There’s apps, and then there’s tools like OmniOutliner that are so powerful, they last for generations and are the catalyst for new apps. The first version of OmniOutliner was released in 2000, when OS X was still in Public Beta. The last version — OmniOutliner 3 — was released in 2005, 6 months before Apple announced they’d switch to Intel processors, and 18 months before the iPhone was released. And it was that version that provided the platform for Kinkless GTD, a set of scripts that’d turn OmniOutliner into a full-featured task manager and provide the inspiration for OmniFocus.
An app that’s powerful and flexible enough to be turned into a whole extra app? That’s more than your common app.
And yet, in a world where tech writing is dominated solely by the newest apps in town, it’s little wonder that OmniOutliner nearly fell off the radar — aside from its iPad apps — over the last few years. OmniOutliner used to be the tool everyone was using in the latest scripts, until it got old enough to just get ignored. In the mean time, we got more interested in Markdown-powered writing apps, and rich-text powered outlines started to seem old-school. Plus, who’s really that interested in writing outlines, when they seem to only stand for the worst of schoolwork you left behind when you graduated?
Forget everything you think about outlines, and rich text, and Mac apps. Here’s what’s great about OmniOutliner, what’s even better in its fourth version, and why you should be using it already.
So Much More Than an Outline
At its very basics, OmniOutliner is a great app for writing detailed outlines. Type in your points, tap to start making sub-points or ⌘[ to de-indent a sub-point, and click the handles on the left of any point to drag-and-drop it to a different position. Throw in the option to add notes to any point via the note button on the left or the ⌘’ shortcut, and options to open or hide sections of outlines with click on a little triangle icon on the left, and you’ve got a powerful if standard outlining tool.
Dig a little deeper, and you’ll find more to love for raw outlining. There’s a convenient Focus option in the right-click menu on any item, so you can focus on just a subset of your list without being distracted by the full outline. Combine that with the auto-generated Table of Contents in the top left and its search tool, and you can keep a ton of data in one OmniOutliner document without getting lost. And noticed I said data? Your OmniOutliner documents can have far more than just text — there’s an audio recorder built-in so you can record a lecture and write notes at the same time, and you can drag any picture, audio, video, or any other file you want to keep track of right into an outline where you can view it right in OmniOutliner or open it in its appropriate app.
So now you’ve got outlines that are easy to navigate, can be easily used to manage tons of text and anything else you want to keep together. But it doesn’t stop there. The things that make OmniOutliner different are its theming tools — which make it incredibly easy to make a beautiful document you’ll want to write in — and its multiple columns.
Themes, first off, got the most attention in v.4’s updates. There’s a redesigned dynamic inspector that makes it simple to tweak your fonts, colors, and more, and a new left sidebar that lets you tweak your document section styles and quickly change styles with your function keys. There’s a new set of built-in templates, including a very nice Solarized Light template, and you can in 2 clicks switch your document to a new template from your library. That template library, it should be mentioned, also is used as the new “Resources Browser” that shows your recent documents so you can quickly open them — something that almost feels like an iCloud-style document browser to keep your OmniOutliner files close at hand, even though they can be saved anywhere.
And then, there’s the columns. Columns add a slight hint of spreadsheet functionality to OmniOutliner — you can add as many columns as you want, which can contain just standard text, or they can contain numbers, dates, time durations, checkboxes, or a pop-up list of options. That’s the secret to how it so easily powered the original OmniFocus concept — there’s checkboxes to mark off tasks, extra fields for tags, and due dates in yet another column. And so, you can use them in much the same way. Just add new columns, then set the column type in the inspector, and hack away. Date and duration fields understand plain-text dates, so you could type in next tuesday or +2m, and it’ll add a real date for next Tuesday or two months from today, respectively. You’ll find format options as well, so those dates will show up the way you want, and your number columns can be formatted as percents or currency amounts or plain numbers with thousands separators and decimal points. All very much like a smarter, yet more limited spreadsheet.
But then, there’s the final part of columns that make them so great: summaries. Add a summary, and it’ll show up on the top levels of the outlines — individual points on the lowest level have their info (say, the price of the item listed), and their header points will show the summary (so, then, the total price of all items listed) and the top point will show a summary of the summary (the total price of all the totals, say). And there, you can tweak again, having numbers summarized as totals, averages, minimums, or maximums, and durations summarized by the total time (automatically converted into work days and weeks) or minimum/maximum timeframe in the list. Checkboxes will be summarized by showing if everything is complete, and pop-up lists can be summarized by showing what the most popular option is. There’s so much you can do with it, especially for quick lists math and project timeframes, but really the sky’s the limit. The columns are what makes OmniOutliner so versatile, and so apt to be used for a million different purposes by everyone. It’s at once the basics of a spreadsheet and databasing app, tied to a beautiful theme system and great rich text handling that make it a joy to use.
The App in Action
I’ve likely convinced you that OmniOutliner is interesting, at least, but that’s far from enough reason to buy an app. Instead, you need an app that works great and makes your life easier.
OmniOutliner 4, from my time beta testing it last year and using the final release for the past few weeks, is as reliable and fluid in use as you’d hope. Gone are the clunky, dated UI elements from previous versions, but still there are the great text editing experience you’d expect from a Mac app. It’s a great outlining app, and goes beyond just outlines in a way that you’ll want to work it into more of your life.
It works equally great with audio and video in an outline, though it does slow down for a bit if you drag in a document or other file, apparently as it’s trying to see what it can do with it. The multiple columns and their new features such as OmniFocus-style real-language date recognition work great as well. Exports work quite good for most uses — your PDF and HTML exports will look beautiful, and OMPL files will work fine in any other outline or mind-mapping app, though don’t expect to use the Keynote exports for now unless you have an old copy of Keynote ’09 around.
That’s the only quibbles I could find with the app. It’s solid otherwise, and has me writing more things in list and outline form than I would have otherwise. In fact, the only thing keeping me from using it more is the lack of a companion iPhone app for viewing my outlines on the go.
