The Mighty Monocle

My friend, Darren Rolfe (the brilliant graphic designer who designed the MacSparky and Mac Power Users logos) has a new web comic premiering Monday, The Mighty Monocle. Sounds like just the thing to make Mondays more bearable. Do yourself a favor and subscribe now so you can be there for the beginning.

Home Screens – Joseph Nilo

This week I’m pleased to feature Joseph Nilo (twitter), one of the pioneers of Mac podcasting and a very talented video and audio production guy who co-founded HiLo Media. After having a multiple year e-lationship, I finally got to meet Joseph in person this year at Macworld and I was so pleased that he agreed to share his home screen. So Joseph, show us your home screen.

What are your most interesting home screen apps?

My preferred home screen apps are pretty standard-issue. My least recognizable are certainly DP Control, which is a controller for my audio production software Digital Performer, and Authenticator, which allows me to securely log into my World of Warcraft account.

Additionally I really like Flickpad Pro, which is an ingenious way to view my friend’s Facebook and Flickr photos.
I do have to mention that, for the sake of this post, I had to pull my most-accessed apps out of their respective folders to make it more interesting. I like a clutter-free home page with folders. The dock holds my six most-accessed apps and I use the Spotlight search or just muscle memory to find the rest.

What is your favorite app?

I certainly spend the most time in River of News and [Instapaper]. My last hour before bed at night is spent going through RSS feeds and saving interesting stuff to Instapaper for later reading.
Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Authenticator represents my real-life guilty pleasure: World of Warcraft (I can stop whenever I want to, I swear!). My favorite time-killer is Monopoly HD.
How many times a day do you use your iPad?

I use my iPad quite often. It sits in my edit suite with me (along with a Mac Pro with three displays and a MacBook pro, it certainly is excessive).

The iPad gets used (for work) mostly as a script reader— I keep the script for whatever video I’m editing live on my iPad for quick access. Additionally it comes with me into the voiceover booth as I’ve long-abandoned printing out scripts for the sake of being green. And hating printers.

The tools I use for managing all my work stuff: Dropbox, Evernote, Simplenote, Things, and a Safari link to Google Docs. Plus I prefer the Gmail interface in Safari to the iPad’s Mail app.
And then my iPad becomes a part of my nightly ritual of reading in bed.

What is your favorite feature of the iPad?

Usability. I am constantly amazed that Apple has designed a product that my four-year-old has an almost disturbing mastery of. If she needs to be occupied for a time at a restaurant or on a plane or in the car, I feel better about her interacting and problem-solving in her favorite apps then having just parked her in front of a movie for a couple hours.

Thanks Joseph.

Data Liberation, MultiMarkdown, and OPML

Fletcher Penney has been hard at work on MultiMarkdown 3.0. Perhaps one of the most inspired new features is the ability to work with OPML files. (Don’t know what OPML is? Read this.) Fletcher let me in on the secret early and it is absolutely nerd-tastic.

The Revolution

We are on the verge of something remarkable with our data. Simple data portability is here and it is killing the stranglehold of any one software developer over our digital toolbelts. This option-rich environment is letting people build their own workflows. For a change, the machines are working for us. How did we get here? I see a few reasons:

The Mobile Explosion

With the iPhone, iPad, and App store, Apple has turned the world of mobile computing on its head. Every step of the way, competitors laughed, then feared, then copied. People are digging these new multiple devices and, as a result, there are a lot of operating systems to play in.

Multiple Operating Systems

The whole Mac vs. PC thing arises from one dimension, desktop computing. Those days are over. There are now more operating systems than ever and people are no longer working in just one. I currently use three daily (four if you count the Web). Once the Tablet-aganza gets in full swing there will be even more options. People need to move their data between these operating systems. The text, markdown, and OPML standards are the foot soldiers used by every app to make this happen.

Home-Brew Apps, Inc.

An App stores supporting these new platforms create historical opportunities for small developers . Size doesn’t matter if you have a good idea and execute on it. These little guys are competing where only multi-million dollar companies dared a few years ago. The result is a rich environment of options where ten people can have their favorite App in any category and they are all different.

