Oh. My. Lord. Do you want to see a movie made by one of the stop motion animation masters behind Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Willow? Do you like visual story telling? Do you just like movies that make you wish you could unsee them? Mad God is all of these things and more. Seriously, this is not for kids (or even most adults), but it is gorgeous and incredibly detailed.
The Omnigroup is testing deeper and more complete automation for OmniFocus on iOS. From their forum:
So we took this a step further, and added support for copying projects from OmniFocus as TaskPaper text and pasting them back into OmniFocus as TaskPaper text. And then another step further, creating an Editorial workflow. This Workflow accepts TaskPaper text with placeholder tokens and prompts for you to enter final values, then creates a project in OmniFocus 2.
Eddie Smith has sampled the nectar of static blogging and now he’s hooked. He provides a very nice rundown of moving from Squarespace to Jekyll.
As for they big “why”, Eddie has the saddest and most accurate reason for fighting the good fight:
Even though indie blogging has been relegated to third-, fourth-, maybe fifth-class citizen status on the internet in the last few years, I’m still grateful it lives on through the people who won’t let it go.
My thanks to Internodal, the makers of Agenda Minder, for sponsoring Macdrifter this week. I don’t carry a lot of sponsors but I like to think the sponsors I work with are the best people out there. Agenda Minder is a new Mac App for managing meetings made by people that know how effective meetings are created. So many people forget how important an agenda is and I love that Agenda Minder focuses on fixing this common problem.
I can’t pass up a good article about Drafts. Tim Nahumck has a thorough discussion of how he uses Drafts for iOS.
Wow, this new Sketch version looks like it will be dyn-o-mite. The symbols will save so much time prototyping apps and websites.
Finally, A.I. is doing some real work.
Computer science researchers from the University of Rochester have developed an app for health departments that uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence to identify food poisoning-related tweets, connect them to restaurants using geotagging and identify likely hot spots.
A secondary benefit is that you’ll also know exactly where a Chipotle is without opening Yelp or Foursquare. In all seriousness, I’d love to see either of those services adopt this sort of metric.
From Serenity Caldwell, comes this beautifully drawn review of the Apple Pencil.
We have an iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil. In my opinion, the best thing about the iPad Pro is the Pencil. It’s a wonderful device for creating art. I love to doodle and fiddle with the Pencil. It’s also where my daughter prefers to practice spelling. Maybe it’s the novelty, but I’m all for any device that makes homework more fun.
Slate has an interesting, if somewhat overly dramatic, take on recent psychology studies about Ego Depletion:
But that story is about to change. A paper now in press, and due to publish next month in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, describes a massive effort to reproduce the main effect that underlies this work. Comprising more than 2,000 subjects tested at two-dozen different labs on several continents, the study found exactly nothing.
Kieran Healy created a really interesting analogy to the wealth gap in the US:
So, what if the space on the plane was allocated in proportion to the share of total income earned by each class? With a bit of help from the Census Bureau, Emmanuel Saez, and the Federal Aviation Authority, Air Gini is proud to bring you the future of air travel