The Question of Editions
There’s only one thing left to mention: the editions. The base version of OmniOutliner for $50 gives you everything I’ve talked about here. Pay $50 more — to buy it directly, or to upgrade later on — and you’ll get AppleScript support, Word export, and a few other extra features including additional theming options like increasing spacing between columns. The AppleScript support is most interesting, since there’s only the very basics supported in the base version, compared to an extremely extensive AppleScript support in the Pro version that was used in the last version to build OmniFocus’ predecessor. If you want that, spring the extra $50 for the pro version, but otherwise, you’ll be just fine with the base version.
The best part is, you can test out the feature set of both editions from the 2 week free trial through an option in the app’s menu. That should help you see which one’s best for your needs. And since you can upgrade anytime for the same price, with an in-app purchase from the App Store edition or an Omni Store upgrade if you buy it directly, there’s no reason to worry about which version to pick. I went with the base version, and happen to bet that’d be fine for most uses.
In Summary
OmniOutliner describes itself as an app for “Indispensable idea organization”, and I can’t think of a better way to describe it myself. It’s almost an app that defies description. It’s great for traditional outlines, sure, but the notes, themes, and extra columns and data-types make it an insanely versatile app for keeping track of anything.
When a plain-text document is too little, and a spreadsheet too much, OmniOutliner’s the app you need. You’ll turn to it for simple budgets, project overviews, book drafts, basic databases, and lists of the mundane things in your life, and it’ll work great for all of those. There’s really nothing else like it.
It’s a bit hard to get started with, and could do with a larger selection of built-in themes and export options, perhaps. So much has been added to v.3 over time in free updates, v.4 might feel to long-time users as a tiny leap. But OmniOutliner’s so good at what it does right, and so unique, I couldn’t help but awarding it an Insanely Great rating. Its generous upgrade policy means you’ll get v.4 for free if you bought v.3 over the past 3 years, and otherwise, a $24 upgrade after 7 years of free updates isn’t a bad bargain.
So go give the 2 week free trial a spin, and use it for everything you can think of. Try the keyboard shortcuts, the extra columns, and the theming options. I happen to think you’ll like it.
Update: As Doug Murray pointed out on Twitter, the award for the original Macintosh outlining app would go to Dave Winner's Living Videotext ThinkTank, which was an original outlining and "idea processing" app. It retailed for $150 — nearly $350 in today's dollars — and cost $10 for a trial copy. 'Twas an entirely different world then.
So, I've updated the title. OmniOutliner is the original Mac OS X outlining app, carrying on a proud tradition started by innovative apps like ThinkTank. The only surprising thing is that there were such powerful apps for organizing ideas that far back, and yet they're not more popular today.
To-do list apps used to frustrate me terribly. They’d sound great on paper, but when I tried to put them to use to keep track of everything I needed to do, they'd fail me. Or I’d fail them. One way or other, it just wasn't working out. Me and to-do lists were apparently just not meant to be.
Of course, if you follow me online, you'll know that I'm pretty devoted to my to-do list apps these days. It's worse than that: I practically couldn't live without them. So what changed?
To-do list apps. That's what changed.
Turns out, all tasks aren’t equal, and neither are all to-do list apps. If one doesn't fit, perhaps you need two. Or three.
Learning to Love the Lists
Tools are only useful if you have something you need them for. We’ve all got stuff we need to do, but all of us don't have the same tasks, and we definitely don't all work and think the same way, so we each need different tools. That, more than anything, is why some people swear by OmniFocus, while others couldn't imagine life without Things, and others get by with just a simple plain-text list of stuff to do.
Spoiler: none of them are the wrong way to manage tasks.
There's tons of great to-do list apps out there, each of which have their strong points. That's not to say you won't hear me waxing poetic about the ways OmniFocus is better sometime in the future - but really, there's a lot of good ones. You don't really need to over-think it.
What you do need to think about is what you need from a to-do list app. Personally, there's three main types of things I need to keep track of: appointments on specific dates, things I need to do on specific times (complete with notes about them, ways to sort and categorize them, and make them repeating easily), and random small things I need to keep up with that aren't urgent or tied to a date or project.
An App Apiece
Let's break that down. Appointments are simple; they go in the calendar, and you've likely already got an app for that. When you need to make note of your nephew's graduation or your upcoming vacation, a calendar just makes the most sense. No need to stress that one.
The second one is where the advanced to-do list apps like OmniFocus and Things - or even the built-in Reminders app - come in. These are the tasks you must do, whether at work or home, and you need a way to get them out of your head and categorize them by project, location, due dates, and more. You want to add notes to them so everything's together in one place, and if they’re things you'll need to do over and over, you’ll want the app to automatically recreate them for you. This is what the majority of major to-do list apps aim for, and there's tons out there you can try. Pick one, and stick to it, and it'll simplify your life. Really.
But don't put absolutely everything into it, because some things shouldn't go in you main to-do list app. They're the random little things - movies you'd like to watch some day, the stuff you should pick up at the store next time you're out, apps you want to try - that don't really fit in your advanced to-do list app without cluttering your inbox, and they most certainly don't go in your calendar. They’re what lite list apps come in handy for, or even just your notes app. Jot them down there, and you’ll still have them saved, but they won't make you feel like you're losing your mind in your advanced to-do list app.
Find Your Three
For me, the three magical apps are Fantastical for calendar, OmniFocus for projects and scheduled/advanced tasks, and Clear for my simple lists of random stuff. They're each great, and I'd highly recommend them each. But you can accomplish much of the same with the built in Calendar, Reminders, and Notes apps if you’re just getting started.
Just keep things separated, and you'll find each app and system makes a lot more sense. OmniFocus never did make sense for my bucket lists and grocery lists, but it keeps my work at AppStorm and Techinch manageable. I couldn't live with just Clear, but I'd be a mess with just OmniFocus, too.
Use the right app for the right tasks, though, and everything works so much better.
Originally published on July 1st, 2013 in Techinch Magazine Issue 1
At 30, the device that defined Apple Computer, Inc. would be easy to dismiss in Apple, Inc’s device lineup. It accounts for only 15% of Apple’s revenue, stars in only 4 of the 30 ads and promo videos Apple’s published on their YouTube channel over the past year, and seems decidedly stuck in the past with a traditional keyboard and touchpad that fly in the face of the multitouch and sensor-orientated iOS devices. Surely it’s doomed.
