JB

Brent Simmons recently wrote about his dislike of the iCal interface in the latest developer preview of OS X 10.7. In his article, he says how the torn paper present in the interface of the latest build would eventually force him to find an alternative, because he would always want to finish tearing the paper off. What caught my attention in the article more than iCal was how Brent deals with the Trash in the Dock. He constantly empties the trash, a habit I share.

The trash is actually part of a larger problem, the Dock itself. I’m never happy with where I have it. At times I have it hidden, sometimes I have it on the left, sometimes on the right. It is like an awkward sweater that doesn’t fit quite right. It provides enough functionality that I want it around, but not enough for it not to bother me when it is.

A large part of the problem is how much vertical space the Dock occupies. If the Dock stretches across the screen, then I feel that I have too many apps in the Dock and the bright and often contrasting colors distract me. If the Dock does not stretch across the screen, then I feel that I’m wasting the pixels to the left and right of the dock. Those pixels remain empty when an application is “zoomed” to maximum.

Moving the dock to the left or right solves the wasted pixels problem. But, then I have another problem, how best to access certain functions of the Dock, like the Trash, like the Finder, and like minimized windows. If an application has more than one window open, minimizing one of the windows puts it out of reach of command-tab. At this point I either have to go for the mouse, or I need to call Quicksilver and think through what command I need to call to bring that window back to the screen.

The Dock is an annoyance. It’s too big not to be annoying, but too useful to get rid of.

Use only the software that you need. No more, no less. Choose one application for each task, and become an expert on that application.

I have two types of applications that I’ve had a hard time finding a favorite: web browsers and text editors. When I first started writing, I wrote everything in Microsoft Word. When I needed to learn vi for work, I unconsciously relegated it to headless servers. Later, when I had a brief fling with Linux on my work PC, I used, and despised, Open Office. Last month I found that I had purchased or installed every major word processor and text editor for available for the Mac.

I’ve had Word, Pages, Mellel, Mariner Write, Ulysses, AbiWord, Bean, WriteRoom, OpenOffice, MacVim, and TextMate. To top it all off, I’ve coupled the last two with LaTeX for “document generation”.

Browsers are a similarly sad story. My default browser as gone from OmniWeb to Camino to Safari to iCab to Shiira to Firefox to Flock to Sunrise to Stainless to Chrome to Opera and finally back to Safari.

All of this, everything I wrote about each of those applications above is ridiculous. I have the utmost respect for the developers, but the honest truth is that I simply do not have the time or desire to keep trying new software.

Which leads me to the “Principle of Least Software”. The less third-party software you install, the less likely you are to run into problems when upgrading. Apple has brilliant engineers working for them, and their bundled applications that come with OS X set the bar for competing apps. Safari is a perfectly good web browser; it’s fast, loaded with features, and supports extensions. That’ll do, thanks.

Another perfectly good application bundled with OS X is TextEdit. The humble text editor that could. When I am writing, I need only for the text to be rendered in a pleasing font, and for standard OS X keyboard shortcuts to be recognized. Everything else is gravy. I write my blog posts in Markdown, so most of my writing looks like plain text anyway. Markdown syntax is so minimal that having keyboard shortcuts for it is almost silly. How hard is it to put an asterisk at the beginning and end of a word? Or to enclose a word in brackets and follow it with a URL in parentheses? Not hard, and I’ve been chasing my tail on these “productivity hacks” for far too long.

I’ll keep Word around, because, face it, sometimes you just need Word. For everything else, I’ll be sticking with TextEdit and Safari. I’ve been to the fancy TextMate clubs, and the exclusive Vim resorts. I’ve been to the Firefox festivals and Chrome love-ins. I’ve been there. I know exactly what they can do, and I’m no longer impressed.

Use only the software that you need. No more, no less.

I need only one text editor, one web browser, and a handful of other single purpose apps. What do you need?

I have one wish for the next major iOS release: full keyboard support. The iPad works with the bluetooth keyboard, and the original iPad came with a keyboard dock, but support for doing things other than basic text is sparse at best. My wish list is small, but meaningful. I would like to see support for all the keys on the keyboard, the ability to command-tab between running applications, and arrow key navigation for apps that include table views.

When I purchased my iPad last summer, I also bought the bluetooth keyboard and the dock. My intention was to be able to use the iPad as a writing device and a terminal for systems administration tasks. Using the iPad for writing works well, but trying to use the keyboard to SSH into a server and manipulate text turned out to be far more difficult than I thought. I use vi constantly, and have the shell on my servers configured to accept vi keybindings, but the iPad did not recognize the esc key, which meant a lot of moving back and forth between the keyboard and touching the screen. For a touch typist, one who has the vi keybindings embedded in muscle memory, this was unacceptable.

The second thing I’d like to be able to do is switch between apps quickly using the keyboard. The existing key-combo command-tab seems like a natural fit for this task. Imagine writing an article, or an email, and needing to reference the text of a web page. If you had the device in your hands at the time you could double-click the home button (or use the fancy new gestures) and tap Safari. If you have the iPad in the dock and are writing a longer email, reaching up from the keyboard to double-click the home button is frustrating.

