The Acade-me Awards

What makes me qualified to discuss the Oscars? A semester of film school, that’s what. I could have been as good as Lubezki but I thought I’d give him a chance, so, I switched majors. The academy, however, robbed him of the award for best cinematography for his work in Children of Men. They have been trying to make up for it for the past three years, but I’ll never let it go. This will tie in later.

The Acade-me awards were established about 10 minutes ago when Leo (finally) won his first Oscar. I said to myself “Hey, my name is Leo too, I could do great things.” My last attempt to get Planet Money’s attention with a post about a Taco based economy failed. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for economics journalism. Maybe, what I need to do is create my own awards. Each year (probably just this year) I will think about the tools I use for a couple of minutes, make up some categories they can fit in, and give them an award (in the form of a quick mention here). I hope this will send ripples in the economy which Planet Money will someday cover. Without further ado, the winners of the 1st Annual Acade-me Awards are:

In the Category of Best Browser

Google chrome. Google or Alphabet or whatever it calls itself these days is awesome. I am on board with them ruling the world in a utopian/dystopian future where they know everything about me. It’s no surprise this google fanboy would only use chrome (always test on all browsers kids). It has a great set of dev tools. It looks amazing, on the bond scale it’s an Idris Elba. It tells you when sites autoplay sounds with a friendly speaker symbol. Firefox lovers, it’s ok, get mad, throw a stool at your dorm room’s door narrowly missing the window like some people did when Children of Men lost to Pan’s Labyrinth.

Achievement in Pixel Perfection

Pixel tools. Do you find yourself taking screenshots and superimposing them on a design in photoshop, and then, like, making it semi transparent or like a negative or something? You do? Wow, ok, that’s cool, that’s one way to do it. I mean, it’s up to you. You could, instead, use pixel tools and measure stuff obsessively until it is perfect, like that opening shot of Children of Men.

Outstanding Desktop Organization

Moom. You could drag your windows around, resize them and try your best to get them just right. Or you could get moom and have your life changed by the Many Tricks folks, self described, makers of helpful apps. Moom is Life changing in the way that car scene in Children of Men was. The one where they get chased by a motorcycle and the dude kicks the door open and the motorcycle goes flying, and the whole thing is a 3 minute long continuous shot. Seriously, that lost, to Pan’s Labyrinth, the movie memorable for some monster with eyeballs on his hands.

Achievement in Text Editing

Atom. I know what you are thinking. Actually I don’t, if I did, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be shorting the next bubble like Steve Carrell in the Big Short. But if you are like half the NJI dev team you might think Sublime is better. It isn’t. If it were, Sublimites wouldn’t ask me about Atom every day (actually, about once a month or so). Want to know how many questions I ask about Sublime? None, because I’ve never used it. I am happy with Atom. It’s a great product brackets (<>) with heart (<3) by the fine people at github (winner of most the Acade-me’s Sci-Tech awards that happened last week). They have an amazing video introducing Atom 1.0 which is worth a watch. Git integration is helpful and a rich ecosystem of packages and themes doesn’t hurt. In short Sublime is the Pan’s Labyrinth of text editors.

Outstanding Achievement in Communication

Slack. If you don’t use slack there are three things you need to do right now. Get slack, invite @heytaco to a slack channel, and activate the giphy extension for slack. Slack is great, you can talk to people and they can talk to you. It’s chatting, like on AIM, but grown up, and with less (or hopefully no) creepy chatrooms. This guy disagrees with everything I just said. I disagree with pretty much everything he says and actually want to do a more detailed response later (though I make no promises on ever getting to that, I am too busy looking for cool gifs to post and checking slack non stop because of fomo). For now I’ll just say some people think Pan’s Labyrinth is a good movie, and I am ok with that, I just think they are wrong.

In Memoriam

I want to pause to remember an app that left us this year on February 26, 2016, Mailbox App by Dropbox, the best email client of all time. Dropbox, you really Pan’s Labyrinthed this one badly. Mailbox was the Children of Men of mail clients. You took that from me, and I don’t know what to do now (I got Outlook for the iPhone) and I might never heal (actually I am fine, I lived).

The Best Thing Ever. Period.

Browsersync. This is better than that car scene from Children of Men. Browsersync can be configured to reload your browser after making changes. You will never have to command + r ever again. Disable cache on the network tab of chrome and make that never having to command + shift + r ever again. Browsersync provides an external access url to test on multiple…wait for it…devices, at the same time! Browsersync can go back in time, it can change history, and make it so that Pan’s Labyrinth never gets made! Add browsersync to your gulp/grunt setup today!

That’s it. I should say the views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the views of NJI, or even the dev team for that matter because they like inferior text editors. I think Pan’s Labyrinth is actually ok (not really).

As always we love to know what you think of our blog, let us know on Facebook or Twitter. I am Leo Bauza, and I write closings that sound like the end of a Planet Money episode in my head.