Cloud Sync

We finally have a way to easily sync files between computers, operating systems, and platforms. There is a reason everyone gets misty eyed when we talk about Dropbox: we remember how hard it used to be to sync. Now that syncing is easy, the data needs to work everywhere.

Just the Beginning

Us nerds are just figuring this all out. Things are only going to get easier and this speaks well for our future computing experiences. No longer will we all need to bend our habits to the foibles of a few applications. Instead we are going to pick the apps that work the way we think and move our data between them without a second thought. I can’t wait.

Dashkards, Keyboard Shortcuts on the Dashboard

If you are having trouble remembering the keyboard shortcuts for your favorite Mac OS X applications, check out Dashkards, a nice little pre-rendered bit of HTML that you can add to your dashboard using the little-known dashboard clipping feature. The site supports many popular Mac OS X apps (including Markdown syntax!) and is a great way to earn your “keyboard sensei” merit badge.

MacSparky.com is sponsored by Bee Docs Timeline 3D. Make a timeline presentation with your Mac.

Meetings vs. Electrons

Several posts have cropped up lately concerning using an iPad in meetings. Ben Brooks is for it. Randy Murray, not so much while Eddie Smith walks the middle path. This raises a bigger question about the role of technology in meetings and since it is hard for me to have a single unpublished thought, here I go.

I specifically recall the first time I confronted the issue of electrons and meetings. It was 1995 and I was talking to a group of clients about some pretty serious troubles. The clients (all three of them) had shiny new Apple Newtons and were making plenty of “bleep, blop, blorg” sounds while I was busy trying to keep them from getting sued into oblivion. I thought the whole thing was ridiculous. As a result of that single event, for a long time pen and paper was my only meeting technology and I skipped the Newton revolution.

A few years ago the Livescribe Pen showed up at Macworld. The Livescribe pen is great in a meeting. It records your pen strokes on its microdot paper letting you create a PDF of your notes. In addition to digital backup, it optionally records your conversation and indexes the recording to the pen strokes. Tap the pen on the page where you scribbled “fanny pack” and the pen plays the recording it took while your boss talked about his holiday.

My note taking skills were never that good. Using the Livescribe pen, I now jot down signposts and instead focus my attention on the other people in the room. Perhaps it is less efficient having to go back and listen (or at least index) later but my peanut-like brain usually gets something out of the review and I know I get more information out of the meeting attendees when I’m focused on them instead of scribble scrabble. So I was happy using the Livescribe pen. My nerdy nougat filling found a way to use a gadget in meetings. Then the iPad showed up.

iPad Notes

For the last month, I’ve been desperately trying to replace the Livescribe Pen with any of the legions of note taking apps for the iPad. We are recording a Mac Power Users episode on taking notes later today and I’m here to report that, after a month of research, none of them really worked for me.

Despite some very smart developers best intents, I didn’t find an app that could keep up with my Livescribe pen. There are a variety of iPad note taking apps. Some of them let you zoom in on the screen and later shrink it. Others will record and let you drop in graphics. When the bullets were flying in a busy meeting however, they all were more distracting than helpful. Drawing words with my fingers just didn’t work. Perhaps it was all that loud music I used to listen to or my inherent lack the fine motor control but, despite my best efforts, everything I wrote came out looking like the half drunken scrawlings of a semi-literate yak herder. I bought a stylus for the iPad, which is kind of nifty for diagraming but useless for words.

The closest I came to making the iPad work as a capture device in meetings was iThoughtsHD. iThoughts makes it really easy to build mind maps and it is wicked fast. When a meeting strays in to brain storming, iThoughts kept up with a pen and paper mind map just fine.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Great Meetings

Although I’m not sold on the iPad to take notes in meetings, I have found a role for it. The iPad serves as an all knowing, all seeing, source of information. Because I’ve incorporated so much of my world into the iPad, I find it really useful as a reference in meetings. If a question comes up about some document, chances are, I have an annotated version of it sitting in GoodReader. Want to talk about a complicated brief? I probably already have an iThoughts outline of it drawn up. Trying to figure out dates, open the calendar. I’ve also got OmniFocus task lists, Simplenote text files, and Safari to answer just about any question that comes up.

