Category Archives: TechBits - Page 2

Getting It Done… Again?

Posted by on September 15, 2011 Comments Off

Okay, it was about a month ago that I got back on the GTD train. I’m not exactly sure what caused it, but I think was really starting to feel overwhelmed and I had a number of personal projects that were driving me crazy. Strangely I was being pretty productive with my coding projects, but stunningly ineffective with everything else and the stress was getting to me.

Now this is probably my third trip to the GTD dance. I first learned about it 6 years ago, and I thought it was the bees knees. But the incredible attention to detail usually overwhelmed me and I’d give up. But then life would completely overwhelm me and I would come back to it. So this time, instead of being completely doe-eyed that I’d convert everything I started small.

So I started in my personal life. And I started to go through all the todo apps I’d started to collect. I realized that perhaps some software had advanced since I’d last taken a tour through the world of todo apps.

What I needed (or wanted) was something that would let me enter tasks on my Mac, then take them with me on my iPhone. If there was an iPad version that was a bonus. But the goal was to be able to quickly capture information with a full sized keyboard, access to online resources, and then be able to take those lists of tasks with me where ever I went.

I knew the one important thing about Getting Things Done, was that I needed contexts. The ability to look at my tasks from a different point of view. In fact from a very specific point of view, the environment or context by which they would be executed. Having two points of view was critical to effective GTD for me.

The other thing I really wanted was the ability to set a start date for my tasks. One of the best, but hardest to implement ideas I found in GTD was the idea of the tickler file. You stick tasks you can’t act on yet into a future folder. That way you don’t have to think about it until the task comes into a time frame when you can actually do something about it.

For example, every two weeks I have to open the flood valve in our back yard to irrigate our lawn. I want to be reminded the day before but I don’t want to see that reminder in my to-do list every day. Or perhaps there a BluRay movie I want to buy. It won’t go on sale for a few weeks, and it doesn’t really matter which day I buy it, but I don’t want it to show up on my BestBuy shopping list until I can actually buy it. I love start dates. Very few systems seem to support them.

I think it’s important to point out that a start date is not a due date. A due date is something that REALLY has to be done by a certain day. Things like this probably really belong on a calendar, but if you have to complete a task by a certain date (like turn in a homework assignment) having it in your daily tasks is better than sticking it on a calendar in the future where you may forget about it.

The key difference is that a start date constrains WHEN you can act on a task (and when it takes up precious room in your brain) and a due date constrains when a task MUST be completed. After watching an excellent video series by David Sparks of Macsparky.com, I now rarely use due dates. I employ start dates religiously to help manage my mental load of what I’m going to get done and when.

So, where to start?

To Do Apps

I’m looking for todo apps with a Mac client, and an iPhone app. A web based client is okay, as long as it’s easy to use and quick. The apps I looked at were:

Things
Toodledo
Remember The Milk
ToDo
Get It Done

Initially, I completely discounted OmniFocus as being way too complex and expensive. Ironic, as in the end that is the tool I use daily. But I’ll get to that.

What worked what didn’t

Things – I love the look of things, it’s simplicity, and the power of tagging. What absolutely kills things is the lack of syncing. While I can sync between home and work – oh yeah, another critical requirement. Their syncing between iPhone and mac is atrocious. They really need a syncing solution and they don’t appear to be working on one. Plus it’s expensive. Boo Things.

Toodledo – Was absolutely one of the best solutions I looked at. While they don’t have a desktop client, their website in general is excellent and they supported all the features I wanted. Except, their syncing with the iPhone just didn’t work. If you created a project on the web, it didn’t show up on the iPhone and changes on the iPhone didn’t sync back to the web. It was crazy. What’s more, they had SO MANY options for each task, entering tasks on the web felt clumsy. Despite Toodledo’s great features, I can’t use something if it doesn’t work and the sync killed it for me. Rats Toodledo

ToDo and GetItDone Looked promising. I didn’t like GetItDone’s $40 a year subscription fee. I’ve had OmniFocus for 5 years. At $40 a year, would be like spending $200 for an app. Heck, I don’t like paying that for Office. I’m not paying that for a task manager. ToDo looked promising but was slow.

Remember The Milk The winner for me was Remember the Milk. Bar none it had absolutely the fastest mechanism for entering tasks (capture is important) and it was simple. There was an outstanding blog post by a user who explained how he used RTM for GTD and that gave me the handle I needed to start using it. The iPhone syncing worked flawlessly and once I got the idea down I could begin using it.

Next… How I started with RTM.

I finally understand Twitter

Posted by on July 18, 2011 No comments

I have to confess that I never understood twitter. I knew it was SMS (short messaging system) based but why? All the buzz on blogs like lifehacker and gizmodo and engadget all talked about desktop applications, or apps for your iPhone or iPad. I tried it a couple of times, but there was nothing I could do with twitter that I could not do better with a blog, or email. Tumblr is simple and clean and effective. Facebook is way more popular to most of the people I know and easier to understand.

