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Web apps come to life

Fluid iconPrism icon

These days more and more people, including yours truly, are spending time in Web apps. For myself, this includes the mighty GMail, Remember the Milk, and Google Docs. It really is nice to untie your documents from a single computer and have it accessible anywhere you go, including on the iPhone. Never again leaving work only to find out halfway home you forgot to copy That Important File to the flash drive is priceless.

So, Web apps are great. Although you STILL HAVE TO BACK UP. You don’t want to wake up one morning to find Google has deemed you persona non grata and you are now locked out from all your documents.

But there’s a psychological hurdle, at least for me. Having my task list sit as one tab among many in my browser makes it feel less … “real” is as good a way to put it as any. Plus, if the browser dies, there goes your document. Kaboom.

So it’s nice to make Web apps feel more like “real” apps. Which is the goal of a Site-Specific Browser (SSB). Basically, an SSB turns any Web site into an application with its own icon, its own place in your Dock or taskbar, and in some cases even badges showing you things like unread items in GMail.

Now how much would you pay for something like this? $19.95?

Just kidding. They’re free.

The two big players on the block—both in pre-1.0 versions at this writing even though both are plenty stable—are Prism from the same folks who brought you the Firefox browser, and Fluid.

Prism is cross-platform, while Fluid is Mac-only.

Either one will do you solid and elevate Web applications to first-rank status on your computer. Try ‘em out. You’ll thank me—and the developers who wrote them—the next time Flash nukes your browser from orbit.

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By niclindh
— January 19, 2010 at 9:22 pm

A clean, shiny Mac

Some people have asked me what I’d consider to be the essential things to set up on a brand-new Mac.

Obviously, setting up a computer is an intensely personal exercise, and what works for one person may be like shag carpeting and disco lights to another.

Long years of painful experience has taught me that the number one rule for trouble-free computing is to do as little mucking around as possible—the more stock your system is, the fewer issues you’ll run into. First, do no harm.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun productivity.

Pasteboard history

Why oh why this is not part of the standard Mac OS befuddles me. Having exactly one item on the pasteboard feels so 1985 it’s not even funny. JumpCut fixes this glaring omission. It’s an application I would have a hard time getting through my workday without.

Transparent hidden apps in the Dock

Making the Dock work with you

You can make the Finder show you which applications are hidden by making the icon transparent. Why this isn’t the default boggles my mind.

To accomplish this, fire up a Terminal and enter:

defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden -bool true

killall Dock

I’m a huge proponent of putting the Dock to the right of the screen. Why? Because your screen is wider than it’s long, so you’re more likely to have room there. And if you put the Dock on the left side, ill-behaved applications will cover it. So to the right it is.

I also like having the Dock pinned to the bottom. Having it just hover in the middle of the screen disturbs me for some reason. Perhaps I should talk a to a mental health professional about why this bothers me so much, but before I get around to that, here’s how to make it pin to the bottom. Again, fire up a Terminal and enter:

defaults write com.apple.Dock pinning end

killall Dock

Hint to Apple: You could maybe make both transparent hidden and pinning visible preferences for the Dock, hmmm?

As part of my whole neat-freak thing, and also since the icons in Mac OS X are absolutely gorgeous, I like to have as few things in my Dock as possible. Oh, it’s a big day for any application on my system when it is deemed Dock worthy! The laughing, the horn blowing! The basic idea is that if I don’t use an application every day, it doesn’t go on the Dock.

But doesn’t that get annoying? Having to open up the Applications folder every time I want to launch an application that’s not in the Dock sounds awfully close to tedium. Fear not.

Application Launcers

An application launcher is a huge time saver. The one I use is Google Quick Search Box, since it’s Google’s world and we all just live in it anyway. A quick control-space, type a bit of the name of the application, and boom, there you go.

There are several other application launchers out there—if you don’t like Google’s, just google for them.

And of course, if you’re on a machine not your own, command-space and there’s Spotlight search. Type in the first few letters of the application name, hit return, and Bob’s your uncle. Why not just use that? Because it’s slower and it doesn’t learn your preferred abbreviations for applications.

Text Editing

If you build Web sites or program, you live in a text editor, and the venerable BBEdit is king of the hill. If it’s text, BBEdit can handle it. It’s a bit on the pricey side, but oh so worth it. If you only do light editing, BBEdit’s less-accomplished but free brother TextWrangler can probably do the job for you. Both beautiful applications.

Since Mac OS X is a Unix under the hood, every stock install has Vi, Nano, and Emacs included, but unless you know why you want to use them—or you have a penchant for deep learning—stay clear. They’re fun, if you’re into pretty hardcore nerditry, but not for civilians.

