What a lovely idea: Marco Polo is a very simple messaging app for friends (or groups of friends), but instead of using text you communicate with short, recorded videos.

Want to save important snippets from the book you’re reading? With this iOS app, you can take a photo of a page, highlight the sentence or paragraph you'd like to save, and the app’s text recognition software will store your highlights in editable plain text.

A nice-looking monitoring app for tracking the time you spend on your Mac: “Timemator automatically captures everything you do on your Mac. You can go back to review what you were working on and with just a few clicks, assign the time to your projects.”

I really like this and would love to see more of it for all the different silos of the tech world: three free, downloadable posters that prompt and remind you to avoid jargon and catch-all phrases in your design practice.

The Making of Prince of Persia →

The journals behind a legendary game

Stripe Press books hardly ever get me excited, but this one looks like a real gem: “Before Prince of Persia was a best-selling video game franchise and a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, it was an Apple II computer game created and programmed by one person, Jordan Mechner. Mechner’s candid and revealing journals from the time capture his journey from his parents’ basement to the forefront of the fast-growing 1980s video game industry... and the creative, technical and personal struggles that brought the prince into being and ultimately into the homes of millions of people worldwide.” Get a taste in this short video.

The Earth →

1000-piece puzzle

From the folks behind The Moon puzzle: launched for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, this 1000-piece, 26.5” (67cm) circular puzzle features a portion of the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific Ocean in incredible detail. (Unfortunately currently sold out)

This is absolute gold: “On Wall Street, everyone was not only okay with being the douchebag, they often troublingly wanted to be the douchebag. In Silicon Valley, no one yet seems to want to admit they’re the new douchebags. And this more an observation than a value judgment. Power and money beget douchebags. It’s just the nature of the beast.”

I’m rereading and resharing this piece at least once a year. “You come to understand your impact on others. It’s interesting that even in the first year of life you learn the impact that a variety of others have on you, but as late as middle age many people have a very imperfect understanding of the impact they themselves have on others. The hostile person keeps asking ‘Why are people so hard to get along with?’ In some measure we create our own environment. You may not yet grasp the power of that truth to change your life.”

A collection of photos marking the Earth Day anniversary: “On April 22, 2020, we observe the 50th Earth Day, and though many improvements have been made, environmental challenges remain. In the past five decades, the population of the Earth has more than doubled – more than 75 percent of the people alive today were born after 1970 – and the increased demand on our limited resources makes sustainable solutions even more important.”