Another keynote came and went yesterday, and there was nothing I could do after it was over. I couldn’t order the new iPhone 7, or upgrade my current iPhone to iOS 10. I couldn’t buy the new Apple Watch, and even the new iWork collaborative editing features are in new versions “coming soon”. When I tried to download the new Mario game, the App Store let me know I’d be notified when it was available. After everything was announced yesterday, today I’m wondering what the point of having the event when they did was.

There was once a time when you could download new apps or operating systems as soon as the keynote was over. I specifically remember Steve saying more than once “… and it’s available today”. For the past few years we haven’t been getting that. At best the new features are coming in a couple of weeks, or at worst at some undefined time, presumably so far in the future that they can’t nail down a specific date.

It’s good to ship products when they are ready and not at an arbitrary keynote date, but Apple used to be better at coordinating those times to all coincide. By not having anything available on day one, Apple misses out on the consumer excitement it generates by having these events in the first place. At least, I’m not as excited today as I was yesterday. After they keynote was over if I had the ability to order a new Series Two Apple Watch, I almost certainly would have. After giving it a day to think it over, now I’m not as convinced that I need one. I’ll probably wait for the first few reviews to come in and see how much of an upgrade it is.

Perhaps this is another sign of Apple’s confidence and maturity as a massive global corporation. It’s possible that the internal workings of scheduling all the moving parts is impossible to line up correctly. It used to be we only had the one platform and one operating system, the Mac and OS X.¹ Now we have the Mac, iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, and Apple TV; macOS, iOS, tvOS, and watchOS, as well as iCloud to tie everything together, and the multiple services Apple provides. Now add the complexities of global shipping and coordinating their retail stores around the world, and I can start to make out why it might not all line up the same as it used to.

However, it doesn’t change the fact that the event came and went, and after it was over there was nothing I could do but read about what’s coming.

iPhone 7

I upgrade every two years on the “S” cycle, so on the off years, like this one, I get a glimpse of what’s coming when I do decide to upgrade. Overall the new iPhone seems like a great upgrade. I think they’ve taken appropriate steps to mitigate the uproar over removing the headphone jack by both including an adapter and setting a reasonable price for replacements. I’ve got at least another year with my current iPhone 6S, so by the time I’m ready to upgrade the story won’t be a story anymore.

More concerning is removing the physical home button and replacing it with a 3D Touch area. This is one of those things that I really hope works well, but since I haven’t been impressed with 3D Touch on the 6S, I’m skeptical of how well it’ll work for the most-used button on the phone. How fast will it respond to double-clicking for the app switcher? The exiting 3D Touch app switcher, where you press on the side of the phone is terrible, I never know if I’m about to damage my phone or what amount of pressure to apply. I find it unreliable enough that I don’t use it. Again, hopefully by the 7S model this will be resolved. Better camera, better color, faster CPU, all good things.

AirPods

I already lost them in the couch. Then another pair went through the wash. I’ll probably not be getting these.

Apple Watch Series 2

I wear a fitbit most days, but I run with my phone strapped to my arm, tracking my runs with the Nike+ Run Club app. When the Apple Watch was first announced being able to run without my phone was the first thing that came to mind, but the hardware wasn’t ready yet. The Watch didn’t have the ability to accurately track distance without GPS, so it still needed to be paired with the phone, which defeated the purpose for what I wanted it for. Now that GPS has finally been added I’m seriously thinking about getting one to replace my fitbit as a personal fitness coach and tracker, but I’m going to want to hear how it works for a few other people first.

That the watch is waterproof now is nice, but not a big deal for me. Sometimes I run in the rain, and not having to worry about my phone getting wet would be nice, but I haven’t swam for a few years. I suppose if I ever start training for a triathlon it’ll come in handy.

I use Nike’s apps, and have for about 1640 miles, but that Nike-branded Apple Watch was just plain ugly. No way I’m putting down any money for that band. The pure white Nike band looks acceptable, but still not as nice as the black sport band.

Assorted Nuts

The enhancements to iWork would have been more interesting to me a few years ago when I was in grad school. I had to write a few collaborative papers, and the only way to do it at the time was Google Docs, but I would have much rather worked in Pages. Of course, I still probably would have had to use Google Docs because the other students I worked with weren’t on Macs.

The Mario game looks like fun, I’ll buy it when it comes out, but what I’m really looking forward to is a proper Zelda adventure. We’ll see how far Nintendo’s commitment to iOS goes.

I could have done without Tim Cook singing, but the skit was fine. Better than previous attempts have been.

