In a bit of a break from tradition, I thought it'd be fun to run an interview with a fellow tech writer here on Techinch. I've run numerous interviews with developers on AppStorm, but this is the first I've run on Techinch.
Jason Rehmus is a guy I've met — virtually — from my work with CoSupport a couple years back, and we've kept in touch via Twitter and App.net. He's recently launched a new online editing service, Sweating Commas, so I thought it'd be fun to interview him about his work, what his service offers, and his favorite apps and writing tips.
Enjoy!
Thanks for taking the time for this interview. Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
I'm a freelance writer and editor. I like shaping sentences and making paragraphs have greater impact, so partnering with other writers is a natural fit for me.
I'm also a road tripper. Most of the writing I do for myself revolves around the trips I take or hope to take. I've been on one long road trip so far this year, and I hope to add some more in the coming months.
Can you share any experiences or things you've learned from working with 37signals? I've been a fan of their apps for quite some time.
The best thing about going to work for 37signals, was the process of getting the job itself. It required I step well outside of my comfort zones, and it paid off big time for me. Sure, I landed the job, but the process of going after something I really wanted taught me so much about myself and what I'm capable of.
The other truly great thing about working there was getting the chance to meet Sarah Hatter. Sarah started her own company, CoSupport, providing top-notch customer support in the tech industry. I've been fortunate to be able to work with her over the last couple of years, and that's been a great experience for me, learning from someone as knowledgeable as Sarah. Seeing Sarah start CoSupport helped me see the possibilities in starting something of my own, which helped me in starting Sweating Commas.
From your experience in tech support, what's the best thing customers can do to get the support they need from companies?
The best thing customers can do is to be clear about what they need. They should ask their question as simply as possible, leaving out unnecessary information. Also, they really need to just ask one question at a time. More than one question at a time can cause confusion and slow down response times.
Tell us about your new venture, Sweating Commas. What was the inspiration for it, and how is it going so far?
Sweating Commas is an editing service designed for bloggers and content marketers. I provide that objective look that writers can't get on their own. They're too close to the work to see everything that could be improved. For bloggers that means they can publish with greater confidence. Content marketers save time by letting me handle the last step of their work while they move on to writing drafts of their new pieces.
It's great! My goal, aside from earning some money, was to get my name out there and to meet and work with new people. That's exactly what I've done. I've had some really cool opportunities come my way as a result of starting Sweating Commas. My clients work in a variety of industries I haven't worked in myself, so my work is much more interesting than it was before.
What's the most important writing tip you could give our readers, based on your editing experience at Sweating Commas?
Read your piece out loud as you're doing your final edit before publishing. If anything sounds like something you wouldn't say, change it immediately. Your voice is what sets you apart, so make sure the voice in your writing actually sounds like you.
What devices and apps do you use for your daily work?
My primary work machine is a MacBook Pro. I also write on my iPad Mini, and I'd like to do more editing on it, but I'm more efficient on the laptop. Touching the screen to place the cursor for making a correction requires more patience than I often have.
I tend to stick with stock apps like TextEdit, Mail, and Safari. I use Marked for reading through drafts while editing. I also rely heavily on Dropbox for my own documents and for receiving drafts from clients. Oh! And Hazel monitors my Dropbox folders and moves drafts around for me, doing the heavy lifting on some truly boring work. I like to keep things as simple as possible.
What's one app you'd love to see made that you don't have right now?
There isn't one. I adapt to the tools I have available to me. That's what makes me a horrible beta tester!
Thanks, Jason!
That's a wrap, but if you're a writer and need help getting your writing polished, be sure to check out Jason's Sweating Commas service. I'm still planning on giving it a shot for some upcoming top-secret writing projects I have going on :)
My favorite way to jot notes down these days is in Markdown formatted plain text files. I've got a folder of plain text files in Dropbox, and when I need to find something, I can quickly search Alfred for the file I need. It works quick, and is easy to use anywhere thanks to the fact that all of my notes are plain text files in Dropbox.
Using Alfred 2, creating these new notes is simple. I just type in the name of the note I want, and it makes a new note and opens in my default text editor — iA Writer. Thanks to a request from a reader on Mac.AppStorm, I've now tweaked it to add the name of the note to the top of the note as well. If, perhaps, you want the note to automatically include the contents of your clipboard — which would be a terribly simple way to turn anything into a plain text note — you can tweak the bash script in the Alfred workflow to include $(pbpaste) in the "echo" part of the script.
