Matthew Lang

A few weeks ago I had an idea. A newsletter that would provide help and guidance for a particular type of organisation in using the Internet and social media to promote and connect with their target audience.

To make this happen, I decided to use MailChimp to handle the sending out of the newsletter. I’m already a subscriber to several newsletters that use MailChimp, so if it’s good enough for them, then it’s good enough for me.

I was able to put together a template for my campaigns over a couple of hours. One thing that I had to do some digging around for though was how to send welcome emails out to new subscribers. I eventually found this and was able to have that email setup in about half an hour.

The final task was to update the landing page with the correct form attributes so that email addresses are sent to MailChimp directly. Again, straightforward.

I spent a couple of hours over the holidays putting together a landing page where people can sign up; I just needed the MailChimp form to complete this. The first pass is pretty much on par with every other landing page I’ve seen for such newsletters, so I’m happy with the results. It will be tweaked over time though to encourage sign-ups.

I already spent a couple of hours last week writing the first campaign. After a further few passes at it and some feedback from Jen, I had an initial campaign ready to send out.

I spent about 30 minutes testing the two emails that get sent out. I spent a bit more time on the first campaign, tweaking parts of the email design and ensuring that I had all the correct information in the right place.

MailChimp allows you to preview email and include live merge tags in your preview so that you can see what your subscribers see, but the real test is in sending out a test email. A test email allows you to look at all parts of the email as the subscriber should see it. Great for checking that everything is in place and that it reads fine.

The next part of this little project is to send out a few invites to organisations that would benefit from this newsletter and invite them to subscribe. With the first campaign sent out, I have an example of the content available through the newsletter for organisations to see.

I’m not expecting a massive rise in sign-ups over January, but I’ve got a goal in mind, so I’m aiming for that.

I was surprised by how quickly I was able to get a mailing list up and running on MailChimp. Previous attempts using MailChimp have always resulted in me turning away from it. This time though, I kept it simple, so I just got the absolute essentials in place. A welcome email and a first campaign.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be spending a bit more time digging into MailChimp and seeing else it can help with in maintaining an email list.

When it comes to planning the day with bullet journaling, there’s one aspect of it that frequently throws me. Knowing when a block of work should finish, and a new block of work should start.

I’ve been using plan bars (both daily and weekly) to plan out my day. When it comes to working through the day though, I usually find myself losing track of time and working through a block of the day that I had reserved for a particular task.

The first and obvious solution here is to use a calendar with reminders to let me know when I have to switch tasks, but if I’m using a calendar app then what is the point in using the bullet journal?

Also setting up a calendar like this requires a lot of clicking and typing, which I’m not keen on doing.

The best idea that I’ve come up with this for this problem is to split the day into blocks and have recurring alarms set for the start of each block. This alert will give me the nudge I need to look up and switch tasks if I need to. Most days the blocks will start and end at the same time, but there will be days where blocks will change from the usual times during the day. The Reminders app on macOS comes to mind, but I'm wondering if there's something even more straightforward than that that I could use.

If anyone else has any other ideas for staying on track through the day with bullet journaling, then I would love to hear them.

In the last 18 months, I’ve moved from using a task manager application to using pen and notebook and a technique called bullet journaling. The transition to this method hasn’t been without its challenges, but there’s one thing that it provides that I don’t get with any task manager application that I've used. And that is constraints.

Task management applications like to sell lots of benefits like being able to go with me wherever I go, work wherever I am and manage anything I throw at it. That last advantage is quite interesting because it’s here that I find that task management applications work quite well for me for a while, but I usually end up over-committing with a crazy list of tasks sometimes running into hundreds.

Thanks to improvements in technology, we have these little portable devices in our pockets that can potentially hold thousands (perhaps even millions) of tasks. These same devices also make it simple to add more tasks with the ability to type, speak or automate the process of creating new tasks. There are very few constraints in creating new tasks other than perhaps losing the wi-fi signal or running out of battery. These are not big constraints given that the world is more connected than ever and we have portable chargers to keep our devices topped up.

I keep all my tasks together at the back of my notebook. Written by hand and double-spaced. Sounds labourious right? Bear with me.

With each new task added, I often find myself questioning the value of the task and whether it is even worth writing down. I also look at the number of tasks I have decided if I need to focus on those first before adding anything else.

When it comes to moving tasks from one page to another, again I question the value of the task and whether it is worth moving.

My master list of tasks is usually about three pages long. Take into account that the notebook is smaller than A4 and my writing is double-spaced, that’s not a lot of tasks to do. The constraints of time to write a task and the effort in maintaining it when using paper mean that my complete list of tasks is manageable.

You can enforce these constraints on your favourite task management application, but I’ve often found that this is difficult to do given how easy to use these types of applications are.

Now, I’m not saying that bullet journaling is the silver bullet solution to all productivity hacks; it isn’t. However, the constraints of notebooks are why I find that bullet journaling works so well. It allows me to manage a smaller and more focused list of tasks and that in turns stops me from over-committing.

With a rising interest in newsletters, I started one last year. I tried to publish one long-form post a month as well as a collection of links at the end.

I intended to keep this newsletter going through the year, but after a few months, I decided that a newsletter of this kind wouldn’t be of any additional value that my blog couldn’t already provide.

Now I’m also blogging on a daily basis, so there’s no need for such a newsletter, and most likely I’ll never publish a newsletter of this kind again.

The newsletter experiment did not succeed in the way I thought it would, but although I closed the newsletter down, I learned something valuable from the newsletter.

Newsletters themselves are great, but the real value of a newsletter is the niche the newsletter caters to. This niche could be an interest, a topic, a market or anything like that.

This year I’m starting a small side project to build a newsletter aimed at a specific type of organisation who are looking to make more effective use of their digital presence and other tools to help those organisations.

I’m sending out a few invites to sign up for some local organisations that meet this criterion. I’ll then run the newsletter for a few months, collecting feedback on the first few editions. If the feedback is positive, I’ll keep going. If it's terrible, I’ll adjust the content to either suit the feedback or close the newsletter down.

I’ve already got a landing page up and running and I just need to dig into how to send a welcome email to each new sign up. Once done, I’ll be ready to accept sign-ups as they come. I’m not going to market this though until I decide that it has any lasting value as a product.

There are a few added benefits from this experiment.

I get some hands-on experience with running a newsletter using MailChimp. TinyLetter was an ideal service for my previous newsletter, but for this newsletter, I need a few more features like more options for formatting emails and their content.

I can spend a bit of time researching and writing content for the newsletter. I’m budgeting a fixed number of hours a month for this, and in that time I need to have the material ready to send and handle any replies or feedback. A test of time management and improving my writing.

The final benefit is that this is a testbed to a more significant opportunity. I’m using the newsletter to gauge the interest in a range of services that could help a particular market. This newsletter will be the on-ramp to that range of products and services and will determine if there’s any value in them.

I think I’ve found a niche market with this newsletter but only time will tell. I do believe that this will have a better chance of success than my previous attempt at a newsletter, but the only indication of this is whether organisations that sign up for this and find it useful.

I'm not making any resolutions for the year ahead.

In my experience, it's a self-defeating exercise that always ends up with me not seeing it through to the end of the year.

If you're thinking along the same lines, then what's the alternative to making improvements without failing?

Have you ever noticed how bad habits stick like watching television, sitting on the couch, and mindlessly thumbing through timelines on social media? These are not good habits to get into, but the thing about them is that they're easy to do. They just don't require any thought whatsoever.

What if we could just as quickly get into good habits rather than bad habits?

Well, this is what worked for me when I first started building good habits.

I started with just one habit.

I started getting into the habit of writing every day. To help remind myself to write, I set the alarm on my phone to give me the nudge to start writing. When my phone went off, I would then start writing. That's all I did for a whole month. A habit built up every day. And it worked. It's still working. I'm writing this, aren't I?

The following month I added another alarm on my phone to do something else the next month and kept it going through the year. By the end of the year, I had built up some good habits that helped me through the day.

The problem many people face with new year resolutions is that they try to do too much at once. It's like trying to lift weights at the gym. You just can't bench press 100kg unless you've trained your body to get into the habit of being able to bench press 100kg. To achieve such a weight, you need to start with a smaller load and then gradually build up to the target weight.

Habits are the same.

You start small (ideally with one) and then build them up.

Tracking your habits is a great way to build them up. I've tried some habit tracking apps over the last year, but the one that works for me is Productive. It was the first habit tracking app that I tried, and nothing else I've tried has been as easy to use.

The good thing about tracking apps is that they give you a sense of success when you've reached a significant milestone like completing the habit for a week or even a month. Productive and other habit tracking apps have reminders built in as well, so it keeps all your habit building needs in the one place.

So, forget the new year resolutions and set yourself a short-term habit to achieve for the next few days. Once you've completed a few days with it, extend the practice for a few more days and keep at it. In no time you'll find that you've been able to get into your intended habit daily and by the end of a period of a few weeks it will become more of something that you just do.

While it was my intention to write about my web development workflow on my iPad Pro at a later date, one of my readers got in touch asking about how I use the iPad Pro in this capacity. Rather than hold off I thought it would be a good time to elaborate a bit on my workflow when using the iPad Pro for web development. What follows is still under review and isn’t my first attempt at using an iPad Pro for web development.

My first iteration on using the iPad Pro involved the Blink app and setting up a remote development environment on a DigitalOcean server. This took a while to setup but even then I found that using Vim as my text editor on a touch device didn’t work for me. So it was back to the drawing board and what follows is a second pass at putting together a web development environment for the iPad Pro. It certainly isn't final but it’s working for me now.

Another point to consider is that this web development environment is tailored towards Ruby on Rails development. A similar setup will work for other languages and frameworks providing you can run your development environment locally in iOS or on a platform like Heroku or Engine Yard.

Remote services

I'm using a number of remote services not because I need too just to be able to work on an iPad Pro, but because they're already part of my workflow on the desktop and I can use them on the iPad Pro as well.

Github

I’m using Github for source code management for a number of reasons like client familiarity, Heroku integration and a few other reasons. The main reason I'm using Github though is that it's tried and tested. You can't argue with that.

I've tried a number of source code management services like Gitlab and Bitbucket. While there are benefits and drawbacks to each service, Github is my preferred source code management service.

Heroku

Heroku has been my go to hosting platform for Rails applications for a long time now. I’ve tried other platforms and while they might be good fits for particular clients with specific needs I’ve found that Heroku has everything that I need for hosting most Rails applications.

I’ve already mentioned that github is good for Heroku in that it’s baked into the pipeline service that Heroku offers. Automated deploys are a great thing and using this in conjunction with Heroku’s CI tool is one less thing for me to configure.

Client side apps

With our remote services in place it's time to focus on the client side apps. Apps that focus on developer productivity have largely revolved around other things that developers do like project management, issue tracking and documentation but there are more text editor apps becoming available on iOS and I’m confident that there will be even more apps like this overtime.

Working Copy

I’m using Working Copy as my local Git client. I’ve been using this for a few months now. It's easy to setup and it works well in iOS 11 with split view and the drag and drop functionality. Working Copy also integrates well with GitHub, Bitbucket and Gitlab. So I’m not tied to using one particular Git source code hosting service.

Text Editors

And now the essential bit of kit for any developers toolbox, the text editor. I’m running two text editors at the moment with the hope of selecting just one of these when I’ve given each of them a thorough test.

Textastic

I’ve used Textastic in the past but only as a means to edit text files remotely. Using it now as a text editor means that it needs to tie in with Git, have the essential settings I need for editing source code and perhaps the most important feature of all, a nice colour scheme!

So far I’m pleased with its feature set and there’s been little in the way of blocks when it comes to workflow. Once I had Working Copy setup to track my Github repos, I was able to drag a branch into Textastic and start working. Changes to files are marked in Working Copy so that you can commit your changes as you normally would.

Textastic doesn't have all the preferences of a desktop text editor like Sublime Text but the essentials are there. Editor themes, font selection and size, and tab size and type. There's also find and replace and symbol listing which is handy for larger source code files.

Textastic is working well for me but the one thing that I would like to see a easier management of the files I'm working with. A command pallete like Sublime Text would be a nice addition.

GoCoEdit

GoCoEdit is a new addition to the test. While Textastic I have history with, GoCoEdit is fairly new and I’m still finding my feet with it. It shares many of the same features as Textastic though, so it's easy to get started.

Like Textastic, you can drag and drop a repository from Working Copy into the app to get started working. Changes to files are marked in Working Copy for you to commit.

Editor themes, font selection and size and tab size and type are supported as well. There's also find and replace functionality as well. I've also found that in GoCoEdit there is a command pallete with limited functionality. You can manipulate text, find and replace text and save a file using this but there's not much else you can do with it.

I must admit, I do prefer working with GoCoEdit over Textastic. Saying that though there isn't much between them and both are more than capable of being all-day text editors if you find you have to work on your iPad Pro for the full day.

There are many things missing from these editors that would be taken for granted in a desktop text editor like Sublime Text but apps like this are still relatively limited in what they can do on a iPad. The most essential features are there though.

Adapting

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all this is that if you’re going to use an iPad Pro for web development or any other form of work then expect to adapt to a new range of apps. Sure you’re preferred apps might be available on iOS but the interface does require you to adapt to the new environment.

Thankfully iOS is getting there with better features like the split view and drag and drop. Features that we’ve taken for granted in desktop operating systems for years but are only starting to see in operating systems like iOS.

My web development workflow has required some changes for the iPad Pro but it’s nothing drastic and a bit of learning on a new device isn’t a bad thing.

Thanks to Curtis McHale for reaching out to ask about this and giving me that much needed nudge to write.

A while back, I read with disgruntlement about the change that Smile were introducing to their TextExpander product. It was the introduction of a cloud syncing change to their product which required a monthly subscription.

I wasn't too keen on the idea. The reason I wasn't too chuffed with the idea is that I only ever used TextExpander on my MacBook Pro and nowhere else. I decided to look for an alternative. I switched to aText and never looked back. Until now.

Last week I purchased an iPad Pro. I've spent the first couple of days getting the various apps I needed setup. Then I started working on getting together a usable development environment so that I could do everything on my iPad Pro that I can do on my MacBook Pro. Aside from some of the terminal hackery that I can do on my MacBook, I can do just about everything else on my iPad including web development work for clients.

With my new tablet of choice I started doing administration work last week. An invoice was outstanding so I started the process of gathering the work I did for the week and writing the invoice and email for the client. Invoice done, I moved to the email. After a couple of attempts at trying to generate my email template I then realised that I wasn't using my Macbook Pro which is why the auto-expanding snippet I use for this particular email didn't work. It was time to re-assess the auto-expanding snippet tool of choice.

So what's a familiar auto-expanding tool that let's me use a single library of snippets across multiple devices? Well, TextExpander of course!

Is the subscription price for this worth it now?

I think so.

Jack Baty has been using his new iPad in anger this week. The results are good!

I’ve been using the iPad exclusively while at home for more than a week and I have been continually surprised by how much I enjoy it. I’ve been emailing, managing projects, editing photos, drawing, tweeting, and generally carrying on like it’s actually normal doing stuff on an iPad other than reading social media sites and playing games. Who knew?

Surprise! The iPad is a Content Creation Device

I picked up an iPad Pro at the weekend that I'm currently using side by side with my MacBook Pro. The iPad Pro isn't intended to be my main development machine but it will be my portable development tool of choice. First impressions are good and Jack's blog has been a great read with his recent move to using an iPad.

Kurt Harden is concerned about the erasing of American history.

The first is that it strikes me as an effort to erase history. That never goes well. And I write as an Ohioan with absolutely no sympathy for the the Confederates memorialized in bronze, copper, or stone. The statues represent our past and they offer different reminders to different people.

Erasing history by Kurt Harden

I agree with Kurt on this one.

By removing these statues, the American people are removing part of their history. Yes, these statues represent a side of America that many would like to forget but it's in these statues and the history they represent that we see the progress that has been made.

Rachel Kaser over at The Next Web certainly thinks so.

Like it or not, social media provides an easy-to-use template that lets anyone make their personal information available — and most of those sites are a hell of a lot easier to use than even the mildest website creation software.

— It’s time to kill the personal website by Rachel Kaser for The Next Web

I can certainly see Rachel's point. With all the progress we've made on the web, the days of self-publishing means that you don't need to be tied to a domain or a way of publishing your thoughts online. Social media and blogging platforms make publishing online easy.

