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.

A Few Thoughts on iTunes Subscriptions

There seems to be a lot of distress over the fact Apple will be taking a 30% cut for online subscription materials. I can understand why this would make me angry if I published a magazine but (then again) if I published a magazine, I’d probably be too paralyzed with fear over a failing business model to work up any anger. I get that 30% is a big cut but I also think delivering 100 million registered credit card consumers and eliminating the need for printing and shipping has some value.

As a consumer, however, I like what Apple is doing. I am (finally!) able to control how much of my personal information gets to publishers and protect a few shreds of my vanishing privacy. I can easily pay for subscriptions using my existing iTunes account and I can manage my subscriptions in one place. All of this makes sense to me. My gut reaction is, that as a consumer, I prefer this model. Either way we are venturing into uncharted waters here and it will be interesting to see how all this shakes out in a year. I suspect innovators will emerge and make a killing along the way.

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

Macworld Video

There are video clips from some of my Macworld talks:

MacPowerUsers Live Session Excerpts

Unfortunately, the video of the whole session didn’t happen. Our friend, Steven Sheridan, did post some of his Video to YouTube.

OmniFocus Talk

OmniGraffle Talk

The sessions I did at the Omni Booth felt a bit disjointed. Nevertheless, I’ve received several very kind notes so maybe I’m too critical. On a related note, the OmniFocus Ninja screencast is coming along swimmingly and I should have the first segment (Capture) out soon.

Also, the OmniFocus “Snooze” script is courtesy of Dan Byler and can be found here. Make sure to thank Dan for putting this together.

Secure Data in Your Pocket?

The not-so-surprising news this week is that if someone gets physical possession of your stuff, there is a really good chance they’ll get the electronic bits too. Remember to get a separate secured database on those mobile devices (like 1Password secure notes) so there is a second layer. Keyboard lock the phone (not every thief is a hacker) and back up your phone often so you have no hesitation to pull the trigger on a remote wipe if it does go missing. That is all, for now.

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

Home Screens – Brett Terpstra

Brett Terpstra (twitter) is my kind of nerd. He is an ingenious programmer that makes useful stuff all day (like nvALT and InstapaperBeyond). In my mind, Brett is like some benevolent mad scientist who takes things I love (like TextExpander and Notational Velocity) and starts bolting on exgra limbs. Most recently Brett made a Web site, markdownrules, that looks at a URL and spits back a markdown file. I had the pleasure of making friends with Brett at Macworld this year and am happy to report that, in addition to his coding prowess, Brett is a stand up guy. If you haven’t already, keep an eye on Brett because you just never know what he’ll do next.

So Brett, show us your homescreen.

What are your most interesting home screen apps?

  • DuckDuckGo, the official app for the DuckDuckGo search engine, which is also brilliant, but I won’t go into that
  • 1Password is essential to me (full disclosure: I work for Agile Web Solutions)
  • PlaySafe is the simplest, best-looking touch controller for music, and I use it every time I’m in my car
  • Camera Plus Pro is pretty spectacular so far. I just discovered it at Macworld this year, and I’m still breaking it in.

The apps on my iPhone’s home screen are, by and large, not my most exciting apps. They’re mostly workhorses. I’m going to stick with my iPhone for this chat, but I should mention that I’ve found that my iPhone and my iPad have very different apps on their home screen. Each device is better suited to certain environments and types of apps (I actually have games on the home screen of my iPad).

What gets an app onto your iPhone home screen?

It’s a pretty simple system. Apps on the home screen are ones that are either frequently used, or ones that I want fast access to. Shazam is an example of the latter. I don’t use it that often, but when I need it I usually don’t have time for a lot of tapping around. This is doubly true of the Dock, where QuickCal, Flashlight and Camera Plus Pro live. All three are useless if I miss an opportunity (or run into a door) while fumbling for them.

What is your favorite app?