Bringing up any application with a tableview in horizontal mode should allow the user to navigate that tableview using the arrow keys. It’s been this way on the Mac for as long as I can remember. I can see perhaps needing to touch the screen to select the tableview (if it doesn’t already have first responder status), but after that, the arrow keys should be able to select the next and previous items in the table. For extra points, an app could support right arrowing into the main content area.

Its clear that Apple has put years of thought, experimentation, trial, and error into the touch screen experience. Using the iPad is superior in most ways, but not in all. Apple giving us the iPad was almost like suddenly having a car that could fly, but for the few use cases when you need to drive on the roads (like landing, maybe?) having fully functional wheels, instead of, say, tank tracks, makes the experience much better. Tactile response to keyboard input is necessary to truly lose yourself in the task. Its why the first thing we learned as high schoolers in typing class was to type without looking at the typewriter. We looked at the sheet of paper we were transcribing, and learned to only look at the typewriter when we could feel that we made a mistake. Using the iPad without the hardware keyboard, there is no tactile response, no way to feel the F and J keys, so you are forced back to the first days of learning to type, and having to look at the keyboard, hunting and pecking.

Physical keyboards are the closest thing we have right now to a perfect input device. The more time and attention that is given to learning how to use the keyboard, the faster and more accuratem typing becomes. When you expand your use of the keyboard to include hotkeys, using a mouse becomes more of an annoyance than a necessity. A virtual keyboard is a step back in performance and usability.

Go2 1.2 is in review, and when it is released it will bring a new feature that I’m hoping will speed up access to bookmarks considerably: Spotlight integration. Spotlight is amazing technology, and one of the biggest advantages OS X has over it’s competition. The Spotlight search and matching algorithms can index millions of files, which makes it a perfect companion for people who have anywhere from hundreds to thousands of bookmarked server connections in Go2. So far, my own menubar indexing gets a bit choked up at around 1500 bookmarks or so. It still works, but no where near as fast as Spotlight.

How Go2 makes its bookmarks available to Spotlight is a bit strange. When the user selects the option in the preferences, Go2 creates a folder in the users’ Public folder named “Go2Data”. Go2 exports each bookmark as a .go2 file inside the Go2Data folder as a basic XML file. I chose to put the bookmarks in the Public folder because, for one, the folder is not normally used, and two, the Library folder is, for all practical purposes, invisible to Spotlight. I even asked about this on StackOverflow, and it seems there is no way to force Spotlight to index files inside the Library folder, which is unfortunate because that would be the perfect spot to put the .go2 files. However, I believe Public is a good alternative, we will see if Apple agrees by approving the 1.2 update.

A secondary, and unexpected, benefit from Spotlight integration is that Quicksilver can now index and launch Go2 bookmarks. Simply add the Go2Data folder as a custom “File and Folder Scanner” object to the Quicksilver Catalog, and ensure that you select a depth of 1 for the folder. I’ve been using this myself for a few days and I’m happy with the speed and the result matching.

As long as nothing goes drastically wrong, Go2 1.2 should be available in the Mac App Store in a few days.

When you pay for software/services upfront you know how much it is going to cost right away.

via: Fragility of Free — The Brooks Review

Great post from Ben Brooks on why he likes paying for things. I agree, I much prefer an honest transaction, where I am the customer, and I’m giving them money for goods or services. Of course, this is also a good place to draw a line between free and open source. If it’s free, you are not the customer, you are the product being sold. This applies to web services too. Gmail is free, but it is not open source.

In Ben’s theory, if Gmail were to be shut down, there’s nothing we could do about it. If it were open source, we could open up our own Gmail on our own servers. Furthermore, if Tweetie were open source, we could create a fork without the #dickbar. I think what Ben is really concerned with is the continuance of software that he enjoys, which is where I agree with him, and why I prefer my software to either be paid-for commercial versions or open source. Both models have a greater chance of sustainability than “free”.

There used to be a line between having a Mac, and owning a Mac, and that line was drawn with Quicksilver. Quicksilver changed the way I thought about using my computer in a very fundamental way. It led me to think more about telling it what to do, instead of clicking about asking it to do something. It led me to think about mastering my tools like a craftsman, choosing my tools with great care and thought. Quicksilver was my first step towards owning my Mac.

At first, Quicksilver is a difficult application to get your head wrapped around. At least it was a few years ago. It’s an application launcher, a file browser, a mail client, a basic text editor, a database manager… and more. What truly sums up an explanation of Quicksilver is that it’s a unified interaction paradigm for the Mac. You speak to it in sentences, tell it what you want, and then what you want done with it.

Here’s what I said about it in a paper I wrote in 2006:

Using a Mac can be made much more productive by installing the free application named Quicksilver from Blacktree. Quicksilver runs in the background and waits until the user presses a pre- defined key combination. Once the main Quicksilver window is available, the user types in the first few letters of what he is looking for, followed by a tab, and then the first few letters of what the user wants to do with the item selected. For example, to launch the Safari web browser, the user could type “S tab return” and the application would launch. Quicksilver is a major leap forward in human computer interaction, however it currently has a very steep learning curve and takes some getting used to.

