Category: software

some random apps

I’ve been trying to be careful about how many iOS apps I buy and/or download, since I’ve gotten to the point where I have a fairly ridiculous number of them in my library — a little over 250, based on the size of my “Mobile Applications” folder on my Mac. But there were a lot of holiday app sales over the past couple of weeks, so I gave in and bought a few things that I thought might be interesting.

First, I bought Launch Center Pro, which I’ve heard much about and seems like it could be really useful. I’ve played around with it a bit, and I can see where there’s some potential, but I haven’t really figured out how to do anything that interesting with it yet. I need to read up on it a bit; there’s some good stuff on MacStories that I should read.

Second, I picked up Day One, a popular journaling app. I’m not sure I really need an app like this, since I already write quite a bit on my blog, and keep track of a bunch of stuff in Evernote. But, hey, it was only a dollar. I think I might be able to do some interesting stuff with it, if I also pop for the Mac version, then set up Slogger and/or Sifttter. Both of these solutions seem to be a bit Rube Goldberg-ian, but they’re interesting.

And, finally, I bought Gneo, a task management app that can sync with Evernote. I’ve also been experimenting with Things again. I think there’s a fair chance that I’m going to give up on both of these, and just keep track of my tasks in Evernote directly, which is basically what I’m doing now, but I still feel like my system isn’t working as smoothly as I’d like. And I do realize that it’s easy to waste a lot of time messing with GTD software, rather than actually getting things done, but I don’t think I’m going to fall too far down that rabbit hole.

Between Launch Center Pro, IFTTT, Evernote, Drafts, and a few other apps and services, I think I really ought to be able to do some interesting things, linking apps together and automating stuff. But every time I think of something that would be useful, I can’t find an easy way to do it. Oh well, it’s all fun to play with anyway, even if I don’t actually accomplish anything useful!

Office 365 Home Premium

I’ve been going back and forth for a while now as to whether or not I wanted to sign up for an Office 365 Home subscription. I’ve been using a retail box version of Office 2010 on my desktop PC, and a HUP version of Office 2013 on my ThinkPad, so I’ve got both of those machines adequately covered. And I’ve never bothered with Office on my Mac. But the only office suite I had on the Mac was iWork ’08, which is obviously out of date. I’ve occasionally thought about updating to the new Mac App Store versions of Pages and Numbers, but I couldn’t talk myself into spending $20 each for them.

So instead I bought a key card for Office 365 Home for $60 from a sketchy third-party seller on Amazon. It worked, so now I have Office for Mac for a year, plus I can upgrade my desktop PC from Office 2010 to Office 2013 if I want. (And a bunch of extra space in OneDrive, and some Skype minutes.) I don’t know if I’ll want to renew it next year or not, but it should keep me out of trouble through 2015.

I’ve never actually used Office on the Mac. I’ve always relied on iWork, and before that, AppleWorks. I don’t do much word processing or spreadsheet work on the Mac, so that was always good enough. But it’ll be nice to have a “real” install of MS Office on my Mac, for those occasions when I really do need to work with an Excel file or (less likely) a Word or PowerPoint file.

I’m not really tempted to move away from Apple Mail to Outlook for my personal e-mail on the Mac. But I do have my company e-mail set up in Apple Mail too, and that’s an Exchange account, so maybe I should delete that from Apple Mail and use Outlook for that. It would make some sense, and certain things would probably be easier, but then I’d have to check two different mail programs. So I’m probably going to ignore Outlook for now.

I need to think about whether or not I have any use for the copious OneDrive space or the Skype minutes. Right now, I have DropBox and Google Drive installed on all my computers. I’m not sure I want to add the OneDrive client in there too; I don’t think it gives me much that I’m not already getting from Google Drive, except just more space. And I never come anywhere close to using up all the minutes on my Verizon plan, and I don’t need to make any international calls, so I’m not sure what I can do with those Skype minutes.

two-factor authentication and other worries

After reading this article earlier today, I panicked a little, since I couldn’t remember ever having seen a “recovery key” associated with my Apple account, nor could I find one in KeePass, 1Password, or Evernote. But, when I got home from work, I checked, and it turns out I’ve never enabled two-factor auth on my Apple account. And I do still know the answer to my security questions, though I’d never copied them over from KeePass to 1Password for some reason. (I’ve done that now.)