It seems to change at least monthly. I’m fickle. Right now, I’m really loving Trunk Notes and Nebulous Notes (on both iPhone and iPad). Trunk Notes because it gives me a wiki that I can edit, search and browse on my iPhone, iPad and through any web browser, and because it syncs to Dropbox where I can edit in TextMate (and navigate using the Plain Text Wiki bundle), preview in Quick Look and search with Spotlight. Interoperability with my OS X workflow remains a major factor for me, though I’d love to someday be computing entirely on a more mobile platform. Anyway, Trunk Notes is also Markdown-based, and nothing in my geek world really makes me happier than Markdown.

Markdown is also the reason I like Nebulous. It doesn’t bill itself as a Markdown editor, but its ability to run user-defined Macros (including wrapping selected text) is perfect for that. Selecting text and pressing a button to have it wrapped in square brackets followed by a pair of parenthesis? Priceless.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Infinity Blade.

What is the app you are still missing?

I’m an obsessive collector of note-taking apps. To a fault. I’m still looking for the perfect capture tool that has it all in one, but I don’t really know what that would look like, or if I’d like it when I saw it. I like mind mapping, I like using text recognition in photos, and I love plain text notes. Honestly, though, I don’t think I’d love an app that did all of that at once. I just don’t see how it could be good at any of them if it tried to do all of them.

Answering this question actually makes me realize I have everything I want right now, albeit in separate apps. Good deal, though, I get to be surprised when some new and indispensable app drops into my life.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone?

It depends on the day. I use it every day, but some days it’s an alarm clock and an MP3 player (and a flashlight if I go to bed later than my wife). Some days it’s my GPS system, my note and task capture tool, my news, my leisure, my expense and time tracker and my connection to other people. On those days, I probably pull it out of my pocket a hundred times. But who’s counting?

Well, I guess my wife is, at least when we’re eating out with friends.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone?

I think the feature that fascinates me the most is motion sensitivity with the accelerometer and gyroscope. It’s more because of the possibilities than because of any current implementation. It’s added an aspect to everyday app development that’s beginning to change the language of interface design. A few apps have made great use of it, even with the simplest of gestures (I fondly recall the first time I used it in Instapaper). Some apps make a mockery of it, but I think we’ll see more innovative (and appropriate) uses as time goes on. Can we quit with the shake-to-undo thing, though? It’s pretty asinine, even when it works properly.

Anything else you’d like to share?

You ask a dangerous question, my friend. I could probably talk an hour each about every app on my iPhone. For everybody’s sake, I’ll stop there.

Thanks Brett!

The Joy of Text

Why I Love Text Files

Over the last few years I’ve woken up to the problem of how I store my digital words. Up until recently, I just wrote in whatever word processor was the flavor of the month. As a result my digital noodlings are a long stream of computery-type gibberish in various formats ranging from MacWrite to Scrivener.

The problem is, I spent very little time thinking about exactly what it means to put words into word processing files. Relying on these application files for our precious words is a mistake. Standards and preferences change. What your computer can understand today, it may not tomorrow. Below is a simple Microsoft Word document.

Just six words, default settings. Below is a screenshot of the file generated by Microsoft Word for those six words. (Note the scroll bar.)

As you can see, there is a lot more to this file than those six words. This problem is exponentially worse with more complex formatting.

Below is a screenshot of that same document as a text file.

There’s something to be said for the use of plain text files. Text is simple. Text files are easy to read on any computer running any operating system and don’t require any proprietary word processor to interpret. Even more important, text files can be read by humans. Keeping your writings in text makes them digitally immortal.

Moreover, text is internet friendly. The files are small and can jump among connected devices with poor connections like hopped up Disney faeries. It is really easy to work with your text files on any device from anywhere.

Why Now?

So why this sudden epiphany about text files? For me, there were several revalations on this road starting with me adopting Scrivener a few years ago as my primary word processor. This forced me to start thinking about making my words portable. I also adopted the Notational Velocity/Simplenote Tango.

I’m not alone in this. When the Mac development software matured to the point that independent developers could commercially make word processing applications, a lot of us grabbed our life vests and happily abandoned ship from Microsoft Word, looking for software lighter, friendlier, and cheaper.

