Venture-backed web and mobile startups have gotten the world used to free. It’s simply taken for granted that online publications are free, along with mobile games and file sharing services and practically anything else that doesn’t come on a disk. It’s a wonder that the App Store generated $1 billion in December — as much as apps filled conversations with family and friends, geeky and non-geeky alike, the only paid apps I ever heard referenced were Microsoft Office’s apps, and even then they were only mentioned in relation to the fact that most people don’t need anything new in the new versions of the suite. Free is the name of the game.
So, of course, are shutdowns, acquisitions, pivots, and the other side-effects when free doesn’t pay the bills.
Everyone hates it when their favorite free service gets shut down — remember Google Reader? — but companies can get an incredible amount of hate for charging for their products.
Droplr’s gone through a bit of a transition this year, growing up from a basic simple file sharing system to one that includes an image annotation system, has a new robust API that lets shared files get edited and re-saved on the server (see the new Markdrop app), and has team plans for businesses (one I accidentally announced before it’d been released to the public). And now, this week, it closed down its original free accounts that let you share up to 1Gb of files for free with a small ad on the file preview page. Instead, Droplr now has a Lite plan that costs $4.99/month for unlimited sharing of files up to 2Gb in size, along with a Pro plan for $9.99/month that includes customization and more.
Predictably, the announcement was met with angry comments on Twitter and Facebook, some even suggesting that Droplr had no business sense by dropping free accounts — when charging for your product should be business 101. Others, comically, suggested they add a free ad-supported tier — and seeing as that’s exactly what they just shut down, it’d make you think those complaining weren’t real users anyhow.
Building a business — paid or ad supported — is tough. I should know: I shut down my own paid magazine last year, and my employer just shut down the AppStorm network since ads alone never brought us into the black. In a world where everything is ad supported, the value of each ad is rapidly approaching zero. It’s time to start paying for stuff again.
If you need to quickly share files often, I couldn’t recommend a better service than Droplr. I’ve used it with a Pro account since last July, and couldn’t be happier. It’s a quality service worth paying for. And I happen to be excited about the new things they’re doing in the space, and wouldn’t mind more simple apps like MarkDrop that leverage Droplr like a new iCloud.
Perhaps it’s not for you — everyone doesn’t need to share files often. But it’s absolutely not a stupid idea for Droplr or any business to charge real money for their products. In fact, charging is what I’d call good business sense, the type that’ll build companies we can actually rely on for years to come instead of having to jump to the new hotness in apps ever couple months. If this is what the app market maturing looks like, I can easily get behind that.
You can make great things. Your tools are only there to help you.
It was a crisp afternoon, late in 2003, long enough ago that we cared to check the mailbox daily, but recently enough that the mailbox was already empty, more often than it was full. That was seldom a cause for worry, though, since the mailbox was at the end of our wooded driveway, a slab of asphalt rolling downhill perhaps 200 meters around some of the best of East Tennessee's fall colors — the perfect place for a walk where one could collect their thoughts and unwind. Growing up with 7 younger siblings in the house, the quiet and aloneness of the walk, combined with the sounds of nature, made it quite the reward itself, regardless of the contents of the mailbox, and the uphill walk back home. There's many a chore I've avoided through the years, but that mailbox walk is one I cherished.
As rewarding as the journey was, in its own right, some days were more rewarding than others. Such was the day when I opened the mailbox to discover a newsletter from the American Museum of Science and Energy, announcing their upcoming annual bridge building competition among other upcoming events. Beats me how I noticed it, but suddenly, that contest was the most interesting thing in my life.
Now, I'd never designed a bridge before — never even thought of wanting to do such a thing; and, every boxed model I'd ever made — other than the 2-piece glider planes — had been left half-finished, or worse. But there, standing on the side of the road in the afternoon sun, 15 seconds after learning there was such a thing, I knew I had to enter the bridge building competition.
