Weeknotes 21:19

November 7, 2021

Week of October 31 - November 6

New (Faster) Computer

As I mentioned in my last post, my work computer died a couple of weeks ago. My company is going to replace it with one of the new 16″ MacBook Pros that were just announced a couple of weeks ago. The downside was that I will not get that new machine till the end of November or early December.

The plan was that I was going to try to use an older computer I owned to work on in the interim. But after a couple of days, it became apparent the older computer was not going to work out because I kept pushing the limits of its processing power. I talked to my leadership about borrowing another machine. They ended up buying a newer machine that I will use this month and then send it back so that another teammate can use it in the future.

I am so glad that I asked and so glad that they sent a new computer. I got the new machine last weekend and set it up on Sunday. It was so much nicer to work on this new machine this past week. The primary project I am working on right now is a one-page photo library so having a better machine has been better to work with. I am spending a lot of time in Photoshop and I was spending about twice the amount of time working on it on the old machine because it was slow to run things.

Little Snapper Replacement

For many years, I have been looking for a replacement for LittleSnapper. LittleSnapper was an app by Realmac Software that you could collect and catalog screenshots of websites. You could also save the code of those sites (Safari Web Archives). You tag the screenshots, make notes, and annotate. It was a great solution to visually collect and find screenshots of sites that inspired me. It was also a great way for me to capture screenshots of projects that I worked on.

Ember replaced Little Snapper around 2013. It also included the functionality to do screen captures which was a great way to capture animations or interactions. But development on Ember ceased and I was not able to find another solution. From time to time, I would search to see if I could find a replacement but had yet to find anything until a couple of weeks ago. That is when I discovered Eagle.

Eagle is exactly the app that I have been missing for the past six years. I downloaded it earlier in the week and bought a license after getting to play around with it a bit. I am very impressed with it so far and it seems like the creator has a solid plan for future development.

My idea to create a photo grid of screenshots of sites I have worked on over the years sparked my recent interest in finding an app like Eagle. I created a backup of my Ember library and that is where many of the screenshots of past projects are located. Eagle is going to make it easier for me to find these screenshots as I start to put those together in the next few weeks.

I bought the original license for LittleSnapper on October 8, 2009, and I switched over to Ember in September of 2015 and used it till 2016 or 2017.

Articles I Read This Week

• Respecting Users’ Motion Preferences – Great article from Michelle Barker with a lot of helpful tips I will be using in my projects going forward.
• How to Play and Pause CSS Animations with CSS Custom Properties
• Going From Solid to Knockout Text on Scroll
• Chapter 10: Browser Wars – Jay Hoffman’s continuing series on Web history
• Disability: Let’s Say the Word
• A Deep Dive Into object-fit And background-size In CSS
• Pure CSS Custom Styled Radio Buttons
• The 37-Year-Olds Are Afraid of the 23-Year-Olds Who Work for Them (NY Times) – Interesting perspective on workplace dynamics
• UX design has a dirty secret
• A Year of Sorrow, a Year of Gratitude, a Year of Grace – Reflections from Tim Challies on the anniversary of his son’s death.
• A Christian Case for Bitcoin and Blockchain
• Beware of Stoical Dangers – Some great perspective about not just getting through things in life

Books Read This Week

• Insites, The Book – I finished this book last weekend.
• Winsome Conviction – I picked this one back up after putting it down for a couple of weeks.
• Providence – I read a couple of chapters in this one on Saturday. I would like to finish it before the end of the year.
• An Introduction to John Owen

Watched This Week

• World Series – I enjoyed watching the Braves win the World Series this year. My son and I had tickets to see a game in Atlanta in July but it ended up getting rained out and we could not attend the makeup game.
• The Great British Baking Show (Netflix)
• Inspector Lewis (Prime Masterpiece Subscription)
• Doogie Kamealoha, M.D. (Disney+)
• Baking Impossible (Netflix) – My wife recently discovered this show and I watched an episode with her this week. Looking forward to watching more of it.

Played This Week

• MLB The Show 21 – This game finally went on sale for half-price so I bought it last weekend. I started playing a franchise season with the Atlanta Braves this week. I had played through a season with the Braves back in 2018. I decided to play with the current roster. It has been fun to play with many of the players that I played with 3 years ago.