The Simplenote – Notational Velocity Tango

I write, a lot. I write for the day job (lawyer). I write for the night job (blogger). I’ve now even added a weekend writing gig. Needless to say, I’m always looking for a way to write better and faster.

I’ve been aware of Notational Velocity for some time but wasn’t exactly sure what to do with it. Notational Velocity is an open-source project for text junkies. It just holds text but it does it with Panache.

There is no interface to speak of, just a search bar and a list of text files. To make a new entry, you type a unique name in the search bar and press enter. Nothing more. You then have a text field and nothing but your own willingness to procrastinate to hold you back.

After you collect a few (or a lot) of notes you can find them just as easily as you make them. Type a few keywords in the search bar, tab to the one that matches your search, and press return. For years I’ve kept folders full of small text files. Notational Velocity allows me to keep them all in one place and makes them searchable. It is simple, obvious, and mind bending all at once.

Anyway, a few months ago two people from Notational Velocity and the iPhone Simplenote App talked and had one of those “your chocolate in my peanut butter” moments. Put simply, Notational Velocity syncs flawlessly with Simplenote on your phone. This changed everything.

Now I can not only have this unified list of text files, they are in my pocket and editable at any time. Since the syncing function was turned on, I’ve been moving nearly all of my data over to Notational Velocity for this Simplenote sync. I’ve moved data out of Yojimbo and Bento where possible. As just a small taste, Notational Velocity has:

  • My list of notes about judges I appear before;
  • All of the essential data for any active cases I’m working on;
  • A list of trial dates and commitments out through the next two years;
  • Contract form text I may want to re-use;
  • Information concerning my childrens’ schools and activities;
  • Ideas for future blog posts;
  • Half written blog posts;
  • A list of seeds for a garden I am planting with my daughter;
  • A list of dumb mistakes I have made which I will never again repeat;
  • A list of useful Mac terminal commands …

The list goes on.

Last night, this got even better.

Simplenote released its iPad version. So now I can hack at this stuff on my precious iPad and leave the Mac at home a lot more often. I’ve been playing with the iPad version. Indeed I am tapping this post out over my tortilla soup on my iPad.

My biggest gripe with the iPad is file management. Simplenote fixes this problem for text today. All of my text is always in sync over all of my devices. If you work in text, learn the Simplenote – Notational Velocity tango.

OmniGraffle Folder Trick

If you drag a folder on the OmniGraffle application icon on your Dock, you get an interesting dialogue.

After clicking OK, OmniGraffle creates a diagram of your folder structure. Really.

Little things like this make me smile.
Thanks Landya for the tip

iPad vs. Kindle

I used a Kindle for two years. As of today, I’ve been using my iPad for two weeks. I thought I’d share some initial thoughts and impressions between the two units.

User Interface

The iPad interface is intuitive and gorgeous. The Kindle interface can’t compete. While Amazon has made strides, its lack of user interface experience combined with the lack of touchscreen prevent it from matching the iPad. Once you get in the process of actual reading on the Kindle, the interface is fine. Click a button, turn the page. It is everything else that feels like pulling teeth compared to the iPad

About the Screens

There is a lot talk about how much better the Kindle is in direct sunlight. All of it is true. The idea that everyone is bringing their electronic devices to the beech sort of baffles me. I can’t imagine bringing my iPad or Kindle to a place where sand always gets in everything. Reading on a park bench or in the backyard however is a different story. Outside on a sunny day is right in E-Ink’s wheelhouse.

The Kindle simply doesn’t work in the dark. iPad, however, is very low light friendly. The built in brightness slider in iBooks was a stroke of genius. For daily use, both devices look great, but different. The full color screen of the iPad trumps the text clarity of the Kindle in my opinion but to each his own.

The Weight

The iPad a significantly heavier than the Kindle. This could be an issue for some people. If you are used to reading for long stretches holding your book (or Kindle) in front of you, this will be difficult with an iPad. Having used the iPad for several weeks, the weight has not been an problem for me although I have found myself reading it on my side in bed, as opposed to holding it up in the air while laying on my back. I generally read books laying on a table so your mileage may vary on this point. Since my transitions is from a generation 1 Kindle (which had a sharp corner in the lower left side that always dug into my palm), the easier form factor trumps the weight.

