Wherein my friend Pedro breaks down what we really need in apps, and why the awesome, new apps don't always pan out the way it'd seem they should. Sometimes, we simply don't need something new and shiny.
The best apps solve a real problem, and simplify life. To borrow a catchphrase from Minimal Mac, that's what we believe in.
∞You don't need PowerPoint to make a presentation. Or Keynote. Or any special app, really.
As my first tutorial at Tuts+ Computer Skills, here's the absolute basics of making a presentation. And not just any presentation, but a great presentation.
It's the simple tips to blowing default PowerPoint templates out of the water, using Paint or Paper or even TextEdit, that no one wants you to know.
∞"In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore."
Thorsten Heins, CEO, Blackberry
We're used to breathless reviews of the latest gadgets, written before the rest of us have a chance to even see the gadgets in real life. The reviewer gets a couple weeks - or sometimes just a couple minutes - with a new device, tries out the new features, and declares it a winner or loser in today's market. The next day, it's time for a new gadget. Rinse. Repeat.
It's not bad, per se - I do the same with apps for reviews, and obviously most movie reviews are written after watching the film once. Restaurant reviews? Why, they're typically written after only eating a couple entrées in the restaurant, and hardly can really tell us how everything in the restaurant will taste.
But how about something different: a review of a gadget that's far past its prime, one that's all but obsolete but still in service?
Enter the iPad 1. Blackberry's (now former) CEO predicted that 5 years from now, tablets will be passé at best, so where does Apple's original tablet stand today? The iPad 1 is increasingly a tech dinosaur, shadowed by The New iPad and the iPad Mini - and whatever tablet Samsung is promoting this week. But it still works, and many of us are still using it in 2013. My wife and I still used it daily until she got an iPad 4 earlier this year — and now my Mom used the old iPad 1. It's still working, and is still a game changer for anyone without a tablet today.
Most Techinch Magazine readers will be familiar with the iPad already — you may even be reading this issue on one right now. But I thought there was something to the idea of capturing my thoughts on Apple's first real tablet, an experiment that was inspired in part by Patrick Rhone's review of his iPad 1 late last 2012. So here's my take on the iPad 1.
My first Apple tablet wasn't official a tablet at all, but rather a Newton MessagePad 2000, given to me in, of all things, 2000 after the company he worked for decommissioned them. It was my first Apple product, one that introduced me to the puff of smoke that now graces the OS X dock when you remove icons, and the pull down to trash can animation that was in Notes, Mail, and more until iOS 7. But, for the most part, the Newton was a novelty, one where I kept a journal and used an on-screen calculator and practiced writing in Graffiti since it was far more accurate than the Newton's own software. It was fun, but never something I ever used for all that much.
I was a bit late to the iPad party, getting my iPad 1 in early January 2011 (after I won a giveaway; thanks BraveNewCode!). At the time, the only laptop I had was a PC netbook, which I used exclusively when traveling - it was too annoying for much else. I purposed that the iPad would replace it completely as my on-the-go computer.
And it did that, and more. I was still in college at the time, and ended up typing up numerous essays in Pages, even submitting them thanks to iCab Mobile's support for file uploads (the lack of file uploads is still the biggest frustration I've had with my iPad until now - something that's been fixed for pictures in iOS 6 which the iPad 1 can't run, but is still an issue for iOS overall). At the time, I was both writing for AppStorm and doing tech support for Flow for work alongside college, and the iPad 1 performed remarkably well for both of those jobs. The built-in 3G made getting online on the go insanely simple, something that felt miraculous compared to sharing internet from my old phone then or using a 3G dongle. And I'd easily get 8-10 hours of use out of the iPad even through a full day of work on 3G, something you couldn't beat on a computer until this year's MacBook Airs were released.
The first and most obvious complaint about the iPad is that no one would want to type on the on-screen keyboard all day. But, for myself at any rate, I found I could type far more accurately on a cramped bus with the iPad's on-screen keyboard than I could on my old PC netbook or my newer 13" MacBook Air. The former was simply too small and flimsy, and the latter is large enough to make use on public transit a public nuisance. The iPad, on the other hand, was just the right size to fit in my lap and let me type rather accurately without taking up too much space. And yes, I can touch-type without looking at the iPad screen — it still amazes me that I can thumb blind on my iPhone, but typing on the iPad is equally surprising. And yet, it works.
What also works amazingly well is using an external keyboard. I linked the Apple Wireless Keyboard I used with my Mac to the iPad, and was pleasantly surprised to find that, even from the beginning, iOS supported most of the best text editing keyboard shortcuts from OS X. It was great on the go, but add a keyboard and it almost felt like a "real computer". And, the iPad 1 even was light enough that you could bring along an external keyboard and not weigh more than most laptops — but really, that's unnecessary, because the on-screen keyboard is that good.
Performance with iOS 4 was good enough that I never really thought about the iPad 1's speed — it simply worked. What did bug me from the beginning was multitasking — or the lack thereof. There was basic app switching from the beginning, but that's all it was: basic. iOS 5 bought the multitasking gestures, though, and that changed everything — at least once they were brought to the iPad 1 with the first update. Sure, iOS 5 felt slow on the iPad 1, and most apps would have to refresh when you switched between them. But doing a tiny bit of Safari research then swiping back to your text editor to keep writing was suddenly simple. If they'd only add CMD+tab to the external keyboard support to let you switch apps without touching the screen, it'd almost be as good as a Mac.