But I did see lots of celebs using twitter… Like their one personal PR channel, but I’m not famous and no one really cares what I have to say in 140 characters or less so what good is it?

Then I tried to send a group text to 24 people…the result? A big fat FAIL! That’s what. You can’t do it. Even more depressing, I got myself caught in tech no mans land. I use google apps for everything. Google supports Microsoft exchange format. iPhone supports Microsoft exchange format. So now I have google apps integrated with my iPhone and it rocks EXCEPT I can’t get my google groups to flow through to my iPhone. This means that creating texting groups on my iPhone means I’m buying an app. Sigh… Really?

And then.. AT&T won’t let you send a group text to more than 10 people. Seriously.

And then I learned something about twitter. You don’t need a computer. In fact you can sign up for twitter right from your phone. And it’s simple.

Now I know why 10947462786468618 people use twitter. It’s the network marketing (re pyramid scheme) of communication. If I create a twitter account with my phone. And my friends create a twitter account with their phone and FOLLOW me. Every time I send a text message to 40404 – everyone who follows me gets that “tweet”.

In short, I can create a text distribution network using twitter that is almost limitless. Forget the PC and the apps, once you connect your phone to a twitter account, you and your friends can use it as a sort of public broadcast system. If everyone in the group follows everyone else then it becomes like a public Internet chat room.

That’s some powerful stuff.

I started using it to keep my baseball team up to speed with important information while on a travel tournament and 90% of the parents signed up. So far everyone has gotten my texts and using retweets I can take messages sent to me and I can share them with everyone else. The only thing I don’t like about it, is that twitter is not private like email. At least I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.

But for me, I can now see how twitter can be used as an awesome group communication tool. Just don’t tweet and drive.

Coda-Coda-Coda-Chameilian

Posted by on June 12, 2011 No comments

And other bad 1980′s puns.

The real title should be

I wish my websites where this simple

Came across what appeared to be a very nifty IDE. If you are making simple relatively stand alone websites Coda is absolutely genius. It’s available through the App Store, but I bought it via download.

What makes it so slick is that it’s a bit of Komodo, Safari, CSS Edit, FileZilla, SVN and Terminal in one package. It’s super easy to flip between Editing, Previewing, Uploading and working with version control all mixed into one. It has those nice little Mac touches (brace matching doesn’t just change the color of the brace, it hits with with a radar blip animation to really draw your attention).

What’s more it updates as you work, so working with CSS, this feels like a really really solid replacement for CSS Edit.

However, for heavy duty app work – I still find myself going back to Komodo, CornerStone, and Firefox.

Why?

  1. Debugging.

    If I need to debug something, Komodo’s integrated debugger is genius and that saves me more time than anything.

  2. Code Folding.

    Komodo supports folding code in the editor so I can quickly compress classes and functions and get a quick overview of my code.

  3. Better Completion

    Coda does a great job of offering completion suggestions for standard calls, but Komodo actually scans your code and most of the time does a great job of making suggestions from the local variables, or class definitions. that makes it a lot easier to use verbose or self documenting variables names.

  4. Batch Checking, Revert, and Compare

    I might be missing something but I couldn’t find a way to submit all my changes as once. Further, I couldn’t find a way to revert to the latest version of a file and I don’t see a way to do a quick file compare. Of course Komodo doesn’t support that last one either, but Cornerstone really makes these things easy to do.

  5. console.log() isn’t good enough

    There are times you just really need a javascript debugger and the one from Apple and Firebug are both fantastic.

  6. Syntax Highlighting Gets Lost

    For historical reasons we work with large files. Coda often gets lost parsing those files and we lose syntax highlighting. That’s disappointing.

All in all if I had a simple (view php file) website that was basically HTML and CSS then Coda is fantastic. I’ll keep working with it, but it’s interesting the things you can learn working with a new tool. What I really do love about it, is that it keeps all of my Site information in one package – Terminal login (so I can check out changes on the server). FTP so I can move files back and forth.

What would really be great of all these features is if Coda would implement code folding and fix the syntax highlighting. I’ll keep running it for a while, but at $99 it’s one of my more expensive tools.

Two Inexpensive Adobe Alternatives For Mac

Posted by on May 7, 2011 No comments

I have the good fortune of being able to use the Adobe Creative Suite and CS5 is a really, really impressive suite of software. However, there are a couple of things about Adobe that make it really impractical for light work. First, it’s really tied down. I have 3 computers I use (one at the office, one at home, and a laptop for the road). Adobe’s license restrictions mean I can’t use that software on those machines. Frustrating, and I’m not really all that thrilled about shelling out even $600 for the learning or student additions. There are other things I’d rather spend $1800 on.

