is a blog about design, technology and culture written by Khoi Vinh, and has been more or less continuously published since December 2000 in New York City. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe. Previously, Khoi was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired in 2013), Design Director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. He is the author of “How They Got There: Interviews with Digital Designers About Their Careers”and “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” and was named one of Fast Company’s “fifty most influential designers in America.” Khoi lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
Many, many moons ago my friend Scott Ostler and I started tinkering with a really, really simple Mac utility that lets you choose which app you want to open your links in, on the fly. Today, after many distractions, we’re finally launching it as Bumpr—it’s available right now in the Mac App Store—with special half-off launch pricing for a limited time. Here’s how it works.
Click on a web link in, say, Slack or Preview or your desktop Twitter client—basically any desktop app—and Bumpr seamlessly intercepts the link. Basically, Bumpr is acting as your default web browser, but instead of opening your page, it very, very speedily displays a simple, compact menu of the web browsers you have installed. Click on one and that link opens in that browser. It’s simple and easy and fast, and it’s particularly useful if you have more than one Gmail or G Suite account and want to use a different browser for each.
Bumpr also works with desktop email clients. Click on a mailto link and you get a menu of your available email clients. You can of course tailor the email clients or browsers you want to show up in Bumpr via the simple and, if I do say so myself, pretty nicely designed preferences, accessible from the Bumpr icon in the menu bar. That looks like this:
As you can see the preferences include some simple stats on which browsers or email clients you’re opening most. (Yes I still use Firefox a lot.)
Scott and I have both been using Bumpr every day for, well, for years. (We’re pretty happy to have finally finished it!) It’s one of the very first things I install every time I get a new Mac. I can’t live without it. You might feel the same way. Get it today at getbumpr.com. Also join the conversation over at Bumpr on Product Hunt.
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