And yet, the Mac itself is responsible for 50% of the profits of the PC industry, not to mention the Mac indie software market with its slew of exclusive — and profitable — professional apps from the likes of the Omni Group, Pixelmator, Panic, and more. The success of iOS devices are directly tied to Macs, since every iOS app is developed on a Mac — not to mention that once can only assume Apple’s own internal work is all done on Macs. For anyone worried that Apple will soon tire of making Macs when iOS devices are its profit center and chief source of marketshare, last year’s upgrades to Apple’s OS X apps and the new Mac Pro should at make it blindingly obvious that Apple’s still dead-set on keeping the Mac as the best PC in the market.
But what will the Mac look like, 30 years from today? Or what, for that matter, will it look like 30 weeks from today, after Apple’s likely unveiled its next annual upgrade to OS X? Will it work the same as it does today, albeit with a Helvetica Neue Thin and iOS 7 inspired refresh as so many designers have proposed over the past months?
Or will, perhaps, OS X and iOS somehow be merged, perhaps in a release I’ve enjoyed referring to as “OS Xi”? OS X Mavericks is v10.9 after all, so — baring a v10.10 release — the next version should technically be v11. To carry that moniker, one would assume that the version would be as groundbreakingly new as the first OS X release itself was — the initial version that killed Mac OS Classic in lieu of the new NeXT OS inspired UNIX-powered OS that just happened to look like a far shinier version of OS Classic. What could be more groundbreaking than a fusion of iOS and OS X? It’d kill the mouse and traditional OS X in one fell swoop, while perhaps super-powering iOS devices with more of the core OS X features professionals expect.
Except that’s not very likely to happen. Craig Federighi stated in Macworld’s Apple executive interview on the Mac’s 30th anniversary that the Mac “has been honed over 30 years to be optimal” for keyboards and mice, while further stating that it’d be a waste of time to simply add a touchscreen to a Mac, or try to fuse iOS and OS X for no reason. And the death of the Mac is out of the question, too, since Phill Schiller, in the same interview, said that “There is a super-important role [for the Mac] that will always be. We don’t see an end to that role. There’s a role for the Mac as far as our eye can see.”
Thus the Mac will live on, without merging iOS and OS X, and perhaps without a touchscreen. It’d seem obvious that it’ll get some iOS 7-style design touches, perhaps along the lines that 3rd party Mac apps like Simplenote and Fonts, or a continuation of the general less-extreme design trends — somewhat flatter, with redesigned inspectors and flatter, with larger, more graphical popover menus instead of text lists — that we’ve seen in iTunes 11, the new iWork, the Omni Group’s new apps, Capo 3, and more. Or perhaps it’ll stick with its current design, letting iOS veer off on its own design trajectory.
Step back from the bright colors and thin, Helvetica Neue Thin-esque lines of iOS 7, though, and there’s a lot of iOS specific parts of iOS 7’s design that make it what it is. Design isn’t simply the icons and colors — its the way the device experience looks and works together as a whole. Making hardware and software compliment each other has always been Apple’s specialty, far more than perfecting the absolutely most beautiful software interfaces. iOS 7, with its edge-swipe gestures to bring up the control panel or to go back in apps, uses its bright colors and thin fonts to highlight your content in a way that feels perfect on mobile.
That same look may come to the desktop, but the same feel cannot. There’s no way edge swiping from iOS could make its way to OS X in the very same way. Nor, for that matter, could iOS 7’s zoom-into-app animation that gives you a spatial feel for where you are in the OS, or the parallax animation on your wallpaper. They’re designed for the hardware and OS paradigm they work on.
OS X could, perhaps, use a similar rethinking in the way we interact with software on a traditional laptop or desktop, but those redesigns — even if they superficially look like iOS 7 — would have to be designed in a way that compliments the trackpad and keyboard if they’re to be truly influential changes. So many recent OS X changes to make the Mac more like iOS, from Notification Center and Game Center to the new Dictation before its Mavericks reinvention, are ignored by most users simply because they don’t feel perfectly at home in a keyboard+mouse environment.
And yet, that environment is still good. As Dr. Drang pointed out in his “MacBook Touch” article, the traditional computing environment affords a high level of information and control density that couldn’t be maintained if everything was increased in size to make it touch friendly. And no matter how many nifty multitasking gestures you bake into iOS, there’s nothing that’ll replace the speed of using launchers like Alfred and Quicksilver, or the text-editing keyboard shortcuts that thankfully are baked into iOS, or the simplicity of CMD+Tab to switch to another app without leaving your keyboard. The mouse and touchpad cannot go away from professional computing until someone reinvents a way to make computing without it just as powerful — and the keyboard won’t go away completely, ever.
One thing’s certain, though: Apple appreciates the role that the Mac and its unique components play in our work, and that’s refreshing to hear. I’m not against the idea of OS X becoming more like iOS, but those changes must come with an understanding of the power we get out of touchpads and keyboards. If touchscreens can productively argument or improve on that, in a way no one has done so far, then I’d be more than interested in switching, but until then, it’s nice to be reminded that the Mac is still appreciated just for being the Mac.
I’d still like to see the next version called OS Xi, though. Just because.
When Steve Jobs unveiled the Macintosh 30 years ago — or, perhaps, should I say the Macintosh introduced itself — the world was a different place. No one in the audience was carrying a phone in their pocket, and few in attendance likely used a computer daily. There was no internet as we know it today, no live tweeting of the keynote. Photos of the event were shot on film, and Jobs himself likely listened to music on a cassette tape on the way home.
It was a different world.
Bill Gates’ stated dream of “a computer on every desk and in every home” was still a dream, a seemingly far-fetched one at that. And he, along with IBM and the rest of the industry, was dreaming of that in terms of DOS PCs on every desk.
So Steve Jobs and the incredible Macintosh team shipped a computer that could introduce itself, one that could be a canvas for artists, a bicycle for the mind.
The Mac has never taken over PC sales in marketshare. But most popular? That’d be easy to argue. They — along with the NeXT computers that formed the foundation for today’s Macs — have always been the aspirational machines that you aspired to own, that other tech companies aspired to copy.