I was going to go ahead and enable two-factor authentication on my Apple account tonight, but I couldn’t quite make up my mind as to whether it would be a help or a hindrance. I need to think about it some more.

This also made me think about my Google account, and one particular thing I’d been meaning to do for a long time: make a local backup of my GMail data. About a year ago, I read about a tool called Gmvault, and made a note to install it on my desktop PC and start using it. But I never got around to it. Well, now that I’m on a bit of a GTD kick, I went ahead and made a new note about that and put it in my Evernote ‘inbox’. So now I’ve got gmvault installed on my PC, and I’m letting it run. It was easy enough to set up; it’s a pretty simple command-line tool. It looks like it’ll take a couple of hours to run. After the initial sync, it can apparently do incremental syncs, so if I can manage to remember to run it occasionally, I should be in good shape.

Occasionally, you read horror stories about someone losing access to their Apple account or their Google account for one reason or another, and getting caught up in the bureaucracy at those companies and not being able to get their account back. It’s kind of scary, how much of our data we trust to these guys. I try to keep track of everything I’d ever need to restore my access, if I ever get locked out, and I try to keep important stuff backed up locally, whenever I can. But there’s only so much you can do.

Thanksgiving weekend

I spent Thanksgiving day with a friend’s family. It was a good day, but pretty loud and chaotic, which is to be expected when you put sixteen people (including three small children) together in a house on Thanksgiving.

I spent Black Friday home alone, working on some personal organization. I almost managed to update the map on my TomTom GPS, but hit a snag when the new map was too large to copy to the device. That led me on a wild goose chase that ended when I found a notice on the TomTom site that said they were aware of the problem and working on a solution. But it was a fair amount of wasted time. (I’d thought, at one point, that maybe they’d purposely made the new map file just a little too large, to force people with older devices to upgrade to newer ones, but apparently it was an honest mistake.)

I also continued my work on getting stuff out of Backpack and into Evernote. I’m almost done there, and I should be able to close down the Backpack account soon. I’m getting enough stuff into Evernote now that I’m starting to think about how I’m organizing things, and what kind of adjustments I should make. I read the book Evernote Essentials yesterday, and also listened to a podcast with a lot of Evernote tips, so I could hopefully stimulate my brain a bit and come up with some good ideas on how to best use Evernote. I found both the book and the podcast helpful, though there weren’t any earth-shattering revelations in either of them.

I had a page in Backpack titled “GTD”, and I was using it to keep, basically, GTD-related lists, like a “someday/maybe” list, a “waiting for” list, project lists, and stuff like that. But I stopped doing anything resembling a weekly review quite some time ago, and I haven’t really been keeping up the lists. So, for instance, one list item was to use a $10 Best Buy Reward Zone certificate before it expired… in 2011. So I’m not entirely sure how best to clean up and re-structure those lists in such a way that I’ll be more likely to use them.

I really like the general idea of consolidating as much stuff as I can in Evernote, and cutting down on complexity a lot, eliminating OneNote, Backpack,  DevonThink, and whatever else I can. But I also noticed that Things for iPhone and iPad is free this weekend, and the Mac version is 30% off. So maybe keeping my GTD stuff in Things would be a good idea, while using Evernote for reference material and archives. But Things doesn’t have a PC version, or a web version, so I’d only be able to access it on the Mac and iOS. Which probably isn’t really a problem, given the way I’m using my computers these days. (Also, “Things” is a horrible product name, and tends to produce a lot of irrelevant (but amusing) results when Googled.) I’ve already downloaded the iPhone and iPad versions, and have played around a bit, and like what I see. I’m planning on downloading the trial version of the Mac software today, so I can see if it’s going to work for me or not.

