A lot of great choices here. In terms of more recent albums, I really love Andy Stott's Luxury Problems.

Would second all the Dell Ultrasharp recommends. Worked with many companies that have cut corners further with HP, Acer and other brands. They aren't necessarily bad, and you can shave off an extra hundred or more from the price, but they are always a noticeable downgrade from Dell and Apple, especially for design.

Personally, I'd rather have a 24" monitor that's high quality with good viewing angles than a 27" monitor that's poor. In more concrete terms, I'd rather go 24" Ultrasharp than 27" cheapo brand any day.

For design:

On the Grid

Design Details

For development/design/web matters:

Shop Talk

Film:

Slashfilm

Battleship Pretension

The Canon

The Dissolve

Filmspotting SVU

Gaming:

Giant Bomb

DLC

I started my web career splitting html usage pretty evenly between ids and classes. If I knew for sure it was the only instance on a page, it got an id; classes were assigned to the rest.

But at this point, for any new project, I don't use ids for selectors, period. An older article but many of its statements hold up.

Stole my choice! Yes, a really smart introduction to the service.

Sorry for the late reply on this one. I wouldn't consider it "essential" to my long form writing, but the focus on sentence structure or specific word types (especially adverbs and conjunctions) can help with self editing. The real features that make Writer Pro a winner for me are the overall layout and typography.

It's going to be hard to move me away from Writer Pro, but it's always encouraging to see more competition.

More strong entries in the minimalist Markdown space are a good thing. It's less about competition with each other, and more about providing extra incentive to move away from more traditional word processors like Word and Pages for many.

When an idea strikes it goes into one of several buckets:

• Drafts 4 is great for jotting down quick thoughts. I love how I can customize virtually every aspect of the entry process (typography, color, custom keyboard row). And of course it's designed for exporting that content virtually anywhere, which for me most cases is a simple Dropbox folder of plain text files.

• Wunderlist is more for a tiny idea that I want to noodle on later. I'll write a quick note to "explore X later" in my inbox, maybe add a specific reminder date or due date to revisit.

• Dropvox is a slick little audio recording tool for the rare case where an extended voice memo works best.

Most of my podcasts are for entertainment and are intentionally unrelated to my development/design day job. But there's one exception: ShopTalk. Great for front end web development and design tips.

In fairness the first half of his post is dealing with the app aesthetic question. Though yes, the rest of Gruber's argument does boil into a "web apps have lost the war, web is overrated" thesis at the end.