I’m so glad to see Quicksilver back in active development again. I’ve looked at the source code, and it’s a daunting task, but it seems like the group who’s adopted it is a dedicated bunch. They’ve set up a twitter account, and a blog; both of which are worth following.

There are so many things that Quicksilver does that I’ve forgotten how much I’ve missed them. Appending a text file on the fly, adding an event to iCal, shooting off a quick email, searching the web at DuckDuckGo, keyboard access to an apps menu, moving files, printing files, the list goes on, and on.

I suppose this is a testament to open source, that a dead project can be resurrected by a few who want the app to continue. Here’s hoping that it not only continues, but thrives.

The devastation from weather related disasters in the past few years has been overwhelming. Japan was ready, as ready as you can be for a disaster of this scale, Haiti was not, nor was Christchurch.

If you’ve thought about giving to Red Cross before, now is a good time. Text REDCROSS to 90999. Information

It’s not really a science, it’s more of an art. If you are careful, and attentive, you can see when someone starts working this particular art form. In a technical discussion, bit by bit, you start getting lost in the conversation, wondering how we got on to this topic, when it doesn’t have anything to do with what needs to be accomplished. Then you realize that the same guy has been talking for the past few minutes, and he’s been working his art, casting his spell, and the whole room has fallen under it. He’s convinced everyone in the room that he knows so much more, that his knowledge on the topic is so vastly superior to anyone present that no one is on the same level. Which is exactly where he wants your mind to be, because the next step after that is agreeing with whatever he wants to do.

There are several problems with the scenario described above. First, that the culture of the organization would allow a meeting to continue when the topic has been lost, and confusion has taken over. Second, there’s a good chance that the guy throwing out acronyms and buzz-words doesn’t understand the topic, or how the acronyms he’s spewing relate to the topic. He probably has a vague concept, he looked it up on Google, maybe even read about someone else doing it on TechCrunch, but he’s missing the deep understanding of the subject to speak with real authority on the matter. Einstein said:

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough

If things are getting deep and confusing, and the guy doing all the talking is talking too fast, and you start to see the same looks around the room, it’s time to take a step back. It’s time to say “wait, stop, I don’t understand how we got on this topic, let’s get back to how we can fix X”. It is at this point you see what the guy is really made of. If he’s good, he’ll respond by saying something along the lines of “ok, no problem, let me walk through it a bit slower so everyone is one the same page”. If not, he’ll try to push back, either with intimidation or more technical jargon, or he’ll change the subject, which might be best for everyone.

The most important problem that should be addressed directly is that the guy doing the talking is behaving just like a schoolyard bully. Like any bully, the one and only way to deal with him is to call him out. Make your stand, demand an answer. Of course, making a stand means that you are going to have to prepare first. You can’t stand up to him if you don’t have a solid grasp on the situation. But, if you do, if you know your tech inside and out, by all means call him out the first time he starts throwing around terms that you know don’t belong. After a few times, he will start to acknowledge your presence a little differently. He’ll start to think a little harder, and choose his words a little more carefully. An end result that will benefit everyone involved.

Starting next year, every one of the PCs shipped by HP will include the ability to run WebOS in addition to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, Apotheker said.

via: Apotheker Seeks to Save HP’s ‘Lost Soul’ With Software Growth - Businessweek

Well, this will be interesting. Porting WebOS, which is Linux based, to run on x86 hardware should not be too difficult. What will be difficult is managing the user interface. How are they going to integrate the touch based UI of WebOS with the standard PC?

Apple is solving some of these problems with new gestures and interaction changes with OS X 10.7, but they are not porting iOS to the Mac.

Also, dual-booting is a pain. I used to dual-boot Windows and Linux, before I started using my Mac at work, and the problem I’d run into was that I never knew where my data was. Did I save that file in the Linux partition? Did I accept that meeting invite on the Windows side?

I’m going to assume that HP plans on including WebOS as an option for fast, almost instantaneous boot to use a limited subset of the computers capabilities, and not as a full-blown Linux install. In that case, no one will ever know its there, and will continue to boot straight into Windows.

If HP is really serious about this, I’d suggest that they not install Windows on their machines at all, and ship them with an enhanced, more desktop ready, version of WebOS as the one and only operating system.

We charged money for a good or service

I know this one is controversial, but there are enormous benefits and you can immediately reinvest a whole bunch of it in your project sips daiquiri. Your customers will appreciate that you have a long-term plan that doesn’t involve repackaging them as a product.

via: Anatomy of a Crushing (Pinboard Blog)

Exactly. I’ve said before that I prefer an honest transaction with a company, where I am clearly the customer, and am not volunteering to be part of the product being sold.

