JB

Computers are complex tools; designers and developers are always trying to strike a balance between usability and usefulness. I have a theory that over time a computers configuration grows to resemble the mental state of its primary user. Each machine is a unique mix of file and folder organization methods, naming schemes¹, and application choices. Those choices can reflect the level of technical knowledge and values of the user, but only if the user has made a conscious choice in what apps to use.

A user making the right application choice is empowered in a way that she wasn’t before. Suddenly this opaque machine begins to bend to her will and provide results, she feels the machine working with her and not against her. Tasks which were too complicated are made understandable, and eventually she is able to forget the computer and become enveloped in the flow of her work. Sometimes finding this flow is difficult, but it is almost always worth the effort.

But how can someone find the right app? In this sense, especially in the Mac and iOS ecosystems, we have an embarrassment of riches. Even for something as basic as a word processor, there are several choices for all types of uses. Off the top of my head I can list:

• Microsoft Word
• Apple Pages
• LibreOffice Write
• Mellel
• Nisus Writer Pro
• Scrivener
• Ulysses²
• Byword
• IA Writer

The list goes on. If you are looking for a simple text editor or note taker, the list of available apps is even more ridiculous. So, what to pick, how can someone make the best choice for themselves that doesn’t waste their time and end up abandoned in frustration?

This is actually two problems. The first is discoverability, or, how to know that an app even exists. This problem is much harder to solve, because the best apps are not always featured in the app store, and do not always show up at the top of a Google search. Personally, I find that immersing myself in the Apple community for the past thirteen years has helped tremendously. Reputable sites like Federico Viticci’s MacStories, Jim Dalrymples The Loop, Shawn Blanc’s The Sweet Setup, David Sparks’ MacSparky, Jason Snell’s Six Colors, and of course, John Gruber’s Daring Fireball are the best places to look for reliable, and personal, application recommendations. I would avoid trying to search in either the Mac or iOS app stores.

Once you have a handful of recommendations for a certain genre, let’s go back to our list of word processors, it’s time to start whittling down the contenders.

Aesthetics

Like it or not, how something looks will affect how it is used. Look at the screenshots, is the app pleasing to the eye? Can you visualize yourself doing the type of deep work you care about with this tool? If you’ve already installed the app, investigate the view options for hiding toolbars or views. The app should be inviting, a prompt for you to do your best work.

Familiarity

You could also call this usability. On the Mac, most well-designed apps function in a fairly similar way. There are common keyboard shortcuts that should be standard. In your word processor, start typing. Edit a couple of paragraphs. Does shift-option-left arrow do what you expect?³ Does the app not only look like it belongs on the Mac, does it feel like it belongs? Does it function in a way that gives you the impression it was built with care specifically for the Mac?

Reputation

The Mac has been around since 1984, and iOS is coming up on a decade. Developers have had time to build reputations in the industry for themselves and the apps they create. If you like the look and feel of the app, take a few minutes to check into the history of the app and it’s developers. Are they active in the community? Do they have a history of supporting their app? Has the app received any recent updates? Are updates regular? What you want to find out here is if you feel you can trust the app to be around for the foreseeable future.

Trusting that the developers care about their app means that they will put the effort in to adopt new features of the operating system as they are announced by Apple, and that they will not abandon the app so that it eventually stops working. Establishing this trust in your tools is essential in quieting that little voice in the back of your mind that panics when you start using the tool for significant work. If the developer blogs regularly, is active on Twitter or other social networks, and releases updates to their app on a regular basis, chances are that they care enough about the app, and are personally invested in the app enough to keep going.

Data Longevity

Depending on the type of work to be done, how you feel about the longevity prospects may or may not be important. For example, I use OmniFocus for day to day task management, but I’m not especially concerned with being able to review todays tasks in twenty years. However, for our word processor example it may be very important to be able to read and edit the papers you are writing today. Maybe you are in grad school and are looking for the right tool to write your thesis, or you are a stay at home dad and want to record your thoughts for your son. How you look at data longevity is dependent on the job to be done.

Choosing open formats is the easiest answer, but may not always be the best for day to day use. Plain text is the most future-proof, but it’s difficult to work with plain text if you want to include images or media alongside the text. To solve this problem, I’ve made the decision to work with tools that can export to an open format, normally PDF, but not necessarily use an open format natively for day to day use. This way, when I’m done writing that important paper I can hit the export button, or print to PDF, and I have a reasonable safe way to save my important information in a way that should be readable at any point in the future.

