OmniOutliner Essentials

This week Ken Case of the Omni Group announced the upcoming OmniOutliner Essentials. It is a focused version of OmniOutliner that doesn’t have quite all the bells and whistles you get from OmniOutliner Pro but still a wicked useful outlining application. The best part is that they are going to sell this for just $9.99. There is also a price reduction on OmniOutliner Pro. As they work towards the release of OmniOutliner 5, OmniOutliner Essentials is available for public test.

The first version of OmniOutliner I purchased was in a box at a computer store. Those stores are all gone but OmniOutliner continues to evolve.

The 10.5 inch iPad

Today the rumor sites are abuzz with the “delay” of the new iPads. I always find it funny how the press reports something is “delayed” which has never been publicly announced.

Nevertheless, Apple finds itself in that place once again with the rumored 10.5 inch iPad Pro. I’ve not written anything about this new iPad yet but there are many rumors at this point that it’s probably a real thing. This hypothetical iPad gets rid of the bezel and manages to get a 10.5 inch edge-to-edge screen on a 9.7 inch iPad-sized device. I think it’s a great idea.

An edge-to-edge screen makes the standard size iPad all that much more useful for making things in addition to consuming things. It may offer users the best of both worlds with a large screen and portability.

I’ve currently got both sizes of the iPad Pro and find myself using the larger screen for very particular projects–like reading sheet music, editing PDFs, or working on a detailed document in Microsoft Word–while I use the smaller iPad for most of the day-to-day tasks–like managing OmniFocus, answering email, and the like. I’d be curious to see if a 10.5 inch screen is good enough for everything. Either way, if the rumors are right, were not going to hear about this until May or June.

Looking at Tags … Again

Lately I’ve been thinking about making another run at file tagging. It’s kind of funny how these tech issues percolate up. It all started with some receipts that I wanted to save to both client folders and tax folders. I found myself creating duplicates to have them in two places at once, which rubs me, someone who used to save computer data onto a cassette tape, as fundamentally wrong.

Tags would solve that problem. I could barf tags all over the file and then find it easily enough later with any index. Spotlight is good for this. Houdahspot is even better.

Then I had another problem with a backlog of unfiled documents. I’ve got Hazle trained to auto-sort a lot of documents that come my way but between my various careers I also get a lot of oddball one-timer documents that don’t really lend themselves to Hazel rule creation. However, if tagged, Hazel could easily land those documents in the various big bucket folders in my system.

So I’m looking at a hybrid tagging system that will still work with folders at some level but also rely on tags to help sort, store, and find files. There still are a lot of downsides to tagging. It takes extra time and it has very shaky support on iOS. I’m making a list of problems as I go.

I’m only a few days into this new experiment so I’m not going to share results until I dive deeper but I will say early results are promissing. I’ll report back on this next month.

Free Agents 15 – Getting Paid

There’s a new episode of the Free Agents podcast. In this episode we discuss why the sign of a true professional is ensuring that they’re being compensated. Why is getting paid so hard? How do we handle billing? When you’re on your own, you’re the one who has to make sure that the money is flowing in. If you don’t get paid, you won’t be an independent worker for very long.

Too Busy with Brett Terpstra

This week I guested on Brett Terpstra’s Systematic podcast where I talked about being too busy.

MPU 365 – Maps and More

It took us 365 episodes but Katie and I finally got to an indepth look at at the available mapping and navigation options for your Apple gear.

This episode is sponsored by:

TextExpander from Smile Type more with less effort! Expand short abbreviations into longer bits of text, even fill-ins, with TextExpander from Smile.
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Even More iPad Musings

Last month I wrote about the iPad and how I felt, fundamentally, the problem is software. The iPad hardware is plenty powerful. However for people who want to get their work done with an iPad, quite often they run into software-based obstacles that push them back to a Mac or PC.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only person thinking about it. I had a couple long drives the last few days and several of my favorite podcasters are also weighing in on the fate of the iPad. One of the most interesting points was by Myke Hurley who explained last year Apple sold 45 million iPads and 18 million Macs. So last year for every Macintosh Apple sold, almost 3 iPads went out the door.

I think a significant number of those iPads were sold to people that wanted to get work done on them. I’ve talked to non-geek friends who bought iPads to do work on but, over time, gave up on being productive with their iPad for the reasons I explained in my earlier post. In those cases, the iPad did end up a largely content consumption device but that was not by design as much as it was software limitations.

I think Apple has a big opportunity. The iPad could be an important piece of the future of computing. As things stand, the iPad hardware is awesome and the iPad software is too constrained. The first time an iPad user realizes she has to save 20 email attachments to Dropbox one file at a time, she is going back to her Mac. This is a solvable problem.

The trouble is that the iPad’s role diminishes the longer Apple takes to give the iPad the software power it needs. People will move on as Microsoft ups its own hardware game and the general perception of the iPad further solidifies as something to surf on, not work on. The irony of this is that for years, other lawyers used to make fun of my Macintosh computer as a “toy” computer. Apple already knows how difficult it is to break that particular stereotype.

A few years ago I spent a lot of time banging on about cloud services and how Apple needed to get its act together. Right now I feel the same way about iPad software. There’s so much power in there to unlock. Now’s the time.

WWDC in San Jose June 5-9

Today Apple announced that they are moving Worldwide Developer Conference back to San Jose. The move puts WWDC much closer to Apple’s campus and makes it a lot easier on Apple engineers attending and participating. San Jose hotels are also a lot less expensive than San Francisco hotels and will save attendees significant amounts of money.

There are already questions in the community as to whether moving to San Jose will put a damper on the more social aspects of WWDC. Despite the fact that San Jose is a lot sleepier than San Francisco, I don’t think there will be a problem. I tried a case in San Jose a few years ago and spent several weeks in the city. There are nice restaurants and things to do. Moreover, I’ve always felt that the energy at WWDC parties comes from the confluence of Apple nerds way more than anything particular to San Francisco. I hope to see you there.