Where I disagree though is that while these social media platforms are easy to use, they require an investment of effort in order to be effective. In order to stand out you need to be publishing consistently and that requires investing time and effort in that platform. I'm just not prepared to make that investment in order to build my name when I can use a personal website.

Having my own website means that I'm only investing in the content at my own website and then optionally using social media to get my content out further. I not only control the content but I also having a simpler delivery method for people. I have a place where people can follow me without the pressures of social media timelines. You can visit my website or subscribe to my RSS feed. It might be less convenient than following me on social media, but when you consider that you can read my website in a less crowded environment, away from the timeline, then I think having a personal website is essential if you want people to actually read what you're publishing.

Dave Winer ponders on the possibility of an open source version of the popular blogging platform Medium.

What if Medium had been designed from the start to be the Mother Node of a network of clones. The basic software would be available for installing on your own server, but if you want, there's a place you can put your document today, now, quickly, where everyone will be able to read it, now and for the foreseeable future.

— What if Medium were open source by Dave Winder

This is the kind of thing that I can get behind. I like Medium's approach to easy publishing but I dislike the fact that everything is on their network.

I've been using Slack for a few years now. I use it more for work than anything else. I am part of a number of different client teams and it's through these that we do most of the day to day communication. I have to be honest it has become something of a necessary evil to have, but it is an easy way to stay in contact with clients. For clients that have only a handful of employees then I recommend that we just stay in touch with phone calls, emails and of course whatever project management tool that works best for the client.

Benjamin Pollack's post about his issues with Slack are good points and with more people turning to apps like Slack, it's worth remembering that Slack isn't a great tool and should only be used if there is a genuine need for it other than, "Hey I need this right now!".

Perhaps the greatest argument against using Slack isn't the filtering of communications or the notifications.

It's the version of Markdown that Slack uses for it's messages. It's just not Markdown.

5. Its version of Markdown is just broken

I’m going to use up an entire heading purely to say that making *foo* be bold and _foo_ be italic is covered in Leviticus 64:128 and explicitly punishable by stoning until death.

— Why I Hate Slack and You Should Too by Benjamin Pollack

What grieves me more is that there isn't a week goes by where I don't end up sending a message formatted incorrectly because Slack has it's own version of Markdown.

Slack isn't a necessary evil but teams should consider Benjamin's points before deciding if Slack is worth using.

Give me email and a phone any day of the week.

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off today.

I wouldn't call myself a fan-boy but I definitely have a preference for Apple products. I am interested in seeing the release of a new iPad Pro. Sadly I don't think there's going to be any new iMacs released.

Expect an explosion of Apple related news and tweets later on today.

... with Nicholas Bate.

I've been wrestling with my inbox for a while now but last month I started batch processing my emails again, and although it has taken a few weeks I've got my inbox down to a handful of emails this morning from the 100+ that were sitting there a few weeks ago.

I've had pre-paid cards in the past but the app that accompanies the Monzo card should provide better insight into spending habits and make me think twice about my spending habits.

Over the weekend I closed my Highrise account.

In case your not familiar with the name, Highrise is a CRM product for small businesses. It started life as part of the 37signals range of products, but has since branched out onto it's own.

The initial pull to using a CRM tool like Highrise is that I wanted to a tool that allowed me to store important emails from clients as well as track projects and work I was chasing with prospective clients. Highrise has great email integration that allows you to forward emails from clients to Highrise and it will store them for you. It also allows you to track deals which in my case represented prospective work with clients and creating proposals to win work.

I should mention that while Highrise is a great product, my decision to cancel my account with it isn't anything to do with the performance and features of Highrise. It is a great product and under the right circumstances it is worth looking at if you need a CRM for your small business.

My main reason for moving away from Highrise was more to do with how I wasn't using it to it's full potential.

In the time that I've had to use Highrise, I've used the deals section rarely. It's nothing to do with Highrise, it's just that in the time that I have been freelancing, most correspondence takes place over email and I've rarely had to pitch for work. Most prospective clients like to discuss the work that they would like me to do and discuss my background and experience. After a few emails, most of these prospective clients then decide to exchange contracts to begin the work. I've rarely had to pitch for work and so the deals feature of Highrise has been left untouched.

The email integration with Highrise on the other hand though was used on a daily basis. Client emails went straight to Highrise as well as my replies to them. Although I used this feature daily, there were only a handful of different clients to deal with at anyone time so while the archiving of these emails in Highrise was nice to have, most of the emails involved discussions before work began. My email provider already offers a large amount of space to store emails and they're filed away in a folder. I was starting to wonder if I needed Highrise to manage the storage of emails.

Finally there was the managing of contacts. Yes I do have all my clients contact details, but I rarely have to refer to them. I speak with clients daily when working with them, I use email to send weekly updates and invoices and for all other daily correspondence with clients I recommend Slack. All my clients details are saved on the appropriate devices I need to have them on and aside from that there's no other special requirement to managing this data.

It was starting to look like I didn't need Highrise at all.

After deliberating for a few days I finally decided to export all my data from Highrise and delete my account. Without a CRM though I needed something else. All my client details are already stored in my address book but I needed something else that acted as a more detailed version of their details and allowed me to find and filter contacts based on information I have recorded against each of them.

The answer lay in a document type that I rarely use. The spreadsheet.

After getting the contact columns in the spreadsheet in the right order, I imported the contact details in and started adding the necessary changes I need so that I could filter those contacts.

Right, so the spreadsheet doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Highrise, but for the moment it will do. I've got all my contacts in one place. I can filter them based on the next date with which I need to contact them for a catch up and there's enough flexibility in Numbers in that I can add more information if I need for each client.

If my client base was to increase over the next 12 months and work started to change on a monthly basis then I would definitely consider Highrise again. It is a great product, but I couldn't justify it's use as a simple address book and email archive.

For the moment though, the spreadsheet is enough for me.

The blogroll has been chirping about coffee shops. First it was Future Lawyer:

First, some of us refuse to pay 3 to 5 dollars for a cup of coffee, so we don't spend a lot of time in Starbucks. But, we do have lunch at Panera Bread, and we don't use the public WiFi there either. At least, we don't use it without first tunneling through a VPN.

— Why Lawyers Should Never Use Starbucks WiFi by Future Lawyer

Then Cultural Offering.

I freely admit that I dislike Starbucks. On the few of occasions I have been in the chain - airports, a meeting or two, and when an employee needed to throw up (seemed the perfect spot) - I found myself wanting to tell the students to try the library and the adults to try a tie and a home office.

— The shoes bother me the most by Cultural Offering

Then Execupundit.

I like Starbucks. It is a convenient and comfortable meeting spot. I ignore the computer users who are tapping away at, no doubt, the next War and Peace. The Americano is a nice watered-down version of their strong coffee. When ordering I still use small, medium, and large rather than their menu lingo. That immediately signals "out of touch" to the staff and thus is desirable.

— The Starbucks Experience: In But Not Of by Execupundit

I'm fortunate enough to have a coffee shop in town that isn't Starbucks, has plenty of seating and has some damn good coffee for those mornings when I need it to make the code flow.

And yes I also say small, medium or large.

Great to hear that new iMacs are on the way.

Regarding iMacs, Schiller also said that new iMacs are in the works, slated for release some time this year (no specifics other than “this year”), including “configurations of iMac specifically with the pro customer in mind and acknowledging that our most popular desktop with pros is an iMac.”

— The Mac Pro Lives by John Gruber

I've been looking to replace my MacBook Pro for a while now. I do most of my work at home and it's rare that I do serious development during a client visit. While the MacBook Pro made sense at the start of my freelance career, I think an iMac would be better for myself.

The question of what to do on client visits though remains. Should I still keep the MacBook Pro for client visits? Unless I'm called on to write code during that visit (I never am) then I think it's safe to say that I can relegate the MacBook Pro to another younger member of the family who can use it for school work more effectively than I would use it as a second development machine.

I'm still debating the purchase of an iPad Pro to act as a portable device. I would use this more for admin, marketing and writing and planning tasks. Anything that isn't writing code essentially.

I'll get the desktop hardware sorted first before I go down this road though.

Bear uses a simple three-paned design. The largest column is devoted to your current note. A smaller column to the left contains your notes in reverse-chronological order, topped by a search bar. The left-most column contains notes that you’ve pinned, as well as any tags you’ve created to organize your notes — #recipes, for example. I spent years trying to sort my notes into notebooks in Evernote, only to learn that what I really needed was a faster search box.

— Why I finally replaced Evernote with Bear by The Verge

I've been a user of Bear for a few months now. Previously I used Simplenote but I found it lacking in a few features. Bear has these features along with a much more pleasant interface.

At the start of this week I was visiting a client for a catch up and a chance to go over a project I'm working on with them. It was great to hear from the client that they're exceptionally happy with the progress, but that's not what this post is about.

During my visit I couldn't help but notice the two Surface Pros in my client's office. It was the first time that I have seen these devices out in the wild.

After quizzing my clients about them for half an hour and a quick demo it was fair to say that the Surface Pro have not only been really well designed but also specced well. Each of the devices were being used for the usual office tasks but they were also used as development environments and in each case plugged into a dual-monitor setup. As a portable device it's light years ahead of the iPad and in my eyes better than the iPad Pro.

As an Apple fan I've been disappointed with the distinction between the iOS operating system and macOS. While iOS was made to drive portable devices, it is certainly not the ideal environment to be doing any kind of software development. Apple have been expanding their mobile products to be bigger and faster and now we have the iPad Pro as the ultimate touch device that Apple offers. The problem is that the device still uses iOS.

When you're limited to the apps that you can install and the amount of access you have to a device I think it's hard to justify the label of "Pro" on the iPad. When I first heard about the upcoming release of the iPad Pro I assumed that a touch version of macOS would be offered. Sadly that wasn't the case.

When I look at the Surface Pro I see a portable device that can replace a desktop and a laptop but is also really effective when you're on the go.

Will it replace my MacBook Pro?

Not in the near future. I still love working in macOS and it's where I've invested my time to get a range of apps and tools that work well for me. I'm not about to give that up in a hurry.

It's fair to say though that I've now been put off from purchasing an iPad Pro. I don't see the benefit. If I can't run a terminal client and a text editor to write code then it hardly qualifies as a "Pro" device.

A story of one man and his music.

Tonight I discovered that my music library has gone missing. I maintain a massive library on my computer - 46,680 song, not that I am counting (yes, I have a backup but restoring the backup creates an incredible amount of work for me).

— I still have my iPod by Kurt Harden

Kurt: Bite the bullet and restore the backup. Yes it will be hard work but you'll have your beloved music back.

I'm bookmarking this as an essential. I'm surprised I haven't read this post before by Merlin Mann, but then it was a long time ago.

Essential advice for bloggers.

Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can't stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person's obsessions take them?

— What Makes for a Good Blog by Merlin Mann

Hat tip to Patrick Rhone for this.

My favourite calendar app, Timepage, has just been released with a number of particularly nice features.

Theme colours

The themes preferences screen gets an overhaul that allows better manipulation of the theme as well as new colours and the ability to use light or dark text for your theme.

Advanced Repeating Events

Events can now be repeated with greater granularity. One example of this is you can set an event to repeat on a particular day and week of the month and repeat it a number of times.

Better Notes

Notes now support URLs, flight numbers, email addresses and phone numbers.

There's a also a number of other features and improvements like synchronisation between devices, text size and calendar colours.

What sets Timepage apart from other calendar apps for me is the user-interface. It's not like your typical calendar app. Almost all calendar apps start from a month view and work down to a daily view.

Timepage is different in that it starts with a view the upcoming days and allows you to switch to a heat map of the month or a view of your day.

The iPhone and iPad applications both share the same look and feel but with the extra screen space on the iPad you get a split screen view of the upcoming days and what's happening today.

There's also nice integration with Dark Sky for weather updates on both the iPhone and iPad versions.

All I need now is a version of this app for my macOS and the set of Timepage apps will be complete.

My favourite mobile phone case company Otterbox are now expanding their product line to include chargers and headphones.

I'm pretty much tied to my Apple EarPods (not the wireless ones, they look ridiculous) as they serve my needs. I also have a reliable Anker charger that I use when I'm out and about.

I'm intrigued by the products that Otterbox are now offering but it will take a few good solid reviews to make me part with my cash.

A few weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and stop using Todoist as my task manager. As you know I'm a big fan of Todoist and it wasn't easy making that decision. My frustrations came from the fact that I needed something more intentional than another app on my phone, another task list in the ether of the Internet. I need something that requires a bit more work to manage than just bashing in a few words with my keyboard or frantically clicking my mouse.

CJ Chilvers' post about ditching your to do list had been on my mind for a few days before making the decision to stop using Todoist.

I've slowly become a convert to the idea that we need to concentrate on our calendars a whole lot more to achieve what we want in work and life. If you want it done, it must be scheduled. If it's not scheduled, it's just another item on your wishlist that will never be completed.

— Kill Your To Do List by CJ Chilvers

Investing time in the task manager isn't the priority, it's investing the time in the calendar that makes the difference.

So, do I need Todoist? Well, I've been without it for over a month now and I'm still working, still busy and still making an income. Clearly working from your calendar is a good thing.

However, that leaves me without some form of tracking and managing tasks. I wanted something that didn't have me sitting on my phone first thing in the morning, something that required a bit more effort to use and finally something that I could just pick up and start using regardless of where I am.

I've been using pocket notebooks to capture stuff through the day like notes, messages, tasks, ideas, books to read and so on. Being able to stop, write, and then carry on working gives me a little break from the screen through the day but it also got me thinking about using more notebooks to manage my tasks.

I might have killed my to do list on Todoist, but I still needed some form of task management. And that's what this week's posts are about. So tune in tomorrow for the first post on the humble pocket notebook.

Todoist has just anounced a new feature to their task management platform, Smart Schedule.

Smart Schedule uses predictive modeling to help you easily plan out your tasks for the day and week to come. It learns your personal productive habits, and takes into account patterns across all Todoist users, to predict the best possible due dates for your tasks.

That means those 50+ overdue tasks you have hanging around can be quickly rescheduled en masse, while new and unscheduled tasks can be easily assigned to the best due dates. In this way, Smart Schedule makes it much easier to stay on top of your to-do list and roll with the punches when your day doesn’t go as planned.

— Introducing Smart Schedule, a more intelligent way to plan your day

I stopped using Todoist a number of weeks ago due to the fact that I was just going through the motions of ticking off boxes. It got to the stage where I was micro-managing myself.

This is an interesting move in the market of task managers and no doubt there will be a few other task managers following down this road.

Many might see the recent annoucements by Micrsoft and Apple as a win for Micrsoft and who can argue.

The company are finally interesting again and not just from a consumer perspective but from a technical and creative perspective. The flagship product of the Windows operating system is now having to share the spotlight with Microsoft's new line of hardware products. And while it's great to see Microsoft getting that innovative edge again I don't see it as a win only for Microsoft.

Their Surface products and open sourced software are now opening another front on the war between the tech giants. For too long it's been a two-horse race between Apple and Google.

Apple's line of hardware is different from Google's and that's where I find it hard to compare the two. Apple's traditional line of computers, tablets and phones are certainly different from the Chromebook and Chromecast dongles that Google sell.

Microsoft are now creating a name for themselves as a serious contender for those looking to make a new hardware purchase. And with the hardware purchase, the software purchases will pretty much follow suit. It's a model that Apple has run for years. Build great hardware and boost sales with software and service purchases. It's now Microsoft's turn to take a stab at it.

Microsoft have turned heads with their new products, but not just from a consumer angle but from a corporate angle. I wouldn't be against the idea of a few people at Cupertino who weren't quietly surprised by the new Surface Studio. Hell, they might even like it.

And that's the win for Apple. They have a new competitor on the horizon. A new front to battle on. A new chance to innovate again.

Dave Winer may be kick-starting an old service. Share Your OPML.

In 2006 I had a web service called Share Your OPML. It was fun. It was a way to see what other people were subscribed to, for news and podcasts. But we hit scaling walls, and the project fell into disuse, and eventually I took it down.

Now we know how to scale much better than we did then, and the community is growing more slowly. So I thought it would be interesting to try it again and see what happens.

So here's the question -- if I put up a web app that asked for your OPML would you upload it?

— Would you share your OPML, again? by Dave Winer

I'd love to see this happen.

To get yourself into the groove of batching, try blocking out two to three daily email check-in times on your calendar, perhaps 30 minutes a piece. If at all possible, schedule an additional 45-90 minutes for creative work before you check your email for the first time. Then, when you do turn your attention to your inbox, no matter what you find there—what fires you have to put out, what unwanted questions you have to respond to—you’ve already gotten some good work done that day.

