There seem to be so many great mac apps available now that it can be tricky to figure out which one is best for any given purpose, especially in areas where several apps seem to be just as good. You can looks at features, reviews, price, etc. but there’s another metric I’ve been thinking about that can be just as important. Let’s call it “momentum”.
Momentum is about the popularity of an app but also about how engaged its developers and users are. If an application is getting regular updates then it might be worth buying on the assumption that however good it is now it’s also likely to get substantially better. This may be enough to recommend one app over another that is otherwise comparable. Of course this is about the quality as well as the quantity of development - many open source projects see regular updates but each iteration doesn’t represent the kind of improvement one often sees in a app made by a small team with a clear vision.
Another component of momentum is the size and involvement of the user base, especially with apps that scriptable or extensible in some way. Sublime Text 2 is a great text editor made much better by the huge number of plugins developed by users. There are also numerous guides, tips, tricks and tutorials you can find online that have been posted by the user community. This breadth of functionality and support just doesn’t exist for every text editor.
For years I’ve been using LaunchBar, a terrific app launcher and general productivity booster. I’ve sung the praises of the app to anybody that will listen and have happily used it and extended it through hooking in AppleScripts that can be used to create additional actions the app can perform. Now I’m looking at Alfred, an app that does pretty much the same things as launchbar. I don’t know that Alfred is a better app (although it is a bit prettier) but it seems to have momentum behind it right now. A new version 2 has just been launched that supports user created “worflows” - essentially plugins - and folks have already created a bunch of them. Although there were gaps between Alfred and LaunchBar in terms of features those gaps have been closed and workflows represent an area where Alfred has now gone beyond what Launchbar can do (Launchbar can access scripts as actions but doesn’t have its own UI for creating and accessing plugins the way Alfred now does).
Alfred now has all the elements of momentum: rapid delivery of updates, an involved user base and more and more attention being paid to it by bloggers, online media, etc. I don’t like it much more than launchbar right now but I have a hunch that I will fairly soon.
Momentum is a funny thing though. It can swing another way fairly quickly and today’s hot app can be tomorrow’s barely supported dinosaur. TextMate suffered this fate, as did another launcher, Quicksilver. Both of those projects are now open source and development continues but without the same buzz as before.
There are exceptions. In the realm of text editors Vim is the stalwart, gathering moderate numbers of enthusiasts all the time even though the application itself has remained unchanged for many years. It’s so extensible that the functionality continues to grow even without official development. The learning curve is such that once you master it there’s little chance of wasting that investment by switching to something else. It seems invulnerable to the shifting winds of momentum.
For me, at least, momentum has been a significant factor. I often wish that I could stay satisfied with the tools I already have but hot new apps continue to turn my head and exploring them is just too much fun to give up.
I was just faced with that email. You know, the one that sits in the inbox from somebody you don’t have time to deal with asking for something you don’t have time to do. I don’t want to blow it off completely because there’s a chance that the relationship or the offer being made may be valuable but I don’t want to do anything about it right now either. That message had been in my inbox for days floating among the flotsam and jetsam of other message cruft until I processed my messages today and it was the last one staring me in the face, mocking me. To make things worse this was a follow up email asking for a reply after I had already ignored an earlier one.
I had a few options:
- Ignore it, and have it keep taunting me.
- Delete it, and probably receive another follow up.
- Reply to it.
With those options in front of me I could see that number three was the only acceptable course of action. So I sent a short message in reply saying that I wasn’t going to take the time to act on the matter right now but I’d get to it and send a reply in a couple of weeks. Then I created an action in Omnifocus to take the required action with a start date of a week from now.
That felt good. It felt like I had just given myself the gift of a week or two and had sent a clear but polite message that I had more important things to do and would reply in my own time rather than respond to any further badgering. The next step is to convert my message into a template for automating replies to similar solicitations, which I receive fairly often.
For me this is what Getting Things Done is all about: finding ways to blow away the annoying bits of friction creating grit so I can get back to the real stuff of my life.
One great thing about git is that branching and merging are cheap. For this reason I create a lot of branches and there’s a whole bunch of them sitting around in my repo and on the remote I share with my team. Many of these branches are out of date and useless, cluttering up the repository and making it more difficult to see branches that are still active. I had been deleting these one at a time but figured there had to be a better way. A google search later it was Stack Overflow to the rescue.
First I wanted to clean up the remote repository. I found this SO page that provided the following one-liner:
git branch -r | awk -F/ '/\/PREFIX/{print $2}' | xargs -I {} git push origin :{}
Just replace PREFIX with the appropriate string and the matching branches will be deleted from origin. In my case feature branch names begin with Jira issue numbers so deleting a bunch using this method was a snap.
Then I needed to remove outdated local branches as well. Another line (given in another SO thread) will take care of that:
git for-each-ref --format="%(refname:short)" refs/heads/3.2\* | xargs git branch -D
Now my local and remote repositories are cleaned up in minutes and I can do this easily again when it gets messy. Sweet!
In a guest post on The Brooks Review, Pat Dryburgh mentioned that he doesn’t regularly follow any blogs by female authors. That got me to thinking, how many women am I following? Suffice it to say the answer is embarrassing.
What could be the reason for this sad state of affairs? For one, I follow a lot of tech focused blogs, a field in which women are underrepresented. I don’t think that’s the whole answer though since I read more male authors even when it comes to novels and non fiction books. It could be that I relate more to other men’s sensibilities and so gravitate toward their writing. It could mean that male writers are overrepresented when it comes to the kinds of material I read. Whatever the reason I’m not satisfied with the result.
One the one hand it really shouldn’t matter what the gender of a writer is when it comes to enjoying his work. On the other hand I can’t help feeling like I’m missing out on an important perspective (or rather group of perspectives) by reading predominantly works by men. So I’m going to make a point of seeking out more women to read. I hope this time next year my mind will have been opened just that much more.
Brett Terpstra wrote a nice review of Write, a new text editor for the iPhone. I mostly agree with his assessment that it’s a well made app that falls short on some features but overall provides a good experience, especially due to its excellently executed cursor control button.
I’m writing this in Write and it works well enough for me, but I doubt it will be my editor of choice for a couple of reasons:
- No landscape orientation. I often like to type on the iPhone in landscape so that missing feature makes a big difference to me.
- Only saves to a Write directory in Dropbox. To me the whole beauty of Dropbox is the flexibility and portability of what I save there. If I can’t access a file saved by Write in other applications (and vice versa) then I may as well be using iCloud. Why not just let me save in whatever Dropbox directory I want?
One other annoyance: when accessing a file I need to press an Edit button to start writing in it. Tapping once on the text to enter editing mode seems more conventional and considerably easier.
For all these problems Write is a strong effort for a 1.0 release and I’m looking forward to how the app is developed further. For now though I’ll be sticking with Plain Text for short notes (hooked up to the same Dropbox folder as nvALT on my Mac) and Writing Kit or Byword for longer form writing. It helps that all those apps have iPad versions as well.