And here's something that I really have always loved about the iPad: you can only do one thing at a time. That's frustrating, and yet, it makes you slow down and just do one thing. Turn off notifications, and there's nothing at all to distract you. It's scary almost how much the friction of switching back and forth between apps feels odd, because you're really not getting much done when you're constantly switching back and forth anyhow, even on a Mac or PC. It's good for you, once you're used to it — enough I almost wonder if it wouldn't be good for most of us to turn off tabs in our browsers.
But I digress. So, the iPad 1 for me was a revolution for two main things: it was easier to use on the go, something that was huge for me as I was traveling a lot the year I used it the most, and it made it easier to focus on just one thing at a time.
Now, on a Mac or PC, there's well-known apps for just about everything you'd think of. The iPad, especially at first, didn't have that advantage — or should I say, it didn't have that curse. Instead, developers were able to find their own way with apps. Apple jumpstarted the iPad with the iWork apps, each of which found its way into my personal iPad-only workflow. Pages, as mentioned before, was the perfect Word replacement even in college, Numbers met my needs for lite spreadsheet use, and Keynote is the gold standard for presentations on any platform — assuming you can use Keynote to show said presentation, something I did from the iPad with the VGA connector. No problems there.
In the same way, the built-in email app was a tool I used daily, and with the iPad 1 it was practically the only email app on the platform. But that was ok — it worked great for my needs, and is always a reminder to me that sometimes we overlook the best built-in apps on platforms because we're so quick to want something shiny and new. Safari, also, was nearly enough, but the aforementioned lack of upload support in the iPad 1 made iCab Mobile my browser of choice whenever I needed to upload stuff — something that's still needed on any iPad today if you need to upload more than just images.
For nearly everything else I needed to do, there honestly was an app for that. Screenshot resizing is something I have to do a lot in my AppStorm work, and OneEdit was an app I just discovered in the App Store that worked perfect for that. Same goes for Textastic for code editing and FTP, iA Writer for writing, and more.
Now, that's where the iPad 1 quickly showed its age. It was fun using Garageband and Diet Coda, but both proved almost too much for it. Newer apps just were too much — oddly enough, for a machine that played back iTunes movies more smoothly than my older PCs ever did.
In the end, the iPad 1 today is still a great reading and writing device. For everything Jobs demoed in the original keynote, it's still perfect. It still gets great battery life, still scrolls beautifully in Instapaper, still is amazing for typing out some thoughts in Notes or Pages or iA Writer. Maps never were as awesome as they seemed they would be, thanks to the lack of turn-by-turn directions, and tabs in Safari were only mildly useful at best with the iPad 1's limited memory.
But you know what? It did the things it did better than anything else I'd ever used — and then enabled the awesome experiences of games like World of Goo, tools like the Paper app for drawing, and animated eBooks that my younger siblings loved. And hey — it still works today, something you can't say for so many competing tablets.
That's not bad.
Ever tried to setup an online store? Rather daunting little task, isn’t it? Every major eCommerce CMS is complex and confusing at best, from the newer and simpler solutions like the WordPress powered WooCommerce all the way to full-fledged eCommerce engines like Magento. You can use them to make your own store, but you’ll sure find it frustrating at best to get everything to look and work the way you want. And don’t even talk about hand-coding your own eCommerce system from scratch without at least using a payment solution, unless you really know you can make a fully secure and PCI compliant.
Really, just scratch building your own online store by hand unless you’re really dedicated to the tech side of things. Just make a store on a hosted platform like Shopify or Big Cartel, places that make it easy for sell stuff online for a few dollars a month. You’ll get your own site to tweak as you like, within reason, and it should just work. That’s a ton simpler.
But even that’s likely too much trouble if you’re really not geeky. I mean, you just want to sell stuff: why have to go to this much trouble? So instead, just list your items on eBay and Etsy. There’s a built-in audience at those sites looking for things, so you’re more likely to get discovered anyhow. Seriously.
Wait. Is discovery the magic word? In that case, you might not even want a store at all. Just think for 3 seconds about where you discover stuff at random the most online, and you’re ready to sell.
Apparently, that’s what entrepreneuring farmers in Kuwait did, when they decided to start selling their sheep on Instagram. No, really. It sounds insane, but as Quartz reported, farmers there are taking pictures of their livestock, adding the price and their phone number or WhatsApp messaging ID to the photos, and then posting them on Instagram. Voilà. Without doing anything more than simple photography and editing, they got a full eCommerce store that looks sharp and automatically broadcasts their new products to their customers. What more could you ask for?
Backtrack several months, and my wife was trying to start an online business, selling handmade natural paper and more. She’d sold stuff on eBay years ago, but the fees and frustrations with eBay’s interface and policies made her want to try something new. So, I suggested we just make an eCommerce site and sell directly.
Easier said than done. WooCommerce proved rather frustrating, and the whole website project turned out harder than I would have thought at first. But once you have a site done, how are you going to attract buyers? You can try to get to the top of Google for the things you’re selling, but that’s tough at best — and still, how many people are going to buy stuff directly from a site they just stumbled across from a Google search? For her, eBay became the solution again. It’s filled with people looking for stuff to buy, and if you can put up with their insanely dated interface and listing tools and make enough to scrape together a profit after paying all of their fees, it’s rather simple to make your store a quick mini-success.
