jog my memory. Should you choose to purchase one - which I wholeheartedly recommend - the video above should be more than enough to get you going, so fret not.

Misc.

Latching

Although I’ve seen it written elsewhere that magic wallets latch onto the cash as soon as they are closed, that’s actually not entirely true. It doesn’t do anything when it’s just closed until you pull it back again in the opposite direction. That’s just enough to snap the elastic around the cash.

And yet it still is so much faster than a regular wallet. Just fold the cash stack, lay it on the inside flap of the wallet, and with a quick flick of the wrist the cash is more secure than in a regular wallet. And to get it out you just tug it out from under the elastic. The thing is super slick. And you can tell from all the italics I’ve used in this post thus far.

Colors

I believe at one point JCrew offered the magic wallet in a black as well, but they do not any longer. The brownish leather is fine in my opinion, but the fact that they no longer stock the other color is what worries me that they will discontinue it one day. Sad, but I suppose there will always be other places to get similar things.

Cards

Be warned: There is not much room at all for cards. Of course, that’s kind of the point of a thin wallet. I mean, how many of those cards do you really need?

To be precise, there are two slots for cards, but I found I was able to get two cards in each slot no problem. So, with doubling up, you can get a maximum of four cards, IDs, etc, in the magic wallet. More than enough for me.

A Favor

Please, do yourself a favor and get rid of the bulge in your pocket. Get yourself a thin wallet. And once you’re going to do that, make it the magic wallet. It’s simple, clean, minimal, super thin, and unique. It’s all leather other than the elastic and goes for only about $25.

And the best way to understand all the magic spoken about in this article is to try one for yourself.

Tempting, no?

So go buy one.

In short, I’m going to be explaining the simple system I use to manage my RSS feeds.

Before we get started though, a quick refresher. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication was created as a sort of email service for the web. In other words, instead of you going to all your favorite sites, you have them come to you. Any site tat so choose, which is close to all, can ‘burn’ their site to an RSS feed. This site’s feed for instance is run through FeedBurner and can be found by clicking the RSS link on this site itself, or going here. People can then subscribe to the feed using the service of their choice. Google Reader is by far the most popular. Instead of using the website though, many people prefer to use an application like NetNewsWire or, my personal favorite, Reeder. These applications are far better made then Google’s basic site, look nicer, and are far more capable, powerful, and feature-full.

The problem with all of this is that, as you can see, “Really Simple” syndication is no longer so simple. People, myself included, are subscribed to well over one hundred feeds - if not far more - and managing them all became somewhat difficult, really. Reader, and thus all it’s client applications, support folders. But should you organize by topic? By importance? By a little bit of both?

Are folders really the answer at all?

For one, do you ever really want to read by topic? I never did, and that’s how I used to organize them. It just got annoying to swap between all the various folders. It was more keys hit on the keyboard, or clicks or them mouse. Then take organizing them by importance. How do you determine importance? An A-List and a B-List? Maybe a C-List too? I tried that too, but then you only ever end up reading the A-List. And better yet, if you find something unimportant and hit ‘Mark As Read’ as soon as you see it, unsubscribe from it altogether!

I just wanted a list of all my feeds to be able to read them all together, or perhaps sometimes by particular feeds.

My System. Or Lack thereof.

I organize my RSS feeds by not organizing them at all. No folders, just a list of feeds. Simple. My system is a total lack of a system altogether.

And it works like a charm.

No more am I reading only some of my feeds. I now read them all. What about when I go on vacation, or am away for a little while and my unread items build up? Well, they don’t. I’m very strict with the feeds I am subscribed to. I went through all my feeds over the course of a few weeks using Patrick Rhone’s system, and got rid of every single feed I didn’t absolutely want to read. Again, it was that simple. And so when I get to Reeder during slow parts of the day, at night, or after a week of vacation, there is never a sick amount of unread items. And I know that I don’t want to miss any of the, and sit and go through them all.

I’ve never loved RSS so much before. I’m telling you, the ‘no folders’ thing works better than any other ‘system’ out there.

A Few Tips

• Every once in a while I go through my feed list again and ‘trim the fat’ so to speak. I just make sure I am still reading all the sites in the list, and that all the sites are still publishing.

  I also thought I should mention at some point that I am subscribed to somewhere around 100 feeds. Perhaps a bit more or a tad less at any given time. I find that 100 is just about the perfect number. I am able to read through all the great posts, and set the ones that I really love aside to post to this site.