Meanwhile, I just ordered two 500GB Samsung SSDs, for $189 each, with the general idea of replacing the old-fashioned drives in my MacBook and ThinkPad. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time now, and I kept putting it off. But I keep hearing, over and over, from friends and random internet sources, about how much difference an SSD will make, so I finally had to go ahead and do it. So next weekend’s project will likely be replacing either the MacBook or ThinkPad drive. Or possibly both, if I have enough time.

I’m also thinking about going to NYC to see The Imitation Game, the new movie about Alan Turing. I don’t think I’ll talk myself into doing that today, given how cold it is outside right now. But maybe tomorrow, if it’s a little warmer.

a bit more on Evernote

I’m making good progress with my efforts to consolidate all my notes into Evernote. All of the notes from OneNote on my desktop PC have been copied over or deleted. And I’m working through my Backpack notes.

I’m still thinking about whether or not Evernote is a good choice for the long term. There’s some interesting stuff in this recent article from The Guardian.

Stuff I like:

  • “We don’t data-mine your information, we’re not selling you to anyone. Our fundamental belief is that we make money when our users say ‘we love this product and we want to pay for it’.”
  • “It takes longer to get started, but ultimately it gives us a shot at building a 100-year startup.”
  • “If a third-party developer makes something great that gives people a great experience, we make more money. Other companies have this love-hate relationship with developers. For us it’s just easy: it’s love.”

Stuff that I’m maybe a little worried about:

  • “We’re about work. Last year we made the decision to really focus on work. We don’t really talk about Evernote [as something] for your hobbies any more.”
  • “We’ve never changed our price: we launched seven years ago at $5 a month, but we realised a couple of years ago that it was the wrong price.”

So, basically, I’m glad to see that they’re thinking long-term, and trying to monetize via paid subscriptions rather than selling info to advertisers, and I’m glad to see that they’re still supportive of third-party developers. But I’m a little concerned that they’re focusing on business rather than personal use, and that they may be mucking with the subscription price next year.

Trimming the Costanza wallet

I must admit that I’ve been carrying a Costanza wallet for the last few years. Well, maybe not as bad as that, but really it’s a bit thick. I’ve been experiencing some pain in my left hip lately, and I think the overstuffed wallet may be a contributing factor. In addition to switching from my left pocket to my right, I also decided that it was time to trim down the wallet a bit.

I’ve been meaning to get rid of all my loyalty cards and replace them with an app on my phone, but never quite got around to it. So I went ahead and did that today. I looked at a few apps, including Key Ring and Card Star, which seem to be the two most popular. I also realized that Red Laser, which I already had on my phone, can be used to store loyalty cards. So I started with Red Laser, and that seemed to work fine, but I decided to mess around a bit more, and tried Stocard. It has a nice and simple interface, and had no trouble scanning any of my cards. So I think I’m going to stick with it for now. I used it for the first time today at the supermarket, and the cashier had no trouble scanning the code off the phone screen, so that’s good. I’ve got about a dozen cards in the app, so that’s a dozen cards that aren’t in my wallet anymore.

I wish I could get rid of some more cards though. My CostCo card, for instance, has a mag stripe on it, and I have to show it at the door when I go in, so I guess I can’t get rid of it. I looked at the CostCo iPhone app, thinking maybe it could be used in place of the card, but apparently not. Oh well. And I can’t really do anything about the “buy 12 coffees, get one free” card from the bakery down the street. Or my credit cards, though I’m hoping Apple Pay will take care of that problem in a few years.

Evernote for Mac 6

I’ve been making steady progress on my project to consolidate all my notes into Evernote. As I’ve said before, there are a few things that I don’t like about Evernote, but I’ve decided that it’s the best solution for my needs.

Last night, I got the usual client software upgrade pop-up on my Mac; Evernote updates their client pretty frequently, so that’s generally not too exciting. But in the release notes this time, I saw that it was a major version upgrade (5.x to 6.0), and the top item in the feature list was “Sleek new design inspired by OS X Yosemite.” I groaned a bit, but went ahead with the upgrade.

