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Twitter has become one of my essential daily tools. I have set it up as a service that I get all my news from, connect with certain people and follow a lot of people that I admire and respect. A few months ago, they released some updates to DMs but there were a few things that I would love to see. It was a good start, but this is such an underused feature.

More video support – Hangouts is my main messaging system, but there is a terrible support to share videos. Twitter has support for videos you shoot in the app, but it does not work in the messaging feed. But, I want like to be able to upload something from my camera roll and send over. The only messaging app that has a wealth of options to send media is Facebook. I have always resisted it, but they are making it harder.

A separate app – When this trend started I hated it. But, since Twitter is so public. I think it would help with people becoming more comfortable with usage. It would be amazing to see all of the messages floods into the feed if it were a fully featured part of the service.

Twitter Cards in conversations – Streaming songs inside the chat app. I’d love to be able to have actionable items in chat. I’d like to see a little popup window for YouTube videos while in mid chat. Have you ever tried to recommend a friend to install an app in Google Play. How amazing would it be to see that link converted into an install button with a short description?

I hate email – We all hate it, and we all want it to go away. Maybe this is an area where Twitter can make some inroads. Facebook is updating messenger to work with business during the checkout flow. I still do a tremendous amount of talking via email. Being able to subscript to individual updates to get pushed to your phone.

Impromptu conversations – There is a lot of times when I shared links in twitter and sent an email or add a new text or hangouts. It would be nice to have this instant sharing and conversations develop over a topic. If someone is talking about something in their public feed easily being able to bring that conversation into a private or small group setting could be interesting to see unfold.

I was just too exhausted to do anything today. I have been using surge.sh all week for projects and it has been every bit amazing as I thought it would be. So, I just decided to go hunting for other interesting things out there.

Android Studio for Designers – It is rare to find a class for designing for Android, and it is also FREE. It is nice to see more Android focus work starting to pop up.

Intro To Sketch – A simple Sketch 101 to get you started with thew software.

Opinion 2 – Record and Publish a Podcast from any iOS device. I have been recording Evernote’s voice notes this week in an attempt for maybe starting up a podcast.

Here is just a round up of the best things I have found over the last few days.

Responsive Grid System - 2kb that looks simple and promising.

Gulp Unused CSS - Check to see what is going on with your CSS

CSS – Will Change - Walkthrough of the property it explains what it is, when and how to use it.

CSS Performance – Rendering Blocking?

Atomic.io - I was just invited to the Beta tonight. Interface design software with built-in prototyping and collaboration tools.

Learn Angular JS - Codeacademy launched Angular tutorials.

Moving a Wordpress Install

Switching to Sketch

Google announced that they had opened up Android apps on Chrome OS to all developers. App Runtime for Chrome runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. This means that the floodgates will open to having your Android apps on multiple devices.

I think that this could be a massive help for Chrome OS. The big problem everyone has with Chrome OS is that functionality is lacking. Being able to run any Android app can fill those holes. The apps already exist to fill those holes.

You can get an image editing app that is probably going to me more fully featured than some existing web apps.

What I would I love to see is some focus on some development tools for ChromeOS. If I could write code and remote into my desktop and run some of my Android apps, this could be something I would want to try to my workflow.

The things I use every day are Todoist, Evernote, Sublime Text, Slack, Git and various Markdown editors.

It is going to be interesting to see these new apps flood the Chrome Store and how they perform.

I have been waiting for a product like Surge. When, I first saw Surge I actually ignored it. The website explained what it was. “Surge makes it easy for developers to deploy projects to a production-quality CDN through Grunt, Gulp, npm.” This was all free it felt too good to be true.

I needed a working URL for a small project I was hacking on and I figured I would give it a chance and see how this would fair. This was the perfect project to demo this. The install process was as simple as running “npm install -g surge” to install. Then you run surge to set up an account and that is all the setup that is needed.

My project was pushed to their CDN and I have a .surge.sh domain within 30 seconds. There is documentation about adding custom domains.

Tomorrow I want to look at the grunt, gulp and github plugins and see what we can do with those.

Yesterday, I talked about the holy grail that was finding Surge.sh. Today, I decided that I wanted to take a simple landing page and push it to a custom domain. The process was so painless. I changed a few settings at the registrar level and everything was ready to go. You can check out the finished product here.

I played around with some page speed tests and rendering of the page. I saw nothing but really impressive performance. This page was only 1 image a few hundred lines, but you still need to test for performance.

