Paul Mayne blogs here since 2003.

If you know me, you know that my recent project called Day One, a journal application for the Mac App Store, has been consuming my time and energy lately. My blog has been abandoned for a couple months, but I’d like to keep it somewhat current for as long as I can, so here I am putting down a few thoughts on my new app.

Day One is an idea I’ve had for a long time now in some form or another. At one point several years ago I started to design and develop a simple journal application using Flash and AIR. It never really went far as I was consumed by a full-time job. Also, before the advent of Apple’s app stores, the barrier to entry for marketing and selling an application were pretty steep, and even then you may or may not get much visibility.

When Steve Jobs announced the Mac App Store my wheels didn’t stop spinning until I had committed myself to an idea that I would see to fruition. I quickly landed on “Simple Journal” an easy way to write and log small entries about your life with a reminder system. Over the next couple months I put in as much time as I could afford in wire-framing and designing the initial look and feel.

The entire process took longer than expected, I didn’t even come close to making the debut of the Mac App Store, but in the end it all came together perfectly. Initially the plan was to launch the iPhone app months after the Mac app, but it turned out, the iPhone app launched one week before the Mac App.

About a week after submitting the app to Apple, Day One was approved and live on the store it was featured as the #1 app under New and Noteworthy (which is possibly the best possible spot on the entire app store)! Nuts.

It’s been almost three weeks since the launch and in addition to the first feature, the app made it up to #10 in the overall Top Paid Apps, Featured in the “What’s Hot”, and is currently featured as the top Showcase app on the front page and was also give a custom app page treatment. In-freakin-sane.

All the sales and features are great, but the most gratifying part is the feedback I’ve been receiving from the users. They really get it, love it and are using it to write about and remember their lives as they never had before now. It’s awesome.

Now I’m looking forward to improving and adding to this great foundation of an awesome app. And create a killer iPad app!

— March 29th, 2011

Thanks to Pummelvision, a great little service created by Jake Lodwick, I am able to see every photo I’ve posted to Flickr over the past 6 years in only 4 minutes. Really cool idea and great music that flows perfectly.

Jump over to Vimeo to see it in HD.

Speaking of Flickr, there’s a reason they don’t innovate and create stuff like this themselves. It’s because they are owned by Yahoo. Even still, they are the best photo sharing site out there and I’ve invested a lot in adding my own photos to the site. It’s only a matter of time until a Flickr killer arrives and allows you to transfer all your photos to it’s service. Who want’s to build it with me? Until then, I just renewed my Pro membership for another year.

p.s. The frame above is not of me being charged with possession of a controlled substance. It’s after I sprained my ankle walking from the beach in Haiti. I’ve never had so many people care about my personal well being. These guys were ready to operate while my family stood around laughing at me. It’ hurt!

— December 27th, 2010

I’ve been an avid user and fan of Delicious since February of 2005. Delicious is a free social bookmarking service, used to save URL’s to webpages with title, description and tags for easy recall and identification. I’ve saved multiple bookmarks to Delicious daily and I’m currently at 4176 bookmarks.

I don’t bookmark every article I read, but the ones I find interesting or think I may want to reference later. For me, recall is the beauty of the service, a simple search or click of a tag and it’s easy to find what you are looking for, typically more relevant than a Google search. The other nice feature is the social aspect of sharing and viewing friends bookmarks.

I was surprised and unsure when Del.icio.us was purchased by Yahoo a few years back. I was hopeful it would improve and advance the service, which it did in some ways, but very slowly. It’s still a solid service, but it could be so much more if the group were not tied down by the bureaucracy that’s typical of joining a large corporation.

Last week Yahoo had a round of layoffs including the entire Delicious team. They have since announced they are not shutting down the service, but looking for a place to manage it outside of Yahoo. Regardless of what they are looking to do with the service I was open to other options.