The new version is, indeed, more Yosemite-like, with diminished contrast between foreground and background, making it harder for old folks with poor eyesight like me to use. I’m having the same problem with 1Password.

There’s a good overview of the upgrade at MacStories. Other than the unfortunate Yosemite-inspired design changes, the client still works fine, and they didn’t make any unnecessary changes to keyboard shortcuts or anything else that would affect my ability to use the software productively, so that’s good. (When did we get to the point where the main thing I hope for in a software upgrade is that they don’t make it too much harder to use, though? Was it the Office ribbon? The all-caps menus and horrible color scheme changes in Visual Studio 2012? iOS 7? But I digress.)

I’m also not terribly excited about the new features they’ve added to Evernote recently. Over the last few versions, they’ve added a presentation mode, work chat, and now “context“. None of those things really helps me use the software for its main purpose — taking notes and organizing them. But they’re easy enough to ignore. (I’d be even happier, of course, if they’d let me remove the buttons for these features, so I could use the space more effectively.)

And I’d be really happy if programs like Evernote and 1Password would introduce options in their software to switch to an alternate color scheme, like Visual Studio did after enough people complained about VS 2012’s default color scheme.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering if messing with the system font on my Mac will make things easier to read or harder. I want to try out Fira and Input. While replacing the system font probably isn’t something Apple wants you to do, it’s simple enough and appears to be easily reversible, so I might as well try. (I miss the old days, when you could use a tool like Kaleidoscope to change practically everything in the UI!)

rearranging the deck chairs

I’ve been working on a few things lately to improve the way I keep things organized. I’ve already blogged about my move from KeePass to 1Password. I’m also working on consolidating all my personal notes in Evernote. And I spent some time this weekend cleaning up my GMail inbox, and reviewing my use of OtherInbox Organizer, and thinking about whether or not I want to keep using that.

All of this “work,” when viewed from a certain perspective, looks a bit like pointless busy work, “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” as it were. GMail, for instance, gives me enough space that I really don’t ever need to delete an email. And the search tools in GMail are good enough that I really don’t need to categorize anything, if I don’t want to. If I need an old email, I can probably find it in a few seconds with no problem. Evernote is almost as good. The limits on even a free account are generous enough that I’m not going to hit them, and the search is good enough that I can find stuff quite easily, regardless of how little I’ve bothered organizing things.

But there is a real point to smoothing out the kinks in the system, reviewing old notes, and cleaning up old cruft. It’s a way of reviewing my own recent history, maybe seeing some patterns that I didn’t notice before, or remembering projects that I had abandoned but would like to pick back up, or sweeping away old projects that aren’t relevant or interesting to me anymore. And, even if none of that mattered, it’s still something to do that just makes me feel a little better about myself and my control over my own life, so it’s worth it just for that mental benefit, even if it’s fleeting and possibly illusory.

So, having said all that, I’m now going to bore anyone still reading this with some details on what I’ve been doing. First, with 1Password, I am now about 80% of the way through moving everything over from KeePass. I have the iOS, Mac, and Windows clients all installed and running, and the Firefox extension installed on my Mac & Windows machines. I’m not sure if I’m entirely happy with the Firefox extension, and its ability to automate logging in to a site; it seems to get that wrong most of the time. That’s probably something I can straighten out with some more work, though I’m not sure if it’s worth spending too much time on it.

With Evernote, I’m trying to convince myself that I can use it to replace Backpack, and I want to try and consolidate all of my random notes from various other systems into Evernote. Backpack is a product that has been pretty much retired by 37signals. They still keep it running for existing users; I pay $7 per month for it, and it works fine. But I know it’s not getting any new updates or features, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they decide to shut it down entirely at some point. So it seems prudent to get my data out of it and into a more actively-supported product. A while back, I paid a flat fee to set up a personal Basecamp account, which is now 37signals’ only active product. I haven’t really done anything with it though. While I could shoehorn my Backpack data into it, it’s not really appropriate as a general note-taking and reference tool.