Yesterday, I saw a tweet from the Kirby account that got me rather excited: there was a new Alfred 2 workflow for creating Kirby posts. This workflow, created by developer Marc Jenkins, let you turn a quick Alfred query into a folder for your post (with a iterated number for that folder) and made a plain text article file in that folder with the basic structure for an article.
It was great, but I wanted more. So, I took some time, and added some features to the initial workflow. I first set it to open the article file automatically, and then tweaked the iterated folder number so it wouldn't count my /feed/ folder in the number. I also changed it to use dashes instead of spaces in the new article folder name, since that's how I usually save my articles. Finally, I had it add the query to the Title: link in the new post file. That made it perfectly fit into how I blog with Kirby.
Now, I can open Alfred, type "post A New Post", and it'll make a new folder "XXX-A-New-Post" with an article.md file in it that has the title "A New Post" and the current time, and that file will automatically open in my default writing app, iA Writer. Boom. That sure simplified blogging.
There's one extra thing I wanted, though. I also write link posts using Kirby's custom post types, and wanted an easy way to make those as well. With a few tweaks, I got it to make an article.link.md file when I start the Alfred query with "postli", and it automatically adds the Link to the post file from my clipboard using pbpaste. I figured I'd need to copy the link anyhow, so that works out good. Now, to make a link post, I just copy the link, open Alfred, type "postli A New Link Post Name", and I'm ready to write.
It's been a fun little adventure into bash scripting in Alfred, and I'm sure I'll be using this little workflow a ton. Go check out my tweaked Alfred 2 workflow for new Kirby posts on Github if you'd like to use it with your own Kirby blog.
And a special thanks to Marc Jenkins for making the original Alfred workflow; I wouldn't have gotten started without his first version!
There's two expensive application suites that are almost considered a necessity to have on your computer: Microsoft Office, and Adobe Creative Suite. Many find ways around paying for the latter (alternate apps work, there's the cheaper Adobe Elements apps that work for most stuff, and such), but Office is a bit trickier.
Especially this year. After releasing Office 2013 for Windows and the new Office 365 subscription version of Office, traditional Office pricing has gone up. Used to, all editions of Office let one user install Office on up to two computers, which worked great if, say, you had a desktop and a laptop. Then, the Home and Student edition let you install Office on up to 3 computers in the same household, which was a great deal for families.
With Office 2013's release, now all editions of both Office 2013 and Office 2011 for Mac are only licensed to be installed on one computer. At least you're still allowed to transfer your Office license to a new computer if you need to, something Office 2013 oddly didn't allow at first.
The Cheapest Way to Get Office Today
So, if you want to purchase Office today, and not get it as part of a subscription, then here's your options:
Office Web Apps
I know, I know: it's not real Office, but it's close enough for basic use, and it's free. It's the best option if you really need to go cheap on Office. Check out my full review of the Office 2013 refresh of the Office Web Apps at Web.AppStorm, or go try them out for yourself at SkyDrive. You might be surprised.
Real Office
Ok, so you want real Office to install on your computer? Here's the options today:
Office 356 - the subscription version of Office for Mac and PC
Office 2011 for Mac
Office 2013 for PC
Office 2010 for PC
Office 365
The first option — and easily the best if you have more than two or three computers — is Office 365 Home Premium, Microsoft's new subscription for Office. For $9.99/month or $99.99/year, you can run Office on up to 5 computers (Macs or PCs), get 20Gb extra Skydrive storage (a $10/yr value, though even that's way cheaper than, say, extra Dropbox storage), and 60 minutes of Skype calls per month (worth around $20/yr). You'll get full Office - Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, as well as Access and Publisher on a PC. If you'd pay for Skype and extra Skydrive storage as well, and have 5 computers in your household, it works out to around $14/computer/year.
Students get Office 365 University even cheaper: $79.99 for 4 years of Office 365 for 2 computers. That'd work out to around $10/computer/year.
If you're running a business, Office 365 for Business makes a fairly compelling choice as well if you do need Office, or even if you just need hosted email. You can get hosted Exchange email for your team starting at $4/month, and can get Office for your employees (and yes, they'll each be able to run it on up to 5 devices) for $12.50/month. You can check through the options and see what works for you. I'm actually considering giving the cheaper option a shot for my own domain's email, and have an upcoming AppStorm series about it. Stay tuned.
Oh, there's one more awesome feature in all versions of Office 365: you can run Office — full Office — from the web if you're away from your computer (though it only works on PCs). It lets you essentially stream the full-featured app, downloading the features you need as you need them, so you can use full Office anywhere. That's pretty nifty.