***
I’ve a confession to make: I’ve only been using a Mac for three years now. It’s strange to say, perhaps, since my day job was being the editor of Mac.AppStorm for the past two years, writing about the latest and greatest Mac apps from a relatively shorter perspective than many. My first Mac was a 2011 Mac Mini, followed the next year by a mid-2012 MacBook Air — the Mac that’s still my work machine today. And yet, that was far from my first experience with Apple’s products.
The first memory I have of Apple would be of an aging Apple repair center in my hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee, with a fading classic rainbow Apple logo. That, along with grocery store banners about donating “Apples for Students”, was the only Jobs influence I can remember for the first 10 years of my life. My dad had an Amiga, which I can remember having to swap floppies while it was booting, and playing Marble Madness and some basketball game. That was followed by a Windows ’95 PC, with a stack of floppies to install Office, and an Aol. internet connection that proved more trouble than it was worth. Personal computers were too much trouble — heavy and cumbersome — and seemed far more at home at Dad’s office.
When I was 10, though, I remember our neighbor had an original bondi blue iMac, and that computer fascinated me. I never used it, but who wouldn’t be interested in a translucent, colorful computer that was easily portable? And then, a few years later, my grandfather got an iMac G4 — the most stunning Mac ever, in my opinion. It was simply incredible that the Mac could be that much nicer than any PC.
In the mean time, though, I’d gotten my own hands-on experience with some of Apple’s magic, by means of a Newton Messagepad 2000 my uncle gave me in, incidentally, 2000. That little machine wasn’t the most useful, perhaps, but I kept a journal on it, learned to write in Graffiti, and discovered the tiny touches I’d see again later on the Mac and in iOS — the poof of smoke when you erase something, just as you see when you drag a file off your dock on your Mac, and the suck-into-trashcan animation that was standard in Mail and Notes through iOS 6.
My first computer of my own was a Compaq LTE laptop, which I used to type papers in Word through 2007 when I finally purchased my own PC — a custom-built PC for $500 with a student-discount copy of Windows Vista and Office 2007. Vista didn’t give me as many headaches as most people complained about, but it also didn’t give me anything to be that excited about. Microsoft had hyped Vista as much as possible, and yet, when all was said and done, there was still next-to-no new indie software on Windows. I’d envy Notational Velocity and Keynote, Quicksilver and Marsedit and Writeroom — there was always new software to be excited about, but it was always on the Mac, not the PC.
And so, my original dream of buying a Mac lingered. College finances didn’t permit it, so I’d play with Linux, tweaking it to look like a Mac — but that was never as fun, and there still weren’t exciting new indie apps there, either. I was likely one of the very few users of Safari for PCs, just because it brought the Mac look and feel to a little corner of my PC. And that only increased my Mac envy, with its classic Mac-style slide-out dialogs and auto-resizing settings window. I’d read everything on Folklore.org, watch Steve Jobs keynotes, and attempt to Hackintosh my PC despite my hardware being wildly unsupported. And finally, when I figured out I could get OS X to run fine — if somewhat slow — in VirtualBox, I was hooked. I, at long last, had Notational Velocity, and Spotlight search, and Helvetica.
Along the way, I picked up a 3rd Gen iPod Touch, won an iPad 1 (which held me off from buying a MacBook right off, since I used it as my on-the-go computer for my last year of college), switched to an Apple wireless keyboard (yes, on the PC), and finally bought my first Mac Mini. It was, in true form, the perfect switcher’s Mac, since it worked with my existing monitor and carried a price tag that was easier to justify.
After years of flakey sound, driver errors, dead video cards, annual DVD drive replacements, and countless lost hours to updates, the Mac really did just work. Installing a program took one click, not a mirage of confusing dialogs. Sleep mode actually worked. The little things — the beautiful selection of fonts, the copy of “Here’s to the Crazy Ones” on TextEdit’s icon, the text editing keyboard shortcuts, the ubiquitous spell check and dictionary, the text substitutions and transformations, the power of Spotlight and its built-in calculator and Quick Look — themselves made the Mac so much better than any PC, it’d be impossible to imagine using anything else. I mean, the Mac could read Thai out loud, of all things. It was incredible.
Apple isn’t perfect, and neither are their products. It’s insane, perhaps, to wax poetic about a corporation’s products. And yet, the Mac, with its deep hardware and software integration and dozens of tiny things that truly make your life and work better, is something it’s easy to get attached to. I only wish I’d switched sooner.
***
When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, ushering in Apple’s new age by, incidentally, killing off the very machine that introduced me to Apple, the company’s future was far from certain. He cut to the bone, trimmed Apple’s product lineup, and focused resources on the design-led iMac. At the same time, he commissioned a new ad campaign: the “Think Different” campaign with its “Here’s to the Crazy Ones” commercials — ones that were originally to be narrated by Jobs himself. They defined Apple as the company that made machines for the thinkers and changers, the scientists and artists and musicians and leaders that make our world great. At its close, it said:
“While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
And that was Steve Jobs and the Macintosh team. They were crazy enough to think their little computer could change the world. 30 years later, I happen to think they were right, and am rather glad they were crazy enough to think outside the beige box.
It's a Post PC world, and we're just living in it. But for now, you still need a keyboard.
Steve Jobs told us that PCs are the new trucks, and tablets are the new cars. We all need a car — assuming we can't simply rely on public transit (hmm, could smartphones be the new public transit?) — but most of us don't need a truck. Oh, you might want a truck when you're at Ikea and feel like a fool having to stuff oversized boxes into your subcompact car, but you don't really need one. Or if you do, you simply couldn't get by with just a car. Case closed.
With computers, though, the case isn't exactly closed. Actually, turn that around: it's far from closed. Our smartphones are more powerful than the computers that took mankind to the moon, and yet most of us couldn't do a full day's work from an iPhone. At the very least, we wouldn't be very productive. And even on a tablet, you'd likely be hard pressed to get a day's work done, no matter how basic your computer job is.
Own just a car, and you can still get around perfectly fine — and even buy smaller furniture and just about anything else. Own just an iPad, though, and you'll feel technologically crippled.
But it doesn't have to be that way. Actually, all you need to add is a keyboard, and your tablet will be a lot closer to a computer substitute, just smaller and lighter.