This post by the owner of Pinboard is full of interesting information. For example, the service is hosted on three (now four) large, dedicated HP servers, which, according to Netcraft, are running Ubuntu and Apache. His database servers are MySQL, with a simple Master-Slave replication setup. I especially like this part:

It has become accepted practice in web app development to design in layers of application caching from the outset. This is especially true in the world of Rails and other frameworks, where there is a tendency to treat one’s app like a high-level character in a role-playing game, equipping it with epic gems, sinatras, capistranos, and other mithril armor into a mighty “application stack”.

I had just come out of Rails consulting when I started Pinboard and really wanted to avoid this kind of overengineering, capitalizing instead on the fact that it was 2010 and a sufficiently simple website could run ridiculously fast with no caching if you just threw hardware at it. …

If you offer MySQL this kind of room, your data is just going to climb in there and laugh at you no matter what kind of traffic it gets.

Over-engineering is something we deal with at my workplace, and something I’ve been guilty of myself. Which is part of the reason I’ve been looking at moving away from virtualization, clouds, and other buzzwords and returning to the simplest, most reliable setup possible. A concept that Pinboard has nailed.

There is no profit margin on mediocre. While every company including ours has its hiccups as it grows we set the bar on day one to offer a premium service and priced it as such. We are unapologetic about it.

I’m always wary of free services. I like knowing who I’m dealing with and what our business relationship is, preferably with me being the customer, and them providing me with goods or services in exchange for money. Very simple. Services based on advertising revenue will eventually start preferring the advertiser over the user of the service.

For example, take the recent Twitter app update. Twitter is a great service, fun to use and interesting in how it allows you to connect to people. But, it’s free, and since its free we have never been Twitter’s customers. As such, the recent update introduces a new “quickbar” which annoyingly obscures the tweets we want to read with a trending topic we couldn’t care less about. This happened because Twitter needs to please the people who are giving them money. I would much prefer the ability to pay for the service. Paying for Twitter would reduce spam and refocus the company on what really matters; people.

37 Signals comments on a trend I’ve been noticing for a few years. Data centers and IT departments are not the core competency of most businesses, they are a requirement of operating the business. Or, at least, they have been for the past thirty years or so. Businesses are now seeing the benefits of moving what they are not good at, controlling IT, to what they are good at, which is whatever makes them money.

You no longer need a tech person at the office to man “the server room.” Responsibility for keeping the servers running has shifted away from the centralized IT department. Today you can get just about all the services that previously required local expertise from a web site somewhere.

via: The end of the IT department - (37signals)

John Gruber from Daring Fireball has a comment that matches what my thoughts have been when I try to explain the consolidation I see in the sysadmin field:

Certain of the comments on Hansson’s post remind me of this quote from Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

I’ve even heard that virtualization technologies and cloud services will provide more opportunity for sysadmins. That makes little sense to me. People are assuming that the work in the future will be just like the work of the past. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of work, especially work that revolves around technology. It grows, it changes, it merges into new things. Consider the iPhone.

Disruptive technology changes things, and the iPhone was, and continues to be, disruptive. It is powerful, both in means of hardware capacity, and the operating system and software that it runs. How long will it be before the iPhone, or one of it’s many competitors, completely supplants laptops as the computing device of choice for people? I imagine a future where you dock your phone to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and use it as your one and only computer. I don’t think its too far away. When that happens, how much need will there be for a traditional IT department?

Software is becoming simpler and easier to use. Hardware is becoming more reliable, and longer lasting. And, most importantly, harder to break. This comment from the 37 Signals post stood out to me as a common misconception in the IT industry:

I’ve “done” IT for multinationals and startups, and the thing that is most obvious, is that if you leave the kids alone with their toys, you end up with a network which hardly ever works, more viruses than you can count, the mail server acting as a spam relay, the company being raided by FAST , the fans overheating in the PCs, the aircon never having been considered in the server cupboard, the backup plan being a mystery… need I go on?

No, you need not go on. Because every single argument stated is a symptom of the Microsoftian workplace. A computer on every desk, and every computer running Windows. Since Windows is easy to break, people break it. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle. Over the years people have been trained to “click here, and here, and once a week here, but no where else or you’ll break it”. People don’t need to become smarter about computers, computers need to be easier for normal people to use. When they are, when the computer is as simple (or, is) an iPhone, the need for things like anti-virus and defragmenting schedules, and wallpaper policies go out the window.

Desktop support departments are a symptom of misguided use of technology in the workplace. What is the purpose of that Dell on your desk? To assist you in performing whatever task your job really is. Perhaps if you break your tools, you are not really fit to be doing the job in the first place. If you don’t understand your tools, how can you be really good at what you do? Would you hire a carpenter who doesn’t know how to use a jigsaw?

Change is coming. I can feel it, see it on the horizon. Between web services, increased business specialization, and incredibly small and powerful computers, there is a shift in the culture of work brewing.

Alex Payne from Bank Simple sees it

Finally on the technology front, we’re deploying into Amazon’s cloud. Our information security architecture allowed for this even before Amazon announced PCI compliance; their support for these more stringent security standards is a happy bonus for us. Using AWS today is a no-brainer, particularly for an operation of our modest scale and performance requirements.

