I have recently started using DevonThink again for keeping track of diverse research notes and documents. The good folks at Devon Technologies have a great collection of on-line tutorials — simple, small amounts of prose with an illustration, affairs — that are perfectly parsed for learning a little bit here and there to improve your understanding of the application and how you might use it. Great support like this only makes me like — in an emotional sense of the word — the product more, which makes me want to use it more.

I was on the verge of writing a rather glowing account of the joys of going “All in with iDisk” when I have encountered a persistent error message: iDisk not in sync. Here is the text of that message from the Console:

3/30/10 10:12
FileSyncAgent[133]
POST 
/Info.woa/wa/XMLRPC/accountInfo (FAILED), httpStatusCode:-1, 
errorType:106 (domain=AYErrorDomain, code=2), 
transactionState:5, txnId:694B8C79-C874-4ED3-A7E1-F5690D9DE75F, 
auto-retries=0, 
manual-retries=0

First, the LED screen will not be there for long. Color e-ink with decent (enough) frame rates for watching video is on its way — or at least so I am told. Apple knows that this thing isn’t perfect, but I suspect they also saw that the technology in this category was lagging behind market interest and demand. iPad 1.0 is a placeholder in some ways.

Second, if I was 20 years younger, I would stop what I am doing now and immediately immerse myself in everything it took to develop native apps for this and the other devices that are going to copy it. This is the computing device that most people have wanted for a very long time. For better or worse, most folks are consumers, not producers. The IT revolution — Tim Berners-Lee core concept — was a blurring of that distinction. We have seen a lot of movement in that direction, and there are certainly a lot more people producing content than there was twenty years ago, but I think we are also seeing a flattening of the growth curve and a kind of stabilizing of who is going to do what for the time being. The iPad addresses that flattened curve very, very well.

The Apple tablet/slate computer is out as of yesterday and it’s called the iPad — despite all the terrible jokes using that exact same name. It’s a sweet looking bit of hardware, and the pieces of the presentation I caught reveal some terrific software, too.

I’m going to leave to others to work out all the various ups, downs, ins, outs, and assorted other debating points that emerge after any Apple product release or upgrade. One thing and one thing only strikes me as immediately worth thinking about and which yesterday’s presentation flirted with: the iPad as one’s only computing device.

This question popped into my mind because while the iPad intrigues me as an addition to my own setup, it is even more interesting to think about it for someone like my mother. Everyone talks about “typical users,” and I suspect that a fair percentage of those “types” are really parents. For me, it’s my mother. My mother does exactly all those things everyone talks about being 90 percent of “typical computer usage”: e-mail, web browsing, some digital snapshot work, and … and that’s about it.

Say … those are all things you could do with an iPad. Why exactly do you need another computer if that’s all you do? In the case of the iPad, the other computer becomes a fairly large docking station. My guess is that Apple already knows this and is working on a more full-fledged docking station where users will manage the contents of their iPad from their iPad and not from iTunes on the docking computer.

That makes a lot more sense. Imagined this way, Jon Gruber’s concern about packing a keyboard with his iPad when he travels is exactly the wrong direction:

I can totally imagine traveling to conferences (or events like this) without a MacBook, but rather with an iPad and a keyboard.

The keyboard is for home or office, the iPad’s built-in keyboard will be what you use when you are away.

I found this useful bit of advice during a search for something else:

… you can create a template that will load when you open SU that deals with the scale issue you mentioned. Open a new drawing. Draw a square in the center that’s about average size for the things you draw. Zoom into give an acceptable view. While you’re at it set display settings. I like to start in perspective view, Hidden line, profile lines turned off, shadows off, white background.

Next delete the square so you have a blank drawing space. Save As My Template or whatever you want to call it. Save it in the Templates folder under SketchUp. Find the Preferences dialog under Window in SU. Set the Drawing Template to whatever you just named that drawing you saved. That’s all there is to that one.

My thanks to Dave Richards of Rochester, Minnesota who contributed that to a discussion on the Sawmilll Creek forums — Sawmill Creek is an online community for woodworkers.

We are still more than two weeks out from the Apple event that will, if the “leak” is right and all the wonks are right, reveal to the world Apple’s vision for mobile computing. Leaving aside all the “game changing” hype and other folderol and focusing on what really matters, I thought I would add my own small voice to the din:

First, it’s going to be a tablet, and it’s going to look and feel a lot like a large iPod Touch. It may or may not have a revolutionary UI, but that is relatively meaningless compared to the functionality it will offer, which is the ability to view web pages, read book pages, and watch video at something more like an adult size. This alone makes it worth its weight and cost for many, many of us.

