I was getting an Error 3002 when trying to update my iPhone 4 to use the new iOS 5 Beta. Although it doesn’t seem to say it anywhere, you need to use a Restore option to install it. (Instead of an update.)

Just be sure to do a backup first. You’ll be prompted to restore from an iTunes backup right on the device after the restore process is complete. Then you’ll be good to go with all of your existing data.

Happy Testing!

Leadership means embracing the failure of your people if it leads to growth.

There are so many great tidbits in this video that it’s hard to pick just one quote. A must-watch.

Apple just released the iPhone 4.0.1 update that changes the way signal strength is displayed. The new graph looks pretty weird to me since it’s no longer linear. I made some quick graphics of the changes:

Old display (Pre 4.0.1)	iOS 4.0.1

To make the change easier to visualize, I did some combo graphics. The first is an overlay where the red represents the new bars and the second is an animation showing old and new states:

Overlay	Animation

Apparently the bars themselves now also represent a more accurate depiction of signal strength. AnandTech has a detailed write up of the changes. I’ve noticed that where I have normally gotten the full five bars at my office, I am now hovering around four, with the occasional 5.

CSS3 PIE: CSS3 decorations for IE:

PIE makes Internet Explorer 6-8 capable of rendering several of the most useful CSS3 decoration features. […] PIE stands for Progressive Internet Explorer. It is an IE attached behavior which, when applied to an element, allows IE to recognize and display a number of CSS3 properties.

Looks great. One of the most challenging aspects of web development has always been designing for the lowest common denominator of browser features. Tools like this help raise the bar for IE in a (mostly) hassle-free, consistent way.

PIE currently has full or partial support for the following CSS3 features:

• border-radius
• box-shadow
• border-image
• multiple background images
• linear-gradient as background image

I’ve been looking for a good, simple, system-wide color picker. The built-in Mac OS X one is great, but it needs to be launched from within an existing application. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to use it as a standalone app? That’s exactly what Spot Color does:

Spot Color is a simple application that allows you to use the standard Mac OS X color picker as a stand-alone app. This allows you to quickly grab colors without having to be in an image editing app like Photoshop. Since it uses the built-in color picker, you can utilize the system wide color picker plugins and swatches.

It’s just a simple application wrapper that launches the system-wide color picker. The same exact thing can be done with Apple Script but it was way to sluggish to launch and I found I just wouldn’t use it. Besides, Spot Color has a cute icon. And it’s fast and light-weight. (I tried a similar app by Matt Patenaude called simply “Colors”. But it felt a little chintzy.)

The reason this is so useful is that the built-in color picker on Mac OS X is extensible and there are some really great plugins available. These are the ones I use:

• Developer Color Picker: Provides color definitions in a variety of developer-friendly formats including NSColor, UIColor, CGColor, Hex and RGB. Written by Wade Cosgrove of Panic, inc.
• Hex Color Picker: Displays the hex code for any color in a slightly different way than the above plugin. Very useful for web development. If you just need hex values, you can probably get away with just this plugin.
• Mondrianum 2: Loads themes from the Adobe Kuler community.

The source code for Spot Color is on github too, which is always nice.

I also sometimes combine this with Digital Color Meter (found in the Applications/Utilities/ folder on your Mac) since its zoom view makes it a little easier to pick colors from the screen.

Mark Pilgrim just released this nifty little flash block detector:

This is a pure-JavaScript library that detects whether Flash is blocked on the current page due to a Flash blocking extension. The current version can detect

• FlashBlock #1 for Chromium / Google Chrome (Windows/Mac/Linux)
• FlashBlock #2 for Chromium / Google Chrome (Windows/Mac/Linux)
• FlashBlock for Firefox (Windows/Mac/Linux)
• ClickToFlash 1.5.x (Mac/Safari only)

Pretty cool, but there’s a small catch:

If a Flash blocker is active, your callback function will be called almost immediately. If no Flash blocker is active, your callback function will be called after the 5 second timeout.

(Via Mark Pilgrim.)

HumbleFinance:

HumbleFinance is an HTML5 data visualization tool written as a demonstration of interactive graphing in HTML5. It is similar to the Flash tool on http://finance.google.com/. The tool itself is written entirely in JavaScript, using the Prototype and Flotr libraries. It can be used to display any two 2-D data sets of real numerical data which share an axis.

Between this and gRaphaël I’d say there’s a lot of potential for open technologies to be a real, viable alternative to Flash based charts very soon.

jQuery Masonry:

Masonry is a layout plugin for jQuery. Think of it as the flip side of CSS floats. Whereas floating arranges elements horizontally then vertically, Masonry arranges elements vertically then horizontally according to a grid. The result minimizes vertical gaps between elements of varying height, just like a mason fitting stones in a wall.

Came across this for the first time today. Reminds me a lot of the old Grid-a-licious WordPress theme. Also, it’s hosted on GitHub so you can grab it there too.

html5media:

HTML5 video tags make embedding videos into documents as easy as embedding an image. All it takes is a single <video> tag. Unfortunately, not all browsers natively support HTML5 video tags.

… and that’s where this clever little stop-gap script comes in. It replaces the video tag with a Flash Player if the video tag is not supported natively in the current browser.

For me, apps like Omni Focus or Things — although great at managing tasks — don’t give you a complete picture of the things that need to get done. I’m talking about things that you’d like to do, maybe even every day, but that maybe don’t fit into a particular project or “Area of Responsibility”. Things that guide you to a bigger picture goal and remind you that checking off tasks is not the be-all end-all of your life or career.

As is often the case, Rands nails it in this article from 2008:

The curse of any effective task management system is that you get really good at capturing, prioritizing, and executing tasks. To the point that you start to believe that merely completing a task is helping your career. After a solid decade of rampant task management, I realized I needed to augment tasks with a system that would strategically guide and remind me that my job was not to do things, but to remember the interesting words in my title: manager, engineering, and products. That’s what I do.

What I needed was a guiding force behind these tasks, a way to remind me that I was pushing towards a goal and defining and refining a strategy.

He calls this a “Trickle List” and I highly recommend you read the entire article for a clearer picture of what exactly it is.

The problem, for me, with a Trickle List was just that I’d forget to mark stuff off since my list wouldn’t be with me all the time and having to build the list every day (on paper!) becomes a chore. Just yesterday an iPhone app was released that aims to fill this gap digitally. It’s called Daily Deeds and it has a super simple, clean and usable interface.

I still use Things as my task manager, but Daily Deeds seems to fit the bill as a Trickle List replacement very nicely. It’s a great (albeit simplistic) app that allows you to set daily “habits” that you can check off as you do them. Having it on your iPhone means that you have your list with you all the time and adding new habits can be done right away. (By the way, I love that they chose to call them habits since essentially that’s what I’m trying to form by using this app.)

At first I thought that I might want to see finer grained control over the time-frame for habits. Say, I only need to do something once a week, or once a month. After giving it some thought though, I’m inclined to think that those tasks should stay in my task manager as recurring tasks. Daily Deeds is better suited for just that: things you’d like to try to do each day.

One thing I would like added is the ability to see some stats about my habits. On average, how often have I watered the plants? There’s a nice calendar view that helps in this regard, but having some cold-hard stats would help define the things I really need to work on.