Looking at some other options, I would be tempted to go with OneNote, since it’s now freely available across Windows, Mac, and iOS, but I’m not convinced that Microsoft isn’t going to pull the rug out from under the Mac and/or iOS versions at some point. Their commitment to alternative platforms comes and goes, so I just don’t feel like it would be a great idea for me to commit to a product that might disappear in the next management shake-up.

Evernote, on the other hand, is (of course) the main product for Evernote, the company. They’ve always been cross-platform, and I can’t think of any reason why that would change any time soon. And they seem pretty stable as a company, and not not likely to run out of money, or get acquired and shut down, or any of the other things that tend to happen with small, young, Internet start-ups.

There are two things, functionally, that I don’t like about Evernote. First, I don’t entirely like the simple linear organization of notes. As stated above, yes, you can easily search through the notes to find what you need, but I still like to have a bit more structure. (OneNote is really good on that front.) And it bothers me a bit that they don’t support plain-text notes, only rich-text. That might not seems like a big deal to most people, but it can get in the way when I want to paste some source code into a note. The “paste as plain text” option helps out there, but I’d really like an option to just have a new note be either rich text or plain text, and maybe to set an entire notebook to be plain-text by default. But I think I can live with both of these slight annoyances.

What I’ve decided to do with Evernote, in terms of imposing some organization on it, is to create multiple notebooks (but not too many) to sort things out into a few major buckets, then use tags to make it easier to find certain things, such as all notes related to comic books, or all notes related to F# programming. I’ve renamed my default notebook to “Inbox”, and I’ll be using it as an inbox in the usual GTD sense (though maybe not being as strict as I could be). New stuff will go in there until I sort it out somewhere else or delete it. The other major notebooks I’ve set up are:

  • Lists: various active lists, such as my list of which Dresden Files books I’ve read and which I haven’t.
  • Reference: various notes that I may need for reference in the future, such as the note reminding me that “sudo killall coreaudiod” is the command I need to use on my Mac whenever sound stops working.
  • Archive: old notes that I probably won’t ever need again, but maybe I will, so I might as well keep them.

That’s probably all I need, but I’ve also created a “Travel” notebook, for travel-related notes, and I may create a few other topic-specific notebooks.

Once I get to the point where I feel like I’ve got a good system going in Evernote, I’m going to want to consolidate the notes that I have in other systems into Evernote. I’ve already mentioned Backpack; that’s been my primary GTD and general note-keeping system for some time now. Copying stuff out of there and into Evernote shouldn’t be too big a problem.

I also have a bunch of old notes on my Mac in DevonThink. I actually really like DevonThink, and I kind of wish I could use it as a front-end to Evernote, but it’s really a Mac-only solution. What I have in there, at this point, is mostly software license info (which could go into either Evernote or 1Password), and some miscellaneous lists and Mac-specific reference info.

And, finally, I have a fair amount of stuff in OneNote on my desktop PC. This all dates back to a time when I was using that desktop PC a lot more often than I am now. I don’t recall entering any new info into OneNote this year. So, again, it shouldn’t be too hard to get that stuff into Evernote, mostly into the ‘Reference’ or ‘Archive’ notebooks.

The benefits of doing all this will be:

  1. I’ll have all my notes in a single store, accessible on my Mac, PC, and iOS devices, and via the web. (The stuff that was previously only on the Mac or PC will now be available everywhere.)
  2. I can discontinue my $7/month Backpack subscription. (I don’t currently have a paid Evernote account, and I probably don’t need one. But if I want one, it’s still a bit cheaper than Backpack was.)
  3. I don’t have to worry about relying on a product that’s not really supported anymore, and might get discontinued at any time.

So this has turned into a pretty ridiculously long blog post, but writing it helped me straighten a few things out in my head, and maybe reading it will help someone else out someday. (Or at least amuse someone slightly.)

trying out 1Password

I’ve been trying out 1Password for the last few days. I have the (now free) iOS client installed on my iPhone and iPad. And I have the 30-day evaluation versions of the Mac and Windows clients installed on my MacBook and my desktop PC.