Discovery is the crucial element. If people don’t see what you’re selling, you’re out of luck. eBay fit the need by bringing potential customers and sellers together in one place that most people online think to look for stuff. But social networks are even better. Facebook and Twitter are where most people’s attention are these days. So why not sell stuff directly to where people already are?
As it turns out, Facebook eCommerce is already popular in Thailand in much the same way Instagram eCommerce is in Kuwait, but I never thought of it as such. There’s stores here that sell everything from furniture to iPhone cases without more than a Facebook Fan page. They’ll post pictures of their products, and leave more info about them and their prices and shipping policies in the description. If you want to buy anything, you can call them or send them a private message on Facebook, and complete the purchase with a bank transfer. There’s an element of trust since you can see the store’s fans talking in the comments on Facebook, and you know you could raise a ruckus if they didn’t deliver. But they do: eCommerce really works this way.
You’ll still have to build up a fan base, and you’ll still have to make great products. But processing payments and getting a web presence doesn’t have to be nearly as difficult as most of us think. You really just need to tell people the stuff’s for sell, and there’s likely really low-tech options for everything else.
No wonder Instagram sold for $1 billion.
Flash back a decade ago, to early 2004. XP powered desktops are laptops were practically the only computers you’d see, running either IE6 or an early version of Firefox, and more likely than not connected to the internet via dial-up. Gmail wouldn’t be announced until April, the iPod was still black and white, and Fortune wondered aloud if anyone could ever topple Blackberry. YouTube was still a year away, and Netflix streaming wouldn’t be a thing for 3 years. The iPhone was still over 3 years away, and Android even further.
That’s the world Facebook was launched into. A world dominated by desktops and traditional browsers, ones where always-on internet was something new and sharing pictures meant syncing a digital camera and painstakingly uploading pictures hours or days later. It was a slower, simpler time.
And it was a time that Facebook was perfectly suited for, with a slower feed that’d show your friend’s longer, rambling posts they’d have time to type on a desktop, and the flash games and more that made it the one web app everyone used. It ended the reign of Myspace, AIM, MSN Messenger, and strongly displaced personal blogging in one fell swoop. It was unstoppable.
Then 2007 happened, and the iPhone changed everything. Another startup social network with 140 character messages styled after text messages had seemed like a rather unlikely challenger to Facebook’s dominance a year earlier, but now, the information density of short messages made perfect sense with smartphones. The next US election, only one year later, would see Twitter the talk of the town far more than Facebook had ever dreamed of. It was the perfect timing for the most unlikely social network.
Smartphones should have been an equal boon for Facebook, but the desktop-focused social network never felt as natural on smartphones as it had on the desktop. Its purchase of Instagram — the photo social network that, just like Twitter, seemed perfectly suited for a mobile audience – was a final Hail Mary to earn a place in a mobile world. And yet, Facebook itself has increasingly felt like an afterthought for most people: you private message on WhatsApp or Line or iMessage, you share pictures on Instagram, you discover what’s happening on Twitter, and if you’re writing anything of substance, you likely switched back to private blogging or writing on new platforms like Medium.
It's not that Facebook was so bad at sharing your status, or private messaging. It's that it strove to be everything, in an age where we're using one app for one purpose. And then, in trying to be too much at once, it made it impossible to focus on the one thing you where in the app to do: see what others posted.
See, on mobile, information density is where you live or die. Facebook's app shows, at best one and a half posts at once, and often that half is an ad. You're scrolling a full screen each time you want to see another post. And those extra features — private messages, say — are at best 3 taps away. Information density wasn't a problem for Facebook on spacious laptop screens, but when they tried to shrink everything down for the phone, everything got cluttered and crowded, quick.
Compare that to Twitter, the social network that feels much more like a messaging app. In the official Twitter app you’ll usually see 3 posts (though one of those may be a sponsored post), and in 3rd party apps you’ll often get 4 posts at once. Twitter gives you over 3 times the information density in the same screen as Facebook, with far fewer options and confusions than the Facebook app presents at once. Those 140 characters have managed to cram in a ton of info — locations, links, and even pictures of late — that let one tweet tell you so much, while still taking up so little space. Twitter’s focused and information rich, while Facebook retains its desktop bloat.
Thus, the new Paper app. The issues with its name notwithstanding, the Paper app represents the best new shot at making sense on mobile for Facebook since their purchase of Instagram. This time, though, it makes the core service make sense, not just one tiny aspect of it.
The app is slick and polished, enough to catch everyone's attention even in a crowded app market. And, for once, it wins the information density game, even without feeling like it’s cramming as much in one screen as possible. There’s a large banner at the top — itself actually one of the recent posts in your stream — with two and a third full posts visible below. That’s as good of information density as Twitter, if not better, considering how much text and graphics are in that one view. It, for once, has proven that retina displays can actually be more useful than their lower resolution counterparts, with its beautifully rendered full-length-yet-tiny Facebook posts.
