stevenf.com

Steven Frank's website

January 18, 2012

Speaking of notes, there has always been a subset of my notes that I’ve wanted to share with the public — those little techie one-liners that take hours to figure out or find on the web. The ones where I’ve had to look up the same thing over and over so many times, I finally said to myself, “I should really write this down somewhere.”

I couldn’t find a tool that I liked that would let me store all my notes in one place, but also indicate, hey, some of these are public, and please turn them into searchable web pages that look like the rest of my site and put them here at this URL.

So I abandoned that idea and forked my notes into public and private sections. Then I hacked together a script to display the public ones here on the site.

It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing until a more elegant solution arrives.

You can find them here: stevenf notes

More to come, as always.



December 16, 2011

Ricky Romero has released the Chrome version of his excellent Shut Up extension formerly available only for Safari.

The Chrome and Safari extensions make it a snap to use my shutup.css stylesheet, which hides the soul-deadening comments on many popular websites.

Thanks, Ricky!



December 13, 2011

If you like pointless things and are easily amused, you might enjoy UNITINU, new from stevenf.

Available exclusively on the stevenf aneurysm store.



November 2, 2011

Here’s a rough spec of what I think would comprise my ultimate note keeping environment. I’m writing this down in the hopes that someone will implement it, as I don’t have sufficient spare time.

“Have you tried…?”

Yes, I’ve tried that app. It didn’t do at least one of the following things.

There are at least a half dozen apps that are frustratingly close to what I want, but they just don’t close the obvious (to me) loops.

Although I describe this as a single app, it must actually be implemented as both a desktop and iOS app with full feature parity to work for me, as I want my notes accessible in the highest quality editing environment I have available at any given time: a Mac, if I’m near my Mac, iPad or iPhone if I’m not.

The app has a pref for a root folder on Dropbox, which is where all notes are stored as plaintext files.

There may also be images in this folder, so some sort of inclusion/exclusion based on file extension is desirable.

The app shows all text files in this directory. I can click on one to open it. I can sort it alphabetically or by modification date.

A search field pares down the file list to files that match the keyword either in title or content.

When I open a note, I see its Markdown preview. A button/hotkey toggles between preview and edit.

I can edit the note in plaintext with some affordances for Markdown composition.

I can use double square bracket syntax to link to another note by name.

I can reference a locally stored image using the Markdown image syntax or some minor variation of it.

Don’t get design-y.

…

That’s pretty much it.

I know you want to tell me about some existing app right now, but trust me, I’ve tried it already, and it doesn’t do the above things.

There are apps that do one half and apps that do the other half and apps that do both but only run on one platform. That’s no good. I just need someone to bring it all together for me.

Any takers? I have money!



October 5, 2011

Apple was founded in 1976, a year after I was born.  We grew up together.  In fact, for a little while, we grew up across the street from each other.

Through a completely unrelated-to-Apple twist of events, my family emigrated from England to the US in the early 80’s, and we just so happened to land in an apartment complex off Stevens Creek Blvd, about a mile from Apple’s campus.

I attended Fremont Older elementary school in the Cupertino school district which, I’m sure not by coincidence, had a computer lab with several Apple ][ computers.

As a by-product of the video game boom of the 80’s, I became keenly interested in computers and programming.  At home, I typed BASIC listings out of magazines into our Apple ][+.  At school, I had a curriculum that included “Rocky’s Boots”, educational software which played like a video game, but in fact taught the basic principles of digital electronics.

This is what I mean when I say I grew up with Apple.  It’s not that we just existed at the same time.  Our paths were, except for a very few of my earliest years, inextricably intertwined.

Programming went from being a childhood interest to a college path to some of my first paid work to the company that Cabel and I started.  It’s all because of Apple, and Apple is because of Steve Jobs.

I’m not trying to be dramatic here. My life would be unrecognizable without Steve Jobs.  So that’s why it’s hard for me to even comprehend that now we really are without him. I’ve never known a world without Steve Jobs in it. 

He challenged us all — not just Apple, the whole industry — to make the world better. Not just make a better computer, or a better application, but leverage those tools to really make an impact, to make a difference in people’s lives. 

A few weeks ago, our baby daughter started walking around the house for the first time, with the aid of a little red walker wagon. I shot a few minutes of HD video on my iPhone of her joyous face as she pushed it around the living room.  

Shortly, I’d edited the video in iMovie down into a little one-minute montage, with theatrical-quality transitions, backed by “Here Comes My Baby”, then exported it directly to YouTube, and had people around the world (including family back in England) watching it within minutes. It took maybe half an hour at most. Did I ever imagine I’d have an HD non-linear video editing station with instantaneous worldwide distribution in my home?  Never. 

But Steve did. 

I joked to my wife, “what we just did with that video was straight out of an Apple commercial.”  That’s the funny thing about Apple commercials, though. They’re not sci-fi pipe dreams selling you a promise of a future that might be. They really built that stuff, and you can do it right now.  Steve understood that a computer by itself wasn’t much more exciting than a hammer. Wouldn’t it be great, to borrow his phrase, if that hammer could help you build something world-class without you needing decades of carpentry experience?

I don’t know how you thank the person who brings that kind of sea change to your life, to the whole world.  I’m not sure I can find the words or assemble them in the right order.

Instead I’ll do what I can to keep aspiring to Steve’s level of passion for making the greatest possible stuff we can make for the benefit of others. He may be gone, but that’s with us forever. 

— Sent from my iPad



July 21, 2011

I’m happy to announce my first (short) book “How to Count”, is now available on Kindle. Coming soon to unprotected PDF, print-on-demand (and iBooks/ePub if I can figure out how).

“How to Count” is the first volume of what I hope will become a series called “Programming for Mere Mortals”, designed to teach you programming concepts from the inside-out.

It covers such computer-y topics as:

It’s about 70 pages long, and costs US$2.99.



July 8, 2011

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve rebooted this blog. Since 2002, I’ve run it on Movable Type, Tumblr, and all manner of handmade software. Nothing ever feels “just right”. I’m not even sure I know how blogging software is supposed to “feel”.

Tumblr drives me crazy lately. It used to be a wonderful thing. Now it’s slow and just throws up errors half the time I try to do anything. I experimented with going back to Laguna (my homemade engine), but right now I really need to focus my energies on bigger things. I don’t like the way Tumblr makes me feel I’ve surrendered control of my blog, but at least maintaining it isn’t my problem.

Then there’s the issue of my tendency to delete everything periodically. Sometimes I go back and read what I’ve written and I hate it. I can’t stand reading it, the tone of it, the topics, anything about it. So I back it all up, nuke the blog and start over.

I used to worry about this behavior sapping away at my reader base, but then I realized: there really isn’t a truer reflection of myself. A restless, flighty, bee-in-the-bonnet site mirrors my real-life personality with an embarrassing accuracy.

If you have the patience to still follow my blog after all these years and despite all the bumps, you probably understand, and thank you for that. I do my best to keep you all redirected the right place if you’re subscribed, and stevenf.com is always canonical.

One thing I’d like to do is restore some of my historical posts, so it actually looks like I’ve been blogging for 9 years and didn’t just put up a site this afternoon. My long-term goal is to make my writing less frequent and off-the-cuff, and more thoughtful and methodical. If I do that, hopefully the urge to purge everything will happen less often, or not at all.

So, now then. Where were we?