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By niclindh
— November 19, 2009 at 5:19 pm

The cargo cult of technology

Technology is complicated. No doubt about that. For instance, do you have any idea of the machinations your computer goes through every time it boots up? It’s an orgy of different systems and pieces of hardware, each and every one of which has to work perfectly or all you’ll end up with is a sad, non-functioning system.

For example, here’s Apple’s extremely high-level guide to the Mac OS X boot process. When you bring the hardware into the process, it gets way, way more complicated. But this post isn’t about the complexity and intricacy of modern computers, it’s about the human response. Whether you know what’s really going on inside your computer or not, you know it’s complicated as all get out, and that Men With Beards get paid a ton of money to make the magic happen.

Which subconsciously causes a lot of people to exist in a state of angst about their computers. Man, if that puppy blows up, I am screwed.

And what do humans do when exposed to complicated systems we don’t understand? That’s right. Go cargo cult.

My computer stopped working after I updated it. But then I performed an update after repairing permissions on my hard drive, and it worked great. Therefore, repairing permissions must be something to do before every system update.

Google around on the Internet and you’ll find myriad statements like this. To be honest, it’s really depressing. Because it’s nothing but magical thinking—I found something that worked, and therefore that must be The One True Way. It’s post hoc, ergo propter hoc writ large, all over Internet.

Remember, computers are nothing but logic machines. There’s nothing magical inside them. Not even a drop of unicorn tears. All physical processes, all completely understood by engineers.

So whenever some random person tells you that you must do X before you update your system, they are victims of cargo cult mentality. What you must do before installing any kind of update is what the manufacturer tells you. No more, no less. And the software manufacturers spend a lot of time and energy making sure you don’t have to sacrifice any chickens before updating.

Nevertheless, there are indeed times when things blow up. It’s frustrating, but it does happen. And at that point, the only thing that will save your bacon is having a current backup.

Spend your time making sure you have good backups, not listening to the nattering of witch doctors on the Internet, and you’ll have a much better time with your computer.

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By niclindh
— November 12, 2009 at 12:13 pm

Magic Mouse impressions

Magic Mouse

Magic Mouse. Source: Apple.com

The most personal piece of any personal computer is arguably the humble mouse. Not surprising since apart from the keyboard, it’s the piece you physically interact with all day.

Most computer users are happy to use whatever rodent shipped with their computer, but for heavy users, the mouse is an object of strong opinion—one man’s objet d’art is another man’s torture instrument. Apple, as usual when it comes to industrial design, is on the forefront of innovation in this arena.

The Magic Mouse is the first mouse to have no buttons and no scroll wheel, a tapered white monolith that is the essence of clean. Apple being Apple, there is no wired option—you want the Magic, you go BlueTooth.

And yes, it’s weird at first, as your fingers unconsciously search for a button or wheel to navigate from. But after a surprisingly short time, it starts to feel right. Drag your fingers up and down on the mouse to scroll. Sideways to go back and forth in applications that support it.

But it still feels like a half-measure: at least for yours truly, the top surface gets so achingly close to being a trackpad that it’s frustrating to not be able to do all the gestures of a trackpad, like pinch to zoom in and out. Perhaps in a later version.

Nevertheless, after several days of heavy use, the Magic Mouse manages the most important feat for a mouse: it disappears, leaving you with your intent instead of the physical act.

Should you buy one? Depends on you. Mice being so much a matter of personal preference, and the Magic Mouse being such a break from tradition, you’d do well to try before you buy.

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By niclindh
— November 3, 2009 at 6:53 pm

Putting the horse before the car

Probably the biggest problem with new technology is that it requires people to change to get the most out of it.

When you adopt a technology to help solve a problem—like, let’s say team work—it’s not enough to adopt the technology and then use it just like the technology it supplants.

This kind of thinking leads to things like the dreaded e-mail chain, where everybody’s sending e-mails around like they’re little slips of paper. And then a document needs revising, so a Word document gets attached to the e-mails, like it’s a bunch of papers. People open, read, edit, and pass along, exactly like with a piece of paper that gets marked up by different people.

It may still be a win, since sending e-mails is a lot easier, faster, and cheaper than couriering paper around, but it’s still the same old process, only turbocharged.

Because the hard part isn’t using a computer to replace the manual tools—the hard part is to change the workflow. People fear change. Most people at this point have realized the benefits of using a word processor instead of a typewriter, but that doesn’t change the writing process, only the physical act itself.

Which is profoundly sad—the state of computers and networks these days has the potential to revamp the process itself.

One obvious technology that is mature and ready for the masses is shared documents. Let’s use Google’s implementation as an example, since it’s free and polished.

Google Docs lets you host text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations on the Internet, which is great for people who move between different machines a lot, or for people who simply want to be able to work on a document at work, then pick up where they left off at home without resorting to kludges like e-mailing themselves the document or remembering to put it on a flash drive. That’s a win, right there.