They are a bank, and they are gong to be using Amazon’s AWS. Independently responsible employees, outsourced data center, and no IT department. How long will your business hold on to the ’90s mentality of what IT needs to be.

I love these videos from Field Notes.

• Field Notes: Making of Steno Book from
• Coudal Partners on
• Vimeo.

If you take a moment to look around the room you are in now, what do you see?Are you surrounded by things that matter, and were built by people who care?Or, more likely, are you surrounded by mass produced, assembly line, importedgoods that you honestly don’t believe will last all that long? I’ve beenthinking about qualityagain, and how it applies to me, to what I do, and how I spend my time.

It started with our washing machine. After seven years, our washing machinelooks like it’s on its last legs. Seven years sounds like a long time to havean appliance, but its really not. When our grandparents bought appliances theywere built to last for thirty years, now they are built to last five. Wecalled up a repair man who stopped by the house to take a look. He was anolder guy, and didn’t bring the right tools for the job, so he just looked atthe machine and told us his view of the model we own. He said that he had justtold a customer that day that his washing machine, same model as ours, was notworth the cost to fix it, and that it would be cheaper and more economical tobuy a new one. As older people do, he lamented the quality of todays machines,so I asked him what was being built today that was as good as the machines ofthe past.

He looked me in the eye and said “There are none.”

The repairman’s view of the world has become so pessimistic that he trulybelieves that there is nothing built for the common man worth buying. This issad, but I believe he’s wrong. I believe it in part because I’m typing this ona MacBook Pro, in my opinion the best computer ever built. The perfect blendof power and portability, but more than that, an example of manufacturingexcellence. Apple is a company that caresabout details, and they are not alone. I believe we may be at the beginning ofa renaissance of sorts, a return to traditionally crafted goods created byartisans and engineers.

These people have inspired me to do better, to be more, to remember theattention to detail that the Navy demanded of me. Take a minute to read thesestories, watch their videos, and see where they are coming from.

Saddleback Leather,Coudal Partners,DODOcase, BlackboxCase, and finally, StaberIndustries.

Staber may very well replace our Maytag washing machine. Its all they do.

We don’t have to live in a world where all of our things are replaceable,where everything around us falls apart after a couple of years of use. Wedon’t have to live in a world where everything has a computer chip and can’tbe fixed if it breaks. We don’t have to live surrounded by junk. But that’swhat the past thirty years of steadily declining quality of goods has taughtus, it’s become a core belief that affects everything we do. We go to work,and sigh, and think, “here it is, another Monday…”, and do what we have to dountil we can go home. Punch the clock, earn a paycheck, who cares if our workis any good? That’s wrong, and it doesn’t have to be like that.

Living in a world of quality goods and services starts with each one of uscaring more about what we dowith our lives, what we spend our money on, and most importantly, where andhow we spend our time. No matter what you do, if it is writing software orchanging oil, I want to encourage you to do your absolute best. Because nomatter what you are doing, you make an impact on the world around you, youmatter because you are here, and when you start to believe that what you domakes a difference, you start to care a little more, and when you care aboutyour work, you make the world around you a little better every day.

So, today, as you go to work, or prepare for the next day, or think about whatmight come next…

be great.

Readability is a subscription based service that allows you to read the text off of websites in a beautiful, clean, consistent interface. Since I started reading the web through Readability a while ago, I’ve appreciated it’s consistency, meaning that one site looks the same as the next, as the next, and the next. Reading articles on the web becomes more about the writing, and less about design. Jumping from site to site can be jarring, distracting, but when using Readability, the entire web can feel like a single book, one with many chapters.

However, I’ve been able to achieve this consistency with Safari Reader (yes, I know it’s built off of Readability), and Instapaper text view (yes, also inspired by Readability). So, the discussion is not about the value of the Readability service, since you can get the same thing for free, but who should pay for the content rendered through Readability. Advertisers… or you?

Do you feel generous?

I feel that I get value from the sites that I visit, the sites that I’ve marked as “Can’t Miss” in NetNewsWire, and knowing how publishing works on the web, I often visit my favorite sites and click on an ad. That click gives the site money, which ensures (hopefully) that the site will continue to be published and continue to provide me with some kind of value. That value might be entertainment, news, opinion, or instruction, but it is worth something to me. Readability is a way to pay for that value, while reading the site in an interface that makes sense.

Paying for the experience is where Readability differs from Instapaper. In my mind, I think about reading with Readability now, and reading with Instapaper later, but the overlap between the two is too obvious to ignore. Evidently the developers of Readability agree. They have been working with Marco Arment to develop a special build of Instapaper that will credit the sites you read through the Readability service.

Readability has a few surprisingly big names behind it. Not only is Marco onboard, but also Frank Black, Jeffery Zeldman, and more. With a team as talented this, I think its important to think through any criticism of the service carefully. I’m sure they have.

Unfortunately, the current quality of the Readability service is a little less than I would expect. There have been several times in the past couple days I’ve hit the Readability keyboard shortcut and was shown this error.