*****
My grandfather, Raymond Guay, is an architect. He'd designed the hospital ward where I was born, the church where my parents were married, and more. I knew him as Pepérè, the granddad that'd always had an insane number of batteries for Christmas toys. But then, he'd take us into his office, decorated with surprisingly realistic drawings of the buildings he'd designed with careful pencil strokes, in the days before CAD/CAM software was the standard, and suddenly, he was Mr. Guay, The Architect. A designer, a craftsman. The plain rolls of paper that we grandkids would draw pictures on as children could, on his drafting table, be transformed into the blueprints that would turn a barren tract of urban sod into an unforgettable landmark.
For most of my memory, Pepérè has been retired — but that didn't stop him from being a craftsman. Instead, he refocused his energies on woodturning, crafting everything from chess pieces to plates out of discarded chunks of wood on his lathe. We'd escape downstairs while the adults talked in the dining room and beg Pepérè to show us what he was working on, even when we'd already seen the lathe in action countless times. He'd grab the chisel — the perfect one for the task — turn on the lathe, and turn the wood into art.
I'd developed a love of woodworking on my own — minor wood-burning and carving projects — but I can't help but think that Pepérè's work had first sparked my interest in wood. It's not too surprising, then, that one Christmas around that time, Pepérè gave me a set of hobby and carving knives. There were blades of all shapes and sizes — larger ones for bulk cutting, smaller ones for precision cuts, V-shaped blades for chiseling, and more.
*****
Building a model bridge from thin sticks of basswood for the first time isn't an easy matter, especially when your first inclination is to make a classic arched suspension bridge. But I, for whatever reason, was confident I could do it. I pored over stacks of library books, sketched out ideas, and tested them in the West Point Bridge Design Contest's app (and subsequently got myself into another contest — one where I only ever got into the top hundred results). It, still, was a stab in the dark, and my design was more aesthetic than structurally sound, but I had the blind faith to turn my dream into a reality and get a bridge in the competition.
Paper and digital designs will only get you so far, especially without 3D printing, so getting a bridge in the contest meant trips to Hobby Lobby to find wood and glue. But that's all I needed, thanks to the set of knives Pepérè had given me. I was rather confident that I had the perfect tools to make a winning bridge.
And so, I lined up my knives for their intended purposes according to the woodworking books I'd found, got a pot of water boiling to steam wood so I could bend it, and set to work. Everything was set: I had the tools I needed to commence work. This knife for bulk cutting, this one for trimming, and this one for shaving off the excess glue. What could go wrong?
A few weeks of trial and error, and one too many fingers glued together, and I had a bridge ready for entry. The correct knife for the correct job, plus a ton of determination, had produced what I could only imagine was going to be a spectacular entry in the competition.
*****
Life has a way of growing you up faster than you'd expect, at times. Such was the morning of the bridge competition. I set out, bridge and knives and spare wood in toe, ready to win. I proudly handed my bridge in to be cleared for entry, never expecting that there'd be any reason for disqualification. But there was, of course. A change was needed here, this was too long, and these pieces of wood are glued together where they shouldn't be. We had an hour or so to get our bridges competition-ready, by the book, and so I quickly set to work.
You know what happens when you try to work too quickly? Everything goes wrong. Seriously, everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. I cut the wrong spots, broke pieces of wood, and snapped knife blades. Amid the panic, the other contestants were scrambling to fix their bridges, and there I stood, with an open set of 20 knives, minus the two I'd broken so far, of course. Inevitably, one after another, people asked to borrow knives, and before I knew it, I was stuck working with one of the longest blades in the set, the one blade that was decidedly not the best tool for the job. It was awkward, unwieldy — but it got the job done. My bridge was finished, ready to pass the stringent entry requirements, and wonder of all wonders I ended up getting 2nd place.
*****
That day taught me an important lesson: the best tool for the job is the one you have. It might not be the absolute best tool in the world for that job, but it's the tool you've got, and it'll work. Keys sure aren't the best screwdrivers, and credit cards aren't designed to scrape ice off your windows, but they both can be the best tool for the job when they're all you've got. In all honesty, all I needed to make a bridge was a $5 Boxcutter, and anything more than that was extra. The important part was what I did with the knives — not the knives themselves.
It's far too easy to blame our lack of success on a project, or our procrastination on starting projects, or on our lack of the perfect tool. We obsess over having the perfect everything. And yet, success is ours to take, if we'll just put the work in. The job is up to us, not our tools.