Hearing great reviews and recommendations for Pinboard, a service similar to Delicious, I decided to give it a try. Pinboard is similar yet quite different. Most noticeably, it’s run by a very small team and it’s not free. There’s an initial one-time fee to join, which increases for each new user that signs up for the service. They also offer an additional service that archives the pages you bookmark, so you can reference them even if the page disappears. I’m not interested in that feature, but it’s nice for some users.

I signed up for Pinboard for $6.91 and imported all my Delicious bookmarks. Super simple and includes all tags, dates, even private bookmarks just as they were on Delicious. They actually use the exact same APIs.

So far it’s been hammered with all the new users, but I like the concept and a few of the different features. Design-wise, it’s a little less refined than Delicious, but that hasn’t bothered me. The one thing I miss is the nice Chrome extension provided by Delicious. There’s a Pinboard extension, but it’s pretty basic. The other is the social aspect, currently it’s difficult to discover your friends on the service and there’s no way to even see which users are following your feed, you can only see the count.

Time will tell if it will be a long term home for my cloud-based bookmarks, but for now I’m happy with it.

My Pinboard feed: http://pinboard.in/u:paulm

— December 19th, 2010

I’ve launched my first iPad application, a game I designed for my kids who love to play memory card games. My sons (not including baby Dylan) are 4 and 6 years old. It was a lot of fun using them for ideas on the graphics, features and sounds. Seeing their eyes light up was priceless when I showed then the initial designs and especially when we had a working game on the iPad.

The game was designed to play with 1-4 players and is a perfect family activity. Even young kids understand the concept right away. The game is live and available for download on the iTunes Store for $.99. If you like it, a star rating and review would be much appreciated.

Designing for the iPad is a lot of fun. I can imagine it will be fun to design for the iPhone 4 high-res screen as well, something I plan to do soon.

Application page | iTunes Store Page

— July 2nd, 2010

I’ve been using at iMac 27-inch as an external display for my new Macbook Pro for over a month. I’m here to report that as beautiful as the high-resolution LED screen is, this machine is not made to use as an external display.

Why?

More pixels, that’s why. If you’re a designer and you’ve had the luxury of working on a 30″ display, it’s very hard to go back to anything smaller (in terms of pixels). Despite not being updated in six years, Apple’s 30-inch Cinema Display (2560 pixels wide) is the only (Apple) display option if you want more that 1920 pixels wide. And they are still charging $1800 for that beast. For $1700, you can purchase the base model 27-inch iMac, which has an amazingly brilliant LED backlit display with the same pixel width as the 30-inch display, 2560, just at a higher pixel density (108 dpi on the iMac 27-inch vs 100 dpi on the 30-inch Cinema). The 30-inch Cinema has more pixels in height, 1600, while the iMac 27-inch has 1440.

Even with less total pixels, I prefer the iMac screen to the old Cinema LCD screens. They are so much brighter and vibrant.

Apple has been very slow to update the LED Cinema Display line to any size other than the 24-inch. MacRumors reports on why. Sounds like we’re due for the 27-incher next month.

What’s the Deal?

Here’s a list of the issues you will find when using an iMac as an external display for a Macbook:

• The iMac must be awake and fully booted into OSX in order to function as an external display. This mean lots of wasted power and fan noise.
• When waking the Macbook, if you don’t first wake the iMac, the only way for the Macbook to recognize the display is to unplug and re-plug in the mini display cord.
• The above issues make having a dedicated mouse and keyboard for the iMac a requirement. Thus, I have 2 mice and 2 keyboards on my desk. This sucks.
• Can’t make use of the built-in iSight camera, mic or speakers on the iMac (like you can with the 24-inch LED Cinema Display).
• Can’t control the brightness on the iMac display, either from display controls or from the keyboard. Must switch the display back to the iMac’s OS and adjust there. Command+F2 on the iMac’s keyboard.
• Can’t make use of the USB ports. This mean more cord management with using your Macbook on the desk.

Overall, you don’t get any of the plug-and-play features that make using an LED Cinema Display so nice. But you do get that amazing screen.

— May 21st, 2010