Paper makes browsing your Facebook stream — the essential Facebook experience — fun again. Search and private messages and the other Facebook extras are still hidden away behind extra taps, but at the very least it nails the Facebook feed on mobile (and the separate Facebook Messenger app already gives you a one-tap look at your private messages if you'd like that).
And it makes exploring fun again. You likely don't rely on Facebook for your news, but Paper shows that you just might want to, with its curated topic views. They're far from perfect — it'd be much better if it turned your Facebook Likes into curated selections, and then perhaps threw in some of Facebook's recommended picks — but it's the first time I've discovered new sites on Facebook in a long time. Something's right, here.
Best of all, Paper's new card design and simple gestures to flip through content are so unique and yet so obvious once you've used them, it's hard to imagine that they won't be copied as much as Tweetie's then-new pull-to-refresh gesture has been. Facebook's leading mobile design here, and that's a surprising new start.
So, here's to the social network that I'm not particularly fond of. Facebook hasn't been my favorite social network in quite some time — that crown would go to Twitter. And yet, with Paper, I see promise again. At the very least, it's the one Facebook app that feels truly mobile-first and innovative. It's hard for that not to feel exciting.
Your computer, smartphone, and tablet are great, but on their own they can do very little. Your favorite OS might have a ton of features that help you be more productive and make your work environment the way you like it, but it, too, can’t do much on its own. Instead, your hardware and OS together give you the platform to run the software that help you get things done, keeps you entertained, and makes your machines worth buying.
For years now, Tuts+ has been a great place to learn how to use software to create stunning graphics and animations, craft websites and apps, record the clearest audio, and so much more. Its Sublime Text, Photoshop, and web design tutorials are among the very best available. That tradition’s been carried on in new vectors, with Tuts+ teaching everything from craft skills to OS X and Raspberry Pi tweaking. And now, we’re taking that same focus to the apps that make your devices great.
I’d started the new year by mentioning that AppStorm was being shut down, and that I’d be moving on to a new Tuts+ position. Since then, I’ve built a new Software Training team, and am the new Software Training editor at Tuts+. We’re taking the Envato mantra of “helping people earn and learn online” to the productivity apps that can be so confusing to use and yet so essential to business — and to the newer, simpler apps that business think couldn’t possibly counter their “professional” software.
Microsoft Office is still very important, and yet it’s both complex and packed with unknown features, ensuring most people only scratch the surface of what it can do. But reading a article that tells you specific features of an app is hardly anyone’s idea of a good time. And, even as feature-packed as Office is, there’s often ways to do the exact same tasks in other simpler apps, if you have the freedom to use them in your work. So, at Tuts+, our goal will be to guide you through how to accomplish a task with apps, in a way where you can get what you need to get done, done, using the apps you have available. We’ll show how Google Docs and iWork and even simple, Markdown powered tools can be used instead of Office, but we’ll also help you be the most productive with Office when you need to use it.
And that’s only scratching the surface of what we want to cover. You need to get your best work done, anywhere, from any device, and our ultimate goal is to help people learn how to do just that. At the same time, the former Mactuts+ team will continue writing about OS X and hardware, and the new Business Tuts+ will be teaching the business concepts and tips that’ll help you succeed in your work. Together, you’ll be able to learn how to use your devices and the apps on them to do your very best work.
It’s an exciting challenge, and we’re just getting started. So that’s my new day job at Tuts+, one I’m very excited about. Check out computers.tutsplus.com and see what we’re working on — and see the beautiful new Tuts+ hub that makes it easy to find training about anything our entire team has written about. And if you’re excited about the idea of a new style of app training, and would be interested in joining the team, get in touch. There’s a lot still to be done.
∞The global economy is great for everyone who jumps at it.
Somewhere in Europe, a developer decided to purchase an advertisement on an app-centric blog to feature his app, and paid his fee in Euros to the blog’s Australian-based headquarters. That, in part, paid for an article written on that blog, and was paid to writer on that blog in US Dollars — still the common denominator in international transactions. That writer transferred his funds from US-based PayPal account to his Thai bank, and days later pulled out Thai Baht from an ATM down the street from his house. He took that cash to the Scandinavian furniture giant IKEA, and bought drawers and dishes that’d been made in China.
And that’s just a day in my life.
I used to joke that I’m the American who came to Asia to find the outsourced jobs, but the truth is, we’re all working in a global economy. No matter where you work, where you shop, and where the stuff you buy is “from”, odds are a very large percentage of the money you make and use isn’t only made and used locally. In fact, odds are that if there weren’t people in Sweden or Singapore or some unknown village buying the products your company makes or producing some tiny part of the things you buy, your job and stuff simply wouldn’t exist.
It’s not a bad trend, and it’s not even a trend. It’s reality.
We all know how the economy works, on a basic level. We each make something that someone else needs, then we all give each other money for those things so we can each by the other things we need that we don’t make. Theoretically, it all works out.
Realistically, the economy is much more complex than that, but at the end of the day, that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you need people to buy the things you make, so you can buy the things you need. Easy enough, right?
Long ago, that would have meant building a store and selling things in your hometown. If there weren’t enough people in your town to support your widget business, you’d have to find something in higher demand.
