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One of the most-requested features for Todo.txt Touch for Android is a homescreen widget that displays top priority tasks. Android widgets are subject to a set of even stricter visual and functional constraints than full-screen apps, so getting this feature right has been a challenge. Your smartphone's homescreen is meaningful, precious real estate, and this [...]

Link: Why I am an atheistThe details differ, but the story arc of how Mark Jaquith became an atheist mirrors my own. Raised in a traditional Roman Catholic household, on the best days my religion bored me, on the worst, it made me feel like a terrible sinner. Every day, its contradictions and lack of [...]

I've switched to an iPhone as my primary mobile device because I'm dogfooding my new iOS app. Coming off of three straight years of Android, one of the toughest parts of the transition was losing the applications drawer. My new iPhone had so many screens of icons, all perfectly aligned in a grid, every one [...]

Google going evil has become the Godwin’s Law of tech commentary: "As an online discussion tech commentary about Google grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler calling it evil approaches 1." Let's move beyond the sensationalist "evil" headlines and get clear on what's actually been going on recently. The privacy policy [...]

Last January I took apart my computer desk and rebuilt it at standing height. I've been standing at my desk every workday since. Just in my 2011 travels, I've seen standing desks everywhere from the offices of San Francisco startups to the White House. Over the past 12 months, standing desks went from popular life [...]

Anil sums up the history and future of web protest as we wrap up the week we stopped SOPA. I had chills on Wednesday, the day the web went black in protest of SOPA, because we were all witnessing—and more importantly, participating in—history in the making. I'm so very glad to be alive during these [...]

"Bloggers are famous enough to have stalkers, but not famous enough to have bodyguards." —Danny O'Brien Everyone thinks they want a million Twitter followers and a million pageviews a day on their blog and the incredible high that it must be to walk around in the world knowing you're "internet famous." Yes, being famous among [...]

If you're sending Gmail messages from anywhere other than Gmail itself, they may look like they're phishing attempts. Up until today, whenever I sent messages using my Google Apps account with the From: address set to my vanilla Gmail address, my Gmail-using recipients got an alarming, bright red message at the top which said "This [...]

There's a vast difference between software you can use for free and apps you pay to use: different customers, different business model, different commitment for developer and user. When you price your mobile app, for example, it doesn't really matter whether you make it cost $1 or $2. The majority of people who want your [...]

After a year of starts and stops and some flailing and nail-biting, we finally shipped. The Todo.txt mobile app is now available for iOS. Get it for your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad in the iTunes Store now. Just like the Android app, Todo.txt for iOS is open source and built by a community of [...]

Codecademy's Code Year is a weekly lesson for people who want to learn how to program. Over at Slate, Farhad Manjoo explains a few good reasons why you might want to do that at all, with a quick quote from me. When Manjoo emailed, he asked, "What are some good reasons for people to be [...]

Link: The maker makes: on design, community, and personal empowermentJeffrey Zeldman: The first thing I got about the web was its ability to empower the maker. I say “it made me” but I made it, too. You get the power by using it. Nobody confers it on you.

I missed last Wednesday's 2011 Year in Review episode of This Week in Google because I was on an airplane somewhere over New Mexico. That doesn't mean I don't have a list of things I'd like to see Google do in 2012. In no particular order: Release a killer tablet. Price this tablet head-turningly less [...]

As a teenager, my biggest fear about becoming a grown-up was less that I wouldn't get a job and more that I'd get a boring job. With the notable exception of my mother, most of the adults in my life modeled my worst-case scenario. They got up before dawn, put on a suit, and trudged [...]

The software I've been building for the past two years, ThinkUp, left beta today. Download ThinkUp 1.0 to install on your web server, or launch ThinkUp on Amazon EC2 in under 60 seconds. Here's a rundown of what ThinkUp is, what it does, and why it's important. Every day, internet companies like Twitter, Facebook, and [...]

Link: Clay Johnson’s Information DietMy information diet consists of a cap of 6 hours a day of total, proactive information consumption. That means everything that requires my explicit attention that doesn't involve another person—television, movies, the Internet, email, social networks—if it involves a URL, a mouse, or a remote control, that goes into that 6 [...]

Link: The Jobsian fallacyScott Berkun: I’m sad Steve Jobs is gone. I’m sadder still to see the vultures of shallow thinking circling his name. There is a fallacy around great men, a notion we can learn best from their behavior on how we ourselves can achieve. But that’s only true if we study them with an [...]