When I did woodburning as a kid, I was rather convinced I'd be able to go pro by getting a fancier woodburner and extra burner tips. Kitchens and garages are filled with odd tools and gadgets designed to help us do stuff that we'll never likely end up doing anyhow, despite having the extra tools for it. It's the very same in tech: we look around for better text editors, faster external hard drives, and the best camera lenses, but don't put to use the tools we already have.
Being creative isn't about the tools we have. If it was, we wouldn't have beautiful architecture, music, and paintings from hundreds of years ago. Books would've never been written until Google came around, and Google wouldn't have come out until larger hard drives and faster processors had been invented. The first dairy farmer would have never made cheese or yoghurt if they'd had to wait for a dozen specialized tools to be invented first. Instead, being creative — and getting stuff done in the first place — is about taking what we have, and putting it to use. It's about us far more than it is about our tools.
It's not bad to strive to have the best tools. A Leica will take better photos than your iPhone, and a brand-new knife will carve far better than my half-rusted decade-and-a-half old blades. But a skilled photographer — one who's simply done the job for years and years and honed his skills with experience — will take better photos with the iPhone than most of us could with a Leica. And you'll likely cook a far better meal with a simple skillet and spatula than you will with a full assortment of the latest and greatest cooking aids.
If my grandfather could design buildings on a drafting table with a pencil, years before CAD/CAM software had been invented, then I'm rather sure the rest of us can do our best work with whatever tool we have lying around.
So go do that thing you've been waiting to do. Write a book in the free Notes app on your iPad or TextEdit on your Mac or Notepad on your PC. Take the very best photos you can, using whatever camera you have around — even the one on an ancient phone from back when we called them camera phones. Make a budget on paper, or in a spreadsheet, or even in your head. Go plant something in your yard, or fix that broken thing around your house. You've got the tools to do it, even if they're not the best tools.
It wasn't until I turned the paper over to continue writing on the reverse side that I noticed my fingers were sore from writing — that familiar faint bruised feeling I’d get after writing one too many rows of spelling words in elementary school while gripping the pencil too hard. I never dropped the habit of pinching my pencil too hard, but that’s something I rarely think about these days. Every dime I make comes in one way or another from writing words, and yet it’d been months since I’d written more on paper than a store list or an address on a package.
Perhaps I should call myself a typer instead of a writer. I don’t know.
But for an hour, I was an honest-to-goodness writer, scratching words onto paper with a piece of wood and graphite. There’s no undo button other than an eraser, no delete other than the rubbish bin. No cursor to urge you to keep writing. Just your mind and your words, on paper.
I type reviews, op-eds, tutorials, emails, website copy, witty tweets, code, and more. For almost everything else in life I need to say, I talk. That’s how most of us operate.
There’s some things, though, that you just can’t talk though. Things you can never really express yourself correctly about — you know, that advice to a friend you’re not sure how to say correctly, or the message to your sweetheart that you know you’ll say all wrong if you say it. Something you know your boss might consider if it was said correctly, but you’re so fired up about the issue you know you’ll say it wrong if you say it. The tough thing you really need to tell someone that you’ll chicken out of saying if you do it in person. The closing argument with your roommate in which you want to explain yourself without starting another argument — something that’ll never happen if you say it. You know, the messy stuff of life.
That’s what paper was made for. Whenever you can’t say what you mean to say, write it. Get a piece of paper and your favorite writing instrument, and will words onto the page. You’ll have to think carefully, and it’ll take time. That’s good. You’ll get yourself across a lot more clearly. You’ll say exactly what you mean to say.
Perhaps you’ll change your mind while writing. The extra time might make you think through the situation more clearly — and then you’ll be really grateful that you didn’t just txt a quick message with what you wanted to say at first. You might realize your own heated arguments don’t hold much weight when you see them on paper. That’s good. You can always wad the paper up, throw it out, breathe deep, and start over — or drop the whole issue.
Maybe this is the sage advice of a writer that’d only apply to another writer. I don’t know. I’m absolutely not an authority on human behavior and relationships and communications. But I do know that writing works for me.