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I hope this helps, it works for me. There are probably many more aspects to choosing an application that I didn’t list here. Price and income model come to mind. Let me close with this list of companies that are worth looking into:

• The Omni Group
• Panic
• Bare Bones Software
• Red Sweater Software
• The Soulmen
• Bloom Built
• AgileBits
• Smile
• DEVONtechnolgies
• Literature & Latte

I got back from my morning run today and was sitting on the back porch, enjoying the morning air and the feeling of contentment I get after a great run. I logged my run in Day One, and noticed a voicemail from yesterday that I hadn’t dealt with yet.

Lifeserve Blood Center. I’m a regular donor. Or at least I was till I started working from home. My office, when I had one, was five minutes away from the closest Lifeserve location, so it was pretty easy to run down at lunch and spend an hour donating platelets. Now it’s a half-hour to forty minute drive. I had avoided the call.

Feeling as good as I did though it seemed like a good time to listen to the call. The caller had left an impassioned message, and I was moved once again to do something. I decided to make a day of it to head to town and make this part of the trip. But I couldn’t make the call to schedule an appointment at 6:30 AM, I had to put this into OmniFocus to deal with it at the right time. Each voicemail in iOS has a little share icon, and when I hit that icon I fully expected to be able to drop a link to the voicemail straight into OmniFocus. But OmniFocus was missing.

Thinking I had missed it or did something wrong I went through again and searched, no OmniFocus choice. At this point Federico Viticci came to mind and I opened Workflow.

Workflow was probably at the top of my mind at the moment because I had just used it to log my run to Day One. I use the Today View in iOS to launch a Workflow that asks me a few questions, snaps a picture, and pastes all of it into Day One in my Running journal. So far I’ve got 202 runs stored this way.

I knew Workflow had OmniFocus support, and I knew individual Workflows could be saved as action extensions for inclusion in the share sheet. All I needed was an action that could take any input, create a new OmniFocus task, and add the input as an attachment to the task.

Workflow took care of this in one step. Like Dr. Drang once said, “These embarrassingly simple bits of automation are often the most useful.”

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The object of education is not to fill a man’s mind with facts; it is to teach him how to use his mind in thinking. Henry Ford

Farnam Street has quickly become one of my favorite sites. Well thought out articles about critical thinking and intellectual pursuits.

A few years ago I adopted David Sparks' paperless workflow. I installed Hazel and TextExpander, bought a ScanSnap scanner, and started dutifully scanning all of my paper that came in the mail. I scanned the water bill, my bank statements, and notices from my son’s second grade teacher about upcoming snack days. Over the years, and 2000 documents later, I’ve got a massive database of useless facts.

Never once have I actually needed to go back and look at what my home phone bill was last September. Even less have I needed to know what the schedule was for March in the third-grade classroom. I became so enamored by the ability to save everything that I stopped thinking about what I actually needed to save. I was hoarding.

Like any hoarder, I justified my activities. Why did I spend an hour every other week scanning things into my Mac? Why, for the most basic reason of all… I might need that someday! Eventually my Spotlight searches became nearly useless, as every keyword was littered with results from my OCR’d scans, useless information I didn’t need to keep.

So, today I staged an intervention for myself. I archived everything and started from scratch¹. With the help of stackexchange, I now have a sane plan for what to keep and for how long. Some things will still get scanned, like reciepts for large purchases and the kids artwork that we can’t bear to part with. For the most part though, the paper will come in, live in my drawer for a month or so, and then move on out.

The new system will take some getting used to, but in the end I think I’ll be happier and better organzied for it. There’s no need to keep things I’m never going to look at again, physically or digitally.

Turn it all off.

I’ve deleted the twitter apps from my phone and computer, I don’t log into Facebook anymore, and I’m limiting when I read news outside of the tech news to once a week. It just became too much, I started feeling angry all the time, and reading more news wasn’t making me feel any better about it. There was nothing I could do about how I felt, there were no actions I could take to assuage the pain. The constant flow of new events across the world to be outraged about is too much for anyone to handle.