But today, the world’s your hometown. You can sell anything you want to anyone, anywhere. The App Store’s everywhere, as is the internet. You can make something today, in Canada, and tomorrow someone in China could buy it. That’s a huge change, one that’s definitely for the better. If there’s not enough people buying your widgets in Hometown USA, there’s surely enough people around the world that’d be interested in your widgets to make it into a business — or at least a small side-venture.
It’s the change that has left Foxconn be the assembly company of choice
Of course, you’re not the only one out there that can do this. There’s 7 billion of us that can sell stuff online. We can all undercut you — a global economy in many ways will eventually mean that wages around the world will have to even out more — or make nicer widgets or ship faster or offer customizations. You’ve got 7 billion competitors, as well as 7 billion potential customers. And what would be a low income for you just might be a very good income for someone on the other side of the globe, so they’d be more than willing to undercut you. Others around the world might be better at the job then you, charging more but offering more exclusive products and services.
We’ve already seen this in action. Factory workers in China’s wages are going up fast enough that global corporations are looking to outsource production cheaper economies, while wages have been stagnant for years in the US and EU. It’ll be a long time until average wages around the world have evened out entirely, but I happen to think that’s exactly the eventual end result. It’s again not bad, per se — it’s great to see parts of the world come out of poverty, and a rising tide should eventually raise all ships — but it’s sure going to take adjustment, and it’s hard to say where the new average will up.
It’s a bigger market, with more supply and more demand than ever. It’s global, interconnected, and flat. But it’s far from dismal.
In fact, it’s so far from dismal that it’s crazy to think how worried people are about the future. Just imagine living in the middle ages as a peasant in the middle of nowhere in Europe. You work hard, sunrise to sunset, on your sustenance farm. Perhaps you can paint or carve, or perhaps you’re a brilliant chef. But even if you manage to find time to pursue your hobby, how in the world could you become world famous?
Now, think back to how many creative, original ideas you’ve come across online over the past year. Things from far-flung places around the world that you would have never possibly seen even a century ago, now can become a Twitter trending topic hours after they’re shared with the world. There simply weren’t trending topics and viral videos even a couple decades ago.
Today, though, anyone can at the very least get their five minutes of fame online. That five minutes of fame could be over a funny picture. Or a pithy statement on Twitter, perhaps. Perhaps it’s a redesign of iOS 7 you made and shared on Dribbble, that gets picked on top Mac blogs and then gets accidentally used by CNN when they’re telling the world about iOS 7.
And that’s what’s so exciting. Not getting on CNN, perhaps, but the fact that anyone, anywhere, can get noticed. That’s your opportunity. That’s all of our opportunity. You’ve just got to do something that can get noticed by enough people to support your work, which is where creativity comes in. Creativity is the absolutely critical part of this new equation.
We’ve seen it with Etsy, the App Store, and the web in general. We see it — perhaps without thinking about it — with the successful indie businesses all around us. Creativity is driving any meaningful change we see today. It’s the crucial element. It’s what makes those intricately beautiful apps worth downloading, what makes the Tesla Model S so genuinely exciting: creativity and uniqueness and ingenuity.
But you don’t have to go invent a new electric car. You can start smaller. You could start a WordPress theme company from Cape Town, or sell handmade chocolates from Hometown, USA. You can design cuter iPhone cases and sell them at your local mall, and on Etsy to the locals around the world that are your newfound neighbors. And when you’re looking for something new, you can expand your own horizons and find creative products from others around the world, things that are nicer than you could have ever found in the stores. You can find a nicer place to stay than the local hotels, thanks to the flatter-world options like Airbnb, or find writing about the things that interest you in indie blogs and books.
Sure, the world’s getting flatter. I happen to think that’s a good thing. And I happen to think that we can all make the very best of it.
It’s sure an exciting time to be alive.
There's no reason to keep everything organized these days.
It defies common sense to be messy. And yet, there's no reason to keep your files insanely neat these days. There's search for that.
If you started your computing life on Windows as so many of us did, you’ve learned by experience in XP that search typically takes forever and hardly ever finds what you need. Even if you know that’s not the case these days, old habits are now hard to break (witness PC users’ backlash to Windows 8’s lack of a start menu, and the fact that most new Mac users’ first inclination is to look for a start button or pin everything to the dock). Plus, no matter where you started computing, any self-respecting tech user has learned to keep their files meticulously organized in folders. You know you can find the homework you finished a decade and a half ago because it’s a dozen folders deep in your Documents.
Awesome. But you can go ahead and throw that conventional wisdom away, quit being so clever, and start saving some time.
See, OS X has had Spotlight search since OS X Tiger was released 8 years ago, and Windows has had half-decent search built-in since Vista was released 2 years later. There’s a ton of search tools for Linux, with the most user-friendly (hello, Ubuntu!) having similar easily-accessible desktop search. In all 3, you can open a search pane with a simple keyboard shortcut (CMD+space on OS X, the Windows key on a PC, Super on Ubuntu) and start typing without moving your hands away from the keyboard. Chances are, you’ll directly find whatever you’re looking for, like magic. Even if you’re away from your computer, if you store your files in Dropbox or another online storage service, you can find your files with the same ease using the service’s search tool.
Once you start doing that by default for everything you ever open, you’ll realize how much quicker it is than clicking through folders to find what you want every time. There’s less for you to remember, less to click through, and more time for you to do what you set down to do instead of spending all your time getting ready to work.
