Today was my last day at Apple. I’ll really miss it. I quite enjoyed working at Apple. It’s a great company, they do take care of their employees, the people are awesome, and it’s a lot of fun. It’s fun to sell a product you believe in, something you really love. All that said, it wasn’t a hard decision to leave. I’m glad I have my time back to myself. I really look forward to being able to focus on other things.
What other things? Well, I still have my other job, and I do have some other design work I’m doing on the side. And I’ll be writing for Ars Technica and ComputorEdge on a fairly regular basis. Right now I’m working on a very lengthy product review article for Ars that I’m excited about and can’t wait to dig in for a few hours and get some words down. It’s going to be interesting doing writing as a sidejob. I like it. I wasn’t allowed to write before, due to conflict of interest issues, but now that I don’t work for Apple, I’m free to do whatever.
…Duck! It’s the book baton! Thanks to Dave Child for whacking me in the head with it.
About thirty on any given shelf. But we have lots of shelves. As far as grand total goes… Hard to say since I haven’t purchased Delicious Library yet, and haven’t put them all in one place. I’m going to just guess 450 or so. We’ve had to cut back occasionally over the years with moving around, and we make fair use of the local library.
Homebrewing, Vol. 1 by Al Korzonas
Har har. Anybody getting this baton is not likely to be reading a book. They’re reading a few.
Hm… when you’re reading five books, it’s hard to remember which ones you most recently …
Read more…
Introducing PHP Cheat Sheet version 1.0 for Mac OS X Dashboard.
This may sound like a repeat of the last one from three weeks ago, but seriously, it’s different. This one is PHP, not CSS. A big difference if you have any idea what that stuff means. If not, well, move on, move on, I posted another article earlier today.
This widget displays the all the goodies from the PHP Cheat Sheet from Added Bytes.
It’s free to use and licensed under the Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0)
Download it here (Zip Archive 89KB)
Please leave your comments, and let me know how it can be improved.
Have fun!
P.S. Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is required. Download the file, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. If you have Safari, and have it set to open “safe” files on download, just click the download link. Then show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to …
Read more…
At my office, through various circumstances, I ended up with a 12” PowerBook and a 15” PowerBook. I don’t need two computers. One would suit me just fine. So I’m planning on selling the two and scaling back to one.
The question is, which size of powerbook do I get?
I want to clarify, this is my office computer, not my home computer. These laptops are owned my my company as will the one I get to replace them. I will be free, as before, to take the PowerBook home, play around with it, and whatever. But for most of my home freelance work, I use my iMac.
I have had, at some point, all three sizes of PowerBook and enjoyed their unique features quite a bit. This is a great (true) story about how my 17” PowerBook was stolen while I was in Vancouver, and subsequently recovered with all sorts of weird stuff on it.
The 17” is a fantastic machine, though quite large. It’s size is also it’s greatest strength. You can be anywhere and really feel like you have a desktop computer in front of you. …
Read more…
A couple months ago, we decided to get angry. We said we’re sick of this consumer debt and we want out. So we did it, we put copious amounts of our extra cash into our car loan. About ten days ago, I went in to write the last check and paid it off about a year and a half early. What a joy it was to log into my chase account and see this:
So, we’re not done entirely yet. We still owe a bit of cash on the van, but we’re making some sweet progress. After that the only debt will be our house.
I’m not really saying this to gloat or anything. I’m actually trying to encourage anybody out there. Consumer debt is a major pain in the arse. But you can get out, you just gotta get angry. Arrr!
I’ve decided to leave my job at Apple. It’s been a lot of fun working there. I really enjoy the people and the work. It’s so fun to see people get excited about doing fun stuff with their computers. The vast majority of the customers with whom I talked hadn’t ever used a mac before (or at least in the past 10 years). It was very fun.
But, I am getting burned out. Working two jobs while trying to keep some semblance of freelance work, not to mention a life and family, just wasn’t happening. I miss having Saturdays to myself. So I talked with my manager and he was very understanding. He told me the door’s always open if I want to come back.
New things on my horizon are some strong freelance jobs coming up and some professional writing. Both should be lots of fun. I’ll mention more on those as they come to fruition.
And I’ll say it now so I can commit myself to it, I do plan on getting my portfolio online so as to have a dedicated area for my freelance work. No timeframe …
Read more…
Introducing CSS Cheat Sheet version 1.0 for Mac OS X Dashboard. This widget displays the much of the essential information from the CSS Cheat Sheet from Added Bytes.
It’s free to use and licensed under the Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike)
Download it here (Zip Archive 180KB)
Please leave your comments, and let me know how it can be improved.
Have fun!
P.S. Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is required. Download the file, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. If you have Safari, and have it set to open “safe” files on download, just click the download link. Then show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget icon in the Widget Bar to open it.
I’m working on a Dashboard Widget. It should be done sometime in the next few days. It’s been lots of fun, in a geeky sort of way. You may already know this, but Dashboard Widgets are not much more than little webpages that use the same engine that the web browser Safari uses to show the content.
So, I use the same tools that I would for designing a webpage—CSS, JavaScript and XHTML—to make my widget. One major added benefit, though, is that I dont have to make sure that my widget looks perfect on lousy web browsers, IE for Windows for instance. In this case, there is only one web browser, Dashboard. If you can write standards compliant code, you can make a widget.
So, keep your eyes peeled, the widget is soon forthcoming.
Be Good Not Bad is all about really good web design, based on the utmost respect for web standards, accessibility and respect for the user. Based in Denver, Colorado, Be Good Not Bad is run by Brian Warren, freelance designer, blogger, homebrewer and coffee nut.