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.
I heard about the application called LiveReload some time ago. It sounded pretty cool but seemed to be for those who developed for the web locally rather than running an app on a server like I do. So I forgot about it for a while. Then recently I came across another mention of LiveReload 2 and figured since it was a Version 2 it must be much better than it was before so I should give it a try. It’s great, stupendous, life changing and completely useless.
LiveReload watches the files in your web project and then reloads a web page when you save a file. In the case of CSS files it doesn’t even have to reload the page to show you the changes you’ve made even if the web site is running on a server. This saves precious milliseconds from one’s workflow. It means you can view your editor and your browswer side by side and not have to switch to the browser to refresh it. It makes CSS development a whole lot smoother. But that’s it.
This app will not make you a better developer, it won’t optimize your code or make your web site more beautiful. Nobody will know or care that you are using this app and nobody but you will see any benefit to using it at all. It may as well not exist. Except. Except that it makes coding for the web feel like butter, like you’re just gliding through CSS changes rather than slogging through them and makes you feel like you have a robot on the refresh button rather than having to hit those pesky command and R keys yourself. This app gives you a web development superpower. A completely useless, private and uncared about superpower.
Most of the applications I love are of this like this. LaunchBar, Omnifocus, Sublime Text 2, and on and on through the list of applications that improve my quality of life without, alas, improving the quality of what I produce. I’m writing this post in Sublime Text 2, and will prevew it in Marked before publishing it on my blog running on the Jekyll Platform. I could just as well have been writing in TextEdit and publishing on Blogger for all the difference it would make to the (questionable) quality of this article. I like those tools though and using them makes me feel, if not always good, then at least a little bit special. What more can I ask for?
| After listening to the latest GTD focused episodes of [Back to Work](http://5by5.tv/b2w “5by5 |
Back to Work”) I thought it was time for me to follow Merlin Mann’s advice and reread David Allen’s book myself. It’s been a while since I picked it up even though I consider myself a follower of the GTD system. Turns out I was wrong. There’s a lot I had forgotten and several ways in which I was not really Getting Things Done. |
Blinded by Awesomeness
For a while I’ve been using Omnifocus for task management and it’s far and away the best app of its kind I’ve ever used on the Mac, iPhone or iPad. It’s so great that I haven’t looked much beyond what it offers to get myself organized and that’s where I’ve fallen down. Omnifocus supports a lot of GTD out of the box: Projects, Contexts, Review, even “ticklers” in the form of start dates for actions. One thing that Omnifocus can’t do though is actual thinking about projects and tasks and this is the crucial part of GTD that I’ve been mostly missing. I haven’t been asking the important questions: what does this project look like when it’s finished? What principles must be upheld in completing it? What’s the very next physical task I can take to move this to completion? I had got sloppy with creating tasks and projects and am glad that rereading GTD has given me the opportunity to start doing the work that my tools can’t do for me.
Project Planning
Since I had lost focus on much of the thought processes involved in GTD, the subject of The Natural Planning Model had not stuck with me at all. David Allen spends quite a few pages explaining how to plan projects, from conception through execution, and I’ve realized that I’ve been skipping most of this when creating a new entry in my projects list. There are a lot of tasks I’ve recorded that are really projects that need to be broken down further. I’ll probably need to read that section again acouple of times before truly internalizing the workflow but I’m sure it will be worth it.
Miscellaneous Misses
There’s a few other things in the GTD book that I had not been following. One is the way that David Allen approaches the calendar. In GTD the calendar is sacred, not to be clogged up with anything that isn’t absolutely positively associated with a specific time or date. I use my calendar for appointments with others only, but I may have gone too far in this regard. There are plenty of tasks of mine that might benefit from having space on my calendar, mostly so that nobody else can “steal” that time from me. One example is the weekly review, which I think I’ll have to schedule for a specific time to make sure I get around to it every week.
Of course, the weekly review isn’t really a single task but a group of actions: what David Allen calls a “checklist”. I don’t really make checklists, generally approaching projects as one offs. I can see how making some checklists might benefit my workflow though, perhaps being set up as Project Templates in Omnifocus . I’ve already created a checklist for creating new blog posts that looks like this:
- Free writing for 20 minutes to generate post ideas.
- Mind map or outline around one post subject.
- Write a first draft in long hand.
- Type up second draft.
- Edit to create final post.
- Publish post.
I wrote this post using this method and it definitely has helped focus me and remove any excuses for not posting on at least a weekly basis. A checklist like this works much better than a task sitting in my inbox called “write new blog post”.
A Better 2013
I’m already feeling energized by what I’ve (re)learned about GTD. If you’re feeling less than stress free and hyper-productive then it might be worth reading the book, no matter how many times you’ve done so in the past. Chances are you’ll find something new that might change your game completely.
I had a pair of Audioengine speakers which crapped out and figured I’d look into alternatives for getting music playing around my home. I’m using Sonos speakers and have had a good experience with then so far. My setup is fairly simple: one Sonos Player:3 speaker in the kitchen, one more in the living room and a Sonos bridge to connect them. I should state that I’m not an audiophile by any means and excellent sound quality was not my first priority in buying this system. Above all I wanted something that was easy to set up and expand if necessary and that would perform flawlessly. So far Sonos seems to fit the bill.
The best thing about Sonos is that it plays music directly from any of multiple online services as well a from a library on a home computer. I have enabled playback of music from Rdio, Pandora, DAR.fm and Songza. Sonos also plays online radio stations and allows you to set up your city to select stations from. Of course you also have access to radio stations from around the world and around the internet.
I’m finding I’m really enjoying Songza, which offers curated playlists based on genre, mood, even time of day. My favorite find there so far is a playlist of songs from Wes Anderson movies which is great in that it’s a group of songs I want to listen to but wouldn’t have found together anywhere else. If the fundamental unit of music is no longer the album or the single but the playlist then Songza may turn out to be a big hit. Certainly they are better at putting playlists together than I would be, but hey, I still listen to albums.
If there’s any downside to Sonos it’s that it can only be controlled by an app on your mobile device (iOS or Android). There is a stand alone Sonos controller but from what I understand it’s being discontinued and the price is prohibitive anyway at $200 on Amazon right now. The iOS app is good but takes a couple of seconds to connect, a minor inconvenience but noticeable.
As for the sound quality, the Play:3 speakers are as good or better than any comparably sized speakers I’ve heard. The sound is clear and balanced and plenty loud even in my living room. At some point I may experiment with doubling up my speakers in the same room to get true stereo and see if that sounds significantly better. There’s also the bigger Play:5 speakers if I decide to upgrade that way.
Bottom line: I’d recommend Sonos to anybody looking for a hassle free way to serve music from multiple sources around their home.