But the real win is that other people can be invited to collaborate on the documents. So everybody can change things at the same time. Which means no more e-mailing documents back and forth. No more having to figure out who has the latest version, or the even worse scenario of spending your time editing a document only to find out it’s several versions old and all your work was for naught. Not a good feeling, that.

So why aren’t more teams using technologies like Google Docs when the benefits are so obvious?

Because they require a new process. Why mess with something that works—well, that kind of works—but is grossly inefficient?

This is the challenge for technologists and technology evangelists—getting people to understand why changing the entire workflow is sometimes necessary to get the benefits of the technology. It can be a hard sell.

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By niclindh
— October 23, 2009 at 3:24 pm

A clean, well-lighted place to fail

A clean, well-lighted place.

Source: Matt Sepping.

(With apologies to Ernest Hemingway.)

Failure is an important in any creative endeavor. One of the main reason I love using computers—something that leaped out at me the first time I ever touched one—is that with the right setup there is very little cost for experimentation and the occasional failure.

Want to see what happens when you push that shiny button? Just try it. If it didn’t work, command-z and you’re back where you were. Thanks to the magic of command-z (control-z for the Windows folks out there), experimentation is very low cost.

No matter how jaded I get when it comes to technology, the fact that I can go back in time never ceases to amaze me.

This is true at least for single-step experimentation. Things get a bit harder when you branch out into a whole series of steps of experimentation—you’ve changed your images in Photoshop, rewritten a bunch of text in Word, rejiggered your layout in InDesign, or changed a bunch of files in your brand-new WordPress theme, and it all turns out to be a colossal mistake.

How do you recover?

This is why programmers have created whole systems to allow them to experiment and keep the cost of failure low. For most “regular” creative people, though, setting up software like Git or Subversion—and learning how to use it—simply costs too much time and effort, despite the software being free. The revision control systems out there are getting easier and easier to use, so hopefully in time they (or their descendants) will become part of the toolkit all creatives use.

For right now, though, there is still the brute-force way of simply taking manual copies of your files at stages where you know you’re going to go off into uncharted waters. Sure, it’s a bit of a hassle, but the ease of mind makes it well worth it.

The first step is to learn to manage your files. I completely agree with John Gruber that the whole notion of file management in and of itself incurs a mental cost and there are a lot of cases where we simply should not have to deal with files. This is—and I’m phrasing this very carefully—especially true of creatives who use computers. I keep running into people who despite the years and years they’ve been creating on the computer still view things like file locations with abstract wonderment and dismay.

If you’re one of them and you make your living using your computer, please please please seek the assistance of your local friendly nerd to teach you how to manage your files and ensure you have proper backups. The piece of mind will be more than worth it.

The beauty of having gone through the simple yet slightly annoying task of making copies of your files before you take a radical leap is that you can do so without reservations.

The creative freedom is exhilarating. And that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it?

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By niclindh
— March 20, 2009 at 2:28 pm

Your own personal GTD

(Cross-posted to The Core Dump)

David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology has been burning up the nerdosphere for years now, and for good reason. It’s a system of self-defense for dealing not with thugs in an alley but with the endless demands and distractions modern life throws our way.

As with any other positive change in life, it’s easy to understand, but hard to implement. Not hard as in complicated, but hard as in losing weight. Want to lose weight? Eat less and exercise more. Can’t be easier to understand; can’t be harder to accomplish.

As fair as I’m concerned, Allen’s most important realization, the underpinning for his whole system, is the fact that our brains simply weren’t built to handle modern life. The way your brain operates is pretty darn optimal if you live in a small group on the savannah and get up in the morning for another day of hunting and gathering. But it fails miserably if you live in the modern world. This is why your brain wakes you up at three in the morning to remind you about the project that’s due in a week. And why it reminds you to take your kid to ballet class on Friday when it’s Wednesday and you’re waiting in line at the grocery store.

So Allen’s solution is the Trusted System. A place where you write down the things you know you need to remember and know you’re going to check.

So it’s a bit of a bog: You have to remember to write down the things you have to remember, and you have to remember to actually look at the place where you wrote them down. Wax on, wax off.

Once you get into the habit of doing that, though, a miracle happens: Your brain stops telling you things at inopportune times. And that’s how you know you’re doing it right: Your brain starts to shut up.

You might be saying, “So, this guy is a genius because he built a better to-do list?”

Yes, essentially. He makes a very, very nice living showing people how to make lists. (There are a lot more nuts and bolts to Allen’s system, but that’s the heart of it.) Not just lists, mind you, but lists you actually check.

DING! It’s not enough to make a list, you have to actually check the list.