• I’m not subscribed to many news sites at all, and neither should you. (At least if you want this system to work - I can’t really tell you what you should and shouldn’t do.) Choose, say, 3-5 of your favorite news sites, and that’s it. They get really repetitive, especially when it comes to Apple news, and is just not needed. I like one or two Apple sites, one or two general tech news, and the Google Top News Feed . Big fan of that one.

My application launcher of choice on my Mac is Alfred (with the Powerpack). On my iPhone however, well, there really is no application launcher at all.

Dial Better

On an iPhone

On an iPhone when you want to dial someone’s number you have one of two options:

1. Use the dial pad in the phone and enter in the number manually. Madness.
2. Use the contacts search (whether in the standalone contacts app or in the phone app itself) to find a single contact.
3. Tap the name.
4. Tap the number you would like to call from all the available options in that contact card.

To text or email you are presented with a similar situation. You either run a contact search, tap tap tap, or open up the app in specific, search for a contact, and then tap tap tap until you can finally actually compose and send.

Dialvetica solves all that tapping and wasted time.

With Dialvetica

When you have Dialvetica on your iPhone, things go a lot faster. Here is how any of the aforementioned scenarios would play out:

1. Open Dialvetica and start typing any letters, in any order, that are within the name of the person you want to call/text/email.
2. Tap that person’s name.

That’s it.

Dialvetica speeds things up a lot, basically.

Looks

By now you’re probably dying to see what it looks like (if you haven’t elsewhere, already). Well please don’t die. Here it is:

A few notes about the app UI:

• It seems almost Android-ish
• As you can tell, Dialvetica uses a custom keyboard that is far smaller allowing you to see more results at once. It also is not dependent on order, so, as stated above, you can type any letters of a person’s name, in any order, and it’ll know to pull that person up. That being said, if you absolutely hate it, you can switch to the normal iOS keyboard from within the settings (found in the Settings app).
• The app is super fast. So much so it feels instant. I don’t think I’ve ever waited for it.
• When you first launch Dialvetica you see an auto generated list of your most usual contacts. This is sweet, especially as I don’t think I ever used the favorites tab in the official Phone app other than to bookmark special AT&T numbers (to check data usage, etc.). A dynamic most usual contacts list was made for me. I know some people find it a little unsettling to see a newly reordered contact list every time they open the app, but I like it. A lot.
• When you tap a name with multiple numbers for the first time, you are asked to choose a default number to call every time you tap that name in the future. As more often than not you only ever want to call the same number, the way in which this works is totally logical. If there comes a time when you would like to select a different number, simply tap and hold for a pop-up of all of that contact’s numbers.
• The way you text or email a person as opposed to calling them is by tapping on the little icons for texting and emailing next to the contact of your choice. Doing so, however, multi-task ninja swaps you into the email or text messaging app itself. Calling too brings up the calling overlay over the app but upon finishing your phone call, it returns you into the official phone app. Essentially, no calling/texting/emailing actually takes place within Dialvetica itself although, at least in terms of texting/emailing, it is entirely possible and allowed by Apple. Curious.

The Icon

The icon feels Android-ish as well.

Plus, the white grid design actually causes a famous optical illusion which makes the intersection points appear grey.

I’m not a huge fan of the icon.

An App Launcher of Sorts

I doubt there will every be any real sort of application launcher on the iPhone. Sure, there’s Spotlight search now, but that’s as good as it’s going to get. Except for Dialvetica. Dialvetica is better.

For the calling, texting, and emailing app, there is no better way to get to it then through Dialvetica. It’s fast and intuitive.

Trust me. You install Dialvetica on your iPhone, and you’ll be popping in and out of the lightweight app so quickly you won’t even realize it. No, I don’t use Dialvetica nearly as often on my iPhone as I do Alfred on my Mac.

But there’s still no doubt in my mind that Dialvetica is still more than just a cool contacts list.

It’s an app launcher. Of sorts.

I Only Dial With Dialvetica

Not only do I always use the super-speedy, way-faster-than-the-built-in-phone, Dialvetica, but it completely replaced the built in phone on my homescreen.

Dialvetica is $1.99 in the App Store. Go grab it.

And now for another Mac gem of an application that you already have. That’s right. It came with your computer buried in your utilities folder, waiting to be launched.

It’s called Digital Color Meter.

The What

So, what does this thing do?

Simple enough, really. It measures colors digitally. And if that wasn’t enough of an explanation for you, although I can’t imagine why not, allow me to explain a bit further.

