minimalsites.com - Minimal Web Design Gallery and Minimalist Community

“True simplicity comes not from imitation, but from understanding. Certain situations will suggest a minimalist approach, but others won’t. Our digital worlds should feel like they sustain life—not just geometry.”

-

Jonathan Harris . World Building in a Crazy World . Simplicity

Evernote: Mac App Store Has Us Rethinking Everything | Cult of Mac:

Since the App Store launch, more than half of Evernote’s new users across all platforms are coming from the Mac. In fact, between Mac App Store launch and midnight on January 7th, Evernote saw 90,000 client downloads across both new and existing users.

It does not matter how “free” an app is if it is difficult to find or no one has even heard of it. Cost also does not matter if it is difficult to install. I’d be a rich man if I had a dollar for every person I encounter in my consulting business that downloaded a .DMG and did not know how to “install” the app from there. Or hit the download link on a web page and had no idea where the file actually went after that (changing the default from “Desktop” to “Downloads” did these folks no further favors). I would be willing to bet that 90% of those 90,000 that downloaded Evernote the first day the Mac App Store was open fit into one of those categories.

(via this)

“If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re gonna get selfish, ignorant leaders. So maybe it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here. Like… the public.”

- George Carlin, our era’s most perceptive political commentator, disguised as a comedian. (via marco)

Pastoe, the Dutch furniture manufacturer, recently published the book “Vision – Space for Imagination” to mark the 25th anniversary of the Vision range of cabinets.

Vision, created by Pierre Mazairac and Karel Boonzaaijer, is a cabinet composed of any number of boxes in various sizes. The cabinet is simple, without handles or grips, but contains a smart pressure-release mechanism borrowed from the car manufacturing industry.

We wanted something that would exist in a home like a wall that plays with space, volume and line.

At first some people thought the design was cold and ugly, but Mazairac and Boonzaaijer were confident about their product. It’s been twenty-five years and it’s still going strong, Boonzaaijer says.

Space for Imagination is written by Karel Boonzaaijer in association with Ilka Helmig and Johannes Bergerhausen. You order the book under ISBN number 978-90-5856-357-6.

Todolicious - Simple Todos for your Mac:

Todolicious looks like a nice, simple, todo manager with an appropriate amount of features. I really like some of the thoughts that are put across in the developers blog post about the app:

Why does use of a productivity tool decrease over time? One common feature of all these applications are tools to organize your tasks. These tools are generally always “optional” (even though they aren’t, which I’ll touch on next paragraph). There are usually multiple ways to organize (I call them task buckets), like multiple lists, tags, projects, and due dates. And of course there are well designed on-screen options for easily accessing and manipulating your To Dos and organizing them into buckets.

But, as I have said before, features always come with costs:

Now, even though you can ignore all of these extra features and simply add and complete your tasks, these features can never really be turned off. You’ll still see the task buckets in the organizer window and the options to add those pieces of data when you’re adding new tasks. As you ease more of these buckets into your mental organization model, you need to do more work filling in data every time you add a new task - the whole value of an organization system is in its consistency.

Now that we are a little bit into this sparkling new year, I thought I would take some time out to share some of the plans for the site over the next few months:

• Posting Schedule – January is normally a very busy month for my consultingbusiness but it is even more so this year because of the backlog of work I was not able to do in December due to my neck surgery. Add to that some other family health struggles and you have the perfect storm of complete lack of time and inability to keep up. Therefore, you may notice some lighter then normal posting around here for the next few weeks. Please stay tuned.

• T-Shirts – Everyone who ordered a Minimal Mac T-Shirt should have received theirs by now. If for some reason you have not, please let me know and I will do all I can to track it down. I plan to offer them again in the nearish future but with some adjustments. My plan is to offer a black shirt with white and grey logo in both a mens cut and a women’s cut. I had many requests for both and would like to make these available to those who held out ordering for lack of this. I hope to open up orders for these sometime in February.

• RSS Feed Sponsorships – I have not yet posted the next round of sponsorships but plan to do so soon. All reports I have received from those that participated have been very favorable with some reporting their best sales ever. I have been highly selective in the sponsors I have accepted as my greatest asset is the readers of this site and I would sooner shut the site down then squander the trust, time, and attention they have placed in my care. Therefore, the next round of sponsorships will be at a higher rate to reflect that value on both sides. I hope to post the next round of openings, beginning the first week of February, this week. That said, if you have a product to advertise and you would like to sponsor in the next round, feel free to get in touch now.

• Minimal Mac Podcast – I’m in the planning stages of a new Minimal Mac themed podcast produced in association with my friends from The Bro Show. The current plan is to offer mostly short episodes (10 minutes or less) on a variety of related topics. That said, I would love to get some reader suggestions for topics they would like to hear me speak more about. Feel free to let me know your ideas. Contact info is on the about page.