Whenever there’s a pressing issue that’s just heated or important enough for me to not trust my own mouth, I’ll write a letter. Sometimes — like the time I wrote a heated letter to President Bush on an airplane after a particularly frustrating ordeal with the TSA — I’ll realize that I just needed to get the issue off my mind, and will throw the letter away without ever using it. But it still was good to frame my thoughts about the issue and work through it on paper, even if no other human ever saw it. Other times, I’ll rework the letter until it actually gets you thoughts across, and send it on as intended — and sometimes it gets the desired results, sometimes it doesn’t. The only think I know is that it clears the issue from my head, and I’m far less likely to regret what I said in the future if I wrote it down instead of talking through it. Or hey, even if I do talk through the issue, writing my thoughts down first gives me a far more coherent message when I’m talking.
Next time you can’t figure out how to word something nicely, how to get your point across without sounding aggressive — or without getting talked out of what you were trying to say — try writing. You just might find that it works for you, too.
You know those promises you make yourself on January 1st each year, only to break them within the next 24hr? Seems like it’s more than pointless to make them. New Year’s resolutions — or broad life goals over any timeframe — might be good, but to me, they only seem a setup for failure.
But what’s life if not a constant learning experience? Through the unexpected and perhaps mundane aspects of life — those same things that keep us all from fulfilling New Year’s resolutions — we’re all growing, learning, changing, and hopefully getting a bit wiser.
2013 was a rather big year for me. It was my first year of married life, complete with all the great things that brings like signing my first home lease and walking through IKEA for days and taking an incredible 2nd honeymoon this winter. It was also the year that I [launched] and [killed a Newsstand magazine], started working on Mutahhir Ali Hayat on [Let.ter] as the first app I’ve had a hand in bringing to market, and worked my 3rd and [final year] as editor at AppStorm. It’s been one of the very happiest, most exciting, and challenging years yet, and I can only wish coming years will prove it to only be a start.
But what have I learned from it? Hopefully a little at least. Here’s the realizations I came to as I pondered this past year over the last few weeks of holidays and vacation:
You’ll Never Know the Full Story, but the Full Story is Out There.
The Snowden revelations about the NSA were honestly not as shocking to me as perhaps they should have been, since somehow it almost seems self-apparent that people — both nefarious and “good” (hi, Google) — are recording every page online, every place we willfully checkin, every photo and update we publicly share, and so much more. Perhaps reading [Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938] in college and more recently [Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield] made me assume, despite my horror, that there’s so much more going on behind the scenes than many want to think.
And then, I read the surprisingly interesting new book Hatching Twitter on my holiday break. It revealed no nefarious use of private data — indeed, it focused rather on Twitter’s efforts to protect users’ privacy from government agents, despite the fact that Twitter is the most public of all social networks which makes such privacy vanishingly helpful. What it did reveal, though, was the inside struggles of the founders of the social network that’s changed the way we all look at the world, 140 characters at a time. Jack, Ev, Biz, and Noah’s stories and paths to building Twitter came to life in a way that, thanks to media appearances, one could assume was only about Jack, the guy who also made Square.
Perhaps it’s not so surprising the government has hidden power struggles that we can only hope aren’t as brutal as House of Cards portrays, when the startups that are the bread and butter of our industry — and that convinced the rest of us to share everything about our lives in public — have their own private dramas that manage to stay out of the public eye. And yet, all the data’s still there for the taking if only one will put it together and find out the full story. That’s why I can’t find the NSA so shocking, even while I’m still revolted that they’re possibly monitoring this post as it’s written and synced to Dropbox even before I’ve put it in public.
We all didn’t put the Twitter story together even though bits and pieces of it were out there. But you can bet someone did. That potential to piece together “hidden” stuff from bits and pieces of semi-public data is why I can’t imagine the NSA will truly ever cease to exist — and why, on the other hand, we should almost assume there’s other governments and private companies and basement hackers collaborating very similar data sets for myriad reasons, good and bad.
And yet, even still, the next time you hear the news or read a company blog post, go ahead and assume you don’t know the full story. You quite possibly might be able to piece together a fuller picture from any number of data you could piece together, but you can almost guarantee a single report on a revolution or war or company pivot is really the full story.
