The Hickensian is the journal of Jon Hicks, one half of Hicksdesign. I say!

I loved bike shops as a kid (especially the smell of them!) but we didn’t, and still don’t, have anything quite like this. 718 Cyclery is not only a great retail space, but the whole attitude to building bikes and access to the process is unique and just plain brilliant. I found myself nodding in agreement to everything Joe says.

As for the bike they build in video – gorgeous!

Via twinfish on twitter.

Last Autumn I borrowed a friend’s Turbo Trainer, an odd looking device that allows you to use your bike indoors for training. With the nights getting longer and the weather getting worse, it seemed like a good way of retaining the fitness gains and weight loss from the summer.

My first experience wasn’t that great, rather uninspiring in fact. The bike is locked into a rigid position, there was a fair bit of noise (even though this was one of the quietest ones) and it felt nothing like cycling on a road. For my second session, to a proper structure and keep up the interest, I played a Sufferfest video, which helped a lot. Here’s the trailer for the one I bought, ‘The Downward Spiral‘…

If you’re watching this trailer sitting on a sofa, rather than a turbo trainer and bike, you might chuckle at the music and captions feeling a bit overdramatic. Believe me, it doesn’t once you’re on the bike and you get the instruction to ‘close the gap!’ you go for it. 25 mins later however, there was the strong smell of burning rubber, and lo, I had melted the rear tyre, and the floor was littered with rubber shavings. I’d love to claim this was because I was doing such an intense workout, but I think I’d just set it up with the wrong resistance.

The way around this is to use a special turbo trainer tyre, made of a much harder compound, and the easiest way to do that is to have a separate wheel setup ready and change it over for a turbo session. That means getting another tyre, wheel and cassette! But that’s not all you need, as the you also have to prop the front wheel up, have a fan on to keep cool and protect your bike from the corrosive sweat that drips off you in bucket loads.

It’s an awful lot of faff!

However, it wasn’t until the next ride that I felt the benefit. Just doing two short sessions during the week made the Friday ride much better. In the end though, I decided that getting a turbo trainer was the equivalent of a sandwich toaster – a dust-gatherer after the first couple of uses.

Now we’re in February, and the UK is having an extended cold snap where my usual routes have layers of compacted frozen snow. After falling off my bike last November, which made my ribs sore for weeks afterwards, I don’t fancy the risk, and I’ve finally caved in and got one. It’s always going to be better to riding outside, but for the times I can’t, I can at least do a hamster in a wheel impression.

There are a few apps that I’m particularly enjoying using at the moment, so I thought I’d share in case any of them are news to you:

Choosy

Choosy does a seemingly simple task, and does it very well. For a start, it provides a central preference pane to choose your default browser, but its main thrust is letting you choose which browser to open a link in. You can do this either manually via a chooser display (right), or automatically depending on order of preference.

My favourite feature is ‘behaviour rules’. For example, I get emails from Opera’s internal bug tracking system, and I always want to open these in Opera, no matter what my default browser is at the time. I can now do that with one simple rule set up in Choosy!

For someone like me who still uses several browsers (mainly, but not exclusively, Safari, Chrome and Opera) it doesn’t ‘arf make life easier.

Fantastical

Quite simply, the best calendar app I’ve ever used. Its always handy (sits in the menubar), doesn’t have the vulgar leather stitched interface of iCal (yes I know about Busycal) but is small, neat, and made for humans. Yes, it still has an element of skeumorphism, but in my view its done right – just enough to make it feel warm with the distracting superflous details. As well as the mix of traditional calendar and agenda views, it allows events to be added using human language, with the calendar view filtering live as you type, and adding people and locations. Its a joy to use, and I use it as my one and only desktop calendar app.

And then, two well known apps that I continue to enjoy…

Evernote

This is still my central collection source. I’ve tried all sorts of ways over the years, but the Evernote ecosystem of desktop-web-mobile is still the winner for me. Shared notebooks works brilliantly, and they are constantly evolving the UI (such as the recent subtle Notes redesign). It all goes in here – images, PDFs, notes, draft blog posts, anything I want to remember or keep for later. Its my travel diary, design scrapbook, UI library, recipe and notes book. It was invaluable in writing The Icon Handbook:

There’s still a few niggles with Evernote – for example you can now drag a thumbnail out of the app to export it, but it does so in a format that only Evernote can read. Not really export is it? Despite a few niggles like this, I remain a big fan.

Spotify

I’ve had a on-off relationship with Spotify. In general, I treat it as a way of previewing whole albums before deciding whether to buy them, creating collaborative playlists and getting access to a large music library on my iPhone without any syncing woes.

They’ve done a few wonky things recently (such as requiring Facebook to sign up, sharing everything with Facebook by default) and since joining iTunes match (a service that I’m greatly impressed with) the latter reason is less important. However I’m enjoying a great new Spotify feature: Apps. I love the last.fm and Guardian reviews apps particularly, making it an even better place to discover new music.