Matthew Lang

I have been a Safari user for a while now. Safari’s built-in sharing on OS X and iOS and the ability to store tabs in iCloud means I could easily move between my phone and my latop. Aside from this, there isn’t much else that would make me choose another web browser. As long as I have the right addons for my browser then I’m happy with Safari.

Mozilla recently announced a new way of testing new features in Firefox without having to run the bleeding edge version of Firefox. Their Test Pilot program allows you to run new features in your stable version of Firefox. Not one to shy from trying something new, I decided to start using Firefox again and turn on all the experiments in the Test Pilot program.

So far the biggest impact has been the Tab Center. This moves the tabs from the top of the browser to the left. It’s running for a few days now and I’m still getting used to the column of icons in my browser down the left hand side. Naturally my reaction is to always move my mouse to the top of the screen but with the icons on the left it’s usually a case of “Doh! There they are!”.

So rather than using the mouse I’ve started using the shortcut keys for switching tabs. I do find it alot easier to switch tabs using the “cmd + number” shortcut for my pinned tabs and anything further down I end up just using “ctrl + tab” to open the right tab.

Also with Firefox now available on iOS, I can now share my tabs and bookmarks on my iPhone using Firefox Sync. It’s early days for this as well, as I’ve been using Safari for about three years on my iPhone.

I’ll give it a month and see if I’m still happy with the setup in June.

A great series by NB.

Well done Scott Hanselman on reaching double-digits with his technology podcast, Hanselminutes.

The observant among you will have noticed another lull in my writing here. It's been a frustrating few months trying to get back to a steady rhythm of blogging. I truly miss the days from a couple of years ago when I was writing and publishing on a daily basis. Those were good times.

There are a number of reasons why this has happened and I won't bore you with the obvious ones like "I'm too busy" and "I'm too tired". Instead I thought I would take a look at the not so obvious reasons.

I don't have the thousands of avid readers that others have but there is a steadily increasing number of readers here. Page views and visitors have been going up over the last two three years. A good sign that I'm doing something right. And yet ever since I noticed the amount of traffic my blog has been receiving, I've noticed that the frequency with which I write to the blog has been decreasing.

Stage fright?

You might call it that. I've lost track of the amount of posts that I have started writing and then abandoned. It's frustrating to start writing something and then trash it and go over the process again and again. I find that half the battle is not in writing something but writing something fit to publish.

The second reason is the choice of topics. For a long time I was writing daily about apps, web development, freelancing, productivity and a few other things. Trying to find something to write about in these areas has been a struggle lately. I'm starting to wonder if I am restricting myself in the topics that I could be writing about. Do I need to start looking further afield? Maybe. Or maybe I need to look back on what I wrote in the past and refresh it? Lots of things change and the topics that I wrote about three years ago could have changed.

Who knows.

All I know is that the mere act of reflecting on the lack of writing has prompted me to write something for the blog. And that is a start in the right direction once more.

What I'm experimenting with now, though, is adding a little more structure to my pages. Not something overbearing (the whole point of morning pages is for it to be free, stream-of-consciousness writing), but more a footnote. Once my daily pages are dumped from my brain, I've started adding three lists: Focus, Fears and Excitement.

— Pulling Focus by Relative Sanity

My morning pages routine has also seen a little change in its format in the last few weeks. I pick a word, form a topic or question around it and then start writing. It's working well so far.

Daniel's decision to delete the majority of his social media accounts is a reminder that social media isn't a necessity in life. You can live without it you know!

Last year, returning from one of my Blurb missions, I landed at John Wayne Airport in Orange County California. We were fortunate and actually landed eight minutes early. The only issue was we didn’t have a gate. The pilot came on and said “The good news is that we are early, but we are going to have to wait eight minutes for a place to park.” The woman next to me, based on her clothing and briefcase, was who I would label as a midlevel executive, business traveler. During our delay she turned on her phone, punched in the code and checked her Facebook page twenty-four times in eight minutes. Again, I don’t use “addiction” lightly.

— Why I Deleted My Social Media Accounts by Daniel Milnor

A nice reminder from NB for the weekend.

via CycleEXIF, photos by Jim Holland

Required reading for anyone looking to harness social media as a tool to connect your product with customers.

Conversations spark the success of products and ideas, helping them garner new fans and break into different markets.

— The Social Media Skinny by Steven Pressfield

I have a particularly bad habit of opening apps, leaving them to run and then wondering why I have so many apps open. I only ever need these apps open for a minutes at a time.

This morning I installed Marco Arment's Quitter app to help alleviate the issue of apps being left open. On my Quitter list is Twitter, Mail and Slack.

We'll see how it goes.

with Nicholas Bate.

The feed is dying. The reverse-chronological social media feed — the way you’ve read Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs (which is to say, the internet) at various points over the last decade, updates organized according to the time they were posted, refreshed at the top of the screen — no longer really makes sense. The unfiltered informational cascade that defined the internet of the 2010s is going the way of the front-page-style web portal: It’s an outdated way of processing online information. The way we consume social media is being transformed and tinkered with as Silicon Valley tries to wring as much engagement, attention, and money out of it as possible. The feed is dying, and we feel shocked by its death — but we shouldn’t.

The Feed is Dying by Select All

RSS is the winner in all this. A chronological feed that you have complete control over.

It's sad to see so social media feeds switching to curated feeds that promote content we might be interested in.

I can't help but wonder though that if all these social media feeds were a paid for subscription service to begin with, would we even need customised social feeds?