Now search isn’t perfect. It can only find the info you give it. So instead of spending your time organizing files into meticulous folders, think about how you’ll find them again in search.
It’s been a long time since you could only use 11 characters in your file names — for the most part, you can use up to 255 characters in most file names these days and be safe on any computer you use. That’s a lot of space to make your file names give a lot more info than “New Document 2.docx”. You can do better than that — you know it’ll be far easier to find “2013 Filed and Signed Income Tax Return.pdf” by search than it will be to find “scan.pdf” in your Documents/Finance/Government/Tax/2013/ folder. So add more data to your file names — it will only take a second extra, but will save you a ton of time in finding your files later.
Then, there’s the other data in your files: metadata. The date you made the file, the date you last edited it, the place you created it (especially in photos), and so much more. Most search tools will see that info, and by running an advanced search in Finder or Explorer, you’ll be able to quickly find files based on when you made them and more — something that’s especially great for photos and videos that often have cryptic names auto-generated by cameras.
Oh, and don’t forget about folders. I know I said you shouldn’t worry so much about folders, but they’re still useful — especially since you won't want to go rename everything. You likely don’t need a dozen levels of folders, but they’re still great tools for putting your 2013 vacation pictures together in something that’ll be easy to find with search. And even for everything else, there’s still no ready to be way too messy — you’ve still got to backup and move this stuff eventually — so some broad-category folders will go a long ways. You won’t need to go change what you have right now, per se, but you’ll likely end up over time with a lot less folders holding a lot more files — and, thanks to search, you’ll find everything quicker than you ever did with your intricate folders.
But it’s not just folders and files you’ll be looking for — it’s data stored in programs, too. So many programs, frustratingly enough, don’t lend their data to easy searching outside of their own app. Good luck finding what Kindle books are on your computer right from your system search. That’s not all programs, though. Evernote, your email app, your browser history and bookmarks, iTunes, and quite a few other programs (including almost anything that syncs with iCloud) make it easy to find your data right from your universal search — and for those that don’t automatically work, there’s often search plugins to expose their data to your system search. Evernote’s especially nice, since you can save everything there, from web clips to iPad drawings to shots of your Post-it notes, and easily find it from everywhere.
So you’ve stopped looking through Finder for every single file. Hopefully you’ve also started launching apps from search instead of looking through your Start Menu or Launchpad every time. Congrats. You’ve only started to scratch the surface of what you can do with search.
See, even with your built-in search you can also search the web, look up info in other apps on Windows 8, find definitions and do simple math on a Mac, jump directly to system settings, and more. But with a launcher app like the fabled Quicksilver or Alfred for Mac, or Launchy on a PC, you can do so much more. They’re power is their extendability — you can make them do anything you want. Check the weather, find WolframAlpha info without going to a website, do advanced math, start playing an album in iTunes, empty your trash, and so much more right from your search tool of choice — the same tool that’s opening your files and launching your apps will be simplifying everything else on your Mac. I’ve made Alfred scripts to open my default Scratchpad document where I jot quick notes throughout the day, and to make a new Kirby blog post template to simplify posting right from Alfred. There’s so much more you can do, both on your own and with pre-made templates.
So stop looking for stuff. Start searching, and you’ll realize your computer can actually simplify your life like it’s supposed to.
You’re standing in line at the mall, ready to relax for the evening, when you get a text saying your website’s down. Big deal if the site is your personal blog with a couple hundred pageviews a day — it can wait — but if it’s your day job, and the problem’s yours to fix, it’s a big deal.
In my case, it was due to an odd issue where a page permalink starting with the word “feed” will cause that page to redirect to our RSS feed instead of showing said page. And this time, it’d managed to get the whole site to redirect — or at least that’s how it seemed to me from my rushed iPhone testing. The solution’s simple enough — go change the permalink, flush the cache, and everything’s good. Thanks to the marvels of carrying a computer in our pockets these days, it was something I could do in line and still be ready to eat dinner when our queue number was called.
Rushing worked. I panicked, then saved the day, and still had a relaxing evening. Sure felt good.
That’s one time. But for every time rushing works, there’s plenty more stories of times it doesn’t work. Like the time there’s similar server issues, and hurriedly figure out I can’t fix the issues myself — and so take to Twitter to complain about our CDN and its issues. Not such a good idea, especially when it results in a not-so-friendly call from your boss. Or the other time, when I noticed what must be a major issue in another part of our site, file a bug report with our IT team, then email everyone about it — only to notice 15 minutes later after I’d had time to think that the problem was simply my own confusion.
Rushing kills. You can watch the evening news or just pay attention during your commute to notice that in stark reality. But it also kills us in subtler, slower ways. It’s a disastrous way of life, but one we’re so used to, we don’t know how to live without rushing.
Everything rushes. It’s only normal — expected, even — to rush. Rush through the airport to catch your flight. Skip reading the instructions and license agreement and potential side effects because, well, ain’t nobody got time for that. Vote based on talking points since you definitely don’t have time to research every candidate. Drive the max over the speed limit you can get by with, regardless of safety or fuel efficiency.
We live in a culture that tells us we have to hurry in public, one where media makes us constantly feel behind our peer group. We’d better hustle, or we’ll never be as good as those guys. If you frequent entrepreneurial sites and forums like Hacker News, you’ll know the restless feeling that, if you didn’t invent something as important as Linux or raised a couple multimillion dollar funding rounds before you turn 30, surely you’re a failure.