In a nutshell: I have a few minor issues with the Mac version, but I think I’ll stick with it, and switch over from KeePass.

There are a few major issues that I want a password manager to address, and none of the solutions I’ve tried previously manage to do all of them well. 1Password isn’t perfect, but I think it does better than anything else I’ve tried.

First, since I’m working with multiple platforms, I need something that runs on all those platforms (or that can be accessed from them all), and that syncs my password database across them without any snags. With KeePass, I was keeping the database in DropBox, and that was working well on the desktop, but was a bit awkward to deal with on mobile. (If I switched to something like LastPass, this problem would go away, since it’s a hosted service rather than client software, but there are other things I don’t like about LastPass.)

With 1Password, I can keep the database in DropBox, and all clients (Mac, PC, and iOS) seem to be able to access it with no problems. I haven’t seen much in the way of documentation about the 1Password database (though I haven’t really gone looking for it), but it appears to be structured as a bunch of individual files within a folder, rather than as one big file, like in KeePass. The obvious advantage here is that this should do a lot to resolve the occasional conflicts that would happen with KeePass. The typical issue with KeePass would be that I’d save a change to the password file on my MacBook, while it was disconnected for some reason, then make a different change on my PC, and save the file, then later go back to the MacBook, and have that machine then try to sync the password file, and cause a conflict. Then, I’d have to open the two conflicting password files, copy the change from the conflict file back to the main one, and then delete the conflict file. Not a horrible thing, and it doesn’t happen often, but it’s a pain when it does. With the way 1Password does things, I think I’d be fine in this scenario, as long as I was changing two different passwords on the two different platforms.

I didn’t come up with a good way to export my passwords from KeePass and import them to 1Password, so that was a bit of a hurdle to get over. But I’m now looking at this as an opportunity to clean up my password database, tossing out some old ones and re-organizing things a bit. I’ve manually copied/pasted over 100 entries from KeePass to 1Password now. That’s gotten me through about one-third of the database, I think. I’ve done this all on the Mac client. While it hasn’t been too much trouble, it has exposed a few things about the current version of the Mac client that I’m not too happy about.

The main issue is that they’ve gone a bit too far in embracing the Yosemite aesthetic. The main window just doesn’t have enough contrast between the background color and foreground text. It’s basically grey on grey. This just isn’t working well for my tired old eyes. Maybe it looks better on a Retina screen, but I don’t have one of those. I posted a question about it on the AgileBits forums, suggesting that maybe they could have an option to change this. They replied that I wasn’t the first person to ask about it, but they didn’t specifically commit to doing anything about it. So I may just have to live with that for now. (As a side note, I recently discovered the “zoom” function on my Mac, so I’ve been using that to make text more readable, especially when I’m using the MacBook at night.)

I also have a few other minor nits to pick with the Mac client, but nothing major. For instance, I’ve found that if you have a lot of text in the note field on a password entry, it doesn’t quite refresh the screen correctly when you’re scrolling through it. And I wish the folder and tag lists would default to ‘show’ instead of ‘hide’, when you open the client. But I can live with this stuff for now.

The newest version of the iOS client is great. I can’t really complain about it at all. It can be unlocked with Touch ID, which is really nice and much easier than having to type in a master password every time. (Though Touch ID hasn’t been working well for me lately, which is a subject for a different blog post.) And it integrates with iOS to the extent that Apple allows — which isn’t much, but it’s better than it used to be, and it’s better than any other password software I’ve tried. There’s a good recent review of the new iOS client up on MacStories. There’s not much more I could say about it that they haven’t already said.

So, to summarize, I think I’ll be migrating the rest of my passwords over from KeePass into 1Password, and paying for the Mac & Windows desktop clients. (And maybe paying the $10 to unlock the premium features in the iOS client, though I probably don’t need them.)