The Battery Life

The Kindle runs for days. Because the battery lasts so long, I often forget to charge it and am shocked when I find my Kindle battery is drained. If you are going somewhere without power for several days, the Kindle can keep you occupied. The backlit iPad will not compete with the Kindle battery. However, it certainly holds its own often lasting more than 10 hours in a day. Because I use the iPad as a picture frame at the office (when not working on it) my charge rarely gets below 70%

Unitasker vs. Multitasker

At the end of the day, a comparison between the Kindle and the iPad is not fair. They are entirely different devices. The Kindle is an outstanding book reader. It doesn’t work so well with periodicals (navigation is a pain), and is not much good for anything else, if you like to read books cover to cover, you’ll be happy with the Kindle.

While the iPad is a very capable book reader, it is much more. We are only a few weeks into the iPad and there are already amazing productivity, news, and gaming apps that could never exist on the Kindle. As an example, I use the Instapaper service, a lot. While there are solutions to get your Instapaper documents on a Kindle, they aren’t pretty and they don’t sync. Instapaper on the iPad is, for lack of a better word, luxurious.

Take Away

I’m giving my Kindle to my daughter. Unless you only want to read books in the sun, save an extra month or two and get the whole enchilada.

iPad OmniFocus and OmniOutliner

There has been a little uprising over at the Omni Group forums with some people very unhappy Omni didn’t ship OmniFocus with the iPad launch. I spoke with the Omni Group at Macworld and their reasoning for focussing on OmniGraffle first made sense. We already have a workable version of OmniFocus on the iPhone (which runs on the iPad) and if you make a graphics app like OmniGraffle, how could you resist not tackling it first on such a graphics friendly device?

Regardless, I’m very pleased with OmniGraffle and will be posting a full review soon. OmniFocus is passable (while clearly an iPhone app, it goes very fast on the A4 chip) but I am looking forward to an iPad native version. The good news is the wait won’t be long. The Omni leader, Ken Case, posted on the company blog that OmniFocus will be released in June and OmniOutliner will be out this summer. Both of these apps will be very useful and increase the value of my iPad.

Killing Flash on Your Mac

With all of the talk about Adobe Flash, I’ve become more aware of how it affects my Mac. Ignoring the security risks posed by Flash, the cost of having Whack-a-Mole show up is significant in clock cycles, stability, and battery life. Put simply, I grew tired of the heated Mac, noisy fans, and other tell-tale signs that Flash was having its way with my Mac again. I began looking for solutions.

Because I primarily use Safari, the first weapon in my anti-Flash arsenal is ClicktoFlash. Once installed, ClicktoFlash blocks all incoming Flash animations. When a Flash component tries to load in your browser window, you instead see an empty box with the word “Flash.” If you want Flash to load in that box, you click it once and ClicktoFlash lets it through. If you contextual click it, you can set behaviors, blocking or allowing, on that specific site for the future. It is remarkable how rarely you will find the need to click and let Flash through. ClicktoFlash also strips the Flash out of YouTube.

My second tool for dumping Flash is BashFlash. This menubar application keeps track of how much Flash is hitting your Mac’s processor and, when things get out of control (the app defaults this to 30%), the icon turns red. You can then click on the icon to kill all running Flash.

In the few months I’ve been using ClicktoFlash and BashFlash, my browser stability has dramatically increased. My only regret is not figuring this out sooner.

Getting Dropbox Documents on iPad

Tablet Legal has a good article on pulling documents off Dropbox using iPad Safari. This will work until Dropbox gets its native iPad app out the door. While it is easy getting documents in, sending them back out requires iTunes sync or e-mail. In essence, you are creating another copy of the document which is not ideal. Let’s hope there is a way around this. The first third party developer who figures it out is going to do well.