So, I’ve started myself on a strict information diet. Unless the news is related to Apple or the tech industry, or any of my hobbies,¹ I’m leaving it till Saturday morning after I’ve gone on a long run.

There is plenty of evidence that binging on news is detrimental to your health. In the past few months I’ve noticed my mental state has grown significantly more pessimistic about the state of the world, when in truth my personal circumstances have never been better.²

That’s not to say that the issues in the world right now are not serious, or that I don’t care about the many, many problems affecting our society. I do. I care enormously. I simply can’t let how much I care dictate how I feel about everything else. I’m not cutting myself off completely, I’m simply making a decision for myself about when and how much of the news I’ll allow in. When the time comes for action, I’ll take it.³ I just don’t need to be reminded about what I already know over, and over, and over.

Sometimes the best thing to do for your own mental health is to log off.

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One key to mastery is what Florida State University psychology professor Anders Ericsson calls deliberate practice – a ‘lifelong period of… effort to improve performance in a specific domain.’ Deliberate practice isn’t running a few miles each day or banging on the piano for twenty minutes each morning. It’s much more purposeful, focused, and, yes painful. Follow these steps – over and over again for a decade – and you just might become a master:

Focus and mastery of your chosen craft are topics that I’m deeply interested in, so this article checked all the right boxes for me. In the age of distraction that we live in, where any hint of boredom can be quickly and easily erased by Twitter or Buzzfeed, I believe that the ability to focus, and focus intently for extended periods of time is only going to become more valuable for people who work primarily with their minds.

Each day is an opportunity to either sharpen your saw, or let it rust. Taking action to ensure that you are focusing on the right things at the right time gives you an advantage.

I’d be remiss not to mention Shawn Blanc’s “The Power of a Focused Life” course. I’ve not taken the course yet, it’s a bit pricey, but I’ve followed his work for long enough that I understand where he’s coming from. To do your best work consistently, and to always be pressing the boundaries of your capability, to always be making yourself just a little bit better every day, these are the traits of a master craftsman.

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Have you ever noticed that the secret to all the secrets is that it’s never the easy path?

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However, the main reason was to explain how our actions fit into a larger picture, so that they would seem less random. The point of all this was, and remains, accelerating the advent of sustainable energy, so that we can imagine far into the future and life is still good. That’s what “sustainable” means. It’s not some silly, hippy thing – it matters for everyone.

By definition, we must at some point achieve a sustainable energy economy or we will run out of fossil fuels to burn and civilization will collapse. Given that we must get off fossil fuels anyway and that virtually all scientists agree that dramatically increasing atmospheric and oceanic carbon levels is insane, the faster we achieve sustainability, the better.

Here is what we plan to do to make that day come sooner:

Tesla is the most interesting company in America today.

I’m in the process, a very long process, of switching from Vim to BBEdit as my primary editor. The reasons are long and varied, but boil down to me being tired of screwing around with Vim’s configuration. I do a lot of work in Python now, and I’m using the experience of building and maintaining cloudchain to learn how to navigate BBEdit. Hopefully, someday I’ll be as good here as I was with Vim.

Today I learned that BBEdit ships with support for ctags, best defined by the documentation:

Ctags generates an index (or tag) file of language objects found in source files that allows these items to be quickly and easily located by a text editor or other utility. A tag signifies a language object for which an index entry is available (or, alternatively, the index entry created for that object).

The tag file serves two purposes. First, BBEdit will use the tags to allow you to jump to the point in your project where the selected function was defined. Second, if you copy the tags file to a specific spot, BBEdit will use that file for code autocompletion.

• ⌘- -> Find the definition of the selected function.
• ⌘⎇[ -> Jump back to the point you were at in the previous file (if the function was defined elsewhere).

To generate the tags file, open your project directory in Terminal and run bbedit --maketags. Then copy the resulting tags file to ~/Application Support/BBEdit/Completion Sources/Python/tags. Quit and restart BBEdit and autocompletion and function definition should both work.

Link

He saw Trump as driven not by a pure love of dealmaking but by an insatiable hunger for “money, praise, and celebrity.” Often, after spending the day with Trump, and watching him pile one hugely expensive project atop the next, like a circus performer spinning plates, Schwartz would go home and tell his wife, “He’s a living black hole!”

It’s a shame that the people who need to hear this message the most are the ones least likely to be reading The New Yorker on a regular basis.