I don’t know why so many pundits fail to grasp this. The thing doesn’t have to be revolutionary in any other way than to make it possible to do things that have otherwise been separated, or spanned, across two devices: a laptop and a smart phone. I have a MacBook and I have an iPhone. I can still a place in my world for a tablet, if for no other reason than I am a writer and researcher and the ability to carry around a device that would let me read the myriad of texts, books and articles, on which I depend would be a real relief. I could do this on a laptop, but it doesn’t offer me the portrait view that remains the standard for reading.

If Jim Dalrymple is right, and Apple offers the ability to connect a BlueTooth keyboard to the thing, then that will make this device a terrific portable computing platform. It will be, Apple’s response to the netbook revolution, without having to slug it out in the netbook price pits.

I am a fan of John Gruber in general, but I think he overcomplicates things when he asserts that there will be a third OS to go with the tablet. I think he’s wrong for two reasons: (1) a third OS is unnecessary and (2) why would Apple duplicate Microsoft’s strategy of spinning off one too many versions of your OS.

A third OS is unnecessary because all the functionality this thing needs is already built into the iPhone OS. Any differences in screen size, whether for iPhone apps that can be scaled up or new iSlate apps that can’t be scaled down, can be handled by intelligence within the OS itself or by functionality within the iTunes Store to warn people that they are buying an app that runs best, or at all, on the iSlate and not on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

A third OS would also be foolish. It would require either stretching current engineering resources too thin or growing engineering. The latter prospect is not abad thing, but innovations that occur within one silo may be hard to capture across such an expanse of OSes and should, I think, be something avoided. An iDevice OS and a Mac OS are really all Apple needs. Surely the vagaries, and ghosts of Windows, Windows CE, Windows Mobile, etc. should be haunting enough, no?

I’m not a major player in this pundit business, and so my observations here will not be heard in the roar of the crowd that seems to want more than is truly desirable. (The pundit economy has payed no attention to the crash of the real economy and the greed that fueled it: their desire for attention knows no bounds.) The fact is all Apple has to do is to come up with a device that sensibly spans the gap between the iPod Touch and the MacBook and to price it somewhere in the span — my guess is closer to the MacBook (at least initially since Apple has proved itself more than happy to -soak- charge an early adopter’s tax) — and they’ll do fine. It goes without saying that they’ll need the content distribution network to support the new possibilities, but as long as Amazon plays along and offers a Kindle app that works on the iDevice, they are already part way there.

And, hey, if John Gruber ever reads this, thanks for the site, for Markdown, and, yes, the design of this site was inspired/derived from yours.

MacWorld has two different lists recommending software for the Mac OS. Strange that there are two lists, but that’s modern editorial control for you. One list is the 2009 Editors’ Choice Awards and the other is Dan Frakes’ “Gems of the Year (2009″.

I get asked this often enough by colleagues, friends, and students that I thought it would be easiest just to compile all the answers into a single post and then point people to it. What’s the question you ask? What apps do I use?

The short answer is that I try out any number of apps because I’m always curious to see how other people imagine problems. I pay for a small percentage of those apps. And I end up depending upon a fraction of that. And, no, I don’t mind paying for apps I don’t use. None of the apps listed below represented a monumental investment — nothing like paying for either Microsoft Office or even the Student and Home edition. In fact, for that same $150 you pay for the latter, you could buy the first three apps listed here. The fact is the Mac software world is filled with really great deals on software that will help you work the way you want to work. You only have to explore the territory a bit.

That said, I know plenty of people who never explore the territory at all and are very productive cranking out novels and essays and all manner of other things using Microsoft Word. More power to them. Because there is also some portion of the population out there that isn’t getting near as much work done because they are always seeking the holy grail of productivity, the perfect solution to whatever they think their problem is. (Their problem being that they think some piece of software will magically make the words come. It won’t.) I spent plenty of time in the first group, and, given the chance, I would gladly spend a lot more time with the latter group — hey, Merlin Mann has made a good living and travels all around the world pretty much talking and writing about what he imagines will be the solution to his creativity woes. So much so that that is now his topic.