What Digital Color Meter (DCM) does is basically give you the exact ‘color coordinates’ for any color on your screen. If ever there is a color on the screen that you’d like to use for yourself elsewhere, jot pop open DCM and it’ll tell you exactly what color it is you’re looking at simply by moving your cursor over it.

The How

Now I wouldn’t try to go into the actual technology behind exactly just how the app works.

But I can walk you through how the app works in practice, and how to use just about every aspect of it. It may be small, but it’s powerful.

Now, DCM actually got a bit of an overhaul in Lion, but its core features remained the same.

The Boxes

The box off to the left side is the ‘aperture’. That box shows you everything within a defined radius next to your cursor. The box to the right of it shows you the precise color that you are seeing the values of.

Aperture Size

Beneath the ‘aperture’ box, there is an aperture size scale. You can adjust this to make the pinpointed area either larger or smaller.

I rarely ever find myself using this feature. I keep it all the way at the bottom for ultimate precision.

Values

At the top of the window you have a drop down menu that allows you to choose exactly how you want the values of the color to be displayed.

While I’m sure certain more ‘professional types’ will have their own uses for individual values, changing the setting very rarely even results in a change.

For just about every circumstance and to ensure compatibility, just go with “Display native values” every time. That will show you the exact Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) values.

With these values, you now have the exact color that can be used just about anywhere you’d like. We’ll get to all that soon, though.

The View Menu

There are a few more rather important aspects to DCM, and they’re all found in the menubar under the View menu. There’s nothing else of particular significance to this app under any of the other menus.

Lock X, Y

This is crucial. Essentially, when you have your mouse over the color you’d like, you pretty much always have to lock DCM so that it doesn’t continue updating and following your cursor. To do this, simply hit Cmd + X and then Cmd + Y on your keyboard. Actually clicking these option from the menu would defeat the purpose as you would have to move your cursor to get there.

Magnification

You can adjust the magnification of the aperture by using this menu item. Again, I generally always keep it at 8x for ultimate precision.

Update Continuously

I’m the first to admit when I don’t know something. And to be totally frank, I have absolutely no idea what the heck this does. There seems to be no change whatsoever regardless as to whether or not this option is checked.

If anyone has any more insight here, do let me know.

Show Mouse Location

By ticking this option, the coordinates of the mouse (in terms of pixels) will be displayed in a neat grey bar at the bottom of the aperture box.

Not something I ever have a real need for.

The Why

There are so many possible use cases for this thing, and the more I get into serious design work, the more times I find myself opening it.

Before you can do anything with your newly found color though, you have to be able to save the color in some way, in order to use it. You know, convert the RGB values into a usable color. Luckily, this is easy enough with any built in color palette on your mac. If you have an application like Photoshop, or better yet Acorn, now would be the time to open it. If you do not have either of these applications or similar, just pop open any application on your Mac that allows you to access the color palette (Pages, or even TextEdit).

1. Click on the color slider adjustment tab and switch the drop-down menu to RGB Sliders.
2. Adjust the corresponding RGB values from DCM in the color palette fields. You’ll see the color swab at the top adjust in real time as you make the changes to the RGB values.
3. If you would like to save the color for future use, simply drag from the color swab down to the color boxes at the bottom of the palette.
4. Acorn-like Apps Only: If you are using Acorn (or similar), you get one more tab in your color palette. The # tab. Once you’ve entered in the correct RGB values, you can switch to the # tab to see the hexadecimal color code of whatever color you ended up with.

So, why would you want to ever use DCM? Well, to be honest, there are really no uses outside of the design world. But the design world is bigger then you think.

• As Patrick Rhone always mentions, say you see something in real life that you just love the color of. So much so that you’d like to, say, paint a wall in your house that color. Well, just take a picture of said object and bring the picture onto your mac. Then use DCM to get the precise color.
• If you see a color used online that you would like to use to style some text in a document, DCM is your go-to app.
• Coding and CSS. The uses here are just endless. You see a color elsewhere that you would like to use. You want to compare colors to see which one is darker. Or you want to know if something is true white or not. And the list goes on and on. But even just within using a color you see elsewhere, I mean, that’s just incredibly useful. It’s super powerful. Of course, you would need the hexadecimal color code in order to use it in CSS so Acorn (or similar) would be required, so just keep that in mind. And if you couldn’t tell already, I’m a huge fan of Acorn and highly recommend it.
• To reference other work of yours. If you used a color a while back and forgot what it was, a few seconds in DCM will give you the answer.

There You Have It

Well folks, there you have it. A full rundown of Digital Color Meter. And you do quite literally ‘have it’.