I quipped on Twitter that Phil Schiller reminded me of the Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz when he started talking about courage. It does take some amount of courage to “push the human race forward”, and if Apple has to do it one port at a time, then I’m on board for the ride. I just think they could have found a better way to come across, a better way to convey their reasoning and the purpose behind the change. I’m not going to miss the port, as long as I’ve got headphones I’m fine, but I use either a bluetooth speaker or the built in speakers more often than the headphones, especially now that I’m not driving to work every day and listening to podcasts in the car.

Yesterday’s announcements were about what was expected, Mario being the notable exception. There was not a lot for me, personally, to get excited about. I’m in the market for a new Mac, so I’m hoping for a refresh next month. Then maybe I’ll get excited.

I started writing this post talking about how I was using DEVONthink, and, as often happens when you write things down, I started thinking critically about how I interacted with the application. I took a folder full of screenshots, walked through some usage scenarios, and checked and double-checked what I was actually doing with the application. Then I exported everything to the Finder.

As of right now, I’m not using DEVONthink. I’ve gone back and forth over this for literally years. I get enthralled with the idea of building this perfect database, where every bit of information I need is at my fingertips, organized and indexed exactly as I want it. Then after a week or two of day to day use I realize that I’ve duplicated everything that I do with the Finder and a handful of other apps in DEVONthink, and decide to simplify.

One of the best things about DEVONthink is that it doesn’t modify your data, it simply organizes it and adds a layer of intelligence to help you manage it. The main selling point is it’s integrated “AI”, a parsing engine that looks for similarities between documents and can present you with connections between topics you may have missed. In this way, DEVONthink is more of an intelligent research assistant than a document management application like the Finder. Unfortunately, over the past several years of going back and forth, using it and not using it, I’ve never found a practical use for the AI.

I wrote earlier this week about how if you want to remember something you should write it down. Personally, I’ve found that I’m not good at this. I’m far more likely to find a way to record information using my Mac of iPhone than I am a notebook, simply because I’ve always got one of the two with me. I am however making a deliberate effort to give myself time to think clearly, stepping away from the computer and staring out the window for a while.

Computers excel at storing and searching information. Humans excel at making abstract connections between disparate bits of information. The best AI in the world can’t help me if I either don’t trust it, or if I don’t understand the connections it’s trying to make. My own brain is far better at making connections if I only give it the materials it needs. In other words, if I actually read and make notes on the information I’m saving. Using several “anything buckets” over the years I developed a bad habit of saving things after skimming through their contents, thinking that I would have it if I ever needed it. In practice though, instead of searching my own personal archive, I would almost always just search DuckDuckGo or Google again. My perfect database becomes a crypt of partially read web archives.

My entire job is managing information. What commands to type in where to get the desired result. Which buttons to click and what code to push to enable my team to get their work done. Every day the Internet is building and rebuilding itself, and my team does their part to help make information available. I even went to grad school for Human Computer Interaction, and learned only that the best way to manage information is “whatever works for you”. Sure enough, what worked for me in grad school was to have a top level folder named “ISU”, and a sub-folder underneath for every class I was in, and then a folder under each class for each assignment, as well as a folder for the videos of all the lectures. The organization was simple and easy to understand.

Again, when I looked through my DEVONthink system, I found that I had recreated everything that the Finder did. I had a database for each major topic or area of life, and folders and subfolders that further refined the topic till I reached the files. For example, my “Research” database contained an “Operating Systems” folder, that contained folders for “Linux”, “BSD”, “OS X”, and “Windows”. My Linux folder contained a folder named “Shared Internals”, and underneath that a folder named “Kernel”. Inside the Kernel folder were documents pertaining to the internals of the Linux kernel.

While I’ve read most of the documents in my database, too many of them I’ve only skimmed. What would be much more useful is a Zettelkasten. A Zettelkasten can be thought of as a Wiki with short articles. The point being that while I’ve been spending a lot of time organizing files, what I really want out of my computer is knowledge.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m still working through all of this. I haven’t found the one true way to organize your data that I can recommend to everyone. What I learned in school still stands, how you organize your data remains up to you. Whatever works best for you is what you should do.

I think it’s good to have original source material on hand, but that source material is only useful if the information it contains is extracted and incorporated into a personal knowledge base. This has been my mistake for too long, to think that simply by saving and skimming over original source material I can increase my knowledge and effectiveness. Tools like Evernote and DEVONthink encourage this kind of digital hoarding by making it easy to save data, but the truth is that there is still no substitute for doing the hard work required to learn. You have to read, reflect, think it through, and write it down. Maybe on paper, maybe not, but without the intermediary step of synthesizing the information you’ve collected into your own personal system, it’s just more junk that needs to be cleaned up.