The other brilliant thing about Allen’s lists is what you put on them: Next Actions. You don’t put down amorphous blobs like, “Buy new house.” Instead, you put actions you can perform. Like, “Call Bob about his realtor.”

Like most wonderful things, it’s deceptively simple. This one little change means that when you’re ready to crank through your lists, you don’t have to think about what things mean. You’ve already done the thinking. Just perform the actions.

A warning about GTD, though: As alluded to earlier, many nerds are into it. Obsessive-compulsive nerds. That Guy who moved a wall in his house half an inch so he could get a perfect standing wave from his speakers.¹ He’s into it. Which means that a few simple ideas Shall Not Be Left Alone.

Nay, I say! Nay! We can surely overcomplicate this! We can come up with The One True Way™! We can endlessly debate the finer points! How does Getting Things Done translate to Klingon?

Which is completely antithetical to the spirit of GTD: You are a unique being. You need to figure out what works best for you. And above all, you need to Get Things Done.

So, at the risk of sounding like a cult member, I can’t recommend GTD highly enough. It’s skills for the 21st century. Looking into it is a good use of your time, even if you find it doesn’t work for you.

  1. That Guy actually exists. He was an engineer at Volvo in Sweden. True story.

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By niclindh
— January 19, 2009 at 5:37 pm

Thugs would like you to back up your data

Please back up your data

Please back up your data.

The gentleman pictured here would like to remind you to back up your data. According to KTAR.com, he broke into Arizona State University law student Alex Botsios’s apartment armed with a baseball bat and demanded Mr. Botsios hand over his laptop. At which point Mr. Botsios, freaked out at the prospect of losing months of work, overpowered and pummeled him.

Hug Your Machine does not recommend wrestling baseball bats from intruders, but in this case Mr. Botsios won the struggle.

The point, though, is that the hard drive in Mr. Botsios’s laptop could fail at any point, taking all his hard-fought case notes with it.

Murphy’s Law is powerful indeed when it comes to computers, so if you have files on your computer that matters as much to you as Mr. Botsios’s do to him, do yourself a favor and help yourself to a better night’s sleep by getting the backup religion.

Arguably the best and most succinct how-to on backing up your files in a safe a manner is Jamie Zawinski’s tongue-in-cheek PSA on the matter. When it comes to computers, there are far worse people to listen to than JWZ.

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By niclindh
— November 22, 2008 at 1:38 pm

Death by PowerPoint

One of the biggest wastes of time in Corporate America is arguably the crushing boredom of endless PowerPoint presentations that make no point.

How it ever became acceptable for a person to get up in a dim room and bore twenty other people to death while wasting their time by stretching out what would have taken 10 minutes without slides to a full hour parade of slides crammed with needless details is something future sociologists will no doubt spend much time debating. But for right now, Death by PowerPoint is very real.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way. One of the best books written on the subject is Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds.

Creating better presentations with more impact doesn’t depend on delving deep into the nooks and crannies of PowerPoint or Keynote, but rather on rethinking the way you conceive of the presentation.

It wouldn’t be fair to either Reynolds or you to attempt to rip out his ideas from the context of the book—and his ideas do need a whole gorgeous book with plenty of examples to really come through—so I’m not going to do that here. Suffice it to say that if you create presentations, you must read this book. Yes, must.

Your future audiences will thank you.

If you need more convincing, Reynolds also operates a blog with the same name as the book which I also highly recommend.

Happy presenting.

Presentation Zen Cover

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By niclindh
— November 1, 2008 at 5:59 pm

A problem and a solution

Every day I see people using their computers in backwards ways. People who are frustrated by their machines and digital life in general. So much email coming in, so hard to get Word to stop “helping” you write, so many upgrades that change the things you’ve already figured out.

This makes me sad.

As a huge nerd, I spend a lot of time on computers, and in general they have immeasurably improved the quality of my life. Not that there aren’t moments when I’m burning with the fury of a thousand suns as technology bites me in the nether regions. But I’ve been to this rodeo before, and over the years I’ve learned ways to make my computers work for me and help me get things done.

The impetus for creating Hug Your Machine is to share some of the things I’ve learned over the years, and get new ideas from other people. Believe me, I know how little I know.

Hug Your Machine will not be about “click here to make this happen,” but ways to approach the computer, ways to think more digitally. I promise to do my darnedest to stay away from productivity pr0n and gadget worship.

Usually, you don’t need new software—you need to learn to use what you have. Above all, you need to learn how to approach things in a digital way. Taking analog habits and transferring them on to computers is at best an awkward fit, and at worst a sure way slowly to drive yourself insane.

The idea behind Hug Your Machine is to hopefully give you a reason to want to hug your computer at the end of the day, to feel that it has helped you.

Engage!

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By niclindh
— October 27, 2008 at 2:50 am