Hello from 1868.
The keyboard is an odd part of life. Pencils and pens, even paintbrushes and markers, are simple enough that practically any early human civilization could have though of them. Keyboards, though, are a decidedly modern invention. The Qwerty keyboard we know (but may or may not love) was patented in 1868 by one Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and, in his own way, tech entrepreneur. Smithsonian Magazine dug into the history of the Qwerty keyboard layout and Sholes' work, and found that it was due to both a deal to license the patent to Remington (the company today known as a gun manufacturer) for its typewriters, and due to the way telegraph operators used keyboards, that the layout became standard.
Thanks to the original short message service, and industrial age standards development processes, the Qwerty keyboard layout graces everything from now-antique typewriters to the on-screen keyboard in the latest smartphones. We may have switched to touchscreens, but we're still typing the same way we have for the past century and a half.
But that's not the power of the keyboard I'm talking about. Sure, being able to type letters and numbers and symbols on the iPad is important — but you don't need anything extra for that. What's needed, though, is the extra function keys we know and love from Mac and PC keyboards, and the extra features they can unlock on your iPad.
See, iOS is at its core essentially a lite version of OS X. And all the keyboard shortcuts you're used to using when editing text on a Mac are still baked into the OS. There's just no way to access most of them from your on-screen keyboard. You can long-tap on a key to get alternate versions of the letter or symbol, which is nice, but there's no way to select text, one word at a time, or jump to the top of a page, or insert an Apple icon, or add a non-breaking space character to your document. The iOS onscreen keyboard is best-in-class — I've written thousands of words on it — but it'll never rival a full keyboard unless it gets function keys. For that and more, you need an external keyboard.
The Power of a Keyboard
You'll need to get a keyboard to see what I'm meaning. There's a lot of options, from keyboard cases to an existing bluetooth powered keyboard you may have laying around. Any would work, but I suggest the Apple Wireless Keyboard, which at $69 is neither the cheapest or the most expensive option. But, it's a great keyboard in its own right, is light on batteries, and has all the functions you need to make your iPad into a nearly full computer.
Now, pair it with your iPad — or iPhone, if you don't mind working on a small screen — and open a new document in Pages (still unrivaled as the most powerful traditional word processor on the iPad). If you don't have it, open your favorite text editor app, or even the default Notes app. Type a few paragraphs — you'll likely type noticeably faster than you do on-screen — and try moving around through your text. Nice, right? Your iPad likely feels more powerful already.
Ok. Time to do more. Try selecting text (for those unused to editing text on OS X: hold shift while using your arrow keys, press alt as well to select text a word at a time, or press command at the same time to select to the end of the line, or the top/bottom of the page). Use CMD+C/X/V to copy/cut/paste text, or CMD+B/I to make text bold or italicized. You can even add in special characters with the same keyboard shortcuts you would on a Mac, so if you're learning to use better typography from Matthew Butterick's new book, you'll be able to insert non-breaking spaces and em dashes and more from your iPad. You'll suddenly find that there's no reason to fire up a computer for word processing anymore.
That's not all. Notice the tab key on your keyboard? That still works on your iPad. You can tab through online forms — or cells in Numbers spreadsheets — just like you would on a computer. Sure, it's not quite as useful since you can't CMD+tab between apps, or CMD+Q to quit an app, or use Spotlight to launch an app without touching the screen, but you can do far more with an external keyboard than you can without.
I used to use an iPad 1 as my full travel computer, working a full day of tech support and editing and email on the go. I could do it just from the on-screen keyboard — and multitasking gestures — but it'd be tiring. With a wireless keyboard, though, there's little left to miss from the Mac experience.
Now if there was just a way to install new fonts systemwide — or even in all individual apps, or perhaps just in Pages — on the iPad. Someday, perhaps. Someday.
Update: As it turns out, there is a way to install fonts systemwide in iOS 7. That was still months away, though, when this article was first written.
Originally published on July 29th, 2013 in Techinch Magazine Issue 3
Don't let notifications rule your life. Rule them instead.
It used to be the phone, ringing when people needed you. That was replaced with the vibrant Nokia jingle following you wherever you went, and Aol. letting you know that "You've got mail!" Then, it was the blinking LED on a Blackberry, or the faint buzz in your pocket, letting you now know whenever an email or call came in. Now, it's the ding-a-ling of iPhone notifications, ever-present every waking (and sleeping) moment, reminding us of every tiny bit of info in the world around us. Angry Birds wants you to get your reward of the day, some country you've never heard of just elected a new president, there are 15 new emails advertising products you don’t need, and that group texting app won't stop letting you know that all of your friends have way too much free time to waste chatting.
It's way too much. There's so much noise. You can't even find the info you actually need amongst all the unimportant notifications. Something's got to go.
So we turn on Do Not Disturb mode at night, put our phones on vibrate during the day, and get used to seeing red bullets with 3 digit numbers in the top corner of our app icons. Now we have a new chore: clearing out Notification Center, or trying hard to ignore it altogether
But notifications have a purpose, obviously: giving you instant access to the info you really need to know. That'd be great, if our devices were truly smart enough to filter out the junk and only send us what we really need. Instead, you have to do the filtering yourself — just once. After that, you'll find that notifications can actually be useful again.
Nixing Nonsense Notifications
First Law of Mobile Device Use: Never allow a new app to send you notifications, unless you know you want that app to notify you.
You know the routine: download a new app, open it, and it asks you to allow notifications, let the app access your pictures, and then asks you to rate the app before you've even had the chance to try it out. So we tap Ok, Ok, and, um, No thanks without even thinking. Yay, shiny new app!
Wait: there's the problem. The game you just downloaded likely has no real reason to send you push notifications. You never need to be interrupted during a meeting — or while you're trying to fall asleep — to be told that your crops are dying, or your birds want to kill pigs. You likely don't even need most of the notifications from your social networking apps, really. 99.9% of the time, you shouldn't allow notifications right off the bat. If you really like an app and decide you do want it to send you notifications, you can always go enable them. That makes far more sense than approving everything, only to have to turn it off later.