It’s a wacky world.

The Apps I Use

That said, here’s what I use:

Writing

For long-form writing, I tend to use Scrivener, an app actually coded by a novelist and writer. I like it because it does several things well: it let’s me outline and organize writing quickly and in a way that I can “see” and “feel” — hard to qualify this latter dimension, I know. It also let’s me take snapshots of pieces of my outline so if I want to roll-back changes or keep different versions of a section — for different outputs — that’s all taken care of in-app and in a way that’s easily previewed. I can also split the screen and put media with which I am working next to where I am writing. If I am trying to describe a landscape, I can look at it, zoom in and out, pan and tilt. If I am listening to an audio file in order to transcribe it, I can do that within the app. Or I can work with PDFs without having to switch windows or switch apps. None of that. It’s a bit like iTunes for writers.

For short-form writing, if it’s just text or if I am working with a Scrivener output that needs some adjusting before getting mailed or e-mail, then I rely on Nisus Writer Express. Its native format is RTF, and it can produce fairly robust documents within that format:

This screenshot is from the Nisus site. I don’t think I’ve ever made a document that looked like this.

For more complex layouts, I have changed to Apple’s own Pages. This was brought about in part when I had to deal with a two-column layout, with illustrations, for an IEEE submission and Word simply couldn’t handle it. Don’t get me wrong: I use Word. I depended upon Word for two decades, but now that Pages offers a superior outlining view and seems to handle layout better than Word, the only reason I still keep a contemporary version of the latter around is because everyone else uses it and I have to be able to work with those documents. It’s no longer for the love.

Three, even four, apps for writing? Seems weird doesn’t it? Well, yes. And, no. Mostly it’s just two, Scrivener and NWE. And there’s really no thinking necessary for which app I am going to use. If it’s short, like a letter, or I am moving quickly, it’s going to be NWE. If it’s going to be anything more than a few sections, I’m going to fire up Scrivener.

Organizing

For those projects that have not matured into a writing activity yet, or may never be a writing project but maybe a teaching project or simply stuff I like to think about, I have long used DevonThink — I actually own the Pro version. It’s my kitchen sink application. I’ve looked at other apps, like Yojimbo — mostly because it has MobileMe syncing — but in the end I just keep using DevonThink. It does a marvelous job of letting me dump all kinds of information into it and then search for it when I need it. It also keeps track of URLs of web pages I’ve copied, and it appears that you will soon be able to tag things. Yay!

Most of my planning for teaching is done in Omnioutliner Pro. I have used OmniOutliner elsewhere in the past, for collecting notes or for organizing longer projects, but other apps now handle that space. (A number of us have been pressing the OmniGroup for years now to pay some attention to the app that has fathered both OmniFocus and OmniPlan, and perhaps they will at some point. For now, OO has languished, which has meant many of us have moved on.)

That said, I do try to use OmniFocus to keep up with everything I should be doing. I don’t know about anyone else, but one of my problems with GTD is that if I really do capture all the things that I need or want to do, it’s an overwhelming list. And so I end up writing down little tiny one-offs in my notebook, because peering into the great Pandorian box of OmniFocus is scare. I know, I know. A wiser man would move a chunk of things into a Later category. But, yes, I do try, and when I do, I use OmniFocus. (It’s nice because it syncs itself through MobileMe not only to both my Macs but also to my iPhone.

It’s for that reason that I recently picked up MacJournal. It looks to be able to do the same magical syncing thing, and to post materials to this blog. (How cool is that?)

Every digital image I have taken for the last 5 to 6 years is sitting in a Lightroom library.

All these magical apps! I don’t know at what point I went over to the iTunes way, but there it is. I was fairly happy, and reasonably productive, using nothing more than a text editor and outputting materials by writing in Markdown or MultiMarkdown and then running things through a series of Perl or PHP or Ruby scripts or some XML transformations. But it take up time. And no one else was doing it.

Yes, I would love it if my fellow humanists would use some version of plain text or at least used applications whose file formats were suitable to checking into modern version control systems like Subversion or Git, but they aren’t. By and large, most humanists are still using word processing applications, mostly Word, as fancy typewriters. And, hey, it works for them. But I’m not going to bang my head against a wall worrying about their data. I got plenty of my own data to worry about, and I’m hoping to produce more of it every day. The apps I use take reasonably good care of my data and do not lock it in a way that, should one of them fail, I will lose a huge amount of work.

