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The Podcasts I Listen To

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I'm a avid podcast listener. Whether in my car, walking to work or in the shower (bluetooth shower radio ftw) I've got a podcast playing in Instacast. 

My podcasting habit started in 2005. That was the year that two of my favorite podcasts debut: This Week in Tech and Diggnation. Although Diggnation has since been retired I still enjoy TWiT to this day.

Below are the current podcasts that are in my core rotation (that's an official podcast listener term :). There are many others that I sporadically listen to based on the guest or topic of the episode.  There are also others that I loved but didn't include as they have been retired (such as Diggnation, Hypercritical and Build and Analyze to name a few).

Apple's Product Philosophy

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I just had a chance to watch Tim Cook's D11 interview which took place the other day. In it Cook had a wonderful quote which truly captures Apple's product philosophy:

We think the customer pays us to make certain choices on their behalf. (1:01:56)

I thought it was a great way to succinctly describe Apple's approach to building products.

One of the most useful features in iOS is also the most frustrating

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I'm a big fan of TextExpander on the Mac. It's always one of the first apps I install on a new Mac. It provides a simple way to set keyboard shortcuts to expand into other text text strings. I use it for a variety of things including email signatures, short link creation and Lorem Ipsum among many others.

Unfortunately on iOS TextExpander's app isn't able to integrate as deeply and provide system wide keyboard shortcuts. However, Apple does provide a often unused feature to set keyboard shortcuts. If you visit Settings > General > Keyboard then see the shortcuts section.

Naturally, my first shortcut was my email address. Being a product person I download and signup for every app that's released. However, I was quick to learn that shortcuts automatically adds a space to the shortcut when it's expanded. This is probably great for the normal use case but extremely frustrating for email - especially when a blank space is seen as a character in signup or login forms.

Hopefully Apple addresses this issue in iOS 7 or better yet allows apps like TextExpander to deeply integrate with the iOS.

iOS Shortcut Feature

iOS Shortcut Feature

Gregg and Evan Spiridellis Discuss StoryBots

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Since joining JibJab about a year and a half ago a lot of my focus has been on building products for our new children brand called StoryBots. As Gregg mentioned in the interview, the mission of StoryBots is to re-imagine education and entertainment for kids in the age of mobile apps and personalization technology.

Check out the interview below:

The Story Behind Marimba, the iPhone's Default Ringtone

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Quora never ceases to amaze me. I asked a while back on the backstory of the iPhone's default ringtone Marimba. I'm fascinated by how ingrained that sound now is in pop culture and society and was curious who, how and why that ringtone was chosen.

Visit Quora for the awesome answer of how Apple and Steve Jobs came to choose Marimba.

Buffer, The Fastest Way to Post to Your Social Networks

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I've been user of Buffer for about a year now (June 2012). They were in the news yesterday so I figured I'd chime in on how much I love their service. It's an amazing app that I use on a daily basis. It provides a quick and easy way to do two things: cross-post to multiple social networks and queue social shares to be posted at a later date.

I don't often use it to queue posts but I find it the best way by far to cross-post to Twitter, Facebook, ADN or whatever network I'm sharing to. It has a great browser extension, integrates into many of apps I use such as Reeder and Pocket and also has a mobile app. It also automatically shortens all URLs using my custom brac.co Bitly Pro account which is pretty cool.