Mac Power Users Episode 72, Workflows with Colleen Wainwritght, is live. While Colleen and I haven’t met in person (yet), having followed her for so long at Communicatrix.com, I feel like we are old friends. She has a great story to tell and does some pretty cool tricks with her Mac. Get the episode over at 5by5. Also, don’t forget to subscribe in iTunes.

Between the day job and visiting Macworld, I’ve spent a lot of time with application developers over the last several months. I think because I’m a Mac user, I have an idealistic impression of software developers. They are artists. They sweat the details. They work long days making beautiful things for my Mac, iPad, and iPhone that make it possible for me to get the things done that need getting done.

For the software I truly love and use all the time, I still believe this is true. From the smallest one-man shop, like Marco Arment’s Instapaper, to the larger developers, like The Omni Group, there are indeed developers out there who fit this idyllic view.

My revelation the last few months is the large number of developers who don’t work this way. In particular, I’ve bumped into several iOS developers with a different view of software development. I call them “speculative developers”. I always knew speculative developers existed but witnessing them work first hand is something else entirely. They barf out as many apps as possible in the shortest time possible in hopes that they strike gold in the App Store lottery. They run a never ending treadmill with little thought about the user experience except (sometimes) making sure their apps don’t crash. Some of these “developers” don’t know a lick of programming code. Instead, they are fountain of ideas with a group of somewhat ambivalent programmers on speed dial in India, Russia, and other far away places.

I “get” their business plan. There are a lot of apps on the App Store. It’s really hard to get noticed. They think the more apps they submit, the more likely they are to find lightning in a bottle. They are, however, completely wrong. Their chance of hitting it big with two (or twenty) crappy apps instead of one good one is about the same as their chance of retiring with their lotto winnings. Infinitesimally small.

If you want to develop apps, take your time and make something awesome. Make it fast. Make it beautiful. Make something you’re proud of. Don’t make 60 crappy apps: Make one really good one.

I’ve had several people tell me it is hard to find my screencasts out on the Internet. Not anymore.

I’m pleased to announce that I, generally, and MacSparky.com, specifically, is a member of the Read & Trust consortium of writers and websites. When asked to join and I realized I already follow just about everyone at Read & Trust, joining was a no-brainer. In addition to discovering some great writers at Read & Trust, you can also sign up for their newsletter where members write about things important to them. I’m looking forward to contributing and thank the gang at Read & Trust for inviting me to the party.

Dr. Drang adapts an AppleScript to automate forms in PDFpen. And I didn’t think of this because …

I got nothing.

I seem to change camera apps on my iPhone with the same frequency as my socks but I’m really digging Mattebox by Ben Syverson. It has some real nice controls and feels like a traditional camera when you use it. One of my favoribe bits is the virtual shutter slider. When you touch it, Mattebox locks the focus and exposure. You can then compose your shot with focus and exposure locked It acts just like a half-press on a dedicated camera. You then pull down the virtual lever to fire off a shot. Ben did a video explaining the app.

Slavery wasn’t that long ago. I recently talked to a friend whose great-grandfather was a slave. This letter from a former slave to his former master brings the whole mess into focus for me. Former slave Jourdan Anderson’s closing line cinched it for me.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

Kottke has an update that shows Mr. Anderson lived into the 20th century and along with his wife, Mandy, had many children.

Sven Fechner recently screencasted how he goes about using TextExpander with OmniFocus. Sven has an interesting workflow where he uses a task’s note section to track projects. I do something similar inside nvALT, not in OmniFocus. I do, however, use TextExpander all the time for repetitive phrases in OmniFocus. Since Sven threw down with a video, so did I. You can also download my favorite OmniFocus TextExpander Snippets below.

Download the Snippets

TextExpander + OmniFocus from David Sparks on Vimeo.

Since OmniFocus for iPad doesn’t support TextExpander Touch, you’ve got to use Apple’s own iOS shortcut tools. This is where it gets wonky. For reasons beyond me, the snippet cannot start with a period (.), so I start them with an “x”. Moreover, you can’t simply insert the cursor at the beginning of some text and expand. There must be a leading space. So, when adding a snippet before existing text you have to place the cursor, then advance a space, then place the cursor again back a space (there is no key to move the cursor backward), and then fire off the snippet. Tedious.

After pulling down the screencast podcast, I received requests for additional access for a few of the shows. A lot of this stuff is dated but here they are:

• Email Sorcery
• Magic Install Disk
• Smart iTunes Playlist

I’ve been looking at alternatives to Google Search. You should too. Lately, things are getting weird at Google. In short, I think they’ve lost direction. Google’s original thing was simple: fast, accurate search results without a bunch of clutter. That’s changed. Google is increasingly pushing itself into the social media business. I’m not sure exactly when the course correction started but the battleship is most certainly steaming in that direction now with the emergence of Google+ and the “added benefit” of Searching Your World.

Nevertheless, it seems increasingly clear to me that I don’t want to keep giving my information over to the Google masters. Looking at the original three reasons to use Google search (accuracy, clean interface, and speed), it occurs to me that Google search results are no longer as accurate as they give preference to their own services over others. Moreover, Google search results are no longer as clutter-free as they once were.

Then there is privacy. Lots of people are unhappy with Google’s latest revisions to the privacy policy, which makes clear they are sharing your data across all of their services, like it or not. This really doesn’t shock me. I’ve always known that in the Google business model, advertising agencies are the “customer” and I am the “product.” This is why I could never embrace Gmail despite its many benefits. Regardless, this adds a fourth component to choosing the best search engine that didn’t exist when Google was a plucky start-up, privacy. While my search results are pretty milk-toast, I don’t like the idea of someone using them to sell me milk and toast. Google indexes everything.

Adding privacy to the mix, my new criteria for a browser are, in order of priority: 1. accuracy, 2. privacy, 3. Clean UI, and 4. Speed. I list speed last because it is relative. I want something fast but it doesn’t have to be the fastest. So long as I don’t have to check my watch waiting for results I am fine. So where does this leave me with Google? On the outs.

Enter the Duck

I took Ben Brooks’s advice and started using DuckDuckGo a few weeks ago. It reminds me of Google 10 years ago. The search page is really clean and the results are very accurate. I’m guessing it is slower that Google’s search but it isn’t noticeable. Moreover, DuckDuckGo has the kind of security policy that I can curl up with and get comfy.

DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell.

So I’ve been running it two weeks and I don’t miss Google. It displays search results on a clean page, they feel just as accurate as a Google search would without the spam and Google+ bias, it is fast enough, and they don’t track a damn thing. Winner.

Adding DuckDuckGo to My Life

Since Apple has not added DuckDuckGo as a possible default search engine for Mac OS X or iOS, you need to do a little bit of legwork.

For the Mac, you can use Glims to update Safari’s in-app search bar. Since I do >90% of my searches with LaunchBar, I created a custom search template. To create one, display your LaunchBar index (from the Index menu) and select Search Templates. Then tap the Add button and add a new search template for DuckDuckGo pointing at http://www.duckduckgo.com/*

Next time you fire up LaunchBar, type duck, hit the spacebar, and go.

For iOS, I just added the search page to my bookmark bar as Duck. This syncs between my devices using the iCloud bookmark syncing feature and performing a new search just requires me to tap the word. There is also an iOS apps if you prefer.

After using Google search for so long, I was surprised at how easy it was to dump it and how little I miss it. Give DuckDuckGo a try.