Posts in Linked

April Zero→

Three months ago, Anand Sharma started tracking everything about himself: runs, walks, heart rate, food, locations, and even restaurants and haircuts. Using only an iPhone and apps like Moves and Foursquare, he has built a complete log of his life, which he has turned into April Zero, a website that, through animations and lots of graphs, presents data collected using an iPhone and apps.

This site tracks where I go and what I do every day. Most of the data comes from various apps on my phone.

I’ve measured my heart rate 415 times and typically it beats 69 times per minute. In the past 105 days, I’ve pushed 1,311 commits to this site, gone on 26 runs & eaten 14 burritos. I love a good burrito.

I’m extremely fascinated by this project: since I’ve started testing fitness trackers and apps to have a healthier lifestyle, exercise more throughout the day, and sleep better, I’ve made an effort to use data and numbers about myself to see which areas I can improve (spoiler: less carbs, more fiber and vitamins, go to bed earlier) and how different data points relate to each other with specific trends that I can observe. The quantified self approach can be a little concerning from a privacy standpoint, but, personally, I’m noticing that visualizing certain aspects of my life helps me understand myself better and actively make changes.

Anand’s website takes lifelogging visualizations to the next level, and I’d be interested to know which other apps he used and how he managed to have the patience to track himself every single day, multiple times per day without forgetting about apps or going crazy. It’s also interesting that all this was possible with just an iPhone and no dedicated hardware, and it makes me excited about the potential of HealthKit for third-party developers on iOS 8.

Check out April Zero here.

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CMD+Space with Jared Sinclair→

This week Myke is joined by Jared Sinclair. They talk about balancing being a developer and a designer, and his apps Riposte, Whisper and Unread.

Speaking of Myke and podcasts, I particularly enjoyed this episode of CMD+Space with Jared Sinclair. Jared is the creator of Unread – my current favorite RSS reader for iOS – and I found his career path and decisions to be fascinating and inspiring. There are a lot of points worth thinking about in the episode, such as balancing utility and artistry when making apps with a vision, and I highly recommend it.

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Five Years of Pinboard→

Perspective does not make you immune to burnout. It just makes burnout less scary. I’ve gone through a few episodes since starting Pinboard, and I’m sure there will be more to come. People have been very understanding about my occasional need to flee the Internet. I find that the longer I run the site, the more resistant I become to the idea of ever giving it up, even if I need to take the occasional break. It is pleasant to work on something that people draw benefit from. It is especially pleasant to work on something lasting. And I enjoy the looking-glass aspect of our industry, where running a mildly profitable small business makes me a crazy maverick not afraid to break all the rules.

A great post on Pinboard’s fifth birthday by Maciej Cegłowski. Pinboard is one of my favorite web services because it does its job well and it’s dependable. There’s a lot to learn from Maciej when it comes to building trust and a profitable business on the Internet.

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Panic PunchClock→

Panic has fun with iBeacons:

With this new technology in-hand, it wasn’t too long before I put together a brand new office In/Out tracker called PunchClock. It uses a combination of a geo-fence and iBeacon tracking, plus a simple Sinatra backend hosted at Heroku. The part that took the longest to fine-tune was figuring out the right combination of polling to provide good location information without draining the battery.

Not only does their internal app look great – it’s also available on GitHub for you to play with.

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Inspecting Yosemite’s Icons→

Nick Keppol has published a great look at the icons from the developer beta of OS X Yosemite:

When 10.10 ships this fall, your users will expect your icons to feel at home in the new system. Rather than critique the icons, I’m going to dissect the icon system and focus on the small details that will help you make icons that look great in Yosemite.

When I saw this link in my Twitter feed, I thought the article would focus on colors, gradients, and comparisons with iOS 7. Instead, Nick has inspected the tiniest details of Apple’s icon design on Yosemite, such as reflections, materials, grids, and combination of shapes. If you’re a designer or just curious about Apple’s new dock icon language, I recommend reading this post.

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Ron Johnson Recalls The Early Years→

Gary Allen has a summary of Ron Johnson’s talk at Stanford University:

Former Sr. VP Retail Ron Johnson told a Stanford University audience in May that store high-speed Internet connections—nearly unheard of at the time—were intended to attract visitors, allowing them to check their email or surf the Web. Johnson spoke as part of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business “From the Top” series that spotlights company executives. Johnson was an undergraduate at Stanford, and also attended Harvard Business School (HBS). Johnson recalled his close relationship with Steve Jobs, and the main lesson he learned from him—‟You have to be willing to start again.” He recounted the previously-told story of how the original Apple store design was re-done at almost the last minute in 2001, because Jobs’ trusted Johnson’s evaluation that it didn’t match up with the company’s “digital hub” philosophy.

There are a lot of lessons and details to take away from the talk, which you can watch on YouTube here.

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