And then, you’ve got the second-to-second rush of notifications and emails, telling you what you need to be doing right now. This is broken, that needs fixed, the other client is waiting on your email since yesterday and surely replying is more important than whatever you’re doing right now.
It’s insanely hard to calm the storm and simply get stuff done — meaningful stuff done purposefully, not just stuff that’s been pressed upon us by the latest notification. Sure, some things are truly urgent and you need to act on them immediately, but even the aforementioned site problem could have honestly waited until I’d had dinner. That would have likely saved me the heartburn from rushing.
So people tell us to turn off the internet, to block certain sites from our hosts file, to use a separate device or desk for creation and communication and consumption. I’ve even recommended trimming down the number of notifications you get in Issue 3, something I’d still recommend. And yet, none of those things are going to change us, to stop us from rushing. You have to change yourself.
I never sincerely believed driving slower would honestly save fuel — and hey, it’d waste time, so why try? But then, when you’ve had one too many accident affect those closest to you, you start to think it’s time to think more about safety. So I gave up my 120km/hr (75mph) ways, and started driving 90km/hr (56mph, or the normal highway speed limit in Thailand). And, wonder of all wonders, that little change nearly doubled the highway fuel efficiency of my 2012 Toyota Vios.
Not rushing worked. Interesting.
Rashly tweeting my thoughts about my day job’s site’s CDN got me thinking about how little I think before I act these days. We’re so used to answering questions on the fly and posting about whatever’s happening around us in real time that we seldom stop to think if that’s what we really should be saying right then. Think, then speak. That’s not just some fable for last generation, it’s something we need more than ever today.
Sure, you might not be the first person to tweet your brilliant thought about today’s news if you wait a minute to think before posting it. But you’ll likely save yourself a headache — or worse — if you realize that tweet wouldn’t look so good on your profile after all. You’ll save time when you take time to find the best solution for problems instead of rushing to fix them with the quickest solution. You might even save some money on gas. And you might be a tad more honest — at least with yourself — if a recent experiment is correct.
So stop, think, and wait. 99.9% of the things we rush to respond to today aren’t life-threatening emergencies — we’re so busy putting out the millions of tiny flames that we couldn’t possibly put out a big fire if we needed to.
The world will wait an extra minute. It really will. You can’t afford another rushed, non-thought-through tweet — at least I can’t.
My first purchase on the Mac App Store was iA Writer, at its original $17.99 price. I’d fallen in love with its iPad counterpart, complete with its sparse white interface, lack of settings and features, and Nitti Light typeface. It was the one app I used for all of my writing, the place where all of my articles started and stayed until they were edited and published.
iA Writer’s limitations were its strengths. It had no settings, no buttons, and only a few keyboard shortcuts beyond the default OS X shortcuts for text editing. You’d open a new document, and all you’d see was a completely blank off-white window with a blinking iOS-style blue cursor waiting for you to write. Open a plain text document, and it’d be the same — just your words, in an easily readable font size, perfect for quick edits or simple reading. And if you really wanted to focus, there was a focus mode that’d dim out everything except the sentence you were currently editing.
That was it. And it was perfect — the closest thing to a digital piece of paper. Its clean design influenced our entire modern generation of writing apps.
iA Writer was the one app I used for all my writing for the longest time — and even after switching to Ulysses III for its great library management, search, and more, I’d still use iA Writer to quickly edit individual plan text documents. It was simple and just worked.
So, when the Information Architects team released Writer Pro, I bought it without even thinking. It promised 2 new typefaces — the sans-serif Nitti Grotesk and the serif Tiempos from Klim Type Foundry — along with new note/write/edit modes and a syntax highlighting, in the clean interface you’d expect from iA Writer. It seemed a no-brainer upgrade to the original.
The core idea behind Writer Pro, as explained in their introductory blog post, is that you start writing with random notes, later combine and expand them into your first draft, and finally tweak and edit your prose before publishing it. To accommodate that workflow, Writer Pro includes four modes — note, write, edit, and read — each with its own typeface — Nitti Grotesk, Nitti, and Tiempos for the latter two, respectively — and text highlight and cursor color — green, blue, pink, and grey.
When you start a new document, or open an existing text file from your Mac, it’ll open in the Note mode and be saved in a Note folder in iCloud. As you’re writing, you can slide the slider in the top right to Write mode, and the interface will switch to the familiar typeface and highlight color from the original iA Writer — and, your document will be moved to a new Write folder in iCloud. Slide to Edit, and the typeface and highlight color will once again change, and your document will move to an Edit folder. The final Read mode is read-only, so everything will look the same as in Edit mode, only this time you can’t edit anything — and, yes, when you switch to Read mode, your document will be moved to the Read folder in iCloud.
The typeface change in the different modes is nifty — I happen to like reading in serif typefaces even though I write exclusively in monospaced typefaces, so that’s perfect for me. The different highlight colors are a whimsical addition that make it obvious which mode you’re in and add a little fun to the app. Neither are a bad addition at all. But moving the files between folders? That’s a surprising change that feels decidedly wrong on the Mac. You can add your own iCloud folders — where, interestingly, documents are opened in Write mode — but if you switch the document to a different mode, boom, it’ll move to that mode’s respective folder. And if you open files from another location, they’ll open in Note mode by default — you can switch them to a different mode, and that file itself will re-open later in the last mode you chose, but all other files will still open in Note mode by default.