Going back to the site and trying again fixes the problem. I’m assuming that they are making improvements to the Readability back-end continuously, and that this error is a symptom of those improvements. Annoying, but I’m chalking it up to growing pains.

The second problem I’ve found is when using HyperDock to split the screen of my 15” MacBook Pro between Safari and a text editor, Readability pushes the text off the right side of the Safari window. The last six or so characters are off the screen. Stranger yet, when resizing the window smaller, the horizontal scroll bar does not appear to allow you to scroll to view all of the text, the text is just gone. The Instapaper text bookmarklet does the right thing and formats the text correctly for the current size of the window, and provides the normal scrollbar when needed. I’m not sure why Readability doesn’t, but its just a bit disappointing.

I’m hoping that both of these problems are fixed soon.

Ian Hines is a fan, and had this to say:

It’s a wonderful concept. It’s all the things we’ve come to know and love about Instapaper, with the added ability of finally allowing us to easily support our favorite writers.

In contrast, Colin Wheeler is skeptical:

…for me it feels wrong cause it puts the burden on consumers instead publishers who need to clean up their websites in the first place

What Colin is saying is when a site is well designed, there’s no need for Readability. The sites many people are most likely to read in Readability are the sites that do not understand the value of clean design in the first place, sites that are covered with ads and distractions. He makes an excellent point, and one that I think is going to be shared by a lot of people.

Herein lies the rub. No one likes ads, but no one wants to pay for online content. So how can sites that make their money off of page views continue to exist if they do actually clean up their interface? That’s the answer that Readability is designed for. An alternative revenue stream. It is an interesting test.

Also interesting to note is that Readability is not a startup, it’s an experiment by an established company. Arc90 builds and designs internal applications for other businesses. Richard Ziade, the original creator of Readability, has this to say about why Readability exists:

We also believe that quality content is worth paying for. The rat race for page views and impressions has not only led to an oftentimes painful experience on the web, but also to a diminishing of quality content on the web. Today’s reality isn’t anyone’s fault but ours. We won’t hesitate to spend $4.00 for our daily cup of coffee … but we’ll balk at even a modest attempt at supporting the volumes of content we consume on the web. Readability represents an opportunity to show all the great publications, writers and bloggers out there that we care about quality and we’re willing to pay for it.

Readability may turn out to be more important to the future of the web than we can currently see. I’m rooting for it. I’m rooting for less ads, higher quality, and more thought.

Like many who are interested enough in the tech industry to attempt to stay up to date on current happenings, I’ve been struggling with an ever increasing number of interesting sites and feeds. In the past I would categorize the feeds into folders with names like “Blogs”, “News”, “Design”, and “Friends”, but eventually I’d wind up with a folder with a name like “MetaBlogs” or some such ridiculousness. While the multiple folders did help to organize the feeds, they did not help with what I needed; keeping up with what was important.

So, a few weeks ago I gave up on organizing the feeds by type of feed, and instead dropped down to three folders of what the feeds meant to me. My New organization is Can’t Miss, Skippable, and Staging. Three folders, no exceptions.

Can’t Miss

I read everything that comes into this folder, without exception. As such, I’m extremely conservative with the feeds that I allow in this folder. For each site I decide that I do not want to miss a single post, I’m making an agreement with myself, and deciding that my time is well spent reading what they have to say. I have several sources in this folder, but most of them are low-volume personal blogs. There are no high-volume sites in this folder.

Skippable

I like your site, I’ve found what you have to say interesting at some point, or I’ve found some value in your site, but I don’t need to read everything you write. Skippable is where you belong. These are the sites that post twelve times a day, the news sites, hacks, and inspiration. I like you, but it’s not love just yet. Skippable is giving myself permission to select everything, mark it read, and not feel the least bit bad about it.

Staging

This folder is also about giving myself permission, but this time it’s the permission to subscribe to anything I choose. Every interesting blog, news site, or any other feed source first winds up here. Like the Skippable folder, I still don’t mind marking everything as read and skipping whats in here, but from time to time I’ll puruse this folder and see if anything has caught my eye enough in the past few weeks to warrant moving the feed into one of the other folders. Sometimes I read one good post on a site and that’s it, everything else is something I can do without. Eventually that feed will be deleted. If I’ve enjoyed several posts, I might move you up to Skippable. And if I’ve found myself searching for your feed, then it might be time to move it up to Can’t Miss.

I think RSS is still very much alive and kicking, and I’m finally feeling like I’ve got a sustainable system for keeping up with the news I care about. Finally, it’s a great idea to break out of your RSS reader and visit the sites you care about.

A friend was explaining his preference for Google’s Chrome browser the other day, and was using 1Password as an example of why he felt that Chrome was a better designed browser. The 1Password extension in Chrome drops down a menu that looks almost like an iOS window, which he felt was more polished than it’s Safari equivalent. In Contrast the “1P” button in Safari drops down a normal cocoa menu. Funny thing is, I’m fairly certain that I had never seen that menu, simply because that’s not how I use Safari.