— Don’t Let Email Zombies Eat Up Your Day by 99U

I've been using Quitter as well to automatically close my email client after a period of time. Out of sight, out of mind and all that.

and MacStories has a complete run down of the upgrade.

A clipboard manager doesn't sound like a mega-useful app to have on your Mac but Tapbot are aiming to change with the beta release of their Pastebot for Mac app. I'm going to run it for a few weeks to see if it is any good.

via Tools & Toys

Ian Dick writes about his farewell to Evernote.

This year though a couple of things changed. Firstly Evernote tweaked there prices so I’d be paying more going forward. Secondly, Apple Notes improved and also offered a way to import Evernote content as did Microsofts Onenote. There also seemed to be a lot of grumbles in the many podcasts I listen to about what Evernote had become and how viable was it’s future.

— So Long Evernote

Evernote's proprietary format has been a reason why I don't Evernote. It's easy to get stuff in but hard to get it back out. I tried Apple Notes for a while but it's Simplenote that gets my award for best notes app.

Desktop apps are my main tools when it comes to web development. A browser, a terminal and an editor. That’s the absolute minimum applications that I would need to do a days work but there are a few more desktop apps that I also use to help get a good days work done.

iTerm2

My terminal of choice hasn’t changed but what has changed is that I’m now back to using iTerm built-in pane management rather than using tmux. Most days I tend to just have two terminals open side-by-side and that’s all I need. Tmux is a great option if you need more control over your terminals AND you run an editor like Vim but for me it was overkill.

Sublime Text 3

The last time I wrote a post like this Vim was my goto editor for coding. Despite sticking with it for over a year and I eventually switched back to using Sublime Text. I also had a brief spell as well with Atom but I prefer using Sublime Text. It’s what I’m most comfortable with.

Safari

I also switched browsers and moved back to using Safari for browsing and as my preferred browser for building and testing Rails applications. Open source it isn’t, but it’s a solid browser and the ability to sync tabs between different devices is a feature I use frequently. I still use Firefox but more as a secondary browser.

Dash

Not an essential tool but something I’ve come to rely on heavily over the last year. Dash is a document browser and code snippet manager. I don’t use the code snipper manager but the ability to lookup the docs for the different frameworks and programming languages I use makes my day a lot easier. It also negates the need to do frequent searches online.

1Password

Probably my most valuable piece of software. Secure, easy to use and makes handling your passwords a lot easier. I'm also using 1Password for families to allow my wife and son to handle their own passwords. So far it's working well.

Slack

Last year I was a big HipChat user, but the pull to Slack and it's growing set of features was difficult to ignore. Starting with a couple of clients, I gradually made the migration across and now use Slack exclusively as my online meeting point with clients.

Turning my ideas into reality is what I want the most out of life. So that’s what gives me the deepest happiness.

Then I realized that all the best, happiest, and most productive times in my life, were when I was completely cut-off.

— Disconnect by Derek Sivers

And on the topic of Netflix:

Star Trek fans around the world clamoring for CBS' new take on the universe have an unexpected party to thank for the show's international availability: Netflix. The streaming giant announced today that it's obtained the international rights to the new Star Trek in 188 countries (excluding the US and Canada), a deal that'll see new episodes premiering on Netflix less than 24 hours after they make their domestic debut on CBS All Access, the network's own paid streaming platform

— Netflix will stream CBS' new Star Trek series all around the world by The Verge

Back when my blog was running on Jekyll, I found solace in the amazing Hyde theme by Mark Otto. Simple, flexible and with a strong focus on the content of your blog.

Due to limitations with Jekyll I switched to Ghost a few months ago. So far everything is going great. The only problem is that many of the themes for Ghost focus on banner sized header and post images.

I ran with the Casper theme from Ghost for a few months. I like the typographical elements of the theme but I dislike the massive banner images for it. I needed a change.

Using Mark Otto's Poole base theme for Jekyll as a starting point, I started building a theme for my blog. The one constraint to the theme I wanted is that it shouldn't use any banner images for any part of the theme.

A few hours later and I have the beginning of a new theme for Ghost.

It's been a while since I flexed my creative cogs. Even though this was just a few hours work, it's still a great feeling being able to ship something. Even if it is just aa theme for my own blog.

The Daring theme for Ghost is available on Github.

I love this view on how people are split when it comes to technology.

We can make lists about how "there's two kinds of people in the world" and split them up into techie and non-techie, or computer literate or non-computer literate...but I'm thinking it's simpler. There's the curious and the not-curious.

— Is technology killing curiosity? by Scott Hanselman

I've tried a number of times to get Ethan interested in programming as I thought he would be curious about how his favourite console games are made. So far he's definitely in the non-curious group. Maybe it will come in time.

Text replacement utilities like TextExpander can make a big difference in the amount of time you spend typing. From email signatures to emails for clients, I used TextExpander for all of sorts of things. TextExpander's licence meant that I was only paying a minimum amount for the desktop tool, but it's where I used it the most.

When I first heard about TextExpander's price change to a subscription model I was hesitant to make any fast reactions. Over the days that followed though I was increasingly convinced that the new pricing model was not for me.

I don't have any problems paying for the software I use. If it has value and is reasonably priced then I'll keep paying. Regardless of whether it's a monthly subscription or intermediate upgrades. It's the only way that you can support the makers of the software that you find valuable.

A big change to the TextExpander app was that your snippets are sent to TextExpander servers so that they could be pushed to your other devices with TextExpander on it. I didn’t find the need to use that particular feature so I started to think that maybe TextExpander wasn’t a good fit for me anymore.

TextExpander's change to a subscription model might be okay for others, but for me it was a step in the wrong direction. I understand that they have a business to run and that relies on a steady revenue but what was wrong with more frequent releases of their desktop app? I would gladly have paid for a single license for the cost of a year as long as it came with frequent updates.

At the end of the day I just didn’t find the value in paying for the features of a software product that I would rarely use.

Fellow Scot Ian Dick highlights some areas of technology where Apple are falling behind.

Apple also seems to be out of the AR/VR loop. It’s computer hardware can’t drive an Oculus although on the mobile side it could easily launch AR support as the hardware in the iPhone is extremely capable.

— Placing Bets by Ian Dick

I can't help but wonder though if things like VR are at the stage where Apple or any other company should be worrying about it.

Zapier is an automation tool that integrated with hundreds of products and services on the Internet. It makes integrating tools together simple and also has multiple step workflows.

The problem with Zapier is that while all this automation is handy for repetitive workflows, I started to question the need for such automation and whether I truly needed it.

Let's take FormKeep as an example. I use FormKeep as a way of allowing people to contact me regardless of the blog platform I am using. I have a contact form on this blog and one on my web development blog. If I receive a contact form submission from someone, FormKeep will send me an email to let me know.

Using Zapier I could do the following with the submission:

1. Send the clients details to my CRM
2. Create a task to review the client's request
3. Create a task to reply back to them within two days

I would do all this anyway, so is there any need for me to automate these steps? Probably not.

Also not all form submissions I get are potential clients looking for me to work with them. Some submissions are general questions about Ruby on Rails, some are offers of full-time work and some are questions about previous topics I have written about. So automating this can result in a false positive and mean that I have to remove tasks from my task manager and contact details from my CRM.

The false positive of automation means that it only works if the intended result of the automation is always going to be the same. If there's a shadow of a doubt that there could be a wrong end result then automation isn't a good fit.

Automation isn't all bad and I still need an automation tool so I have created an account at IFTTT as it offers the simple automation I need but without the cost. I'm not worried if IFTTT disappear over night as it's a form of automation that I can happily live without but I use it just because it helps.

I've been scaling back on a few tools that I use regularly and it's made working a lot easier and removed the need for automation. Zapier is great for multi-step workflows that will always deliver the intended result, but for me it's become a tool I can do without.

I have an up and down experience in finding value in using social networks. Twitter is definitely not my goto place these days and App.net is now a distant memory due to it's lack of participation. It was these two networks that I always thought I would spend my time on when online. What has surprised me in the last year though is that I'm regularly turning to Instagram as my preferred social network.

I always thought of Instagram as just a photo sharing app. I can already share photos on Twitter so why would I bother doing the same thing on Instagram?

Here’s the thing though. Instagram is just a photo sharing app. It allows you to share photos simply and easily. The biggest change I’ve seen in the time I’ve used Instagram is probably it’s user-interface overhaul a couple of weeks ago and yes I do love their new icon. Since joining I’ve yet to see any major change in the way Instagram works as an app. And that’s because it doesn’t need to. It works well without needing to continually change.

Since coming back to Twitter, it hasn't been everything I thought it would be. I have a public account there and I like sharing photos there but I don’t like to share everything. I'm also on Path but that's a private app and is mainly for keeping in touch with the family. Instagram fits the gap in-between the two. My account is private and I keep followers down to a minimum.

In this case Instagram is well worth investing some time in because it doesn’t demand too much of my time. I can drop in when I want to and because the timeline is visual, it’s easier to scroll through without getting sidetracked. It has value for me because I can easily keep up with friends and family across the world and it offers a simple way to share online.

Being a valuable social network isn't always about having the most features. It can be about having a minimum list of features, but making the most of these features and Instagram certainly ticks that box.

Smile have adjusted the pricing of the new TextExpander subscription service.

We will apply a lifetime discount of 50% off the Life Hacker pricing to customers of any past version of TextExpander. That amounts to just US $20 per year. In our initial rollout, we offered the discount for the first year only, and that was a mistake. We value our long-term customers, and it’s important for us to demonstrate that in our actions. Thanks for bearing with us as we sorted this out.

— TextExpander Adjustments

I like the new pricing for current owners of any previous version of TextExpander. $20 per year is a more affordable amount. As well as this Smile have said they will continue to maintain versions of TextExpander 5 as well as 6. I'm skeptical about how long this will last though. With that in mind, I don't think I can rely on an app that may or may not be around in the future.

I switched to aText a few days ago and I don't see myself switching back to TextExpander anytime soon. aText is working well enough for me and the reduced cost for what is a minor utility app has prompted me to start cutting back on other subscription services that I use.

If in the future though, I see a genuine need to use TextExpander over what I have at the time, then I'll know where to find it.

I love using TextExpander. I use it everyday for all manner of things. It's not completely invaluable but it's certainly very helpful. Their recent change to a subscription model hasn't went down well with many users of their software including myself.

I use TextExpander almost daily, but I also use Todoist on a daily basis. My Todoist premium subscription is $22 per year. Very cheap for all the little extras I enjoy from Todoist and I don't grudge Todoist the money.

I love paying for the software that I use but I simply can't justify the $5 per month (or the $40 per year) that Smile Software are looking for to sync snippets that I use on a single device. I'd like to be wrong, but I think that Smile have just priced their product out of the market.

I may continue to use TextExpander without upgrading but I think in time I'll end up moving to something else.

Update:

Since reading more about the TextExpander 6 launch, a number of people have pointed out security concerns with a key logging app that syncs all your snippets to Smile's servers without being encrypted. Another valid argument against upgrading to TextExpander 6 then.

I love this idea of paying a subscription fee for using Twitter, but I fear that it might be too late for Twitter.

Before you scream at me to tell me I’m a dope for suggesting this to Twitter, let me give you this tease: Like anything in this world, in the most efficient economies, you get what you pay for. There’s a bright side in paying and that’s a better user experience. It’s why there are so many apps in the Apple Store that have a regular version, which you get for free, and a Pro version, which you pay for.

— My $4.5 Billion Gift To Twitter by Darren Rovell

I've not been a fan of the whole Twitter experience since signing up again and I'm getting little in value from it. This is largely because the people I follow (who were regular tweeters in the past) are no longer that active. There are some benefits, but most days I never check my timeline and instead steer towards a couple of curated lists I have.

There's little doubt that the world wants free online services. Darren Rovell's poll on Twitter might not be completely unbiased as it was conducted on Twitter, but the results of the poll are clear. People want free stuff.

When it comes to online services and apps, I tend to favour those that come with subscription plans or a one-off cost for a license. Why? Well, because I want to support the team behind the software and the money they get from me helps towards keeping that service alive and running.

The pitfall of a free service though is that once you've dug that pit and put a sign up saying it's "It's free!", everyone wants to jump in. It then becomes hard to get those people back out and into paying for the service.

There are exceptions to this rule, such as companies that offered the right incentives to get customers to pay or services that rely on ads to subsidise the free service. These are the exceptions though and success in their service doesn't means that others using the same method will be successful as well.

Traditional businesses (retail e.g.) never give anything away for free. You always pay for something. It's simple numbers. If you want something you have to pay for it. More and more online services are realising this and bootstrapping their service from the beginning. It's good to see. I just wish more of the services that I love to use online would have stayed clear of the "It's free" pitfall from the beginning.

The recent release of the Raspberry Pi 3 and now Western Digital's new dedicated PiDrive makes the argument for buying a couple of Pi 3s even more compelling.

The 314GB drive, which will normally cost $45.81 but is currently available for $31.42, is a 7mm-high drive based on the basic Western Digital Blue drives that still ship in many budget and mid-end laptops and PCs. The difference is the interface, which has been changed from SATA to USB and is designed to connect to the Pi directly without drastically increasing the footprint of the device. WD says it has customized the drive in order to "reduce the electrical power load of the hard drive on Raspberry Pi while still maintaining sufficient performance to deliver maximum USB data transfer rate." It's also a cheaper solution than the 1TB PiDrive kit the company already sells for $79.99.

— Western Digital makes a $46, 314GB hard drive just for the Raspberry Pi by arstechnica

Ulysses is now out for the iPhone. Having used it on my MacBook for a couple of weeks, I might still be swayed by the shininess of a new tool, although it is one of the best writing tools I've used.

I'm still on the fence about using my phone for writing though, but if it writing on your iPhone is your thing, it may be worth checking out.

I call Ulysses a writing environment, though not really a publishing environment (more on that in a bit), because you're surrounded with a rich set of writing tools. Put another way, it's one of the very few apps that feels relatively complete. That doesn't mean it isn't finished or there's nothing left to fix or add. It's more that Ulysses leaves me with the fewest questions, frustrations, and frictions of any writing app I've used.

— Review: Ulysses 2.5 for iPad and, now, iPhone by MacStories

Apple received a boost in its fight against the FBI after a judge ruled in Apple's favour.

Judge Orenstein applied previous legal decisions interpreting the AWA and concluded that the law does not “justif[y] imposing on Apple the obligation to assist the government’s investigation against its will.” In a formulation extremely favorable to Apple, the judge wrote that the key question raised by the government’s request is whether the AWA allows a court “to compel Apple — a private party with no alleged involvement in Feng’s criminal activity — to perform work for the government against its will.”

— Apple Wins Major Court Victory Against FBI in a Case Similar to San Bernardino by The Intercept

While I do think it's important for technology companies to help government agencies, especially in the case of providing evidence, there has to be a line drawn in the level of powers that an agency can invoke.

A couple of years ago I took the decision to limit my home screen to eight apps. The goal was to limit my the apps I use on a daily basis to just the essential ones.

With eight apps on my home screen I wouldn't be spending time looking for those apps I rarely use or being distracted by other apps. I would unlock my phone, do what I need to do and then put it down.

It started well but over time, the number of apps on the home screen gradually grew and grew until I had two screens filled with apps.

Since the start of the year I've been trying to get the number of apps on my home screen back down to just eight apps. Last weekend I finally got down to my target number. Here's the list of apps I have now on my home screen:

1. Timepage
2. Todoist
3. Path
4. Overcast
5. Day One
6. Twitter
7. Instapaper
8. Instagram

I stick to Apple's own offerings for communication using Messages, Phone, Mail and Safari. I've tried different apps to do each of these, but Apple's own apps are proven apps that meet all my needs. These sit on the menu bar at the bottom of the screen.

Technology is great, but it can start becoming a hindrance if it isn't kept under control. For me, eight apps is enough.

I love reading posts like this. Discovering how different people tweak the home screens on their smartphones gives you a small indicator to how that person acts and thinks.

Another interesting point is Shawn's decision to use the iPhone 6+.

Another thing with the iPhone 6s Plus is that it somehow managed to take over the spot my iPad used to hold. It was such a sly move I never saw it coming. But somehow, over the course of a few months, I just stopped using my iPad for reading and note taking.

— Apps and Workflows: iPhone (6s Plus) Edition by Shawn Blanc

I'm toying with replacing my current iPhone 6 but the decision to go small with the new iPhone 5SE out in March or go big with an iPhone 6+ still eludes me.