Profit is Far More Challenging than Just a Great Idea
After starting and subsequently shutting down a magazine project of my own, and then having my employer shut down the site I’ve worked at for three years, it’d seem that this is the lesson most obvious to me from 2013. It’s easy to come by an idea these days, and even easier to launch the first vestiges of a business and product on the internet. It’s far, far harder to turn those ideas and ventures into profitable businesses.
And it makes me fear for the many, many brilliant, tiny apps out there — some can turn into a tiny business, sure, even one that’s moderately profitable, but paying back millions of venture money? Somehow I can’t imagine every startup we know and love will ever be able to.
Forums are Amazing. And Awful.
There’s a black-and-white picture that’s circulated the ‘net the past couple of months of men with their faces covered with a newspaper on a train in the late 1800’s. It’s typically used to poke fun at the idea that smartphones have made us less social. Point proven.
And yet, all is not well. Perhaps the newspapers those guys were reading were filled with yellow journalism and tabloidic headlines. And the stuff that fills the screens of our devices so often is of equally low or lesser value. That’s especially true when you spend any amount of time on forums, such as Reddit and the more sophisticated Hacker News.
I’ve read plenty of great, thought provoking and helpful article and full books this year, once that reminded me all over again why I love reading so much. And yet, for every one of those, I’ve also read through dozens of NSA rants and comments about startups and hilarious discussions about cat pictures and insane Buzzfeed (or, gasp, Business Insider) photo roundups. I’ve gained some from reading Hacker News (Reddit, not so much), but it still is an addictive time waster.
So here’s a realization that’s turning into a resolution: I want to read more quality posts and especially full books this year, and purpose to skip the junk food diet of the internet. And if I need a bit of diversion or entertainment, I’d rather follow Rands advice and [build stuff]. Because I agree: the feeling of making something is far, far better than the bloated-junk-food feeling of reading comment replies for an hour.
People are Awesome.
Regardless of how cynical the news may make you, people are still amazing. They’ll hurt you and frustrate you, sure, but they’ll also amaze you and make your life better. For every person out there that hurts you, there’s plenty more ready to help you get back out there and be stronger than before. For everyone that uses you, there’s tons more that are ready to do stuff for you for no good reason, things that’ll make you humble and wanting to go make the world a better place yourself all over again. And the more time you spend with people — and away from screens — the better. Which is why I should close this piece.
*****
So there, some major takeaways from 2013. Now, onwards and forwards to learning what 2014’s here to teach me.
Just over 3 years ago, in late October 2010, I filled out a writer application on iPhone.AppStorm in a bit to start writing about iOS after I’d gotten my first iOS device — a 2nd hand 3rd gen iPod Touch. Josh Johnson, the then-editor, graciously replied, and weeks later my first AppStorm post (oddly enough, about the Bing for iOS app that I can’t remember using once since writing the post) was published. And with that, my AppStorm journey began, one that’d lead me to becoming editor of Web.AppStorm 6 months later and finally going full-time with AppStorm when I additionally became editor of Mac.AppStorm just over a year after that.
Along the way, I managed to write for every AppStorm site other than Android.AppStorm, penning a total of 771 articles (not including sponsorship posts), which averages to very nearly one full-length article per week-day since I first wrote for AppStorm. Most of my articles were around a thousand words long, so I’ve easily published well over 700,000 words for AppStorm (and quite possibly over a million). Far more importantly, I’ve made great friends on the AppStorm team, virtual met dozens of amazing developers, paid off my college loans and gotten married. It’s been one awesome journey.
But sadly, the AppStorm phase of that journey ends here. Collis, Envato’s CEO, penned the last AppStorm post today announcing the site’s closure, something I’ve known was coming now for a short while. It’s a bittersweet moment — we all wished AppStorm could be more, and want it to live on, and yet I’m excited about my future at Envato where I’ll now be working as the new Software Training Editor at Tuts+. And the AppStorm legacy will live on in all of us, as each of us who used to be on the AppStorm team will continue to write about software on our own — expect to see more app reviews on Techinch in the coming weeks and months.