If you really want to remember something, write it down. By hand.

There is a growing body of knowledge that shows the benefits of writing things down, and how handwriting is better for learning than typing on a keyboard. It’s unfortunate that these studies come after years of schools pushing to get a computer in the hands of every student, moving quickly to replace pen and paper with bits and bytes.

A 2014 article in the New York Times draws a connection between increased brain activity and handwriting.

When children had drawn a letter freehand, they exhibited increased activity in three areas of the brain that are activated in adults when they read and write: the left fusiform gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus and the posterior parietal cortex.

By contrast, children who typed or traced the letter or shape showed no such effect.

Another article in Science Daily from 2011 reports similar results in a separate study:

Mangen refers to an experiment involving two groups of adults, in which the participants were assigned the task of having to learn to write in an unknown alphabet, consisting of approximately twenty letters. One group was taught to write by hand, while the other was using a keyboard. Three and six weeks into the experiment, the participants’ recollection of these letters, as well as their rapidity in distinguishing right and reversed letters, were tested. Those who had learned the letters by handwriting came out best in all tests. Furthermore, fMRI brain scans indicated an activation of the Broca’s area within this group. Among those who had learned by typing on keyboards, there was little or no activation of this area.

This article in Psychology Today references several studies, focusing mainly on the benefits of cursive writing.

Much of the benefit of handwriting in general comes simply from the self-generated mechanics of drawing letters. In one Indiana University study, researchers conducted brain scans on pre-literate 5-year olds before and after receiving different letter-learning instruction. In children who had practiced self-generated printing by hand, the neural activity was far more enhanced and “adult-like” than in those who had simply looked at letters. The brain’s “reading circuit” of linked regions that are activated during reading was activated during hand writing, but not during typing.

One of the focuses of my writing here is about the appropriate use of technology to enhance our lives. There are so many things that a computer can do, it’s difficult to know where to draw the line on what we should do. Can we give kids computers and have them type notes in class instead of writing them down? Sure. Should we? It’s looking like the increasingly obvious answer from the scientific community is no. Just because it’s faster doesn’t mean it’s more efficient.

There continues to be no shortcut to deep learning. To know a subject, you must study it closely. To learn math, you must practice, especially the fundamentals. The best way to take notes during a lecture is by hand, forcing yourself to synthesize the information you are absorbing into a compressed form that captures the essential ideas, pushing your mind to concentrate intently. Then, at night, when it’s time to study the information further, transcribe the notes into your computer, rewording and exploring the topic as you go. Maybe even speak your notes out loud to yourself, engaging more of your senses.

My favorite quote I’ve read in the past few days is from the Science Daily article, where associate professor Anne Mangen says:

“Our bodies are designed to interact with the world which surrounds us. We are living creatures, geared toward using physical objects – be it a book, a keyboard or a pen – to perform certain tasks,”

We don’t fully understand the effect widespread use of computers from an early age is going to have on us. It’s important not to lose sight of the real world as we continue to explore the virtual one we’ve created.

I’ve always been curious. I remember having coffee with my cousin and her boyfriend as a teenager and saying, in my naïvety, that I wanted to know everything about everything, to know all that was knowable. Even then I knew that was impossible, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to know as much about the world as I could. As time went on I started to dive deeply into different subjects, and put off others till I had more time. Now that I’m looking at forty and an ever growing list of things to learn and do, I’m experiencing something new… panic at the thought of running out of time.

I always assumed that I’d have more time later to learn the things that I want to learn. How to play guitar and piano. Ride a horse. Play chess.¹ Paint like Bob Ross. Woodworking. Gardening. Scuba diving. The list goes on. I’ve started wondering about prioritizing these pursuits according to season, time, and, eventually, health. I run today because I want to be healthy enough to keep learning and doing as I get older.

I was thinking about these things over the weekend when I bought new strings for my guitar. I bought the guitar ten years ago with the intention of learning to play, but one thing or another has always come up, and I figured that later was always a better time than now. Last night I was tuning the guitar² and mentioned to my daughter that “someday” I was going to learn how to play it.

“No time like the present!” she said as she left the room.

She’s right. The finger tips of my left hand are sore this morning, because last night I pulled up a YouTube video and started learning how to play. I may not be able to do it, I might not be able to learn everything I want to know or be able to do. I will fail from time to time. But… “if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”³

After all, “life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

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.

fin

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.”

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.

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.

This looks fantastic.