This week I had something of an issue involving my email and a feature in my CRM that I wanted to use. Here's the gist of the problem.

For each client email I receive I want to send a copy of it to my CRM so that it's easier to find in my CRM rather than filtering through my email for it.

Sounds easy right?

Prior to starting to use this feature I had started using Airmail for my email. It's a lovely app to use and has many great features. There was nothing there that I had to use, I just wanted to give it a try. No harm in that. When it came to forwarding my emails to my CRM I had two problems.

1. I couldn't find the ability in Airmail to automatically forward emails to my CRM. Not a big problem, but manually forwarding email takes time.
2. My CRM didn't recognise the emails that I was forwarding.

The first problem I could live with for a while, but the fact that my CRM didn't recognise my emails wasn't a problem with the CRM (although they are working on a fix to resolve it), it was a problem with the way Airmail formats an email when you forward it.

Now to resolve this I did contact the my CRM's support people and the knew of the problem right away and they offered a number of solutions if I wanted to keep on using Airmail. It involved a bit more cut and paste than I wanted to do though.

Just as an experiment though I forwarded the same email from Apple's own email client, Mail, and guess what? It worked. It just worked. No copy and pasting or changing preferences. It just worked.

Right so if that works what are the chances of being able to automatically forward an email from Mail to my CRM when it hits my inbox. Guess what? It does!

The thing to remember is that I've used Mail for the last three years. I only switched to Airmail out of curiosity. I've switched back to Mail and despite paying a small amount for Airmail, I might go back and use it again if it's updated so that I can use it to forward emails to my CRM. It's a nice email client, and others might have better success with it than me, but not that I see that Mail does everything I need I've switched back.

I only started writing about this little change in tools after reading Patrick Rhone's article on proven tools.

When it comes to the things I use, especially those I rely on every day, I want to use only things that have been prove as much as possible. Proven to work. Proven to last. Proven over time and use.

— Proven by Patrick Rhone

Go on read it, it's worth your time.

And the next time you decide to switch away from something that's been proven to work for you. Take a few minutes and think if it's worth the time doing.

Special thanks to the support staff of Highrise (the CRM in question), who answered my support query in the stupid hours of the morning in the US. Excellent service and excellent support. Thanks Highrise!

Feedbin just won the Internet. Email newsletters direct to your Feedbin.

What a great feature!

It's been 4 days since our Amazon Fire 7 tablet arrived in the post. The idea behind buying the tablet was as a short term replacement for Ethan's iPad which has really become temperamental. It's three years old now and despite the good condition in which it is kept, we are looking to replace it soon. I also wanted to try out the Fire as a writing tool so that I could take my writing on the road and get away from the desk for a couple of hours a day.

The suggestion of the Amazon Fire tablet was by a friend of mine who bought one for his son. I looked at reviews of the tablet online and it appeared to be able to do everything that I wanted it to do. After a few days with it though, there are a few observations I've made that would make me question buying one of these again.

First the benefits. You can't argue with a £50 tablet. Really you can't. Looking at the price and who sells it, you would immediately think this is the right tablet for me. Well the tablet itself is sturdy enough. Obviously not as thin as a new iPad, but the added thickness was a slight reassurance the kids will be able to get a good grip of it and be less likely to drop it.

It has a non-HD display but the kids won't really know the difference between that and the HD display and to be honest I'm not that fussed not the difference either. The display was good enough especially for such a cheap tablet. Lastly the Fire is able to expand it's storage capacity with the the use of a micro SD card. So we're covered for storage.

The tablet is fast and responsive enough that I couldn't call it sluggish. There are a number of apps included in the tablet but none of these are on my requirements list with the exception of the Amazon Prime app and a few other apps I can download from the app store.

Now the drawbacks. If you're hoping to do some work on the Amazon Fire tablet then I suggest you make sure that the apps you need to use are available on Amazon's app store. Not having had an Amazon tablet before I wasn't too sure what apps would be available to use. I did see the Trello app listed but that was all. There are no apps for Todoist, 1Password or Instapaper. Not that this is a reflection on the company that make these apps. The Amazon store is not as prolific as the Apple Store or Google Play, and so it means that the apps available on Amazon are limited. I had hoped that the tablet would serve as a writing tool. With a browser, Trello, Todoist, and a nice markdown editor, I thought I would have a portable writing tool that would allow me to move away from my desk. Not so. There just isn't enough applications that would allow me to do this effectively using the Amazon Fire. The inclusion of a web browser on the device means that I can access things like Todoist, Trello and Draft but for such a device I would prefer to use a native app.

For me the Amazon Fire is more in the consumer target group than the creative target group. With Netflix, Spotify and of course Amazon Prime video available on the device, I see it now as nothing more than a portable entertainment center, which is a shame really as the tablet itself is quite neat and could really do well with those on a tighter budget or looking for something smaller than an iPad to carry about.

So a few days with the Amazon Fire and I'm less than impressed with it. The tablet itself is nice and compact but the availability of apps on the Amazon app store means that if you're looking to do anything more than entertainment with this then I would suggest you keep you're money for an iPad Mini 2 or an equally sized Android tablet. Both of these will have a greater range of apps to use on them, thereby increasing their usage over the Fire's restricted consumer use.

Chris Gonzales has a review of the Kids version of the Amazon Fire 7 tablet at Tools & Toys.

Finding a great task manager can be a daunting affair. Aside from the fact there are so many of them, there's only so much time that you can dedicate to trying them out. You'll never pick the right one first time, so how do you find a good matching task manager?

After three years of using Todoist I know that it works for me. A week ago I dabbled with Wunderlist out of curiosity, but I couldn't adjust to the different interface that Wunderlist offered. It's nothing to do with Wunderlist itself, it's a great task manager but it just didn't work for me. That's the key thing to look for when assessing task managers. Find the right one that works for you. Here's how to do it.

Ask yourself what's the three critical features that you need from your task manager. It might be portability, it might be integration with other services, it might even be important to you to use a hand-written notes. Whatever is important to you then add it to a list.

This is important because if you're blindly testing task managers without knowing what works best for you, then you're going to find it hard to find one that works for you.

I chose Todoist because it has three features that I think are essential to how I work.

1. Todoist has great email integration. The inbox and each project includes their own email address so that I can quickly capture tasks on the go and while I work.
2. Todoist has a minimal user-interface. This is important to me because it lets me focus on reviewing tasks, picking the next one and moving on. Todoist's user-interface is simple and offers little in the way of distractions.
3. Todoist is easy to use. Click, drag, type. The hallmarks of any desktop or web based application, but Todoist makes it easy to move tasks, edit tasks and find tasks.

If Todoist was to close down overnight and I had to pick a new task manager then I would look for a new task manager that matched at least two of these requirements. Three would be a better match, but it's not essential that the task manager you pick meets all three requirements.

By identifying the features that are essential to me, I've been able to find a task manager that doesn't distract and gets the job done. Your requirements might be different though so that's what you need to look for. Find your own essential requirements and you'll find it easier to find a task manager that works for you.

Clay Bavor's large scale digital canvas is a fantastic use of technology.

Even the frame is made to make it indistinguishable from other framed canvases in the room.

Next I turned to the frame material. I wanted something that looked totally unlike anything you’ve seen around a computer monitor or television – a sort of “anti black plastic”. And that led me to a handmade, gilded wood frame, with a classic profile and a good amount of patina.

A Canvas Made of Pixels by Clay Bavor

Making the screen blend in with it's environment and adjusting to that environment is how technology should be used.

There was me thinking I was absolutely bonkers for not falling head over heels in love with the current trend towards towards JS web frameworks.

The web (specifically the Javascript/Node community) has created some of the most complicated, convoluted, over engineered tools ever conceived.

— The Sad State of Web Development by Drew Hamlett

I do like Drew's advice for web applications that have one or two pages with a complex user-interface.

So my advice is to use Rails Django, Play Framework, or Phoenix to develop most of the app, because they help you with most of the boilerplate stuff, and bring in the flavor of the month on a page that needs it. So when the next flavor of the month comes out you’re entire app is not knee deep in the last flavor of the month. You can just re write that one page.

— The Sad State of Web Development by Drew Hamlett

... but certainly not busted. Marco Arment takes a look at why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro is still a sought after purchase.

Despite the low-resolution screen, slow hard drives, very little RAM, and CPUs that were middling even in 2012, it’s an open secret among Apple employees that the “101” still sells surprisingly well — to a nearly tragic degree, given its age and mediocrity.

— Why the 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro still sells by Marco Arment

Amazing that even after 3 years, this is still available to buy.

I'll admit I do love getting fresh new hardware, but the recent shift to hardware that prevents consumers from upgrading on their own is annoying. Yes, the new MacBooks are crazy thin, but I'd definitely trade for a thicker MacBook so that I can upgrade the memory and hard disk on my own.

Maciej Cegłowski, the creator of Pinboard, highlights the growing obesity of the web and what can be done to improve it.

Let’s preserve the web as the hypertext medium it is, the only thing of its kind in the world, and not turn it into another medium for consumption, like we have so many examples of already.

Let’s commit to the idea that as computers get faster, and as networks get faster, the web should also get faster.

— The Website Obesity Crisis by Maciej Cegłowski

Having read this I've just checked this site and I'm glad to say that the index page and a few of the longer form posts are definitely smaller than a major work of Russian literature.

I'll be honest. I'm probably not the ideal person to be giving advice on writing but here's a little bit of advice for those aspiring bloggers and writers who frequently question their own writing much like I do.

Last week I had an idea for a technical article. Over the course of the next few days I outlined the article, wrote a couple of drafts, edited it and then read the final draft back to myself. I hated it. It lacked purpose and it didn't offer enough value to the programmers who would be reading it. In the past I would have simply trashed the article and moved onto something else but is there another way?

In her book "Manage Your Project Portfolio", Johanna Rothman has great advice about evaluating software projects and deciding what action to take with projects.

Once you’ve decided you should do this project, you have a limited number of decisions to make. You can commit to a project, kill a project, or transform a project to increase its chances of success.

This could be equally applied to writing.

I've already mentioned that in the past I would trash any articles that didn't meet the grade. Everything else was published. What about transforming that article into something else though? Could we salvage something from it?

I decided to transform the article rather than killing it. It took a couple of hours but in the end up I had a different style of article on a related topic to my original article. I was happy enough with the final result and its now added to the growing pile of technical articles to be published next year.

When it comes to writing it doesn't need to be publish or trash. If something doesn't meet the grade then consider transforming it into something else. It's definitely worth considering rather than throwing away what could be a potentially great piece of writing.

Dropbox has decided to call it a day on their photo management app Carousel and the email client Mailbox.

Building new products is about learning as much as it’s about making. It’s also about tough choices. Over the past few months, we’ve increased our team’s focus on collaboration and simplifying the way people work together. In light of that, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Carousel and Mailbox.

— Saying goodbye to Carousel and Mailbox by Dropbox

To be honest this isn't going to have any impact on me. I didn't use either of these services, but what's interesting is that we're losing another good email client to a tech giant. I didn't use Mailbox myself but it's clear from the many messages and comments that lots of people used and they rated it very highly.

I remember using Sparrow for a few months as my email client before they were acquired by Google. I loved using it but upon the news that it was being acquired I quickly switched back to using my previous email client.

It's unfortunate that great software applications are acquired and then disbanded or boxed away inside the tech giants. I can't comment on the companies and individuals that are acquired in this way though. I would find it hard to say no to any sizeable amount of money for a software product that I owned.

There are too many easy choices.

I've noticed that retail stores and their vast volume of products seem to be on the rise. Every shopping trip turns into a "who buys all this?" while looking at the mountains of stock available. This isn't just about the products we can easily buy though. It seems now that we're even spoiled for choice in the experiences that we can have in life.

On Sunday I read a story about a silent fireworks display that was intended for babies and toddlers. After the show was finished parents complained that the fireworks were too loud. Hardly surprising given that fireworks by nature are loud.

The bugbear for me isn't the flawed logic of silent fireworks show, it's the availability of choice. We tend to do these things simply because we have the choice too. I'm sure most of us would consider taking our youngest children to a fireworks display but is there any benefit other than the fact that you can?

We're spoiled for choice and the element of resistance in that choice is being eroded away. Just because the decision to do something is easy, it doesn't mean that we should.

Next year it will be 10 years since I purchased my Specialized Langster bike. It's still running well and is a solid bike. Like any bike fan though, I do crave that chance to purchase something new. Will 2016 be the year to purchase a new Langster? It's looking that way.

In a shock turnaround, Marco Arment has pulled his ad blocking app, Peace, from the App Store. Later on Apple also started refunding everyone who bought it on the App Store.

Achieving this much success with Peace just doesn’t feel good, which I didn’t anticipate, but probably should have. Ad blockers come with an important asterisk: while they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don’t deserve the hit.

— Just Doesn't Feel Good by Marco Arment

I admire Marco's decision to step back from the ad blocking market. I wonder how many others could turn their back on a successful app?

Arment has expressed his hope that blocking bad ads will lead to publishers being forced to adopt “better monetisation methods”, from selling adverts directly (and so cutting out the data-collecting middlemen) to collecting direct payments from readers. To that effect, Peace offers the ability to “whitelist” sites easily from the share menu in Safari, if a user wants to support a specific publisher.

— Adblockers shoot up iOS 9 app charts on day one by The Guardian

I've got a couple of adblockers installed on my iPhone, No more dodgy data hoarding ads for me. This is definitely the mark of a new age of Internet folks!

I love how iA have opened up with their iA Writer 3 release:

If you came here to read about ground-breaking new features, we have to apologize: iA Writer has not become bigger. It has become lighter, smarter, more refined.

— iA Writer 3
by iA

That's how you sell software.

Pearls of wisdom from JavaScript laureate, Thomas Fuchs.

Don't follow the hype

Use what works for you. If you’re productive in PHP, by all means, use PHP. Of course, sometimes technologies come along that actually measurably increase productivity or have other huge advantages, but it can’t be overstated how few and far between those are — perhaps one or two happen in a decade.

— How to actually ship software that actually works
by Thomas Fuchs

Loved this. So many times I'll say I don't have the time but it's not actually true. I do have the time, just not the attention.

But really, as I thought about it, I realized I had the time. Every day is the same 24 hour cycle. Every workday around 8 hours. Surely I could have found even 20 minutes a day to work with him. But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t that I couldn’t find the time. I couldn’t find the attention.

My mind fills up with a few key projects and that’s it. I’m absorbed by those. That’s where my attention is. Had I made 20 minutes here and there for him, I’m be physically present in that moment, but mentally I’d be elsewhere. And that’s not fair to either of us.

Time and attention aren’t the same thing. They aren’t even related.

— The difference between time and attention by Jason Fried

It’s a question that I’m seeing on an increasing basis as I venture through the Internet. I’ve seen it appear on a few forum sites and it has appeared in a couple of newsletters that I subscribe to.

Before we answer the question, let’s take a brief look at the history of Rails. 10 years ago the first version of Ruby on Rails dropped. It caused a stir due to the ease with which web applications could be made. In that time it’s moved on through four major versions, had hundreds of releases and has been the collective work of hundreds of software developers who have devoted their free time to making Ruby on Rails what it is today.

Since then there’s been a search for the next killer web framework that will replace Ruby on Rails. 10 years on I’d say we’re still waiting. No other web framework has had the impact that Ruby on Rails has.

So is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

Definitely yes. While a lot of developers have adopted and then moved onto other languages and frameworks, there is still a large amount of developers that specialise in Ruby on Rails. The market for Ruby on Rails developers for full-time and contract work is still healthy. There’s also still a large amount of companies and organisations that need Ruby on Rails developers to maintain web applications and there’s still a demand for these developers with Greenfield projects as well.

It’s not as highly a sought after as it was maybe five years ago, but it’s still a relevant technology as well as a mature technology. It’s been tried and tested by many developers and it’s benefits for building web applications is well known now. Given that companies would rather not risk building an application in a new and unfamiliar technology, Ruby on Rails is now seen as a mature web framework that has grown up over the years.

Ruby on Rails will be relevant for at least the next five years and possibly the next ten years. From there, who knows. As long as it is a low-risk technology for clients, I’ll keep recommending Rails for projects that it is a good fit for.

If you know me and you read my blog on a regular basis you’ll know that I’m an advocate for paying for the software you use. It’s simple, support the software that supports you. Lately though I felt that I was paying for software that I rarely got any use from. As I checked my recent outgoings I noticed that there were a number of software services I was using where I couldn’t justify the monthly fee for using them.