So, all of those are decent options if you have a lot of computers to use with Office, and if you want Microsoft's other services anyhow. The only problem is, you don't really own Office, and can't use it forever. It's a subscription. If you'd buy Office upgrades each time they come out, it likely won't work out more expensive, but you have to consider the best for you.
If you want real Office that you own, for good, then there's still options.
Office 2011 for Mac
Mac users don't have a new version of Office yet, but even still, the existing version of Office got slapped with the same 1 computer per copy of Office restriction. The good thing is, there's still copies of the original Office 2011 Home and Student Family Pack on Amazon, and it'll still get all of the latest updates. That'll get you Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for up to 3 Macs in the same house for ~$120. That's $40/Mac, and if you use it for 4 years without buying an upgrade, that'll cost $10/Mac/year.
Now, both of these prices are only for right now; as soon as those copies sell out, then Office 2011 will cost $119 per computer for Home and Student. Also, remember that Office for Mac is due for a refresh perhaps later this year, so if you can, it might make the most sense to hold off on a purchase, or go for Office 365 so you'll get updates included.
Office 2013 for PC
If you want Office 2013, even just for one computer, you're likely best to go with Office 365. Your cheapest options, otherwise, are Office 2013 Home and Student for $139.99, and Office 2013 Home and Business for $219.99. The former gets you Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote for home use, while the latter adds Publisher and Access and is licensed for business use.
Both options only are licensed for one PC, though the good thing is you can use it perpetually. If you only need the basics of Office on one PC, then Office 2013 Home and Student will likely work out cheaper over time. Otherwise, though, the subscriptions start looking really attractive price-wise.
And Office 2013 is nice, with a much more streamlined UI across the whole suite, web app creation in Access, PDF editing in Word, smart data entry in Excel, and more. It's worth checking out … just maybe not as a boxed version, as you would have purchased Office before.
Office 2010 or older versions
But you know what? Office 2010 or 2007 is still a good option if you've got a copy around, and if you're not feeling like you've got to have the latest features, then your best value would be to stick with what you have. Office 2010 is still quite similar to 2013, and even 2007 is enough up-to-date to keep you from feeling too behind.
Or, if you need to buy Office, you can still get Office 2010 Home and Student for $169, and it'll still let you install it on 3 computers, which works out to just $56/computer. That's a perpetual license, so you can keep using it forever, making it quite a bit cheaper right now than Office 2013 or Office 365 if that's all you need. Plus, it'll run on XP and newer, while Office 2013 and Office 365 will only run on Windows 7 and 8.
There's also still copies of the pro versions of Office 2010 around on Amazon, as well as Office 2007, but none of those would really work out cheaper than their 2013 competitors right now. Though, that's still an option if you need to buy Office for XP or Vista PCs.
That's a wrap
So, that's a lot to consider, but hopefully it'll help you find the best option to buy Office for your PC or Mac in 2013, or get around having to shell out for it. The Office Web Apps on SkyDrive really are a great option, and older versions of Office still are a great value option — especially if you already own them.
But Office 2013 is a compelling release if you're on a PC, and the new Office 365 subscriptions are far more interesting than they look at first glance. I'm especially interested in their hosted Exchange/Sharepoint/Office options, and that's surprising for this Mac and web app guy that's almost left Office behind. Microsoft may have made some missteps with Windows 8 and Windows Phone, but they've also got some interesting things going on.
What do you do when your team has made a successful weather app, and you want to take it to the next level? Why, you build your own weather service, and put its power into a web app that out-classes every other online weather app the web's ever seen.
At least that's what the team behind Dark Sky, the popular iOS weather app, did. Their newly released Forecast.io site is the best weather site on the 'net, hands-down. It's beautifully designed, has rather accurate forecasts for almost any spot on earth (though with more specific and timely forecasts in the US and UK right now), and lets you see storm system data around the globe. You can go back and look at the weather history, or peek into the future forecasts. It's packed with features, isn't cluttered with ads, and even has rather great forecasts for small towns in Thailand, something most weather apps don't have.
It works great on your desktop browser, but is even more amazing on your smartphone, where it honestly feels as responsive as a native app. That's pretty amazing for a web app.
Even neater, the Forecast team is opening the data from their new weather service to other developers, which will hopefully spark more new awesome weather apps. They also made their set of animated weather icons, Skycons, open-source for others to use.
