Fantasical For iPhone Released

I fell in love with Fantastical for OS X a few years back when it was released and recommend it to anyone who will listen to me and is in need of a better Calendaring application than iCal/Calendar.app. This morning, Flexibits released Fantastical for iPhone. I've bought it already and can heartily recommend it as similarly awesome as the OS X version is. It has now become my default calendaring app for my phone. My only wish was that it was universal for the iPad as well, but knowing Flexibits, they're working on either a universal version now or a dedicated iPad-only version. Make your life better, and get this app.

XOXO Conference Videos Now Online

A few days ago the videos from the XOXO conference that happened back in mid-September were posted online for public viewing. I would have loved to attend this conference but the next best thing, being able to watch all of the speakers, is now possible. What is XOXO? From their own site:

XOXO is an arts and technology festival celebrating disruptive creativity. We’re bringing independent artists who use the Internet to make a living doing what they love together with the technologists building the tools that make it possible. Go watch the videos here.

Back Into The Swing Of Things

Over the last few months I've been caught up with work, and life, and have neglected posting to this site as often as I've wanted to. I've decided to step it up and update here more often than I've been able to do in recent memory. What does this mean? Well, I'll just keep posting things that I enjoy or want more people to know about. This mainly will focus on software, hardware, cool stuff I find, or politics. I make no promises that it will be in anyway focused, but then again, I never have. Recently I've just gotten home from a long trip that I took for both business and vacation out to San Francisco. For the first 10 days of my trip, I was managing all of the technology setup for a 25,000 attendee conference at Moscone West/South/North in downtown SF as well as the live-streaming of all of our major events at the conference. I do this annually, which involves about 6 weeks of prep work prior to the conference followed by an intense 10 day period of working 12-14 hours a day during the conference. My wife flew out the day after I was done and we stuck around in San Francisco for Thanksgiving with my best friend and his partner. This allowed us to also meet a lot of our "Internet Friends" and see some of them again. I left so soon after the election (on November 8) that I haven't had a lot of time to think about the win for our team and what this means. I'm so relieved that the President was able to win re-election. Also, during my trip, the picture below happened. I can't imagine any photo such as this ever being taken in a Romney White House and it makes me all the more grateful that the election turned out the way it did.

Black Pixel Opens Up Kaleidoscope 2 Beta

Matthew Panzarino, at The Next Web:

After almost 5 years as a development house for other people’s apps, Black Pixel is undergoing a similar shift today. The launch of its first major in-house app Kaleidoscope 2 — it’s putting its own name on a product and setting it out in front of consumers as an author — marks the beginning of what will be a portfolio of Black Pixel apps. As a big fan of Kaleidoscope, I'm very excited about this.

Geo-Politics And Dead Babies

Andrew Sullivan, at The Dish:

In other words, without diplomacy toward a two-state solution, we are looking at a lifetime of constant Israeli warfare against all of its neighbors, deeper isolation in the region (with Turkey and Egypt already fast moving away) and growing international pariah status as Greater Israel becomes more fundamentalist and less democratic. And at some point, as America's energy revolution leaves us less and less exposed to Middle East oil, and as the national interest becomes more attuned to events in Asia and the Pacific, and as the occupation turns Israel into the South Africa of the 21st Century, the Jewish state will become a self-evident burden for America, spawning terror and conflict and anti-Americanism as far as the eye can see. If all Israel can count on then are America's Christianists and the current GOP, if they continue to spurn American attempts to unwind the conflict by undoing the settlements, then Israelis should be genuinely afraid for their future. I sure am. I think Sullivan gets it exactly right.