For the last three months I’ve been using OnePageCRM for managing leads and deals. It’s a nice and simple CRM for small businesses and it does a fine job of managing leads and contacts but I was using it just once a week. It cost me £8 per month to use but when you multiply this by four or five similar services, I was looking at £40 in software that wasn't necessary.

OnePageCRM didn’t fit the bill but I still needed something that will let me manage my contacts and deals but on a free plan. Then when the time comes for more functionality and there’s room in the budget, I’ll be able to scale up to a paid plan.

In the past I gave Highrise a short spin, but at the time I couldn’t justify the $29 for the Solo plan. It was simply too much money for what I needed but I didn’t give the free plan a look.

After a quick import of contacts from OnePageCRM I’m now up and running on Highrise’s free plan. Okay, I’m not paying for it now but in time I’m hoping that with a busier schedule and more clients, I’ll be able to spring for the solo plan and it will continue to help keep my business ticking over.

Paying for the software you use is good to do, but when you your own needs are for a service that gives functionality on an ‘as and when’ basis then free plans are an ideal way to make sure that you get the functionality you need while also ensuring that you can upgrade to a paid plan in the future.

No sooner do I get settled with Monoid when I hear of another coding font. This time it's the code-generated Iosevka.

About a year ago I made the jump to Vim. Having finally mastered enough of the keystrokes to muster through a single coding session, I made it my default text editor for programming. In the last couple of months though I've been using Atom for most of my programming. The reason for the move? Just for a change. Atom does have a number of niceties that encouraged the switch.

Good Looking

Vim is simple and productive but let's be honest, it's not exactly an eye-opener as development tools go. Sure you can cut and splice code like a keyboard armed ninja, but its look begins to get a little dull when you're using the same development environment for most days of the week.

Atom, like Sublime Text is it's own application and doesn't run within your terminal. The plus side to this is that it isn't restricted in the way the user-interface can give feedback to me through elements like auto-complete suggestions and notifications.

Atom is easier on the eye and maybe that's a cop-out reason for making a change in your development tools, but my eyes start to strain staring at a two-pane terminal session for most of the day. Maybe it's an age thing, but coding with Atom is much easier on the eyes than writing code within my terminal app.

Keyboard Friendly

Atom, just like every other development tool on the planet has a list of keyboard shortcuts that eliminate the need for a mouse. Not only that but there are some keyboard shortcuts from Vim that I can take with me to Atom. Also, like Sublime Text it includes a command palette to allow you to lookup and select the right command for the job.

Atom is keyboard friendly but more importantly for me, it's familiar in that most of the keyboard shortcuts I use are either from Vim or similar to shortcuts that I previously used in Sublime Text.

Switching to Atom wasn't prompted by it being a more productive editor, its growing community of packages or the fact that it's made by Github. The reason for the switch was just for a change. Sure I'm just as productive with Atom as I was with Vim or Sublime Text but sometimes you just need a change of tools to keep things interesting. A simple change like this can stir things up for the next few months or even years. At least until they perfect a text editor in the browser.

Ana Reinert has a couple of suggestions to ensure your most prized notebooks get back to you.

It happens to me more times than I care to admit. I take my iPhone out of my pocket, fully intending to do something — look up an address or take down a note to capture a thought — and suddenly I find myself minutes later deep into checking my Twitter stream or Facebook feed. And the alarming thing is that I’m not even entirely sure how I got there. The choice to check social media was a semi-conscious one born of habit. It even takes me a few seconds to remember the purpose I took my iPhone out for. It’s more than a bit embarrassing.

— Right Intention by Patrick Rhone

Patrick's analogy of liking his use of Twitter to a mall is spot on. All too often it feels like I'm visiting the wrong parts of Twitter. Time for a change.

All the essentials and nothing more.

Not only can you be Google free, but the alternatives are just as good in terms of functionality.

I suspect the ease of switching away from Google depends primarily on whether you use Gmail. I never have — it solves problems I don’t have, and I greatly prefer native IMAP email apps — so Google has never had deep integration with my data or a significant presence on my iPhone.

I didn’t set out to aggressively quit Google-everything, but once I changed my browsers’ default search engine to DuckDuckGo, that has mostly happened. The most surprising part was how easy it was for Google to mostly fall out of my life, how quickly it happened, and how little I missed it.

— Why not Google?
by Marco Arment

I hope not.

Technically, it’s simple. The web cannot emulate native perfectly, and it never will. Native apps talk directly to the operating system, while web apps talk to the browser, which talks to the OS. Thus there’s an extra layer web apps have to pass, and that makes them slightly slower and coarser than native apps. This problem is unsolvable.

— Web vs Native: Let's Concede Defeat by Peter-Paul Koch

It's not all bad though. Peter-Paul does go on to say how web apps can still compete against native apps.

No Man's Sky has high expectations. With a game universe composing of billions of planets, it is set to change the world of gaming. I for one can't wait for its release.

The universe is being built in an old two-story building, in the town of Guildford, half an hour by train from London. About a dozen people are working on it. They sit at computer terminals in three rows on the building’s first floor and, primarily by manipulating lines of code, they make mathematical rules that will determine the age and arrangement of virtual stars, the clustering of asteroid belts and moons and planets, the physics of gravity, the arc of orbits, the density and composition of atmospheres—rain, clear skies, overcast. Planets in the universe will be the size of real planets, and they will be separated from one another by light-years of digital space. A small fraction of them will support complex life.

— World Without End
by The New Yorker

I'm generally not, but that's okay.

If we didn’t have any early adopters ironing out the kinks, there’d never be a now-safe choice for the late majority. And if everyone always jumped on the latest thing on day one, society would waste needless cycles churning through the broken glass of beta software.

— The Stories We Tell Ourselves by Signal vs Noise

I now know that I bring scale to the products that I wait for.

The Zapier blog has been a new addition to my reading list and it certainly hasn't disappointed.

This post about the time-tested task management methods proves that having the killer productivity app isn't the key to being productive. Also great to see Markdown mentioned here.

Keep them coming Zapier!

I wrote this on Friday's post:

Building and marketing products isn’t for me. I prefer to be neck deep in code rather than marketing tools.

I've been thinking about it a lot over the weekend.

The pursuit to build something that people will want to use and buy is what many people want. To take an idea, build it, and turn it into a successful product. Everytime I see an app (usually based on a simple idea) rocket to the top of the App Store charts I wonder, "Why didn't I think of that?".

The thing is though, this usually isn't the first idea for that person. It might be their tenth or even twentieth attempt at making a successful product. Yes, it might be their first attempt, but I don't think there's ever been a single attempt at a product that's went on to sell millions. There's always been a few failed attempts before that one successful product happens.

Rather than continually change the idea of Journalong into something that works I simply let it trudge along based on it's same initial idea. If I was really serious about making Journalong into something better I might have changed how it recorded entries, or changed it's target market to a more focused group, or even open sourced it after the first three months of inactivity. It's taken me a couple of years to finally admit defeat.

A continually pivoting product isn't something I have a whole lot of time for. lame excuse you might say. I would disagree. The ongoing testing and validating of a product until it starts to gain the traction of paying clients isn't what I want to do. I want to write software, but I also want to be paid for writing that software. I'm exploring a few options such as open sourcing a few ideas to see what happens, but for the moment I'll be keeping the focus on writing code rather than building products.

Given I'm a couple of years from this milestone, it's a worrying prospect to think that my chances of being hired will continue to decline.

The unfortunate truth is that unlike other forms of discrimination that are more arbitrary and capricious, age discrimination can often be a result of objective and sound business justifications. I’m not trying to justify it as an acceptable practice, but just trying to describe the pickle it puts the manager in trying to make a sound business decision without compromising the ethical and legal obligations of the company.

— Programmers: Before You Turn 40, Get a Plan B by John Fuex

I suppose though I'm already working towards a plan B with my freelancing career, but is that enough?

A quick summary from different reviews of the Apple Watch.

The Apple Watch is the best smartwatch on the market, the reviewers agree. And it does some interesting things. But it’s not essential.

This is different than smartphones, which became addictive at first use and were obvious, must-own devices. It sounds like the watch still needs some work before it’s great.

— The Apple Watch reviews are in, and they’re uncharacteristically meh across the board by Quartz

Ever since the first official news that Apple were going to be releasing a watch, I've been skeptical of it's initial success due to the fact there wasn't a single feature of it that made me want to buy it.

My take on it is that I don't want another touch enabled screen to distract me, I've already got one.

If I had to buy something for my wrist that fell in this category of technology, I would have to say that something like a Fitbit, or even Microsoft's Band would be something more up my street. Mostly for the health tracking benefits.

It's still early days though for the Apple Watch and given Apple's history of products it's fair to say that a more streamlined Apple Watch is probably already being planned.

I have burned through a number of different tool choices over the last two years. In an effort to find the best tools that fit how I work, I've tried a number of different alternatives. Source code hosting, web app hosting, productivity, bookmarking, social networking and content curation to name a few categories.

For the most part the tools I have tried haven't worked out for me when I compare them to the tools that I was initially using. In most cases I've come full circle.

Take bookmarking for example. I've went from using Pinboard, going through a number of home grown solutions, to using Pocket and then eventually coming back to Pinboard. I've started wondering why I even stopped using Pinboard in the first place. So why did I stop using Pinboard?

I'll be honest, I can't put my finger on it exactly but I know there's an aspect of my personality where I like things to change every now and again. It's a behaviour that I've known since I was a kid. When I get too familiar or settled with something, I start looking for alternatives.

This is okay for the curious ones but in the last couple of years I've tried so many different tools that I'm starting to wonder if it was worth all the hassle, effort and money.

Probably not, but I have learned that if something works, then there's little reason to change it for something else.

Kids have the wonder and curiosity that adults have spent many years replacing with logic and skepticism. To a kid, what looks like some moss on a rock is, in fact, a fairy chair. That skyscraper is a rocket ship. A few trees in a park are a mighty forest where woodland creatures come alive. A kid will shoot the truth they see.

— Give your camera to your kid ... by Patrick Rhone

During the week I found out that Flexibits were releasing a major upgrade to their OS X calender app, Fantastical. When Fantastical first came out, I bought a copy from the App Store and since then I've used it on a daily basis. I can't remember how much I paid for it, but it was money well spent. For close to two years, I got an excellent calendar app that sat in my menu bar and did the job it was intended to do. It came with a number of minor upgrades to the application over the time that I used it. Not bad value for money.

Today I opened the App Store, found Fantastical 2, bought it and installed it. No hesitation, no pondering if the application is in fact worth the purchase or even deciding whether Flexibits deserve my hard-earned cash for the new version of Fantastical (they do btw).

I don't mind paying for major upgrades to software that I use. Not only am I supporting the future of the software product that I am using by ensuring money goes back into the company that produced it, but I'm also supporting the developers who make the software. For developers, writing code is a way of making an income to support themselves and in some cases also supporting their families. Some developers work for clients, some provide consulting services, but for indie developers and small software houses like Flexibits, they work on a business model that requires income from people buying their software. Nothing wrong with that. It's how many businesses work.

Here's the problem though. Some people expect the software they buy to be supported for life. That's a ridiculous idea and here's why.

Software doesn't last for ever.

Changing operating systems and technology as well changes in the way we work means that software will always change. It's just the way things are, and it's not restricted to the world of technology and software either. Lots of products we buy can last for years, but they'll rarely last us a lifetime. Software isn't any different. When I buy a software product, I'll expect a couple of years worth of updates before having to buy the next version up of the product. It just makes sense.

When apps first appeared on the App Store as different versions, there was an initial push back against the idea. People were complaining about having to buy the app again that they had already forked out a few dollars for in the past. I'm glad to see though that there's less resistance to the idea of new major versions of software and apps coming with a price tag.

If the app you use makes a positive difference to your day, then why wouldn't you fork out the money for a new major version of it? If the developer of the app is releasing a new major version every year then I might see the point against paying for that app, but most app developers are giving their apps a couple of years at least before releasing a completely new version of their app.

Software doesn't last for ever, but with the support of you as a paying customer, it can keep going for as long as the developer has the financial support they need to keep working on it. That's a small price to pay for an app that makes a big difference to your day.

... you just can't ignore.

These iPad sleeves make me want to buy an iPad, just to warrant the purchase of the sleeve. Ridiculous idea but these are great looking sleeves.

via Tools & Toys

Marco Arment on what could be Google's biggest challenge yet.

Shallow social-shareable listicles and clickbait headlines have always been plentiful on the web, but it does seem clear that they’re getting much worse and more dominant recently.

Google is making the problem worse, but they’re not the root problem. In fact, the real problem is a pretty big problem for Google, too:

Everyone’s spending increasingly more consumption time dicking around in apps and snacking on bite-sized social content instead of browsing websites and searching Google.

— Google and blogs: "Shit" by Marco Arment

Does this explain why Google are going to show tweets in their search results?

In the early days of the Internet, hosting your own website was reserved for those in the know, but over time it's become easy for anyone to build and host a website. With it though, comes that initial question. Do you use a hosted service or roll your own solution?

Over the years I tried lots of different hosted services. When I first started blogging a few years ago, I jumped from Tumblr to Posterous to Github Pages and then finally settled on Octopress. In recent weeks I've once again been assessing if Octopress is sufficient for my needs. It's got me thinking about the decision to use a hosted service like Wordpress or to use my own version of Octopress that has served me well over the last year.

The Hosted Service

The benefits of using a hosted service are immediately clear. Sign up and your done. As soon as that form is submitted you're ready to go. It's hard not to argue with this instant benefit. For most people this is the only way. Maybe they're not willing to delve into servers and software or perhaps it's a time issue.

For a smaller group of people though, they have the knowledge to roll their own solution, so what makes them chose a service?

I choose services based on a number of factors but mostly it's the benefit I can get from being able to use them on a day to day basis.

Services like Todoist and Trello take the pain out of my task and project management by allowing me to move between devices without having to synchronise data between them. There's a number of other minor benefits but the big benefits is accessibility.

I don't run my own servers as I know it would take up too much of my time to learn how to configure these correctly and ensure they are secure and running smoothly so I look towards services like Cloud 66 and Heroku to ensure my clients sites run without any major impact.

These are just a couple of examples of how hosted services are beneficial but there are drawbacks.

One of the big issues I have with hosted services is my ability to get my data in and out of that service. It's probably the one single feature of any hosted service that ultimately makea me sign up or not. As a hosted service I respect that my data must be located elsewhere for that service to be effective, but I must be able to import my data and extract it in a simple way. This is still a issue with some services, but it is getting better. Sadly though, the services themselves decide on the format of the data and with so many out there, getting them to all agree on the one format is never going to happen.

The Custom Solution

The benefit of a custom solution is just that. It's your own solution.

Hosted services offer a product or service pre-boxed and used by hundreds of people, but they can only be made to fit your needs to a certain point. What usually happens then is you have a service that fits your needs most of the time, just not all of the time.

This is where custom solutions excel. They are solutions tailored specificically to your own requirements. The drawback though is that such solutions need maintanance, and in my experience, a little more effort to ensure they run smoothly.

So what about my blog then? Well as nice as a hosted service would be, I do prefer to have that element of control over how it looks and what it does. Yes, I might have to jump through a few more hoops to publish content, but it gives me more control in that process. I think I'll be staying with the custom solution for the moment.

A couple of weeks ago I moved my Instapaper account over to Pocket. The reason for the move was that I wanted better organisation of the articles that I had read and that meant more than just being able to file what I had read into folders. Don't get me wrong, Instapaper is great for taking content and making it easy to read, but after that you can only file what you have read into folders. Instapaper does offer a full-text search facility in their premium plan but I found that I needed something in between folders and searching.

Pocket caught my eye when it first came out as a re-brand of Read It Later. I did trial it for a few days but it duplicated what I already had in both Instapaper and Pinboard. Since then I've moved on from Pinboard and I handle my bookmarking needs with a collection of Markdown files. What I needed was better organisation of what I had read. Searching amongst hundreds of articles is okay for unique keywords but I have a lot of articles on web development and some of them are difficult to find.

Pocket offers more than just the ability to queue up articles to read. Tags allow you to organise what you have read and there's full-text search also. Lastly Pocket stores a copy of the article for you should the original go missing. Those last two features are in Pocket's premium plan, but at just $45 for the whole year, I would say that it is worth it.