Once you've got that rule down, you're on the road to recovery, but you're not done yet. You still need to turn off the notifications for everything you've already enabled before, that you don't want to bug you now. So head to your settings, and turn off the notifications on everything you don't really think needs to notify you. Think it through, but most of the stuff there really doesn't have info that's so pressing and urgent it has to notify you. So take the nuclear option, and turn off all notifications from most of the apps. I'm sure you won't miss most of them — and you can always reenable them if you decide later that you really want notifications. The same options are there in iOS, OS X, Windows 8, and Android (though in Android, you'll have to turn off notifications in each app's settings), in order to get all of your devices to be quieter.
It's not just push notifications, though, that are the problem. You've got to stop getting so many emails, too. So when you sign up for a new account online, don't check the box saying you want emails from them, unless you really want to get emails from them. And whenever you see another ad you'd rather ignore in your Inbox, take the second to scroll to the bottom and click Unsubscribe. It'll take 20 seconds, and likely get you one last goodbye email, but you'll quit getting the same ignorable emails every single day. That should take away a good majority of the rest of your annoying notifications.
Is your phone still buzzing? No? Ok, good.
Stay Informed With the Stuff You Want
Remember when I said that notifications have a purpose? They still do, even if you just turned off every last notification from your phone and tablet and computer. Now, though, you've got to coax the ones you really want back.
Start by thinking through what you really want notified about. I'm sure you want to get the text messages from your closest friends and family, and likely want to get a notification if your boss sends you an urgent email. You might even like to get a notification if world war broke out, or if your favorite team won a game, or if your stocks dropped by a certain amount. You likely don't need a notification if someone liked your picture on Facebook, but you might like to get a notification if you got a private message on Facebook.
Now you've got options to make notifications work for you. You can turn back on notifications for the few apps you really want to let you know stuff, and tweak those to only send you the most urgent notifications you really want. Your email app can be set to only show notifications when you get emails from your "VIP" contacts; add the most important people in your address book to that list, and you'll only get important email notifications. Facebook and most chat apps like Line and WhatsApp, have similar settings, where you can fine-tune the notifications you get. I've turned off notifications from a group chat in Line, since none of the messages there are absolutely urgent, but left on normal individual message notifications so people can get ahold of me with Line. Twitter and App.net apps only notify me when I get direct messages; otherwise, any @replies aren't typically urgent enough to need me to check them right away. You can even add contacts to your "favorite" list, and set your phone to only ring when favorites call while the Do Not Disturb mode is on. You'll feel at ease turning off the rest of your notifications, knowing your family can still get in touch.
Now that your communications notifications are manageable, you can start adding in the other stuff you want to hear about: breaking news, major events, and such. But turning on bulk notifications from your favorite news app likely won't do the trick. Instead, you'll need to turn to IFTTT — as discussed in Issue 2 — to get the notifications you really want. You can start a new recipe there that'll send you a text — or perhaps a Boxcar notification, if you prefer — whenever there's a new news headline about the topic you're interested in, or when a certain stock drops below a number you set, or when your favorite team wins a game. You can even let it make you smarter, by letting you know when something you want to buy is on Craigslist, or when the forecast says it's going to rain, and more. You're going to get notifications, but this time, it's notifications you really want. And you can set this all up from your phone, and edit it anytime to cut out the noise if you're getting too many notifications, using the IFTTT iPhone app.
That's still likely going to make you miss out on some stuff, so if you really want to know what's going on in the world, you might want to add a news app that's not too chatty, and let it send you notifications. I keep the New York Times — my newspaper of choice — Newsstand app installed, with notifications enabled, and it typically only sends notifications about news that's important enough you'd want to hear about. That works well for me.
Notification Overload, Begone
“The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance”
Staying free of notification overload isn't anywhere near as important as liberty and freedom — but it'll still take eternal vigilance. You'll have to stay on top of your notifications to make sure they don't start overwhelming you again.
But it's worth it. So start by not enabling notifications for every app that comes along, and take the time to tweak your notifications so you'll only get the most important stuff. You might find that you actually like your iPhone's ding-a-ling sound again.
No, you'll likely rediscover the bliss of quietness. And that's better.
Originally published on July 29th, 2013 in Techinch Magazine Issue 3
For years now, I’ve reviewed apps for a living, saving my mini-tutorials, tips and tricks, opinion pieces on tech and life, and more for Techinch.com. There’s been the occasional review from time to time, but they’ve been rather rare over the past year or so.
That’s changing. Now that AppStorm’s closing down, and my day job has been refocused to app training at Tuts+ — something you’ll see shared here too, soon — I want to continue reviewing the apps I love and use, and Techinch is the natural place to keep that going. So now, there’s a brand new Reviews section that’ll list each of my new app reviews, along with a new Kirby-powered review system that’ll include a quick rating and app info section at the end of each review. You’ll see a colored review bar (only one, of course, per app) followed by the app info, as seen below:
And, you’ll be able to spot Review articles from the main blog easily, since their titles will include a ∴ sign in front of them. Link articles already include an → before their title, to indicate that they link to another site, and reviews now include a ∴ since they include a conclusion telling you whether or not you should buy the app. Perhaps the icon isn’t perfect, but I thought it fit, and I wanted some way to set aside app reviews from the rest of the articles here.
Along with that, I’ve made a few long-needed code changes to make Techinch.com fully responsive, so it should look great everywhere. Let me know if you notice anything broken.
What to Expect from Techinch Reviews
A good review is far more than a shiny summary box, though. And if it only tells you that you can install the app and that it has all the features you’d expect and blah, blah, blah…, you’d fall asleep.
Here’s what you will find, though. Reviews at Techinch will tell you what’s great about an app, what problems it’ll solve in your life, and what (if any) issues you can expect from the app. You can expect geeky details like the fonts the app uses, and Applescript or x-callback-url features it has, and deep details on how the app works. Think AnandTech’s hardware reviews, except about apps. There will be none of the stuff you already should know about the app, and all of the stuff you’re curious about the app. It’ll be the detailed analysis you need to decide if you can really use the app in your workflow, along with full-sized clear screenshots of the app in action so you can see how it really works.