Now that's how you build momentum around your app. Awesome work, Forecast.io team. You've turned me into a fan, overnight.
"Email gets a lot of hate these days, but it truly is the king of communication." ~ David Heinemeier Hansson
…says one of the most influential guys behind Basecamp, the project management app we use at AppStorm (and that I use personally as well with the new Basecamp Personal). The funny thing is, I use Basecamp via email most of the time, and it works great that way.
I think this is why: the Basecamp team gets why email is still important, and designed Basecamp to almost extend email instead of replacing it. Everyone wants to replace email, but I honestly can't imagine any other web app working so good: it works no matter what email app or service you and your team are using, is easy to archive and search, and has been around for decades. And I think email's here to stay.
The rest of the interview is great if you'd like insight from the 37signals partner about why he thinks working from home is the future … and why email will continue to be a big part of that.
There's a little trend that keeps bugging me: successful people writing about how college isn't that important. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college, so surely the rest of us would be so much more successful if we dropped out of — or simply skipped — college.
I faced the same dilemma. I was already employed — in a job and company I love and have continued to work for — during my last year of college. A college degree suddenly didn't look so important, especially when balanced against the growing bills said degree was generating. I seriously considered dropping out of college with only a couple dozen credits left to finish.
And why not? The world's changing, and a degree is no guarantee of success today (though really, was it ever?). Education seems to only be a click away — who needs to study when you could check Wolfram|Alpha and Wikipedia for the answers? Plus, if you did want to study, there's all those online courses for free, right? And even if you did go to college and get a degree, everything you learn will be obsolete by the time you graduate.
Not so fast. I did finish my degree — and am glad I did, even if graduating didn't directly change my career — and here's why I believe a college degree is still a very worthy goal, even in 2013.
College Forces You to Study
Deadlines are a blessing. No, really. If there weren't deadlines, I highly doubt I'd have ever gotten through my classes, and I definitely wouldn't have gone through them as fast as I did.
Many people think they could study the very same stuff that you'd learn in college from the internet. After all, there's tons of online courses for free (thanks, MIT OpenCourseWare and Coursera), and you could just purchase the same textbooks from Amazon that real classes use, and study them on your own. Throw in online tutorials and more, and you'll be well on your way.
And you might be. Odds are, though, you'll quit the class before finishing. You know how many tutorials you've bookmarked and books you own that are collecting dust.
"But I might quit college too", you could counter. Ah, you could, but after working towards the degree and investing any money and time into it, you'll be a lot less likely to just throw it out as quickly as you'd close a browser tab.
College Makes You Broaden Your Horizons
I highly doubt I'd have learned what letters of credit were for if it hadn't been for my international business class. Macroeconomics, international business, and music didn't seem like they'd be important to my career, definitely not as much as database design theory and writing classes.
There were tons of classes in my degree plan — especially business classes — that seemed like a total waste of time. However, they gave me a well-rounded education, and forced me to think beyond the things I'd learned on my own. I would have never, ever studied these things on my own. Honestly, many of the things that I studied in college that seemed to apply to my degree — Calculus II and database design theory, among others — were likely things I would have never pushed through if I hadn't been required to study them.
But I'm glad I did study them, and do believe they have helped me in my adult life already, and will continue to do so.
College Costs
I know, I know. This sounds like the worst point of them all, but I happen to think it's true. We tend to value things more when we invest more in them, and that's true with your degree as well.
Now, this won't work if you put your whole college bill on a loan, and figure you'll pay it off post-graduation. But if you have a goal of getting your degree with the least debt possible, and work very hard towards that goal while you're in college, you'll find that it teaches you a lot.
You'll find ways to make college affordable, including buying — and then reselling — used textbooks, and applying for grants, scholarships, and more — a great exercise in working with bureaucracy, something you'll have to do in real-life. You'll have to budget, plan for the future, and work hard, while still keeping your college education deadlines. It won't be easy, but it will teach you a ton of valuable lessons.
But, it's Just a Goal
All that said, if all you have under your belt on graduation day is a degree, you've failed. Everything every pundit has said about college degrees not being valuable will turn out to be true, because they're not very valuable on their own. Jobs are tough to come by these day, and life-long careers in the same company are increasingly rare, so you need to invent your own job. And you need to start that now.