The only problem I have is that when I imported my Instapaper articles into Pocket, I had over 3,500 articles. That's a lot of articles to tag and I will eventually get round to tagging everything that I keep. It's not all bad though. During the import Pocket tags articles with their original folder name in Instapaper, so I have some form of organisation to start with. Also, it gives me a chance to check my archive and remove articles that are irrelevant. Lastly, Pocket offer clients for OSX, iOS and Android and there is also the web client which anyone can use regardless of your preferred platform.

Instapaper is a great service for those that want to read and archive their content and I would still recommend them. If though you want a little more organisation to what you've read, then I think Pocket might be a better fit.

Marco Arment provides a detailed breakdown of his sales figures for 2014 for his app Overcast. More interesting though is the benefits he mentions to being self-employed.

I can work in my nice home office, drink my fussy coffee, take a nap after lunch if I want to, and be present for my family as my kid grows up. That’s my definition of success.
— Overcast’s 2014 sales numbers by Marco Arment

Couldn't agree more.

In the past year I've read a number of different accounts of police using these harmful devices for raids. It boggles the mind that something so dangerous is availble to US police forces as well as being frequently mis-used.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit wrote in 2000 that “police cannot automatically throw bombs into drug dealers’ houses, even if the bomb goes by the euphemism ‘flash-bang device.’” In practice, however, there are few checks on officers who want to use them. Once a police department registers its inventory with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, it is accountable only to itself for how it uses the stockpile. ProPublica’s review of flashbang injuries found no criminal convictions against police officers who injured citizens with the devices.

Perhaps the most horrifying case of harm by these explosive devices though was the case of Bou Bou Phonesavanh.

Bou Bou was sleeping in a portable playpen at the foot of his parents’ bed when the Habersham County Special Response Team broke down the door to the room and threw a flashbang. The grenade landed on a pillow next to Bou Bou’s face. The blast blew a hole in his chest, severed his nose, and tore apart his lips and mouth.

— Hotter Than Lava by ProPublica

Perhaps the biggest problem though is the attitude that a militarized police force is necessary and keeps people safe. I don't see a problem with police officers carrying firearms in the US, they have done for years, but there is a problem with how much equipment is at their disposal and the lack of constraints in which they are allowed to use it.

Weapons like this belong in the hands of specialist armed forces only, not law enforcers.

Paying for tools is a smart choice. If programs like Keynote and Mail.app were actually profit centers for Apple, I would imagine that we'd have far better support, fewer long-term bugs and and most of all, a vibrant, ongoing effort to make them better.

— Five Thoughts on Software by Seth Godin

I completely agree with this, after seeing Google eventually take down Reader, I've always swayed towards paying for tools and services when I can. They're more likely to be still running in the long term, offer greater support and they are updated more frequently to ensure their customers are still getting value.

There are exceptions to this though, but this is a rare exception only made possible by exceptional companies.

Skipping the TDD cycle isn't always a bad thing to do. After all, sometimes you just want to write code.

Over the holidays I had some free time. An idea has been in my head for most of the year, but I never got round to scheduling anytime to work on it. I decided now was the chance to throw something together to see if this idea was worth exploring. To change things up a bit I decided to not follow my usual practice of TDD. Some might call that laziness and that might have been a minor factor, after all it was the holidays and this was just me trying something out, but the major factor in skipping TDD was that I had the knowledge to build the application quickly. Over the course of a couple of days I put together the first attempt at implementing this idea.

Aside from a couple of typos and minor bugs, the application is working fine and doing its job. The bugs were just oversights made by myself during those two days and they were easy to fix once found. I'm not surprised by the this as it is a simple application comprising of some basic CRUD operations and a single Rake task. Once everything was looking good, I deployed the application so that I could see it running for a few days. After a week it was clear that all was in working order. I've shared the idea with a couple of people who have so far been positive about it.

Now being a good developer I mostly write tests before I write code. It's the TDD way. This time though I skipped the tests in favour of getting something basic up and running. I had the knowledge and I ran with it. It was supposed to be just a prototype after all.

In the past I've stuck with using TDD when building even the smallest of products. At that point in my career however I was a less experienced developer. I was still figuring things out. The tests made sure that everything was working as I stumbled through different parts of the product. Now though, I have the knowledge and confidence to throw small web applications together without writing tests to in order to explore simple ideas for web applications.

Is it still a prototype then now that it has been shipped and is being used daily? Yes and no. The line between prototype and product is definitely blurred here. I would have to say that until the code itself was backed by a test suite, it's still just a prototype, an idea. So why not trash the code I have at the moment and start again from scratch using TDD?

I could, but I already know what code I need to write. Do I really want to scrap the whole thing knowing that I'm just going to write similar code again? In an ideal world I would probably do this but I knew it would be a while before I got free time like this again. The next obvious step then would be to add tests to the prototype and gradually refactor this code into something more stable. Something ready for the masses.

TDD is still a great practice to follow when writing software, but I think there's a time and a place for it. When writing software as part of your job, for a client, or as a contribution to an open source project, then yes, TDD should be used in these cases, especially if they are expected of you. However, when you are exploring code, ideas and simply playing around then I think it's down to yourself to decide. And if you decided not to TDD, don't sweat it.

TDD might be advantageous when learning a new language or framework but when you have the knowledge to build something quickly then why not. If it's worth pursuing further then start writing tests for the code that you have before things start to get more complicated.

I was on a roll there for a while, but it's been difficult to get that consistentcy back again. I am working on it, it's just the hovering over the publish button that has frequently held me back.

Software engineers should write because it promotes many of the same skills required in programming. A core skill in both disciplines is an ability to think clearly. The best software engineers are great writers because their prose is as logical and elegant as their code.
— Software engineers should write by Shubhro Saha

For a long time now I've kept my iPhone setup largely the same. Just two rows of apps on the home screen with other apps on the following screens. I've had it this way for over a year now, but recently I've changed this setup.

More Screen, More Apps

With a larger screen on my iPhone 6, I've started adding more apps to the home screen. I started adding a third row of apps. Then a week later I added another row of apps. The following week after that I added another row.

There was two reasons I kept just eight apps on my screen in the past.

1. I like using photos of my family on my phone and so keeping the number of apps to eight means I have more screen to use a nice photo.
2. I kept the number of apps down to the ones I used on a daily basis. At the time I also had an iPad, so I didn't need as many apps on my phone.

Things have changed though. I no longer use an iPad. The iPhone 6 screen is big enough to do most tasks I throw at it with the sole exception being programming. This means I do use my phone alot more. The tade-off of using my phone alot more rather than using two seperate devices is well worth it.

Also, I just set a nice picture of the family on the lock screen and reserve the wallpaper on the home screen for a different image from Unsplash. These two changes mean that I am free to use more apps on my home screen.

No More Folders

Another change to my previous setup is the abolishment of folders to group apps. In the past I used a verb based grouping for apps to keep related tasks together. It was fine for a while but I found that even by using the verb based folders, I wasn't gaining anything other than keeping the screen organised. I was also allowing myself to hoard apps. Even the apps that I used infrequently I kept on my phone in a folder. I didn't have a need for these apps, I simply kept them there, "just in case".

Now I simply keep a couple of subsequent screens with apps on them. My second home screen is largely apps I've installed for use every other day like banking, health tracking, server management and games for the kids (and me!).The third home screen is all Apple's own apps that I don't use often or at all. It's still annoying that you can't delete apps like Notes, Voice Memos and Tips, but with them being on the last screen I rarely see them.

One Last Thing

One last change that I have been making in terms of app usage is I've started to use web based services instead of apps which is why I have a Feedbin icon on my home screen. Previously I've used Reeder and Unread for scanning through my RSS feeds, but Feedbin has such a great user-interface for the phone that it makes more sense to use Feedbin with it's sharing feature available on my iPhone rather than adding another app layer between myself and the Feedbin service. This doesn't work for all services, but where a web based client has been designed with a phone in mind, it can be just as easy to use the web based client rather than an app to connect to your service in question.

That just about covers my iPhone setup. Tools have definitely changed since the last time I wrote about this. I might delve into these apps more in the future and my reasons for choosing them but for the foreseeable future this is what I'm sticking with.

While I do believe that killer apps have had their day for the foreseeable future, I can't deny that the unbundling technique can be used to create some great apps.

Ed Rex reckons there are three reasons why unbundling works. Couldn't agree more with his reason for simplicity.

When your app only needs to do one thing, it can do it really well. You can have big, clear buttons for the things people use it for — because there’s no need to clutter up the screen with all those other options you’ve got rid of. This makes your app unbelievably easy to use — and that’s what smartphone users want.

— The Formula For Creating The Next Killer App by Ed Rex

Read on for the full recipe.

I've not used Evernote for a while now but Seth Clifford's setup in Dropbox still was intriguing to read about.

When it comes to working with clients, there's a shared responsibility to ensure that both parties are using the right tools to work together.

For the last few weeks I've become increasingly uncomfortable in how I work with a client. In the past we've used a particular collaboration tool to manage projects and communicate through, but in the last few weeks this tool has been abandoned in favour for development requests through a chat room. At first it was minor requests like tweaks to the UI and changes to the messages that were displayed to the user when a form was incorrect. Steadily though it's increased to bigger changes and feature requests. Instant Messaging Driven Development if you wanted to put a label on it.

After explaining an issue in the code with the client I took the chance to talk to them about the increasing use of the chat room for requests rather than the collaboration tool that we originally used. I explained my worries about the trend towards this and the drawbacks that the client will inherit as a result of the continued use of the chat room for sending requests for software changes.

The issue was heard loud and clear from the client and for the next hour of the call we discussed plans to move back to the collaboration tool as well as guidelines for using the tool and what we can do to reinforce its place as the go to point for projects. It was a successful discussion.

When you and your client agree on a particular tool to use for collaborating on projects, then it is important that you stick to this. These tools are initially picked for a reason and that's because both you and the client are happy to use the tool and it will serve both your needs. When either side of this arrangement doesn't use the tool then that's where things can go wrong.

Collaboration tools such as Trello, Basecamp and other tools are there to ease the burden of remote parties working together. Parties can share information, assign tasks, check overall progress and much more. Other tools for communicating like IM, phone, text and email are best at communicating but they're a bad choice as collaboration tools.

Who's to blame? Well, in this case both myself and the client. On one hand the client should be adhereing to the agreement of using the collaboration tool. On the other hand, I could have mentioned this to the client sooner rather than let it continue for the few weeks that it did. I admit I was hesistant about bringing this issue to the client, but they were understanding about my concerns and promised to start using the collaboration tool again.

The next time a client deviates from the collaboration tool we've chosen, I'll politely remind them of our preferred place for such things. And yes, I would expect them to do the same to me.

I'm going to give Twitter another go but this time just as a broadcasting tool.

In the past I've been against using Twitter. For me it became too much noise and watching my stream day in and out was becoming difficult to manage. I could have scaled back the number of people I followed but after choosing to stop using Twitter, it was clear I wasn't missing out on much.

The people who I like to follow already keep their own sites and blogs updated on a regular schedule. I already follow these people using RSS feeds from their sites and blogs. It doesn't make much sense to 'subscribe' again to these people through a different medium.

And yet, I do think there is a use for Twitter. Ever since I read a post about the use of Twitter as a broadcast medium (sorry, can't find the link!), I've wondered if that's how I should be using Twitter?

So far a month, I'm going to activate my Twitter account again and point my site's RSS feed to Twitter. I've set myself a number of limits though.

• My Twitter account will be a broadcast only account. No tweets, favourites or reposts will come from me personally. The only tweets I will be making will be fed from my RSS feed.
• I won't be interacting with others on Twitter. If a tweet receives a reply in the form of constructive criticism then I'll endeavour to contact that person through email.
• My account will remain private. Strange I know, but I want to get a handle on the number of people that follow me. In the past I've had to continually block unwanted followers on Twitter. I've no idea what their engineers have done, if anything, to clamp down on spam accounts. The best way I see to get control is to accept each follow request as they come in. With my account only posting links from my blog, I don't expect to see many follow requests and the bulk of them that request to follow me should be genuine enough.

We'll see how it goes.

I love using Pixelmator on my MBP, but it's great to see it's now available on the iPad too.

via Tools and Toys

A new look Todoist for all you Mac people. Love this service.

Big decisions are often fraught with risk. Sometimes though the only way to make the right decision though is to test the options first.

For the last few months I've been working on a CMS application for a client that has been steadily growing in size. We both agree that there will come a time where we will need to make some decisions about the design of the application so that it remains easy enough to maintain and develop but also scales up with the client's expected growth for the next few years.

It's something we've both been putting off for some time now, but with more projects and clients appearing in the client's pipeline, we've decided that now is the right time to start making these decisions.

The problem has always been though that if we make the wrong decision we end up too far down a path that we don't want to be. Backtracking might not be an option and working towards a different solution is something that we don't want to end up doing either.

The answer to this dilemma has been surprising simple. For each technical decision we have to make, we have a number of options that we can consider. Rather than analysing and committing to the most attractive option (in theory anyway), we have decided to take a day and implement that option in a single day to see where we get to. If by the end of the day, we're still happy that we've made the right decision, then we continue on with this option. If we're starting to have doubts, we abandon the option and try something else.

Software developers will recognise this concept as a spike. This is the idea that you carry out enough work to recognise the risks and knowledge that are associated with change in design or functionality. The spike gives the developer the chance to find out the risk and complexity involved in such a change. With the information, developers can provide better estimates for these changes or completely rule out a change.

The spike is a great way to ensure that you limit risk from a decision without committing to that decision. It will involve some time to determine if the option you are spiking is worth pursuing, there's no getting around it. However it is better to invest some time in pursuing the right decision rather than blindly committing to the wrong decision is it not?

Love American Football? Love writing code?

Here's a quick run down of American Football related terms in the context of software development.

As promised to one of my App.net followers, here's a quick run down of the setup I use for writing in Markdown.

I stopped using Sublime Text as my preferred code editor a couple of months ago, but there's something that I still use it for every day and that's for writing my blog. As a result I've removed a lot of packages from Sublime Text and managed to whittle it down to just the essentials. Here's a run down of everything I use for writing in Markdown with Sublime Text.

Theme and Colour Scheme

After a number of years of trying different themes on Sublime Text, I've now resorted back to the excellent Soda theme. It's stable and easy on the eye. There are a number of great themes out there but in my experience, they're not as solid as Soda.

As for the colour scheme I'm sticking with Solarized but instead of using the dark variation for coding, I use the light variation. It's makes a nice context switch trigger when I'm moving from code to writing.

Packages

I don't use a lot of packages for writing in Markdown, but there are a few that definitely help.

• MarkdownEditing - A Markdown plugin for Sublime Text that provides good syntax highlighting and editing features.
• Origami - The default pane layouts and keyboards shortcuts can be infuriating. Origami solves by letting you splits panes easily.
• WordCount - Nice way of seeing your word count. Always handy if you like keeping an eye on that sort of thing.
• Marked App Menu - Opens Marked and Marked 2 from the document that you are working on.

External Tools

A special mention goes to Brett Terpstra's fantastic Marked app which is great for previewing and reviewing your Markdown documents. Simply open your Markdown document in Marked and watch it update your Markdown document in a theme of your choosing while you type. Not only that, but Marked also has a ton of features that allow you to review your writing. If you're a Mac owner, I strongly suggest you check this out.

Keep It Light!

My setup for Markdown writing is rather light, but it's supposed to be light. When I am writing I'm not thinking about keyboard shortcuts I could use to type faster or neat plugins to use. Most of the packages I use are there because I can just install them and that's it. There's little configuration or maintenance to do and that's the way it should be.

I've been writing for so long with Markdown that the mark up is becoming automatic as I type so I don't need to worry too much about using shortcut keys for things. I just keep typing, peppering my words with little bits of mark up as I go.

Continuing with the book, Book Yourself Solid, I've identified what my ideal client is, but what's my target market?

18 months ago if you asked me who my target market is then I would have to answer, "I haven't a clue". Fast forward to today and the answer is still pretty much the same. The reason for this is that I have two types of clients. My major clients are clients I work with in what I see as my target market, the healthcare sector, they're organisations and businesses that require deliver software for the NHS, GP's and other healthcare organisations in the UK. The minor clients are clients I do work for on a rare occasion. I might have provided a website or application for them and they never require much work to either fix or upgrade what they have. They usually require a single week's work every six months or so.