The watershed event, however, was the iPad. Very quickly after using the iPad, I realized I didn’t need a full blown word processor on my iPad as much as I needed a way to enter, edit, and manipulate text. It had to be seemless and fast. iPad developers largely delivered and the Dropbox API provides the glue to hold it all together. Now we can write 1,000 words on our Macs, add 500 more on our PCs, rewrite the introduction on our iPads from a park bench and do the final proofread over a Taco on our phones, all using text.

Text Worthy?

So what do I put in all these fancy text files? Just about anything. I’ve got hundreds of them containing everything from some of my favorite latin quotes, (Sit vis nobiscum), to travel plans, to legal forms, to half written posts, and half-baked ideas. I also have my current Scrivener projects synced to my text databases.

Would You Like Formatting on That?

Using Markdown, you can add basic formatting to these text files including headings, bold, italic, and links. Markdown is ridiculously easy to learn and there are plenty of resources including John Gruber, the Mac Power Users, and Screencasts Online (featuring some of my own markdown files). The point is that Markdown, originally designed to generate HTML, is perfect for sharing text with formatting. The iPad didn’t exist when Markdown first appeared but it feels custom made for writing in plain text on multiple devices.

Show Me the Way

So here is my text workflow. I write primarily on my Mac but also use a PC at the office and (of course) my beloved iPad and iPhone. Everything syncs with absolutely no effort on my part.

The Backbone: SimpleNote

SimpleNote is a Web based text service that grew out of an iPhone notes app but became much, much more. SimpleNote does nothing more than sync text files with the kind of focus usually saved for teenage boys at the beach. It just works. Think Dropbox for text.

There are free iPad and iPhone apps that give you access to all your text. With a paid account ($20 per year) you can sync your text over to your Dropbox account.

Moreover, there is an open API letting third party developers tie into your SimpleNote database, which leads to Notational Velocity.

The Mac

My SimpleNote client of choice on the Mac is Notational Velocity alt, a Notational Velocity fork by my pal Brett Terpstra. I’ve already written about how this works.

The PC

After playing with the various options, I’ve settled on ResophNotes to sync my SimpleNote data to my Windows 7 PC. It isn’t as good as Notational Velocity, but it works. Another gem for writing text on the PC is WriteMonkey.

iOS

I covered the iOS SimpleNote app above but for longer writing projects, I like Nebulous Notes. There are a lot of text editors on the iPad. Nebulous Notes is my current favorite because it is stable, uses TextExpander snippets and includes a customizable top row for the keyboard and macros. Moving text between SimpleNote and Nebulous Notes can be done with a block and copy or (if you are a SimpleNote paid subscriber) accessing the Dropbox copy of the SimpleNote database.

Those Others

I’ve wrapped myself in the warm embrace of the walled garden and not spent much time outside iOS but there are several SimpleNote friendly text editors available for Android and WebOS.

If your text needs further word processing, do that at the end. Open Pages or Word and copy, format, finalize, and ship. So go ahead. Take the plunge. Embrace the joy of text.

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

The OmniFocus Screencasts

I’m now officially in production on the mother-of-all-OmniFocus screencasts. Note the plural. My initial idea of doing it as one big show isn’t going to work, too long. I’ve got an outline and most of the recording done for the first episode, Capture. It is going to end up being broken into several parts (at least three) and my goal is to have the whole thing done by the middle of March. I’ll be releasing episodes as they are done. If you have comments or questions you’d like covered, send ‘em in.

Supercharge TextExpander

Brett Terpstra has coded some remarkable TextExpander snippets including:

  • the ability to auto hyphenate the clipboard
  • encode e-mail addresses
  • paste markdown referenced
  • auto generate markdown references from your clipboard
  • create lorum ipsum text using text from word lists from Dune, Foundation, Ringworld, Harry Potter, and Doctor Who.

There is a lot more. If you are a TextExpander nerd, go here and then here. Now go!