Chrome is an excellent browser, and got several things right with their design and philosophy, it’s fast, light on resources, and I love that it separates tabs into their own processes. The one thing I think they got spot on right was the name. The browser is a pane of glass that the web shines through. When the browser starts outshining the web there’s an imbalance. The browser really is just the chrome around the content of the web, which is why I choose to hide all of Safari’s toolbars.

I use Safari because it is a proper Mac app, and so it respects the standard keyboard combos that I’ve become used to over the years. I browse the web almost without touching the mouse. Almost, because I still use it to click links and to scroll down a page, but for the most part I use these keyboard combos:

• ⌘ + [ = Back
• ⌘ + ] = Forward (I don’t use this one much)
• ⌘ + L = Pop open the address bar to enter a URL
• ⌘ + F = Search for text in the current web page, immensely useful when searching for an answer to a technical question in a long newsgroup, mailing list, or forum page
• ⌘ + ⌥ + F = Pop open the address bar with the cursor focused in the search field
• ⌘ + Shift + R = Safari Reader mode, inherited from Readability

And, for 1Password:

• ⌘ + \ = Log in to the current web site
• ⌘ + ⌥ + \ = Pops open a HUD window that lets you quickly select a saved login, then opens a new tab and logs into the web site for you.

I also use bookmarklets fairly extensively, particularly Instapaper and Yojimbo. Safari let’s me use these keyboard combos to trigger bookmarklets I have saved in the Bookmarks bar. These change a bit more than the others, like once every six months or so, but here’s what I currently have:

• ⌘ + 1 = Instapaper Read Later Bookmarklet
• ⌘ + 2 = Readability, for those few times when Safari Reader fails me
• ⌘ + 3 = Bookmark in Go2, something special I’m working on for Go2 1.2 release
• ⌘ + 4 = Share on Twitter, because… well… you know…
• ⌘ + 5 = Archive in Yojimbo

As I said earlier, extensions can drag down a browser, clutter the interface, and generally do bad things. However, there are a few absolute gems that I keep around.

• Shut Up
• YouTube5
• Incognito
• uTube
• Beautifier
• Optimize Legibility
• Beautipedia
• Google Search Cleanup

New windows and new tabs both open with Top Sites, which I think is just a beautiful home page. My current Top Sites are:

• TeuxDeux: All the “task management” I need
• iTunes Connect: To keep tabs on Go2
• Farmdog Software: because I’m really happy with how the design turned out
• This site: Evidently because I’m my biggest fan
• 5by5: I’m constantly checking the site to get to the links in the shownotes. I wish there was a separate RSS feed just for these links, that’d be pure gold.
• FogBugz: My bug tracker and customer support for Farmdog, also hosts Kiln, a Mercurial repository which keeps Go2’s source nice and cleanly revisioned.

Another part of Safari being a proper Mac app is it’s support for the system-wide dictionary. One of my favorite features of Mac OS X is that I can highlight a word, press ⌘ + ^ + D, and see that words definition in a little window below it. I use it constantly.

At this point i’m fairly invested in Safari. I’ve tried other browsers, but Safari is the one I keep coming back to. Omniweb used to be my go to web slicing and dicing tool, but sadly, it’s been leapfrogged. Safari lets me keep everything out of site, and just a quick keyboard press away. Everything I need, nothing I don’t.

It’s snowing again, which means my normal 40-minute commute will now be closer to an hour. I’m actually a bit excited by the prospect of a long drive; it will give me some time to catch up on my favorite podcasts, most of which come from Dan Benjamin at 5by5.

What Dan has built at 5by5 is important. He’s amassing a collection of incredibly smart people, the people who design and build the things we use on our computing devices every day. Dan is an accomplished developer himself, and has been publishing online since the paleolithic age on Hivelogic. The 5by5 interviews are an audio library of intelligence. Inspirational and honest, Dan has a talent for asking meaningful questions that cause his guests to think. What I love most about the 5by5 shows, especially The Pipeline, is that Dan always asks questions along the same subject line: “How did you get to where you are?” and “How can the guy sitting in a cubicle get to where you are now?”.

The answers to his questions are often hard, but always truthful. There’s a theme of hard work and dedication that goes through all his guests. You don’t get to be a successful developer, designer, producer, writer, or any other profession without hundreds of hours of sweat and tears. You don’t get to be a successful small business owner without the guts to take the necessary calculated risks.