I'll be honest, I still don't know for definite what my target market should be. I'm still getting a feel for the kind of work I want to do and whether there's a long term future for me in that market. Ideally I would like to do consulting work for healthcare software providers or even straight to the healthcare businesses themselves, providing myself as a development consultant and resource, but I don't want to do this forever. There's two options I see ahead.

The first is looking into another target market. I have a few in mind but nothing concrete. The reason I am exploring other options is that while I have firm background in healthcare I also have some experience in other sectors. One area of work I did that was interesting was risk management solutions. I certainly wouldn't be adverse to working in this market again.

The second is building a revenue stream from a number of products that will provide a steady income over the next few years. It has to be years as anything short lived like a book or a screencast is only going to generate so much revenue over a short time frame. If I went down this road I would need to continue releasing books or screencasts every six months and I'm not sure that this plan is for me. Something more long term like a software product or service would definitely be something worth looking at however, getting the right product is a challenge to begin with.

I know what my target market should be and maybe that's enough for me to be going on with for the next few years. There's no rules to say I have to stay with that market. If it doesn't work out then I can always change.

I'm exploring alternative user interfaces to the standard web form for Journalong. In the quest for something simple, there's an obvious answer.

The simplest user interface is no user interface was a common theme in web design about a year ago. It's misleading right away because without any user interface how are we supposed to interact with our product? There's a problem with this statement because there's always a user interface, it can just take many forms. In building Journalong I've tried to keep to a simple user interface but what would be even simpler than this is a user interface that already exists elsewhere.

One of the most popular user interfaces has to be email. Lots of products and services provide interaction through email and it can be effective. All devices provide some form of email client and it's easy to regardless of your experience with technology. When using to interact with other products and services you just need to know what information goes where in your email. With just a subject and a body this can be easy to remember.

This simpler interface is something I'm keen to explore using Journalong. Being able to write journal entries should be easy for anyone to do but the web user interface for it is something I find distracting. I've built a few forms around different ideas but nothing so far has offered the simplest method of using an alternative user interface like email.

Maybe I'm wrong and the best user interface to use isn't email. There's only way to find out and that's trying it out for a few weeks with some users. The option to use a form will still be available, but I'm keen to see how people will choose between using email or the form. Either way, I'm off to brew some coffee and crack open my text editor. I've got some code to write.

My blog has been hosted with Heroku for sometime. My requirements for my blog were not complicated. It's a simple static site that is generated locally on my computer and then pushed to the server. My performance needs aren't complicated as well but one thing that irked me on Heroku was the extra cost in going from one dyno to two dynos. A dyno is a computing unit they use to allow applications to scale from their free single dyno to hundreds should you require them. At just over $35US per month for two dynos, I felt that I just wasn't getting value for money. Heroku does do a lot of the lifting for you when it comes to deploying and hosting but how much of it is necessary for what is a simple static site? After hearing good things about Linode I decided to make plans to move my blog away from Heroku.

At first I was slightly daunted by the fact that I would be setting up the server myself. I've never been a fan of system administration. If there's easier ways of setting things up I'll always opt for them but if i was going to move my blog I had to give the sysadmin part of it a chance. I spent a day setting up the server with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and getting all the necessary dependencies installed. Thanks to some similar steps for a previous version of Ubuntu I was able to get the site up and running by the end of the day.

My blog runs on the Linode 2048 plan which is $20US per month. This isn't the cheapest plan available but it does give me a fair size of memory for my site. I am able to downgrade the server to the new Linode 1024 plan, but I'm happy with my plan for the moment. The server is probably capable of hosting a few more other sites if needed but I don't see that being necessary anytime soon although it is good to have the option there.

To this day I haven't had to do much to the server. I've setup notifications when certain thresholds are reached in terms of size and there's backups of the server taken on a daily basis. You know, just in case. It just runs. And that's the beauty of services like Linode. Yes you could argue that Heroku just runs as well but the setup I have with Linode is just as simple as it was with Heroku. I still keep my blog in a Git repository on BitBucket just as a backup but all that's needs to be done to update my site is run a Rake task. It probably could be simpler if I installed Dropbox on the server and let it continually update each hour through synchronisation, but I prefer to have a little bit of control when it comes to publishing, so the Rake task suits me fine.

After three months I couldn't be happier with Linode's service. Having a hosting solution that just works, requires little maintenance and is relatively cheap are all good benefits. I might even start hosting some Rails applications on them soon!

Dazzled by the lights of new task management app? Before switching, make sure you're switching for the right reasons. Productivity isn't about the apps.

Read any productivity book and you'll find a common observation among them. Rarely is a specific tool mentioned that makes that specific productivity method work better.

I spent a good couple of years hopping from app to app in search of a task management app that met my requirements. It wasn't a wasted journey, I did get to try out a number of different apps but I didn't have a productivity method in mind that I would use with the app. I was simply trying some apps out. I was going about this the wrong way, you see it should be the other way around. Productivity is about processes not tools. The tools we use should compliment our preferred productivity method.

Look at any productivity method and it's about the processes and workflows involved. Capturing, reviewing, planning and executing are the most common processes involved in most methods. I use all four of these processes in my own method which centers around a single list of actions. I then use projects and tags to group actions, filters to review and a calendar for scheduling those actions.

The processes I use means that I could use just about any task management app, but it's in the details where you can find great task management apps. Here's a list of requirements that I finally settled on.

• I need to be able to capture anywhere.
• I need to group related actions into projects.
• I need to group actions by tags.
• I need to see different views of my list.
• I need my list available to me wherever I go.

Looking at these requirements I can think of a number of task management apps that could meet all these requirements. After reviewing a number of apps that I've tried in the past I found a couple that worked for me. I choose TaskPaper as it gave me the ability to keep my master list in one location in raw text. After a few months though my list became difficult to manage. I started looking for a replacement.

One task management application that I hadn't tried up to this point was Todoist. I started moving my master list over to Todoist. That was eight months ago. Today I'm still using Todoist. It meets all my requirements and also provides a number of other features that I didn't look for before in a task management app.

With a crowded marketplace of task management apps it can be easy to be dazzled by the new kid on the block, but productivity isn't about those apps. It's about the processes. If you're on the market for a new task management app or you're simply looking for a change, make sure you are looking for an app that fits your processes.

Curtis McHale as an excellent follow up to my Limiting Yourself post.

When you dive in to a project or communication make sure you choose the right medium. Don’t just stick with email because you don’t want to get on the phone.

— Get your time back with the proper communication medium by Curtis McHale

With the release of the new Swift language for Mac developers, I am now interested in trying out app development for iOS and OS X. With thousands of apps out there though, is there room for new apps?

The App Store is five years old this year. Since it started its life as a platform for the distribution of apps to iOS devices, we've seen a few big hits in terms of well executed apps over the years. I don't think there is one true killer app that has made the App Store what it is, but over time there has definitely been a number of niche apps that have been popular with a particular group of people.

People talk about the simple ideas that took the App Store by storm like Angry Birds, Flight Control and others. Yes, they seem simple ideas, but there is still a fair amount of work involved in building and shipping an app. I'm not expecting to publish a game changing app right away, but I do want to start building my experience in the world of app development.

At the start of the week Apple unveiled a new programming language for developers who want to build apps for iOS devices or Macs. It's called Swift. As someone who has made a number of false starts on iOS development over the last couple of years, I welcome the new language. In the past I have looked at Objective-C which was the only true language to use to build iOS apps. When I seen its syntax I was always turned off by it. With time I could learn about the language, but just as I was starting out I always ended up trashing the idea. With the new Swift programming language though I think I'm ready now to start building apps for iOS and the Mac.

Now the tricky part. An idea. Are there any good ideas for apps left? I've been pondering on this for a couple of days now and it's led me to a number of sources for ideas for new apps.

Make something easier

There are many apps out there that simply try to make something easier to do. I haven't came across many that I thought did this well, but there are thousands that started out this way. The problem with starting an app from this view is that it's only easier from your angle. Yes, there will be others that will share the same view, but will there be enough people who share your view to warrant building the easier app?

Make a better shop window

The Internet is a vast source of information and services. Everyday new services are added for people to use and many of them start with basic web sites to get going. When Twitter started, a developer in the UK seen an opportunity to make interacting with Twitter easier for people. The Twitter user interface was a single timeline that everyone followed, but seeing your messages or mentions meant changing screens. TweetDeck was born and it became an instant success with it's better interface to using Twitter.

Making a better shop window to a particular service is hard work and is probably out of my reach in terms of skills. It means designing something better, and while I might be able to put together well crafted web page, the thought of trying to create a better interface for a particular service sounds like a rather daunting task.

It would also need to be a service that I use on a frequent basis, but seeing as most of the services I use already have good to excellent apps that let me interact with them, then the challenge to make a better interface is that much harder.

Scratch an itch

Perhaps the easiest source of making an app comes from scratching your own itch. If making thousands of dollars isn't your end goal when making an app, then this is where to start. Building an app that serves a purpose for yourself and gives you the experience to build better apps in the future.

An iOS/OS X client for Journalong is something I've had in mind for a year now, but there's always been obstacles in the way. Now with a growing interest in Swift, I might just have the motivation to start building something.

I'm never going to produce the next killer app, but perhaps shipping something that serves my own purpose first is enough of a step on the road to building more apps in the future.

Sicne I started using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine last year, I've had to content myself with what was an aging look and feel to their search results. While Google and Yahoo were charging ahead with redesigned search result listings, DuckDuckGo was falling behind. Thankfully though DuckDuckGo recently upgraded their search page.

The new user interface itself is a welcome upgrade to the old one interface. With tabs for images, videos and products, searches become much more useful depending on your search term and the search listings themselves are easy to scan. There is also a section with more details about your search term if it's a person, company, product or brand name.

Not only does the new user interface work well on desktops and laptops, but it's mobile friendly as well. I've frequently use it now on my iPhone rather than the suggested search engines that Apple includes. Without jailbreaking my phone though, there's no way to make DuckDuckGo your default search engine on the iPhone. I'm hoping that this will be an option in the future.

The next step I hope is that DuckDuckGo updates their iOS app with ability to do searches there and pass the results into Safari. There might be restrictions on this, but it's what I would like to see.

I'm glad to see that DuckDuckGo are keeping their search engine modern and relevant. It might just be a change of look to the search engine, but sometimes that's all that is needed.

Carl Holscher is.

We all have strengths and interests. I have been the Mac Guy. But I need the Excel Guy and the Photoshop Woman to be successful. We all have our strengths. And when our knowledge falls short we use the teams’ knowledge.

— Team by Carl Holscher

Even the best kept habits require a break. Regardless of how well you think it's working for you as a habit, it's only when you step back from it, breaking the habit, that you can see the true impact and value of it.

If you're like me, you'll have tried to introduce hundreds of habits in an effort to improve your health, your career, your finances or even your relationships with people. For me some of them have truly stuck over the years. Keeping a journal is one of them and something I do on an almost daily basis. Whether it's a family event, work or even a thought, it gets written down and saved for a future review or reflection. It took me a number of months to get this habit down on a daily basis and while I can see the benefit of it, I've never taken a break from it.

Last week though I decided to drop the journal tools for a few days and just enjoy the time off I had with the family. It was a real eye opener. In that time I realized that although keeping a journal is a good thing for posterity and also for remembering where I was with some work, I was missing something.

Looking back at my journal entries over the years and months, there has been a subtle trend in my journal entries. In the past I would journal once a day with a review of the day, now though I'm logging journal entries multiple times a day. Whenever I complete a bit of work, whenever I have the inkling of an idea, or even when a link catches my eye but I want don't want to just read it later, I want to read it from a particular angle. Every day I'm working I'm writing multiple journal entries as I'm working. When the weekend rolls around, the context of my journal switches and I focus on one entry for the weekend if I did something with the family that was fun.

Before I didn't recognize the pattern of my journal activities and how I was switching between work and family journals. Having stepped back from the habit of keeping multiple journals, I can see that the shift in change is better for me. When I read the last month's worth of entries I found it so much easier to read the frequent updates per day rather than the single monolithic update done on a daily basis.

I also realized something else. I put too much emphasis on writing a journal entry every day when it wasn't necessary. Having not kept a journal for the best part of a week, I can see that it's okay to miss a few days here and there. It's taken a break in my habits to see the true value I'm getting from keeping a journal.

Sometimes we end up switching to automatic-pilot when we habituate processes that we think will make us better people. Truth is though, we need time away, a holiday from these habits so that we can properly evaluate and review their value. Only when we can do this can we see how that habit is truly working for us.

Software is a form of product that will deteriorate and expire with time. With this in mind, how easy would it be for you to switch software from your preferred tools set to a new one?

I try and not be too dependent on the software that I use on a daily basis. I do have a favourite set of tools that I use but I'm always conscious of the fact that whatever I'm using might not be around tomorrow.

Take for instance my to do list. I've been using Todoist for some time now. What would happen if Todoist stopped trading next month? Or even next week? Barring a natural disaster, I'm pretty confident that most services, including Todoist, will allow a small window of time for you to transfer your data across to another application of your choice before that company closes down.

The good thing about software as a product is that there's plenty of it. We're spoiled for choice when it comes to software and with the now common place app stores from various technology companies, there's an app store for most major hardware platforms.

What happens though when software becomes a dependency?

I've heard many people say that their preferred software product for a particular task is 'X' and that they just couldn't do their job without it. Perhaps that's true if you're in a specialist job working on the next wave of new technology and innovation, but for most of us this just shouldn't be the case. We should not be dependent on just one particular brand of software to get the job done. If you're so dependent on one particular software product then I'd say that you're narrowing your choices down too much.

The text editor is my daily tool for writing and cutting code. My preferred text editor is Sublime Text, but for any reason that Sublime Text was to stop being supported or even cease to exist, then what's my options?

We'll I've played with Vim enough over the years to make the jump to that, and there's a number of other text editors that I could pick up like Chocolat that would do the job just fine. Yes, I may have invested a considerable amount of time getting to know the shortcuts keys of Sublime Text but if I had to then I would comfortable picking up something else. We should always have options to fall back on for the selected tools that we use on a daily basis. In most cases this second set of software might be products we've tried in the past or something that we previously have experience with.

Investing time and effort into a particular software product is fine if it's something that you will use on a daily basis for about 8 hours a day, but anything else is simply a product or tool that could be replaced with alternatives already on the market or a custom made option if needed. Software isn't for life, it's simply a temporary means to an end until we find something better that works for us. With this in mind, are you to dependent on the software you use?

The other day I experienced the limits of what automation can deliver and realized that not all tasks are best done in an automated fashion. Some tasks need that manual touch to get done properly.

At the start of the I got back on the writing bandwagon and published another of my muddled thoughts a couple of days ago. Being a lazy guy, I have App.net's Broadcast setup that takes my daily posts from the RSS feed and publishes them to App.net and to my email subscribers. One of the reasons I done this is that I would ordinarily forget to do it.

This morning I had the realization that I might just be missing an opportunity here. Automating this sharing process from blog to you the reader is all well and good, but what if at an earlier point I could let you decide whether you want to read this post or not?

A couple of weeks ago I started adding a summary to the beginning of each post. In it I try and condense the gist of the post into a couple of lines. If it's not for you, you can move on, if you're interested then you keep on reading.

There was another couple of places though where I could be doing this, and that's in the original broadcast message and the post to my timeline on App.net. I turned off the automatic posting and sharing of my blog and instead opted to use the intro to the blog post as a brief description on the broadcast. The post which was originally sent to my timeline, doesn't include the intro and it uses a shortened URL which I don't want. So as well as using the intro on the new broadcast, I'll rewrite the intro as a condensed version for posting to my timeline on App.net. I'll do both of these tasks myself rather than relying on the automation tools to do it for me.

Automation is great for when it's mundane tasks that can be repeated over and over without interruption, but when we want to tailor that task each time it happens, we need to step in and do the work ourselves. It's not a bad thing either. Now I get the chance to tweak the broadcast and post in the hopes that I can encourage you to keep reading as well as reaching out to more people.

Stopping a project isn't easy to do, especially when that project is based on an idea that seemed to be within your grasp. Sometimes though it's the best thing to do, but to ensure it's dead we need to kill the project.

I had an idea a few months ago for a service for users of App.net. It was a service that curated the most interesting or popular posts from your timeline when you weren't there to check it. For the most part this could be when you're in bed or at work. So if you wanted to see the best posts from your timeline in terms of highest replies or stars, it would filter out the best posts for you and email them to you in a summary on a daily basis.