College isn't the time to only focus on studying what's in your class, but it's also the time you should be building your own career. Do anything you can for experience, even free stuff (contributing to open source, volunteering, blogging) that will gain you recognition. Build your own following. Start making the stuff that you want to make post-college. Whether you plan to make physical goods, software, movies, books, or anything else, the experience will serve you well, and will give you a chance to put at least some of the stuff you're learning into action.
Also, don't quit studying. If you're interested in something your college isn't teaching you, go study it to death. That's equally important. The internet is great for that, as is the old school of trial and error. All that extra learning and doing, combined with your classwork and deadlines, will teach you what you need for life.
It's not easy. Dropping out of college — or not going at all — is easy. But committing to getting a degree, and building a career, and learning more than what you're required to, is difficult. It's the difficult stuff, though, that makes you grow.
Investing in yourself is always a good strategy.
...and no, this isn't an April Fool's joke, despite today's date.
I just wrapped up my review of Draft, the newest writing app I've been using the past few weeks. Suffice it to say that Draft is awesome, and has already changed how I collaborate on articles with some of my AppStorm colleagues. It makes version control for writing actually work and make sense, and is designed to let you save documents you write to the storage service you want.
One side note: Draft is a great proof-of-concept for Filepicker.io, also, since it works so good in Draft for opening and saving documents to online storage services. You can even create new folders in Dropbox by adding the folder name you want as foldername/ to the beginning of the file name. Every web app should be using it for saving files; it's really great.
Go on, read the whole review at the link below. Then go try out Draft. I think you'll love it.
Every tech and business pundit in the world has advice for Apple these days. They need to make an iPhone with a bigger screen, a cheaper iPhone, a watch, a TV, better versions of everything they make, and release them all faster than their current annual product cycle.
So what does Apple do? They counter the negative press — and Samsung's recent gadget launches — with simple, beautiful sites about the best in their own iPhone 5 and iPads.
Go check them out: there's a new "There's iPhone. And then there's everything else" site, as well as a just-launched "Why you'll love an iPad" site. They both tell the story of why Apple sees its devices leading: JD Power awards, the best app ecosystem, industrial design, and long battery life.
Apple's different than everyone else. They make the devices they think are best, in the sizes they think are best, and stand by their decisions. They might release a device in a different screen size — no one outside of Apple, Inc. can really answer that until/unless Apple announces said devices — but if so, they'll have a reason for it, and that reason won't just be because every Android phone maker is making larger screen phones.
Everything about Apple's design and marketing screams choice. They chose the screen size that they thought would work best, chose to make sure long battery life was a priority, chose to use the best materials to make their devices. Then, customers choose Apple products, choose what apps they want to use on them (note that Apple devices come with far fewer preloaded apps than most Android phones, and how most Android phones' marketing focuses on preloaded apps).
Apple's choosy. It wants its customers to be choosy. And that seems to be working, stock price regardless.
Plus, sticking to one design that's working must not be such a bad idea. Samsung even decided to copy the idea with their Galaxy S4, which is almost identical in design to their Galaxy SIII. It's almost like they saw that the iPhone 4 and 4S had the same design, and the iPhone 5 had a similar-yet-different design, so they copied the idea of new-but-same.
Oh, and they apparently didn't get the cheaper phone memo, either, since the S4 will cost $50 more than the S3 did — and than the iPhone 5 currently costs — on US contracts. Too bad Apple will get soundly criticized and more if they do the same things this year.
Samsung can't choose. It makes Android phones, but also makes Windows Phone 8 devices and is working on new Tizen-based phones. It makes dirt-cheap (and dated) devices, as well as top-of-the-line phones. It sells phones and tablets in every screen size imaginable. It can't choose one thing to work on, the thing it really believes in. It gets press by flooding the market with devices, devices that are increasingly hard to differentiate. It can't choose.
Yet somehow, I don't think Apple cares. It chose its own path, and no matter what, it'll continue to be choosy about what it thinks matters. And it thinks we'll continue to choose them. That gives me more hope than anything.
Here's a list of the apps and hardware I use daily, freshly published on Mac.AppStorm. It's not everything I use, but it's the most important stuff that I use to get work done every day. The stuff I couldn't live without.
There's only one quick change to the article since it was published: I'm now using the new OmniFocus 2 Alpha. And yup, it's awesome. Can't wait to see it released to the public. But you still can't go wrong with OmniFocus 1; even if you've never used it before, you can buy it today and you'll get OmniFocus 2 for free.
If you have a chance, I'd love it if you could leave a comment on the article at Mac.AppStorm letting me know what apps you use daily, or if there's any apps you think I should switch to!