Plus, plus, I just got tired of doing everything at the file level. Yeah, Spotlight works, but do I really feel like adding all the metadata by hand? Metadata is where it’s at when you’re in the middle of an information deluge, and these apps handle metadata superbly, making it easy for me to find stuff.

Are there more apps I use? Yes. Keynote, GraphicConverter, OmniGraffle. To name a few. SketchUp when I can. Photoshop and Illustrator when it’s time to go big.

This list is probably too much, too long. But you asked. (No, not you, but the person standing behind you. Oh? You didn’t know someone was standing behind you? Well, never mind. I don’t think they looked too dangerous.)

The Sites I Visit

I also sometimes get asked how I know all the things, about technology, that I know. The answer is I read a lot. Here is a short list of things I read with a promise that I will work on making it longer in the near future:

• Finer Things in Mac is a non-stop stream of “hey, I didn’t know OS X or app X did that, or could do that.” Sometimes there are, usually well-deserved and well-considered, complaints and/or critiques.
• For general news about the Mac world and sometimes insights either into design matters or the politics of it all, I read John Gruber’s Daring Fireball.
• For trouble-shooting, I turn to my fellow denizens of the Macintoshian Achaia, one of many forums at Ars Technica, which has recently gone down hill, I’m afraid, so my only recommendation is for the forum itself. For general technical news — because we don’t live in an Apple-branded universe (thank goodness), I read Wired. The writing is sharper than AT, more thoughtful. (And there’s less re-blogging.) For re-blogging, there’s always Slashdot, and, increasingly it seems all the major news outlets. But then you knew that already, right?

It’s time to slip on the echo-chamber-noise-cancellation headphones and get back to work.

Snow Leopard has only been out for a day or two, but I already feel somewhat “behind the times” among the technorati who appear to have placed advanced orders through Apple and Amazon so that they could get their hands on 10.6 the very second it came out. I’d probably join them, but I have too much to do at present: two essays are due now as well as an NEH grant.

Nevertheless, some of my Mac geekness cannot help but surface when I hear that services are finally getting their due:

The image is copied from the coverage by [Mac OS X Automation's coverage][1] which is linked above. Check out their article for complete coverage of the fact that services now appear both in the Services Menu (1) and in a variety of contextual menus (2-4).

For the more curious, and ambitious, Mac OS X Automation also has a terrific list of free services you can download and install.

Now that we are a two iPhone household, it is time to upgrade Yung to a full-fledged MobileMe account so that she can keep her contacts, calendars, etc. all in sync. And, hey, whaddaya know, there’s also this way to keep your files in sync, if, of course, it doesn’t fail every time you use it. (To be honest, it appears to be working okay for Yung, who has smaller, and usually fewer, files than I do — can I help it if I’m the media member of our household?) To be fair, I was added 1.4GB to my local iDisk and told it to sync overnight, which I figured it would take given our narrow “pipe” on our low-budget AT&T DSL connection. (Come on, LUS, bring us our FttH connection soon.)

Here’s what greeted me this morning:

Here’s Apple’s advice:

5. Disable iDisk Sync (click the Stop button in the iDisk pane of MobileMe preferences, in System Preferences), restart your computer, and connect directly to your iDisk. (From the Go menu, choose iDisk, then My iDisk.) If you are able to connect to your iDisk, turn iDisk Sync on again.

6. If the issue persists, reset iDisk syncing on your computer:

Turn off iDisk Sync (click the Stop button in the iDisk pane of MobileMe preferences, in System Preferences).
Restart your computer.
From the Go menu, choose Home.
Open the Library folder.
For Mac OS X 10.5: Remove the FileSync folder
Restart your computer.
Re-enable iDisk Sync.

But I am also searching out workarounds — without going to a workaround that works entirely around iDisk, like DropBox. We’ve paid good money for iDisk; it should work. It should work out of the box, but barring that, it should work with some elbow grease applied to it.

One possibility is to use an alternate WebDAV client than the one built into the Finder, e.g. CyberDuck, which I already own (or donated to):

Server: idisk.mac.com
User Name: <your dot-mac account name>
Password:<your dot-mac password>
Initial Path: (unnecessary)
Port: 80 (default for protocol)
Protocol: WebDAV

It looks like another alternative is to connect directly to the iDisk using ChronoSync.