Secondly, Photoshop is slow to open, and Illustrator while powerful, is really, really cryptic. How do I convert a point to a bezier or a corner? Why isn’t it obvious?

Enter Two nifty little programs available through the App Store on the Mac that for my use, really do a nice job.

Acorn.app by FlyingMeat.com for Image processing and
VectorDesigner.app for… you guessed it. Vector Drawing, by TweskerSoft.com

Acorn as they describe it, is a great Max image editor, built for humans. It is simple, easy to use and the introductory price of $30 felt like a bargain. For all the image editing I do (and it’s not a lot), I found this to be very useful and powerful. It’s like a lightweight version of Adobe Fireworks which suits me just fine. Except its easier to use and more powerful that Fireworks because it supports filters.

The second replacement is a neat little package called VectorDesigner. I got this a while back through a MacHeist bundle, and I am very grateful that they continued to provide free upgrades. It is available in the App Store for around $30 and I have to tell you, it feels like a pretty nice deal. The application ran flawlessly for me and I find it much simpler and easier to use than Illustrator.

So for about 1/10th the price you can get some really nice apps that will let you create and manipulate images till your hearts content.

Using Scrivener + TextMate + WordPress

Posted by on April 30, 2011 2 comments

I’m pretty impressed with the simplicity of using Markdown as a writing format. It’s concise, simple and powerful. However there are a few features about using a workflow like this.

First, why not the browser?

Just exactly right now I wanted to change this into a header and in the browser instead of writing, I’m thinking about clicks and menus and markup to make that happen. Even with a great tool like TextExpander for the Mac it’s a distraction. With Markup it’s a few key strokes. That’s why I use Tiddlywiki as my development notebook instead of WordPress. I can simply write FASTER. I probably should take a stab at putting Tiddlywiki’s parser into a wordpress plugin, but who has time right?

Another problem with the browser is speed. Saving, updating, waiting, sometimes on my host can be slooooowww. With TextMate I can get instant previews. So writing on a native app is quicker and more responsive.

But what could go wrong?

The main problem I have with Scrivener + TextMate + WordPress is that invariably as I move through the pipeline I want to make changes. I discover formatting anomolies. Places were I needed to add an extra return, or a spelling mistake I didn’t catch in Scrivener. Then as I read it, I want to make minor tweaks in the text to polish the prose.

The real issue

Is that these changes are not easily transported backward through the pipeline. That means my long term record needs to be handled in the final target, and the first couple of steps are only about initial production.

I suppose I could just use TextMate, but it does not organize nor archive information the way Scrivener does (it’s real strength). So there you have it.

Pros:

  • Scrivener is powerful for organizing text and references
  • Textmate is responsive and quick with formatting and previews

Cons:

  • Changes in the later stages are not easily converted back through the pipeline.

Workflow Scrivener to TextMate to WordPress

Posted by on April 30, 2011 No comments

Markdown Test

I’m writing this in scrivener to then test converting it with TextMate for posting in wordpress.

The general idea here is to use a very simple markdown language that makes writing simpler and easier to read without having to go through all the problems of html conversion. The other idea is that if you only have the plain text, the document is still extremely readable. They use a new acronym called WYSIWYM – What You See Is What You Mean.

I agree that one problem with HTML is that the source is often very, very difficult to read. The interjection of tags and elements can make a document difficult to decipher. Even Scrivener suffers from the over complication syndrome. Literally they create a span for an apple space. Really?
Is that necessary?

References

Here are a few of the websites I found that lead me to try this workflow.
1. Practically Efficient.
2. Ice To the Brim.

The author of Ice To the Brim also uses a really nice piece of screencasting software called: ScreenFlow by Telestream. Looks really impressive.

jQuery and grid960 Edit In Place Table Formatting Problems

Posted by on April 22, 2011 No comments

Because this frustrated me so much, I figured I’d put it out there.

I’m working on an Adobe AIR application using Javascript. Sorry, just can’t get into flash. And AIR is based upon Webkit (Safari).
So I’m using jQuery and I like the 960grid css framework for its simplicity.

So heres what I wanted to do. when a user clicks on a table, I want to be able to edit in place.

The Code “should” be relatively trivial.

Inside my app.js

$("#editTable td").click(editInPlace);

Now all cells, if you click on them are editable. And within the function editInPlace
I have

function editInPlace(e) {
   $(this).html("<input type='text' />");
}

That should do it, except… when I ran that, my TD‘s would DOUBLE in width. No combination of setting the cell width, or the input width would fix this. The cell would always rescale and the input would never correctly fill the table cell.