AppStorm all along stood for high-quality independent software reviews that, in the period when the word “app” entered the common vernacular, made it easy for anyone to see if a new app was what they needed in their toolkit. I’m tremendously proud of the work our team did, and will always be proud to say I was the Mac and Web editor at AppStorm. And yet, it was still tough. Writing full-length, high quality, exhaustive reviews is still hard work, and paying for it with banner ads is tougher since every site is competing for quality sponsors and pageviews. Still, I believe the AppStorm team did a great job despite the odds.
That's why it only makes sense to say thank you to the AppStorm editors who took a chance on me when I first started: Josh Johnson, David Appleyard, and Jarel Remick. And then, thank you so much to each of my co-editors and managers at AppStorm: James Cull, Kevin Whipps, Rita El Khoury, Joel Falconer, and Joel Bankhead. Last but not least, thank you to each of the awesome writers I've been privilaged to work with at AppStorm. You guys are awesome, and I'm honored to have worked with each of you.
So now, I’m starting on my new Tuts+ position, one you’ll hear more about soon — and I’m also working on some Techinch.com tweaks that’ll make it better for high quality app reviews. It should be an exciting year!
Several years ago when the 37signals team released their book Rework, I was struck by the beautiful hand-sketched illustrations almost as much as the content of the book itself, and then was delighted to see the same illustrations beautifully translated for the Thai edition of Rework. That beauty was thanks to the work of Mike Rhode, who's since turned his skills into a book — The Sketchnote Handbook. It's got the same charm as his pen-drawn illustrations, and yet he had a secret weapon in making the book — he'd turned his sketchnote writing style into a typeface.
That typeface is, appropriately, the Sketchnote Typeface. It's got the charm of handwritten text with extra whimsy you'd expect from a sketchnote, while being a font you can use in your own work. And from now until New Years, you can get 20% the Sketchnote Typeface with the coupon code TSHBG. That'll get you the Sketchnote Square + Dingbats font — the combination used above — for $23, or the whole typeface of 4 weights for $79 for now until New Years.
Sure, it's not a font you'll want to do all of your work in — that font, for me, is the incredible monospaced font Pitch from Klim Type Foundry — but it is a font you can have a lot of fun with. Sketchnote is that writing font you can use, for once, without getting made fun of. Comic Sans, you've been outclassed big time, this time.
A review of the app that makes sure I write reviews
OmniFocus is a fabled name in Mac geek circles, made by an equally legendary team of developers at The Omni Group. It’s fabled for good reason: it’s powerful.
Based on the outlining app OmniOutliner, OmniFocus on the Mac feels almost more like a spreadsheet or plain-text app than most polished to-do list apps, and that’s a huge benefit. With its Projects, Contexts, and start and due dates, you can view everything in your entire task database at once, or drill down to just see what’s most important for your work at hand. You can even arrange projects in the order stuff needs done, so (say) you won’t see a task to backup your Mac until you’ve completed the “buy an external HDD” task. That, in a nutshell, is what I love about OmniFocus. It’s powerful, and works great.
But, it has never has sported the most polished UI on the market (that award would have to fall to Things or Wunderlist). If anything, the first OmniFocus for iPhone was the ugliest of the trio of apps. It looked essentially like a stock list app in iOS, with the power of OmniFocus’ features underneath. The iPad app was the one with the polished, custom-designed UI that made it the version of OmniFocus of choice for many of us, but the iPhone app felt fully utilitarian, perhaps on the level of the Mac app. It’d keep you organized, and you’d come to fully rely on it more than you possibly could any other task app, but it sure wasn’t the app to go to for UI design inspiration.
That is, until OmniFocus 2 for iPhone was released. The new version immediately looks at home on iOS 7, but is also obviously not a stock app. The Omni team took the default UI style in iOS 7, and made it their own while bringing every single OmniFocus feature to the computer in your pocket. The main place you’ll spend your days is the Forecast view, which first came from the iPad app and now is equally powerful on the iPhone. The lite UI lets you easily see all of your data in an uncluttered interface, with little enhancements like Save+ to quickly enter tasks one after the other that make it more powerful than ever. The new design is nice enough that it’s easily the nicest app in the OmniFocus suite while staying as powerful as its counterparts on the Mac and iPad. And, best of all, it still works great with apps like Drafts and Siri Reminders to easily send tasks to OmniFocus on the go.