Then, there will be no number ratings on Techinch — the metadata in the reviews doesn’t even have a number — but there’s still a ranking system. Here’s how that breaks down:
INSANELY GREAT (green): Apps that do everything they’ve promised, and more, in such a great/new/innovative way that you can’t help but be impressed. These are the kind of apps you’ll want to run, not walk, to the App Store and download.
GOOD (yellow): Apps that do what they’ve promised, and get the job done. They won’t blow your socks off, and aren’t game changing, but they’re solid apps that fit the bill.
OK (grey): Apps that are usable for some tasks, but they’re buggy, don’t meet their marketing hype, and are far from amazing. They’re just ok. If you really need what this app does, go ahead and buy it — but if you’re looking for something amazing, keep looking.
BAD (red): Apps that I can’t recommend you buy. They’re not good, and there’s better alternates out there. Expect to see this rating very rarely on Techinch — I’d rather write about apps I love than complain about stuff I hate — but it’s there just in case I want to use it.
Throw in the app icon and name linked to its App Store page or website, combined with a quick description of the app, the platform(s) it supports, and its price, and that’s it. It’ll hopefully be the info you need to decide whether or not to buy an app. There will be the facts you need about the app, along with my opinion on the app honed by years of testing and reviewing apps. I hope you’ll like it.
For now, comments will still be only on Twitter and App.net, but I’d love your feedback on that as well. If there’s a demand for it, I’d consider adding Disqus comments to review pages to make them more comprehensive. So if you want that, @reply me on Twitter and let me know.
A Quick Word on Kirby
I really wanted to start writing more reviews on Techinch the second AppStorm’s shutdown was announced. And yet, I wanted to make the reviews as nice as possible, and had the idea for a new real-English ratings system along with the more-standard app description box. That took a bit longer to flesh out, though, which is why this post is being published halfway through January.
I think the effort was worth it, though. Essentially, all review posts now include extra Markdown fields that Kirby CMS makes incredibly easy to extract and use in the article and in other pages (thus, the new Reviews page that’ll show every review listed with its respective app icon). WordPress always overwhelmed me, but with Kirby, I can develop practically anything for my site even with my limited PHP skills. And that’s rather cool.
And the best part is, since all new review articles will include the extra metadata, there’s more I can do with that in the future if I have more coding and design time — including perhaps adding a quick review summary box at the very top of the article, something I considered adding but cut for time’s sake this time.
*****
So there you have it — a quick dive into the new Reviews @ Techinch. There’s no new-style reviews just yet, but expect to see them coming in over the coming days and weeks.
And as always, thank you so much for reading Techinch and being a part of the community. I really appreciate it.
It's been 6 weeks since I shut down Techinch Magazine, turning off the paid subscription in-app purchase and pulling the app from the App Store. That's everything a developer can do to remove their work from the App Store.
And yet, I just got an email from Apple letting me know that my monthly sales reports are in — and that a handful of people still paid for a Techinch Magazine subscription over the past several weeks.
That's terrible. People are paying real money for a subscription to a defunct magazine with no new content, one whose app has been pulled from the App Store and theoretically had in-app purchases turned off. But apparently, existing subscriptions will keep on running until you, the customer, go and turn them off. That is bad, and something Apple needs to fix, pronto.
In the mean time, it's a reminder that you need to go check your current subscriptions — to publications, apps, and services, in the App Store or elsewhere. Apple's outlined how to see your current subscriptions and change or unsubscribe from them in their support documents, so go check it, then look around for other subscriptions you've got — check your credit card statements to refresh your memory, if needed.
If you're still reading the publication or using the service, all's well. I still want to pay for Netflix, of course, and would gladly pay for MATTER if it still charged. But if there's anything you're not still using, go ahead and unsubscribe. It's nice to support stuff you like, but if you're not making use of the subscription, there's no reason to pay.
Any scrupulous producer selling subscriptions wouldn't want you to pay for a subscription you're not using. But it's sobering to think how many people must be paying for subscriptions they're no longer using, and how many business models are almost based on the assumption that people will sign up and keep paying long after they've forgotten about it.
Cleaning up your email subscriptions can make achieving inbox zero less of a chore, but cleaning up your paid subscriptions can bring an even bigger change. It'll help your budget, let you pay for the things you'll actually want to still read, and keep you from wondering where your money's going all the time. That's not such a bad little chore to start the year off on a better note.
And if you've paid for Techinch Magazine in the last month, please feel free to get in touch. I have no idea if Apple will refund you, but I'd do my best to refund you personally.
It's Friday. Your project is due this evening, and yet here it sits, unfinished. A blank page, unfilled. The crucial code, unwritten. Textbooks, unstudied. Fence, still broken.
But you'll get it done! You always do, right on time. It's those projects without deadlines that get perpetually left behind, since there's no “or else” hanging over your head if you don't complete them. The app you've dreamed up, the book you plan to write, the treehouse you meant to build, the Arduino you planned to tweak, the exotic dinner to be cooked. You got the stuff done that really had to be done, because you absolutely had to do it — but the extras aren't forcing themselves on you.
I'm preaching to the choir here; I'm the worst at procrastinating, always frantically finishing essays a half hour before they were due, leaving far too much for the end of the week, even today.
But really? What is it that makes us procrastinate? To be honest, I don't know. No one really knows. Seth Godin would say it's our “lizard brain”, keeping us afraid of doing something which may, in some way, hurt us. There's some truth to that. Malcolm Gladwell would say we haven't learned to make rapid decisions. Douglas Adams claimed to love deadlines — and watch them go by. But surely we're not procrastinating simply from masochism.
No, here's the problem: we're scared of falling. Scared of failing. Scared of missing the mark. We're scared of losing face, scared of failing our own expectations. It's not just love that Perri's song could be talking about, it's every single expectation in life. We're afraid to fall.
We've learned of disappointment and failure from our childhood, and how to avoid the pain. So we procrastinate — and that doesn't mean we do nothing. No, we stay busy, we do the tasks that don't require creativity, anything that we're not anxious about. But the thing that requires us to push a bit harder, like making a résumé or finishing a final project or making something we've dreamed up at random? Well, have you ever heard of mañana?
But this is dangerous. You might not fail, per se, but you're never going to advance without getting out of your comfort zone and taking on new risks. The cliché “No pain, no gain” is, perhaps, far truer than we wish it was.