A quick war story

I was in one of those smoke filled rooms for an “important” meeting. One guy was doing most of the talking. To protect the guilty, I’ll call him “Blowhard.” Anyway, Blowhard starts going on and on about how the contract says X, not Y. Everyone in the room is raising their eyebrows thinking this Blowhard guy really has it together. Meanwhile I’m drilling into GoodReader and plugging it into the projector. Up comes the contract with my bookmark directly on the paragraph in question, with my highlights showing that, sadly, Blowhard has it wrong. The contract says Y, not X. I even had a little annotation commenting on it. Behold the power of iPad.

The iPad is invaluable as a reference in a meeting. It is so good at this role that using it to take notes gets in the way. I’d rather take notes somewhere else so the iPad is free to be my Hitchhiker’s guide to everything.

The Wall

The problem I’ve always had with laptops in meetings is that they inevitably feel like you are erecting a wall between yourself and the other person. As a result, I rarely use a laptop in a meeting. When I do use them, it is to display a Keynote presentation or an indexed set of PDF documents. Those roles, however, are quickly being usurped by the iPad. If you must use a laptop in a meeting, have other attendees sit next to you or project it so they don’t wonder if you are twittering.

Summarize, Please

To answer the question, I do see a use for the iPad in meetings, but not to take notes. Instead, I use it to make me look brilliant. I’m okay with that.

MacSparky.com is sponsored by Bee Docs Timeline 3D. Make a timeline presentation with your Mac.

Did You Backup Today?

So this morning I had a grand plans to get lots of writing done, drink tea, and recover from my cold. I sat down at the iMac and worked for about 30 minutes when, while I was away from my desk, everything froze. The iMac was locked up and not going anywhere so I rebooted and was greeted by this friendly icon.

Suddenly my Mac wasn’t sure what happened to the start-up volume. That’s bad. After trying a few times, and getting nowhere, I plugged in yesterday’s automated SuperDuper backup and rebooted from it (holding down the ‘C’ key). Everything booted fine from the clone. I then opened disk utility and discovered my internal disc was gone. Just like that. Working one moment, dead the next. Because I am nutty about backing up, this drive failure was a non-event for me. I took the iMac into the Apple Store and it will have a new drive in a few days. There are no lost pictures or destroyed family video. In fact, there aren’t even any lost pointless, yammering, text files. My latest backup was just an hour before the drive cooked itself.

So my question to you is: If your drive failed right now, how would you feel about it?

Blown up hard drive picture courtesy of PC Tech Notes.

Control + F2

How many times have you keyboard nerds been stymied by the need to access a menu? On Mac OS X, click Control + F2 and your in. If you are on a laptop, don’t forget the “fn” key.

MacSparky.com is sponsored by Bee Docs Timeline 3D. Make a timeline presentation with your Mac.

Home Screens – Adam Behringer

This week’s Home Screen post features Timeline 3D developer Adam Behringer (twitter). Adam’s company, BeeDocs, makes the best timeline application available on any platform and I have used it to vex and harass opposing counsel many-a-time. I’ve been fortunate to get to know Adam over the years and in addition to his XCode prowess, Adam is a musician and very nice person.

So Adam, show us your iPad home screen.

What are your most interesting home screen apps?

My iPad dock is a well considered space that I only put my most frequently used applications. Most of those are ones that I could have predicted before I purchased an iPad. However, I wouldn’t have expected that the IMDb app would end up there.
I’ve always liked the IMDb.com website, but I use it much more frequently and in a different way on the iPad. Specifically, I find myself using it a lot while I am watching movies in our home theater. My wife and I are always asking questions like “where have I seen that actor before?” and “this movie has a unique look, I wonder if this is the same cinematographer as …” Now we’ve got those answers at our fingertips.

What is your favorite app?