Much ado has been made over the price of the new version, but I see nothing at all to complain about. We get the Omni Sync Server for free if you choose to use it, and the Omni Group’s great support and generous 30 day return policy that no one else offers on the App Store. That and, of course, the most powerful task app with a beautiful iOS 7 design — that’s got to be worth something. I was more than glad to pay for the upgrade this time, and if in 3-4 more years they see fit to make another equally exciting upgrade for that price, I’ll be glad to pay again.
But you know what’s great? OmniFocus for iPhone v.1 still works great on iOS 7, and their team just issued an update to quash the few bugs it had on the new OS. So, if you own the older version and don’t want to shell out, you still can use the old version just like you can still use Photoshop CS5 on your Mac. Just don’t watch the OmniFocus 2 demo video, or you’ll end up wanting to open your wallet.
Next up: OmniFocus 2 for Mac. I can’t wait to see what it brings — and if it’ll finally be the leading app that the other two versions need to catch up to. But I’m fine waiting — OmniFocus 1 for Mac is still working fine, as is the current v.2 beta, and v.2 for iPhone has me more happy than ever with my taskmaster of choice.
Email's the original and — in many ways — best way to privately communicate with anyone online. It just works, no matter what email service your friends use, something you can't say for social networks. There's no way to Twitter DM your Facebook friends, but email works whether you're using Gmail or Yahoo! or Exchange or your own SMTP server. For all the talk of replacing email, it's really still good, and there's no reason to get rid of it.
But that doesn't mean it isn't a mess, because it is. Inboxes need cleaned, junk emails need deleted, and the constant dings and notifications are only slightly better than Aol.'s old "You've got mail!" alerts. It's distracting. If all you want to do is write an email to a colleague, opening your email app is asking to get distracted by all the inbox chores you need to do. Plus, most email apps aren't really focused on writing — they feel more like a text box form online with small text and dated formatting options.
That's why I so often switch over to my favorite writing apps to compose an email with Markdown and no distractions, then copy the formatted message to my email app and send.
And yet, there should be something better, and soon there will be. I've been working with Mutahhir Ali Hayat, a developer that's worked with HogBay Software on FoldingText and more, on a brand new app to make writing emails as nice as writing in your favorite writing app. The app is Let.ter, and it's coming to an App Store near you very soon.
Let.ter's a clean writing slate for your emails that lets you just focus on what you're saying, then send a formatted email directly from the app without having to open your full email program and get bugged by your inbox notifications. It's lightweight, simple, and we happen to think it's beautiful.
It's not ready just yet, but I'm pretty excited about it. If you love minimalistic apps, I think you'll like Let.ter. Be sure to signup for our email updates at theletterapp.com to be the first to hear when it launches, and I'll have more to share soon about Let.ter and the work we've put into it.
Several months ago, I stumbled upon a converter app that quickly became my favorite way to convert measurements and more: Konvert. It had a simple, flat UI that almost is more reminiscent of Windows 8's UI than of iOS 7, with the different conversions listed in tiles that flip to reveal the conversion screen when you tap them. It's simple, easy, and works great, and so even though it'd already been out for several months, it easily hit my list of favorite new iOS 7 apps when iOS 7 was released, since its UI fits in so well. And since then, the InnovationBox team has continued to improve it, adding currency conversion (including Thai Baht, yay!) and more that's kept it one of those essential little utility apps on my iPhone.
So when their team recently released the new Kounter, a simple counter app, I knew I had to try it. Kounter makes it as simple as possible to count anything — think of those little push-button counters that security guards use to make sure everyone leaves the building, but redesigned with iOS 7's thin font design, and that's basically what it is. I was disappointed that you can't just tap the main circle to count, but instead have to tap the plus on the bottom, which makes it a tad less fool-proof for quick counting when you're not looking at your screen. But still, it's a nice new approach to a simple app concept.
Then, their team also has made Calcolor, a beautifully simple calculator app that matches your iPhone 5c or 5s color and case accent color — and happens to look great on any other phone, even if it doesn't look quite as cool. And, the demo sites for each of their apps are equally fun — they show off a full demo of the app in action, in a way that makes sense on the web.