So Writer Pro, rather than being a drop-in replacement for any other plain text editor, forces you to rethink your entire idea of document management. You could store your files outside of iCloud and organize them in folders as you want, but you’ll lose iOS integration as its iOS app only syncs via iCloud for now. And without a way to set a “default” mode, there’s no way to make your files open in Writer Pro in your favorite view by default.
But it doesn’t have to be that bad. On iOS, document management is basic at best, and organizing files by their current editing mode is a novel approach, at least, that shouldn’t be too annoying with search. And on the Mac, if you want to maintain some organization of your files while jumping in with Writer Pro’s iCloud document management, you could use tags to gives your files some permanence even as they move between folders seemingly on a whim. That’s a compromise, perhaps, but not such an obscene one as we wait for the perfect iOS+Mac document editing solution.
What’s truly disappointing, though, is that there’s no way to merge documents as alluded to in their launch blog post. Ideally, you write many notes, then combine them in your writing, before chopping out stuff in the edit mode. Ulysses III works perfectly for this by letting you “glue” sheets together — essentially, letting you treat multiple documents as one when writing, and still split them out again later if you want. It’s genius. Writer Pro, however, has no way to merge your notes into a final document aside from copy/paste. Its iCloud folders are a hint of a writing workflow, without the actual pro features to make them truly useful.
Worse still, the Read mode is not any different from the Edit mode aside from its read-onlyness. Your Markdown formatting is still there in plain view, instead of just showing your final formatted text. It, of all the modes, feels the most extraneous. And speaking of Markdown, on iOS, there’s not even live Markdown formatting, even though competing writing apps have had it for months, and no simple way to add Markdown characters to your documents. The workflow, perhaps, holds up the best on iOS, but the editing experience loses the most there.
There’s the promise of potential, and some neat features that — combined with a powerful document and workflow management — could be very cool. But, at least today, they’re not lived up to at all.
That wasn’t the only headline feature of Writer Pro — there’s also the new syntax highlighting. And it’s a neat addition, especially for editing your work. Essentially, it’s the same as the old focus mode — that’s still there if you select Sentence under the Syntax section — but can also highlight nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. Theoretically, that should be a nifty tool to help you see the weak verbs and overused prepositions in your writing — a nice editing tool, but not something you’ll use actually while you’re writing.
And yet, that tool has given Writer Pro some of the worst PR in the history of writing apps. Information Architects called it a patent pending feature that’d taken 4 years or work to develop, and preemptively threatened other developers with lawsuits if they copied it. That’s a sure-fire way to alienate your fans, especially with software patents being so controversial (and, in general, evil) already. Worst of all, the feature isn’t something they invented themselves after all — turns out, other apps like Phraseology had added similar features earlier, and the feature itself was powered by NSLinguisticTagger, a built-in API in OS X and iOS that identifies parts of speech (you’ll see it in use in Mail.app, where it’s used to recognize appointment times and maps).
Information Architects has since withdrawn their pending patent, and promised to not pursue action against apps with similar features in the future, but the entire incident took the magic out of the app. Everything’s a remix — iA Writer borrowed UI cues from WriteRoom and iOS itself, just as other apps borrowed UI cues from iA Writer — and it’s simply bad taste to threaten others from copying your feature. If your app is better and truly original, people will see that. And then, when you’re building on the shoulders of Apple’s built-in APIs, it’s beyond insane to think you could patent what you’d built.
Worst of all, the feature is rather buggy. As you can see above, it highlights Open as a noun, even when it’s quite obviously a verb. That said, it’s still somewhat nice to have around, at least if you want to dig deeper into your text. Just don’t expect it’ll drastically change your writing, and don’t trust it to be fully accurate. And for goodness’ sake, if you’re a developer, don’t make a move like this. You’ll only give people yet another reason not to pay for your software.
Writer Pro is an interesting animal, one that’s rather unsure what it wants to be. iA Writer’s selling point was its simplicity, countered by Byword’s similar interface that also offered 2 background colors and your choice of fonts. Writer Pro’s selling point is its workflow and syntax highlighting, countered by professional writing apps like Ulysses III with their advanced document management, and tools like Marked 2 that’ll do a lot more to help you perfect your documents.
If you want a simple, writing-without-fuss app, the original iA Writer and its competitors like Byword will still do a better job at that. For more features beyond that, there’s a wealth of applications that are far more powerful, from Scrivener and Ulysses III to text editors like Sublime Text on the Mac or Editorial on iOS.
Writer Pro isn’t horrible. It still works great for writing and editing text, and the fonts are beautiful. In fact, if you’re a fan of the Nitti and Tiempos typefaces, this is the cheapest way to get them, albeit only in this one app. Beyond that, though, there’s precious little to justify the $19.99 price tag — especially if you double that for the Mac and iOS editions.
I hope the Information Architects team can surprise us with a reworked document workflow that’s truly transformative. Until then, though, Writer Pro’s only selling point is that it’s a clean writing app with the most bundled premium typefaces.