There is Github integration with web hooks. This is something that I have no idea how to set up. If I can figure this out I will post a full write up because this tool is just incredible.

Plugins

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Plugin Manager - simple plugin manager

Content Generator for Sketch - quickly create placeholder content

Duplicator - duplicate selected layers in a specified direction

Sketch Mobile Assets - Generate iOS and Android assets for slices on your current page

Sketch Notebook

Generate GIF

UI Kits

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Teracy Wireframe UI Kit - Wireframe UI Kit

Dark UI Kit

TETHR UI Kit - iOS UI Kit From Invision

Classes

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Sketch Design - 4 hour Sketch Master Class

Bitfountain Design Immersive - Craft 10+ apps and logos with Sketch

Tutorials

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Sketch for Beginners

11 tips for prototyping with Sketch

Hidden Features In Sketch

This past week Jay-z official launched his Tidal music service. There was a bit of noise around it when it launched as some major artists turned their tweet accounts blue in support. There was a live stream of this awkward launch party with all of these powerful people.

Watching Jack White and Kanye West talking about the artist taking control of everything doesn’t get me excited.

The whole thing felt weird, and they never showed off the product. There just a lot of talking about the artists taking things back and hearing things the artist way.

The high-quality stream was a bit of an intrigue for me. If you are using the right pair of headphones, you can tell the difference in quality. There are those moments when you are streaming when the quality can start to questionable but still only under the right circumstances.

I have been using Spotify for just under three years what is the value add for me to switch services. I get to help Kayne, pay more money and maybe if I have a strong enough stream get to hear quality music.

The problem with music that is different than the video is that I pay for multiple services. Hulu/Netflix/Amazon Prime all serve a different enough purpose to warrant the price tag. For music, you want a more one service to it all.

I don’t want to use Tidal on my Sonos to get a better stream and then switch to my car to listen to the Spotify playlist a friend sent me.

Also, I did want to sign up for a free trial but I had to enter my credit card. One, I am tired of doing that. Let us have a sample, and I will pay you if I find your service to be useful to me. I don’t want to set a calendar reminder to delete my account if I had it.

Then today another new service launched Rithm They are very focused on the social aspect of music. Which, is something that Spotify does extremely well. Everyone I know uses it, which, makes everything very simple. But, Rithm is only 3.99 a month.

Rithm is an interesting product because of what it was focusing on. I love getting recommendations from friends of even just swapping songs during a work day.

I was able to play with the service for a bit today. It is very chat heavy as they want it to be a place where you build these playlists from swapping songs with your friends.

There are some chats or playlists that you follow, and you can get this Pandora-like radio station. It was fun, and I can see it become useful if you have a good group of friends in it.

I also don’t understand why they charge 99 cents for verified profiles. Seems like an odd thing to charge for unless it is for artists.

The thing with Tidal is if it does manage to get artists to pull material from other streaming sites. If Spotify starts to lose bigger and bigger artist, there could be some issues popping up. It would be surprising to see people jumping ship for it as is. The other next thing to watch out for is if Apple tries to do something with the Beats music app this year. Otherwise, I see no reason to change yet really.

It is time again. My iMac/MacBook Pro combo has now hit the 5-year mark. That is usually when I like to upgrade my machines.

I started looking at the MacBook Airs because I liked the idea of a smaller 11.6 inch screen, but there was something that felt a little dated about that machine. Then I started looking at a Retina MacBook Pro and the screen was something that got me excited.

Then the new Chromebook Pixel was announced and I almost thought about because I just wanted something different, but the limitations of that machine would drive me nuts after a few months I am sure.

None of these machines get me really excited to the point of just throwing down the credit card and figuring out how to pay for it next.

The new “Retina MacBooks” will be great when version two hits and they added another USB C port onto the other side like these new Chromebooks.

But, for now I just don’t feel excited at all about a new machine like I do when I get a new phone still.

One of my favorite types of posts is when people post the things that they use on a regular basis. I am always tweaking my workflow and trying new things out to see if they can help me get more work done. I made a list of some of the apps and service that I use at least once a week.

Outside of a few, there is not many apps that are safe. This is my filler post as I did not think of another 30 day challenge for this month. There might be a big annoucement this week.

Evernote

Draftin

Todoist

Trello

Instapaper

iA Writer

Feedly

If This Than That

Sunrise

Hostgator

Dplyo.io

Github