Turns out, the fix was to remove including reset.css from the style chain at the head of my document:

    <head>
    	<title>Roster Manager 2</title>
		<!-- <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/960grid/reset.css" /> this is screwing up my table formatting! -->
		<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/960grid/text.css" />
		<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/960grid/960.css" />
		<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/south-street/jquery-ui-1.8.11.custom.css" />
		<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/style.css" />
		<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery/jquery-1.5.1.min.js"></script>
		<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery/jquery-ui-1.8.11.custom.min.js"></script>
		<script type="text/javascript" src="js/app.js"></script>
    </head>

Removing that one file seemed to solve the problem. Now my input elements correctly and completely fill the table cell without causing the table to “pop” or reformat. However, there was one thing I needed from reset.css

table {
  border-collapse: collapse;
  border-spacing: 0;
}

This little bit of css gets rid of white space between the table cells.

It’s entirely possible that there is a strange interaction created by the jquery UI css, but the reset didn’t do what I expected.
Now it works as advertised.

CSS is so weird.

Lumens

Posted by on August 4, 2010 No comments

There are a bunch of great resources on the web for what stuff means.  I ran into a bunch of heady explanations for the word lumens, however the one that made the most sense to me came from lightsandknives.com.

In a nutshell, if you’re going to measure something, you need a frame of reference. So people use the candle. Also, we know that light gets dimmer the farther away you go, so to measure how “bright” something is you need to factor in distance. Finally, “brightness” can be effected by the shape of the light. Basically how much light is cast over an area. It makes sense that a beam is more “intense” than a naked candle flame. If you’ve ever had one of those Ever ready lantern / flashlights you know exactly what I’m talking about. In flashlight mode you can’t stand to look at it, but in lantern mode it is comfortable to stare at the naked bulb.

So the three components of measuring how bright a light is are the intensity of the source, how far away you are and how much area is being illuminated. The metric standard is to measure one candle, from one meter away and see how much light is cast on a 1 meter area.

A 60 Watt bulb casts 800 lumens if that gives you an idea.

Scott

iPad Apps Starting To Show Promise

Posted by on June 12, 2010 No comments

When I first got my iPad, I was very impressed with the media capabilities. Watching Videos with NetFlix, Reading the Wall Street Journal, or USA Today and Epicurious is just gorgeous. It replaced my kindle the day I got it. And the games are decent, but there are still limits to what you can do with a touch screen (compared to a controller ) but the visual quality is outstanding.

Still, the one big draw back was creating content. Keyboard support is spotty, and there’s no easy way to flip between apps when you want to clip something from a website to put into a Pages document. Even creating emails felt like an iPhone app and not something you would expect to find on a useful computer with a screen this big. And don’t get me started about pen based input. It’s still a joke.

So I figured that the iPad would be mostly a reader or browser, until I saw Photosplash.

The first real program I used to create anything meaningful on my iPad was MaxJournal. During our vacation I kept a daily journal of what we did and attaching photos to it was cool. The iPad is still a nightmare to get photos on for me because I tied it to the iPhoto library on my home machine. Once you’re out on the road, getting photos onto it was not trivial. I had to upload them to a web page with another computer and copy them down. I know why Apple didn’t put an SD card reader on the iPad. There’s open, and then there’s open. Apple believes in open with their permission. But like Jobs wrote in multiple emails, if you don’t like it buy something else.

However, back to Photosplash. This is a very, very clever application that allows you to selectively color photographs. And for the first time, it’s a creative program that feels way more natural on the iPad than any other platform I could image. The gist of it, is that they made coloring with the tip of your finger feel intuitive, and natural. Like coloring with charcoal, or finger paints. The ability to zoom in – even beyond pixel depth, to smoothly trace a region or a line is just amazing.

In just a few minutes I was able to create these images, photos that would have taken me hours to do in Photoshop, mostly because I’d still have to figure out how to do it.

And for the cost of the program? It was well worth it. Now that I’ve seen it, it seems like it is possible – I can’t wait to see what else they come up with.

iPalm – Old Palm Keyboard works with iPad

Posted by on June 7, 2010 No comments

I have been using PDA’s forever. Going all the way back to the original Palm. Along the way, I was always obsessed with having a real keyboard. So I have a bizarre collection of foldable portable keyboards. Perhaps even more bizarre is that I kept them all. Well one of those turns out to be a Bluetooth keyboard manufactured by Think Outside (now iGo.com).   After a little googling, I found the PDF guide for the keyboard and learned that

<Ctrl> <Left Fn> <Right Fn>

When held together will put the keyboard in discovery mode and low and behold the iPad will actually work with this keyboard!  In fact, it works quite well.  The Windows key acts like the Mac Command button, and the arrow keys and all the other function keys seem to work normally.

That has to be the first time ever that holding onto something for 10 years proved to be useful!

And the included Stand holds the iPad pretty well.

– Scott