Michael Whalen

This is easily the best banger of the year. Skip to 1:00. This is the kind of music you listen to when you're in charge of driving the getaway car.

I recently discovered Seven Lions, a DJ from my home state of California. Everything he has on his Soundcloud page is gold. I repeat, GOLD. Click play on the top song and indulge in more bliss than the girls you see in yogurt commercials.

Embedded here is one of my favorites:

Like a lot of my peers, i've recently shifted my primary focus from web apps to native iOS applications. I'm still building web apps in the server-side sense, but native applications for mobile clients are certainly more exciting.

During this transition i've also had to keep an open mind in regards to the way these apps are built, specifically from a UI perspective.

Buttons in iOS take a slight departure from the way that you might build them on the web. Fortunately the new CSS3 properties are sort of bridging the gap between the two ... but we're not all there yet.

Check out this, ahem, thoughtful post from Thoughtbot on taming UIButton after the jump.

This bike is absolutely gorgeous. The paint scheme, the welds on the frame, I can go on and on all day. It's a perfect bridge between old-world steel frame, lugged design and high-tech new-school performance. Those SRAM brakes!

In a world full of weight warriors competing on how many grams their carbon fiber bar-ends weigh, this is a refreshing sight.

It's beautiful.

At my previous gig we operated almost entirely via Skype. We had a real office (here's the multitalented skateboarder/jquery-maven/drunk Maria showing part of it off) but Skype made it easy to communicate both inside and outside the office.

Persistent conversations are hands-down my favorite feature and the main reason I prefer Skype. Think of these as long-lasting chat rooms. Invite a handful of people, set the topic, and it will never die. Unlike IRC, If you're not in the conversation (rather, you're logged-out) because you're out running errands, come back online a few hours later and you're caught up with the rest of the chat. Combine this functionality with being able to pin a conversation as a favorite, and you needn't use anything else.

I have a persistent room right now for the project I am operating with a few friends. We are spread out all over the world: Washington DC, Northern California, Stockholm, and Ukraine. Having a persistent chat room that never dies and clients for all platforms is immensely valuable.

Linked is a lengthy list of handy commands for the more advanced Skype IM user. Hat tip to Bogdan for pointing these out.