Step Out of the Boat
So what are you going to do about it? Read another book on how to do the thing you're planning to do? Find some more data to put in your still-unwritten report, or watch the Cooking Channel for inspiration on cooking the dinner you've already planned?
It's too easy to keep looking for inspiration, finding more info, convincing yourself that you're working on your dream — but you're not. Sorry, that's never going to work. You're procrastinating. The solitary thing which will help you is to just do it (great, another cliché).
So push the fear aside, and start. Do something — anything — to get started. Put some paint on the canvas, drive a stake in the ground, push the first commit of your app to git, buy that domain name. Do something, anything, to get started.
Every step after that is easier. It really is. Because now, you're committed. You're actually doing it. You've put some money on the line, you've made that piece of paper useless for any other task, so now you might as well do it.
When I bought my first domain name, to give my WordPress.com blog my own moveable identity, I struggled over the best name for days. Sure, $15 isn't much of a commitment, but it sure felt like a big deal. Even today, I can't say if Techinch.com was the best domain name I could get, but it's worked. What's far more important is what you do with the domain after you get it, and the time I spent worrying about whether I was buying the right domain was largely wasted time. Procrastination that almost felt productive.
Starting Techinch Magazine triggered some amount of doubt and wondering before I'd put down the $99 for an Apple Developer account. In the grand scheme of things, it's not that much — but it was sure enough to make me stop and think if this was a good idea. I knew I wanted to try, and the days I waited were purely wasted time. I should have just done it.
Instead of waiting and hesitating and second guessing, it's better to just make a blind leap of faith sometimes. You can always change something in the future, but for now, the important thing is to start.
So go start. You'll be surprised how much easier it will be to make yourself finish once you're already out of the boat, making your first steps.
You'll finish that project. I'm sure you will. But that still won't be enough. Because if you don't keep progressing and pushing yourself, you're just standing still. That's not what any of us want, especially not as fast as technology changes and zips past us these days. You've got to keep striving to stay relevant — and getting ahead is going to take a whole other leap of faith.
Just reading and watching and listening to others isn't going to help you. But doing stuff that pushes your limits and makes you have to do more than you thought you could — that will grow you like nothing else.
Do a Ton of Stuff
Jennifer Dewalt recently decided she was going to learn how to code. With no prior coding experience, and no technical background, she set out to make 1 website per day for 180 days. She's kept at it, and 4 months later is over halfway through her project — and has already made some rather impressive sites. You don't have to ask her if she's learned a lot so far; just look though the sites she's made, and you can see how she's gone from making basic sites to crafting interactive web apps, one brand-new page at a time. It's quite the impressive accomplishment.
We often think that our best work will be slowly crafted, painstakingly tweaked and perfected until that one item is our best work. But that's not always the case. Consider the following anecdote from the book "Art and Fear", as mentioned by Derek Sivers on the Hacker News discussion about Dewalt's website project:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups.
All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: 50 pounds of pots rated an “A”, 40 pounds a “B”, and so on.
Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.
It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
It sounds like the most counterintuitive advice in the world to just do a ton of stuff, over and over again. We've learned that mass-produced products are almost always inferior to handcrafted goods, and doing the same chore or eating the same meal over and over is about the most boring thing imaginable to mankind. Surely our best work will be made by focusing on one project, and doing it the very best possible, no?
Perhaps not. Because (to use yet another cliché) practice really does make perfect. You'll get better at stuff the more times you do it. But not just that — each time you do the thing you're trying to do, you can raise the bar. Don't cook the same meal every day, but do cook a meal each day. Don't just make another webpage every day; make a better webpage today than you thought you could yesterday. And then keep raising the bar, one tiny bit at a time, and keep doing it, over and over again.
It works for athletes — they sure don't start running 40k marathons and swimming 100 laps on a whim — and I'm rather certain it can work for our creative projects as well.
So start your projects, take on the biggest, craziest thing you can imagine, and then do it a ton of times. You won't be an overnight success — there's really nothing that's an overnight success — but you'll grow your own success one step at a time. Inch by inch.
Originally published on July 29th, 2013 in Techinch Magazine Issue 3
Spam is still a huge problem for email, but thanks to Gmail and other services’ great spam filters, it’s not something you really have to think that much about these days. But that doesn’t mean email’s annoyances are behind us. We might not have to sort through dodgy offers and scams in our inboxes, but most of our inboxes are filled with the dozens of newsletters and promotions and company updates and more that we’ve signed up for over the years, inadvertently or not.
It can get to be quite a mess. My wife and I took a week honeymoon this past December, and decided to stay offline most of the trip. Even though colleagues and friends knew I’d be offline, I still came home to nearly 100 new emails per day I was away. But once I’d sorted though all the holiday promotions and newsletters and app notification emails, there were only several dozen emails that actually needed replies.
That’s insane.
Gmail’s added tools to sort emails out into promotions and more, and there’s 3rd party tools that can do an even better job at it — but really, you don’t need an app for that. You just need some control.
And so, I’ve taken the extra minute to scroll to the bottom of emails I’d otherwise have deleted immediately, and instead searched for the nearly-hidden Unsubscribe link. A tap — and sometimes a click or two in the webpage — and I should never get another email from that company again. It might take a few extra clicks to turn off email notifications from your apps and social networks, if you want to get rid of those emails as well, but it’s worth it for a cleaner inbox. And if there’s anything you can’t unsubscribe from — a newsletter without an unsubscribe button, or chain emails and message lists you can’t convince people to take you off — just hit the Junk button, and your email app will learn to treat them like spam. Seems extreme, but if that’s your only option, take it.
It’ll take some time — I’ve still ended up needing to hit Unsubscribe on at least on email a day this month — but one day soon, your deluge of internet flotsam should be gone, or at least significantly diminished. You’ll have half-way tamed the email beast without having to see extra “promotions” from Google or let another 3rd party read your email.
Now, your inbox will be back to just having mainly the stuff you really need. It’ll still be annoying to clear out, but you’ll be tapping the Delete button a lot less than before. And, hopefully, you won’t have hundreds of emails to sort through after your next vacation.