Reeder, for sure. For the past several years, I have checked my news feed reader as often as checking my e-mail on my Mac. However, the experience on the iPad is way better than a computer.
The fact that I can catch up with about 30 of my favorite websites in about 5 min before getting out of bed in the morning is great. I no longer read news feeds on my computer any more. I’d rather be sitting in my living room to read content than at my desk. If someone reading this interview doesn’t know how an good news reader application can improve their life, they should really try one out. There is no going back.

Twitterific, Instapaper, and Mail are all runner-up favorites for the similar reasons. All exhibit functionality that is a much better experience once it is no longer tied to a desk.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Well, I love looking up classic Muppets clips with my kids on the YouTube app. Definitely check out the Robert De Nirro interview with Elmo.
What is the app you are still missing?

I think the MLB app looks pretty awesome, but I’m not a baseball fan. I wish there was something similar for college football. An app that supplements the experience of watching a game in person or listening to it on the radio would be awesome.

I’d also like to see more apps that connect me to charity and justice organizations in real-time. I think the age of generalized quarterly newsletters for donors are over. I want details!

Can you imagine a mashup between Kickstarter and Red Cross? Something like “here are some real-time photos of a specific building that was destroyed by an earthquake. It will cost $200,000 and 30 volunteers to rebuild it. Contribute your time and or your money by clicking a button. As soon as we reach our goal, you will get real time updates and photos of it being built along with a video interviews from locals.”

Everyone loved watching those Chilean minors being rescued this past year. Though it may be at a smaller scale, there is stuff like that happening all over the world every day and I want to be a part of it. Seems like the iPad / iPhone could facilitate these kinds of interactions both on the reporting end and the benefactor end.

Great idea Adam.

How many times a day do you use your iPad?

I sit in front of my PowerMac all day when I am working… But, I use my iPad first thing in the morning to check my mail and news. I use the iPad in the kitchen to listen to Pandora while I’m cooking. I take it with me (instead of a laptop) when I travel. I always have it on a side table when I am reading or watching movies.

It is basically my computer for everywhere other than my desk. I probably fire it up 20-30 times each day.

What is your favorite feature of the iPad?

Without question, the battery life is my favorite feature of the iPad. Also, the fact that it never heats up. Those two things really give it a feeling of a household object and let you forget that it is high technology.

Back in the day, I owned a Palm V that had a battery life that could make you feel like you never had to worry about it. The iPod shuffle too… I forget if I have -ever- charged it, it seems to so long ago.

To me, it is essential that a portable device has a ridiculously long battery life. If I pick it up and it won’t turn on, I’ll get annoyed and will eventually stop picking it up. Whenever an “iPad killer” is announced, I always look for the battery life specs first. If it doesn’t have 10 hours of battery life, then the software, the keyboard, the apps, and other factors just don’t matter in my opinion. It won’t be a better choice than the iPad if it isn’t ready to go every time you pick it up.

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you change?

If I was in charge … I would try to figure out how to make the iPad more holdable. By that I mean holding it with one hand, using it while standing, and using it while laying down. It probably needs to weigh less, and be less slippery somehow. I am very tempted by the new Kindle just because it seems like a much easier to hold in those situations where you aren’t sitting in a chair.

I also can’t wait for a retina display on the iPad (but wouldn’t give up battery life for it). And, while I am dreaming, I would somehow make it so that fingerprints never show up on the glass.

Thanks Adam!

Full disclosure: Adam’s company, BeeDocs is the current sponsor of MacSparky.com. This fact, however, has nothing to do why Adam is featured here. Adam, like all other Home Screen posters, is featured here because he is awesome.

TextExpander Markdown Snippets and Beyond

Brett is getting it together. His markdown snippets are more elegant than mine, which feel like the coding equivalent of Soviet-era public housing. Either way, I’m going to start pestering Brett to help out with this project and if you are a TextExpander/Markdown junkie, you should too.

This whole explosion of useful snippets resurrects an idea we kicked around at Macworld 2010. Why don’t we make a centralized depository for snippet bundles? There are a lot of nerds out there making some pretty fantastic snippets. Perhaps it is time we started sharing.