If you need simple number apps for your iPhone, go try these out. I can't wait to see what their team puts out next!
Computing in public isn’t odd. So why are laptops suddenly odd?
If you live in a dense metropolitan area, public transit is a way of life. Subways and other trains, busses and taxis, and some rarer transportation life forms like Ducktours in Singapore and Tuk-Tuks in Bangkok all serve to get us huddling masses from point a to point b without much thought on our part. And hey, while you’re en route, why not get a bit of work done?
Before the turn of the century, computing on the go was a luxury reserved mostly for politicians and businessmen in power suits. Blackberries, at first, helped smartphones keep that same cachet, but Apple’s iBook (the laptop, not the app and bookstore) and cheap HP and Dell laptops had long-since become common among the rest of us. It’d almost have been odder to sit in an airport lounge without a laptop than with one, and pulling one out on the train — provided there was ample seating and no one needed your chair — wouldn’t have been an odd sight.
That wasn’t long to change, though. Once smartphones and modern tablets burst onto the scene, laptops started being the new desktop and looked rather odd on the train. It’s normal to peck at your touchscreen while standing in a crowded train, but typing on a 13” laptop? How quaint.
Just a few months ago, I was riding the Bangkok BTS mid-morning, with plenty of empty seats around me. I was going to be en route for a half hour, so why not get some work done on my MacBook Air?
So I started writing, and got about 15 minutes worth of stuff done while riding. And nothing happened — except for the fact that everyone on the train looked at me like they were seeing a ghost.
Of course, everyone else on said train was looking at their own computers — only theirs were 4 inch phone screens, or 7 inch tablets (yes, even the full-sized iPad is starting to look large in public, at the same time the iPhone is looking too small compared to Galaxy Notes. It’s a strange world). Surely a 13” screen isn’t so odd. But it was.
And yet, what’s actually odd is that everyone was using laptops in public just a few years back. That’s actually odd, if you really think about what most people were doing. They were carrying around a full computer just to browse Facebook on public Wifi, or at best answer some emails and browse the web. There’s always people actually getting real work done on laptops on trains and waiting rooms, but that’s not the majority.
So now, we’ve got devices that actually make more sense for on-the-go computing. It’s not so much that smartphones made online chat possible, it’s that they made it practical anywhere. eReaders and tablets didn’t invent eBooks — I’ve read full books on a BlackBerry-style Windows Phone in the past, of all things, and of course have read many on Macs and PCs — but they made them practical. Google Maps was always something nice on the PC, as Mapquest was before that, but smartphones and tablets made them practical in ways they’d never have been before. In the same way VisiCalc made PCs make sense for business customers, Google Maps and WhatsApp and Facebook made smartphones make sense for everyone.
There’s still spreadsheets and AutoCad, app development and video editing, and so much more that makes more sense on a laptop. Those are the PC and Mac killer apps — the very reason we buy them. And if you really need them, it’s worth lugging around a laptop.
But that comes with a problem. See, no matter how light and thin laptops become, they’re still large machines. They block your vision, take up a rather significant of lap or airplane tray space, and make you look like you’re in a displaced cubical. Tablets and smartphones, for all their faults, make you look more available, more social — even if you’re really being a zombie behind your tiny screen. You’re not the guy taking up a seat on the train anymore, you’re just someone else holding a tiny piece of aluminum and glass when you’re using your smartphone. But a laptop? Go back to the office, dinosaur.
And yet, that doesn’t quite make sense, either. The very idea of laptops is to be able to work from anywhere, and that’s good. It’s just that most people don’t need full computing anymore for the work they’d do on the go.
And somehow, for the very same reason, I don’t happen to think laptops — PCs and Macs in general, at that — are going away anytime soon. Smartphones are better at some things, tablets at others, and PCs still have their place. As do servers, and to a degree mainframes. It’s just like Steve Jobs said: PCs are trucks, and everyone doesn’t need a truck.
In fact, if you’re still driving a truck, everyone in the city might look at you like you’re a freak on the highway. But you’re getting the work you need done, and their tiny compact gets their work done. Neither is right, neither is wrong.