I don’t subscribe to all of the 5by5 shows, but here are my favorites:

• The Talk Show: John Gruber, from Daring Fireball, and Dan Benjamin talk about technology, Apple, Star Wars, and all kinds of assorted nerdery. Listening to the Talk Show is like sitting at the pub with a couple of good friends over a pint.
• The Pipeline: The main 5by5 interview show, Dan’s guests are makers, they build what we use. The Pipeline is an inspirational, entrepreneurial show about chasing your dreams, never giving up, and being honest with what your passion is.
• The Big Web Show: Tagged as “Everything Web That Matters”, Dan co-hosts this show with Jeffery Zeldman, author, speaker, designer, developer, and pioneer of web standards. Dan and Jeffery’s guests range from the unknown trying to get tracktion on a start up to Roger Black.
• Back to Work: Merlin Mann brings his unique view on work, attention, and real productivity to the newest addition to the 5by5 network. I’ve been a big fan of Merlin’s for a long time, and I’m happy to see him back in the public again after his hiatus to write a book. As of today, there has only been one episode of Back to Work, but I’m excited to see where this show goes.
• Build and Analyze: Marco Arment, co-founder of Tumblr and developer of the amazingly awesome Instapaper hosts this show about programming, coffee, and doing things the right way. Marco is super intelligent, and equally opinionated, a combination which that for a really great show.
  The 5by5 shows remind me of broadcasting in the 1950s, an idea that I think Dan shares, if the current design of Hivelogic is any indication. One of my favorite parts of each show, strangely, is the advertising. At some point in the show Dan will stop and acknowledge the sponsors, and read a prewritten release. It feels low-tech, and so much more authentic than a gimmicky advertising agency, and far, far more human than a banner ad on a web page. Whenever I hear the ad I imagine a guy in a suit standing at a microphone tossing papers on the wooden floor after each page is read.

My daily drive is easier now because of 5by5, so, thanks.

I’ve loved reading some of the “Past Blast” articles that have beenlinked about in Twitter, so here is my contribution.

Two from Me

On Graduation Day, written after I, finally, finished my bachelorsdegree. A personal accomplishment that means a lot to me.

The Master Craftsman, solidifying the concept of my work as a craft,whatever that work might be.

One from Daring Fireball

The Life, I just wrote about this article, but I think linking toit today is in keeping with the spirit of the meem.

Yesterday, Go2 was one of approximately 1000 applications available on launch day of the Mac App Store. It’s been a nerve wracking experience, but overall I’m pretty happy so far with the way its gone. I’ve been able to identify a couple of last minute bugs and get their fixes incorporated into version 1.1, which I’ve had in beta testing for about a month now.

I’ve created a new version of Go2 in iTunes Connect, and I’m waiting now for Apple to let me know that they are ready for me to upload. Once I do, the new version should take a week to two weeks to be approved, and will then be available in the Mac App Store. Thats being optimistic, but so far my experience with the MAS has been very positive, and I’m expecting for it to remain positive in the future. I won’t go into any numbers, mainly because they are all very small, but I will say that I’ve sold twice as many copies of Go2 on the first day of the MAS than I did for the entire four months of running my own store.

However, simply being in the MAS is not enough, I still need to be better at marketing, and getting Go2 in front of people. Wording in the short explanations of Go2 provided is important, and getting the definition of what Go2 is right, and getting it brief is important. I’ve started marketing Go2 with a tagline suggested by a friend “What the Finder’s Connect to Server Should Have Been”, but I’ve already had at least one person download Go2 thinking that it was an FTP client like CyberDuck or Transmit. It makes me wonder how many others have thought the same thing and simply didn’t say anything. (Note to all non-spammy types: you can always get ahold of me, I’m a friendly guy!)

I’m confident as people use Go2, they’ll see that it’s a great app and really like it. I don’t want to sound like I’m boasting, but I am very proud of Go2 and very happy with how it turned out. There’s still a great roadmap for the future of the app, and the eventual suite of apps I’m planning on building, in which Go2 plays a big part, but for version 1.1, I’m happy with it. The biggest challenge for Farmdog Software right now is getting noticed. I’ll be working on press releases and contacting people I respect and seeing if they are interested in Go2.

I also developed a “Go2 Lite”, a version of Go2 limited to only six bookmarks and intended to simply be an introduction to what Go2 is. My original intention was to submit Go2 Lite to the MAS and see it alongside Go2, one for $4.99, and the other free. However, I tweeted about this and was promptly reminded that Apple recommends against (read: will reject) demo or lite versions of apps, and they recommend hosting demos on developers web sites, like here at Farmdogapps.com. A secondary discussion popped up about needing a free demo version of a five-dollar app, with the general consensus being that it’s not really necessary. Which brings me back to my original problem: press and marketing coverage. Having Go2 Lite in the MAS might have encouraged people to download and try the free version, just to see what it does, then, if they liked it and wanted to use it, they could download the full version. Ideally, Apple would support a limited trial and in-app purchase to the full version, similar to the original Go’s 30 trial period. Is five dollars enough of a barrier for people unsure of the purpose and functionality of the app? I’m not sure, but it might be. It’s a problem I’m working on.

I’m also still waiting for promo codes to allow the original users of Go to upgrade to Go2, but so far Apple has not provided developers with the codes. I’m hoping that they will, soon, and as soon as I have them I’ll be sending them out in email.

I’ve been quiet on the Farmdog Blog, but that’s because I’ve been neck-deep in Objective-C, writing code and getting Go2 ready. Farmdog Software is in it for the long haul, and the MAS is a great step in the right direction for our tiny, independent company.

Thanks for stopping by.