I've spoke to a couple of people on App.net about the idea and they were favourable of the idea. After months of incubating the idea though I want to abandon the idea. I never wrote any code for it, registered any domains or even tested the idea. The idea might be a success, but given that the number of users on App.net isn't as much as Twitter, I'm making an educated guess that it won't be profitable as a service. I want it off my radar for good. It's too distracting having it sitting in my master list thinking I might do it one day.

I'm killing the project then. I'm not abandoning it, deleting it or putting it off. I'm killing it. Permanently.

With this action comes a sense of relief. No longer will it sit on my radar demanding another few minutes of contemplation. I can get rid of it permanently.

I've only done this a few times in the past and each time it was necessary to simply kill the project. For as long as it remains in a list or in your head, you'll always spend a bit of time thinking that you'll get round to it.

The first time I did this was when I killed my mind mapping blog, MindMapSwitch. I had gave up writing about mind mapping but I left the blog itself up in the hopes that one day I might go back and write about it. I didn't. In fact for about two years it just sat there as another dead blog on the internet. A couple of years ago I decided that the blog had to go. No longer would I need to the account to keep it running. I wouldn't be writing on that blog ever again. So I took it down. Gone was all the work that I put into it, but despite that, I felt great about the decision. Another little project that has been sitting on my radar is now gone forever. I don't need to worry about it, spend time on it or even get it started. It's gone for good.

That's why it necessary to kill a project. There's no sense in having a project or an idea sitting there on the shelf gathering dust. Yes, one day you might get round to it, but chances are you won't. Better to kill the project and move on then have it pecking away at your conscience. Once you've killed that project you'll feel a weight off your shoulders and you'll have rid yourself of a commitment.

Marketing your product online has one bad rule. It's not a rule so much as a practice. Whether it's good or bad, I'll leave down to you to decide. Here it is.

In order to market your product effectively online, you at least need a presence on each of the major social networks.

I'm talking social network accounts here. Google+, Facebook and Twitter. Without a doubt the most popular networks out there, and if you want to market your product you need an account for each of these networks so that you have an outlet for your product. I'm aware that you don't need to be sitting on these accounts on a daily basis to monitor it, but it does require some maintenance. And that's my problem. Why do you need to have an account in these networks just to market your goods? Is there an alternative?

There is and it's probably been staring you in the face since you sat down at your desk this morning with your coffee.

It's email.

Long forgotten as the first popular form of sharing content, email has been increasingly replaced by social network forms of communications. It is one of the last remaining forms of open communication that just works. You can send a message to anyone providing you know their email address. It doesn't matter which email service you use, which client you use or even if it's self-hosted. Email just works and it cuts across the borders of social networks easily. Straight to the people that matter. The people who buy and could potentially buy your product.

You might be able to reach more people by managing a separate account on each network, but do you have time for that? I sure as hell don't.

Lately I've seen a resurgence in the use of email by others to market their products and services. Newsletters are an increasingly great way to market your product to others. Letting people know of changes and offers in your product keeps your customers up to date. A call to action at the end of the email is also a great way to encourage potential customers to check out your product or even buy your product.

The best thing about it though is that it's already there.
Waiting to be used. Marketing your product starts with an email to the right person. Sometimes that's all that's needed to start selling your product.

Remember having a start page? I do.

Everytime I would open my browser, I would be faced with a billboard of widgets that funnelled in data from different sources and displayed them all on the one screen. It was beautiful. Before RSS readers took off, the start page was the go to place for all your news.

I remember my first start page, the Google Personalised Homepage. It was great. All my important feeds on the one screen. Everything I wanted to read for the day in one place. Gradually this evolved over time into iGoogle and with it came changeable backgrounds, widgets created by Google and thousands of widgets created by others. It went to a tabbed page so that you could setup multiple tabs on your homepage. Now you could categorise widgets and cram more data into your home page and you wouldn't need to scroll down to view those widgets, you just clicked on a different part of the screen (yes, I'm failing to see the convenience in this too).

Along came time based backgrounds. These were backgrounds that would change over the course of the day. Now you didn't need to see the same thing in your background all through the day, it would change as the day went on. You could only see this if the you didn't have a screen crammed full of widgets.

I even tried Netvibes for a brief spell and while it as fun to try something different, I went back to using iGoogle after not using it for a week. It was just too familiar and easy to use. Also I had invested time in getting the start page setup exactly as I wanted it.

All good things come to an end though and sadly last year, Google pulled the plug on iGoogle. Online trends have moved on from start pages. Most people now open social media clients as their first port of call for the day or maybe they go straight to their favourite news site to catch up. Only the insane try and start the day by opening their inbox.

Only a few services remain now that offer the start page experience, but I don't see the benefit in using them now. There's too much data out there for me to consume, certainly too much to fit on iGoogle regardless of how many tabs you have on the page.

Feedbin is my new start page now with a greater focus on curated content rather than just letting any old thing in. It has multiple feeds in it like my start page had, but it's better at letting me choose what I want to read and that's more important now.

It isn't often you find yourself using an app that is just effortless and simple to use. If you have an account with FeedBin, FeedWrangler or Feedly, then you'll want to check out Jared Sinclair's new app, Unread.

In the quest to find news users for people to follow in my Netterpress newsletter, I started putting together a few scripts that would poll new accounts created on App.net and update them over the course of the week. I only filtered for accounts categorized as 'human'. I figured that this would limit some of the spam accounts I would get. At the end of the week I would sort the accounts by the number of posts made for each account and then starting hand checking each account from the top of the list looking for interesting users to include in the Netterpress newsletter.

A sound idea in theory, but when it came to checking the accounts, I was disappointed to find that most of the active accounts at the top of my list were in fact spam accounts or valid accounts entirely powered by automated feed tools. There only a handful of actual human accounts in the fifty most active accounts that I looked at last night.

I've never previously done this on other social networks like Twitter or Facebook, but given my experience on Twitter in the past it's hard to be surprised by this.

Social media is it's own worst enemy in my eyes. The very tools that make it easy for us to post from one location to different networks are the very same tools that are used to automate the posting of irrelevant and unsolicited content.

The barrier to many social networks is nothing. All the networks I have heard of are free. Even App.net has a free tier for anyone to join. It's that free entry that makes it so appealing for many, but to others they see an opportunity to post irrelevant content.

In App.net's case, there is a growing number of feed accounts appearing on the platform. While that's okay for feeds that deliver valuable content, there's no getting away from the fact that people will setup accounts to deliver unwanted content, regardless of the social network you use. It doesn't matter what social network you are a member of, there will always be spam accounts trying to dilute the pool of valued content.

I'll be checking through the data over the weekend in preparation for the next Tuesday's newsletter. Hopefully I'll be able to pull together a list of some new users to recommend to others for the next edition of Netterpress.

I take pride in the work that I do as a web developer. I always try and deliver the best possible work that I can. If you're a developer of any kind whether it's systems, mobile, web or any other type of developer, one of your aims each day should be to deliver the best possible work you can. When we do this we take the time we need within our estimate to deliver the highest quality of code we can afford to.

Quality and time go hand in hand in this case and it doesn't just apply to programming. It applies to everything that we do. If you want to do something right, take the time to do it well.

I come up against this on almost a daily basis with my oldest son. He rushes his homework and then asks me to check it for him. Untidy writing and stupid mistakes in his arithmetic are just two hallmark traits of his rush to finish his homework. At this point I rub out all his homework, even the stuff he got right, and ask him to do again. Before he begins his homework again I tell him that rushed homework is bad homework. If he wants to get it right in the future first time, then he needs to take the time to do it properly. As with all kids he doesn't remember this advice from one day to the next and so he needs to be reminded of it daily. He's getting better and it's good to get him in into the habit of taking his time with his homework now before he starts high school.

A simply example of applying the right amount of quality and time to our work but it's amazing how often I have come up against this in a professional working environment.

I've been in this position a few times where you are expected to deliver a specific piece of work within an allotted time. The time you're given isn't adequate for the amount of work needing done. In the past I would have cut corners. I would have written code without writing tests for it, tested it through the happy path and delivered it for it's intended audience. Bear in mind that while I do this, my line manager at the time is aware of the short cuts taken and is okay with the end result. It's reminiscent of the 'live to fight another day' mantra.

I don't want to fight another day though, and a couple of years ago I remember spending weeks just putting out fire after fire. It was an unpleasant experience made worse by the fact that there was just no room for spending time to deliver quality work. At the time, the company had too much work and little resources to handle everything. So corners were cut and everyone suffered. It's not a nice experience and it's a difficult to recover from this.

I'm more aware now of the need for both quality and time when it comes to delivering your best work. I write tests for my code where I can, I take the time to refactor my code, I test it in a staging environment to check it is working as expected.

When it comes to your work, regardless of the what you do, don't forget that time can have an effect on the quality of your work. It's not a perfect world though and we don't always get the time that we need. We've all been faced with the dilemma of delivering work within a tight amount of time, but rather than letting that be the norm, let that be the exception.

The one question you must ask yourself when you let new technology into your life:

[What problem does this solve?](http://minimalmac.com/post/73277791743/what-problem-does-this-solve What problem does this solve?)

Well on the app stores at least.

It's been bugging me for a while now, but you may have noticed the number of games on Apple's App Store that are free. There's quite a lot of them actually, but some of them are not in fact free despite their price.

There's a growing trend now of games that are utilising the In-App Purchases (or IAPs from here on in) ability in apps to subsidise the fact that the game is free to install. It's a freemium model really. Give the game away and then charge for extras. I first noticed it on the game Kindgom Rush, but this game can easily be completed without the need to purchase any of the additional characters that the game offers.

In other games though, the list of IAPs is there as an assist to players to finish a level or the game. Candy Crush Saga and Bad Piggies are two such examples of games in the App Store that employ this model. The purchases are enough to make think they're a one off, but I suspect that this is not the case with many people. Considering that King's (creators of Candy Crush Saga) monthly revenue was allegedly once reported to be half a million dollars a day, it's easy to see how those little purchases can add up given how popular the game is.

Here's the problem I have with IAPs.

I have two sons, a one year old who is too young to talk, never mind understand the value of money, and one seven year old, whose life revolves around technology.

I limit my oldest to the number of games he can have on his iPad and the amount of time he spends playing them. Nothing wrong with that. What's troubling though is the amount of times he has asked for IAPs for games from me. I'll let him make IAPs for the games he really likes but not on a frequent basis. Also, all his IAPs come out his own pocket money. It seems that a growing number of games are adopting an IAP purchase to unlock new features or get new addons. To an adult it's easy to say no. To a kid it's not so easy.

Like all trends though, today's hot new game is always going to end up the next day's old news. Which means that the money you can spend on IAPs for games, can be wasted if that game is no longer played with. It's not a major problem in our house now, as our oldest is extremely limited to the IAPs he can make. How annoying would it be though to spend so much money on a game for it to be deleted and never played again?

Mobile game developers have no obligation to only producing one-cost games, but it would be nice to see some of these game developers move away from the IAP model.

I grew up in an era where the computer game was a one off cost. You paid for the game and then you played it as often as you like. Console games are getting more and more expensive, but they are getting better and better, and most games offer hours of entertainment for that one off cost. It's an investment, but one that I think works very well, especially when you have kids that love gaming.

Thankfully companies producing games for the Microsoft and Sony games consoles are still following this model for the next generation of console games, but how long before we start seeing even these games adopting an IAP model?

I'm not sure that will happen to the level it's happening in mobile gaming, but I know one thing. I'm more wary now of those 'free' games that are topping the charts and proving to be hits with the kids. Even though they're listed as free, I know that for most of them, they're not really free.

As part of my smarter budgeting theme for the year, one area I'll be looking to budget better for is the amount of money I spend on apps and services on the Internet.

It's no secret that I like to pay for the services I use. It just makes sense to support the products that you love to use. That's what keeps them in business. We all have preferences for the tools we use and how we work, but I thought I would share some of my thoughts on keeping your apps and subscriptions in check.

Keep A Budget

Common sense really, but things can get out of hand if you keep on subscribing to multiple services or subscriptions on the Internet. Set yourself a monthly budget and make sure you keep within that budget.

App stores and easier ways of paying online make instant purchases too easy to do now. You can quickly spend $20 or more in a few minutes on apps and services. Review your budget each month and be ruthless with making cuts to your monthly subscriptions.

Ensure you're leave yourself a little room in your budget for experimenting with apps. You can't trial an app before buying it, so leaving yourself a little room for trialling a couple of apps a month.

Find Value

I pay for things that give me value. The same goes for apps and subscriptions as well. I subscribe to a number of email newsletters, but they all offer some form of value. It's easy to subscribe to a newsletter thinking that it's $5 per month, but are you getting value from spending that money each month?

I think it's hard to quantify value, but the way I see it is that if I use that app or service on a daily basis then I'm getting value from it.

Don't Double Up On One Device

Having multiple apps on one device that do the same thing is a waste of money and time. At one point I had three apps on my iPhone for writing. Each was used for a different form of writing, but I've learned now that I can use one app more effectively for all my writing on my iPhone.

Doubling up on apps means that you also need to spend more time learning how to use those apps. Why spend the time learning about two apps when you can really master the one app.

Apps Can Vary Across Different Devices

So I mentioned there that I had three apps on one device, but what if you have a phone and tablet? Well in this case, you can use the same app for both devices if you can. If the app can work for you well enough on both devices then use it.

However, with devices having different form factors, it makes sense to use different apps that play to the strengths of each device. Yes you'll end up with multiple apps that do the same thing, but the money spent is justified in getting a tool that makes the interaction you need easier.

These are just some of my thoughts on the budgeting of apps and subscriptions. They're basically the guidelines I use to keep myself from throwing away money each month and drowning myself in unnecessary apps and subscriptions. I hope they can help you too.

I'd like to order a couple of sets of these iPad stands for the different iPads in the house.

via Tools and Toys

One habit I've managed to sustain this year is my daily reading list. It grew out of the fact there I have subscribed to some good quality content in the past and I was trying to set aside time at the end of the week to read it. Due to the volume of posts I was eventually left with at the end of the week, I decided a couple of years ago to start making a habit of starting my day with reading.

It started with a collection of blogs that I read first thing every morning.

• Nicholas Bate - Unofficial mentor and guide.
• Kurt Harden - Ohio based family man.
• Michael Wade - Arizona based management consultant.
• Curtis McHale - Unofficial freelance mentor.

Now these guys might not post every single day, but every day there is at least a handful of posts from some of them. What's important here is that no two blogs are the same. They're distinctly different and that's what makes reading them every day so easy to do. There's diversity and the posts that I read are all on diffent topics.

The last thing on my daily reading list is James Shelley's Caesura Letters newsletter. Every week day you receive an email with a post on a specific topic. You won't find any techno-babble here or gimmicky productivity tips. James Shelley's newsletter is a daily call to action to make you continually think and and re-focus yourself. The Caesura Letters is deep reading but it's a great way to start the day.

The thing about the daily reading list is that it's more of a learning tool than anything else. The items on my daily reading list are there for a reason. They're a source of knowledge. Not every post has a treasure of information in it, but the amount of posts I save for myself are an indicator of how useful they are to me.

Patrick Rhone has some other suggestions for daily learning tools if you're interested.

It's been a couple of weeks now since I first presented the idea of a newsletter for App.net. A lot has happened in the last couple of weeks, so here's a recap.

Initial feedback was good

Based on poll taken by a number of App.net members, there was very positive feedback on the idea of a newsletter. A number of ideas and suggestions were sent to myself regarding content for the newsletter. A second poll asking if user's would like to see personalised content wasn't as popular.

Using the App.net API

Another thing that came out of this was the possibility of using App.net so that users could authorise their accounts so that we use the user's email address to send them the newsletter. Once this was done I had another idea to personalise the newsletter based on posts from each user's timeline. I would read the user's timeline for the week and include highlighted posts from the past week in the newsletter. There were two problems with this.

The first is that the App.net API does not include a user's email address in their profile when you ask for it. Understandable really given that this email could be used in other ways by an application that has access to the API.

Secondly the original idea was for a newsletter. At the time I hadn't considered a personalised newsletter until a few days later. Now that I've had a chance to access the API, reading user's timelines for highlighted posts is a major task that would require more time than I currently have available.

The idea of building a full application to support personalised content for the newsletter is a large undertaking and one that I wouldn't be prepared to undertake unless I had a number of sign ups already interested in this. Based on the light feedback I had it simply wasn't enough to warrant my time at the moment.

So what's the plan with the newsletter then?

Well, the plan is to still provide a premium newsletter for App.net members who can sign up with any email address they choose. I am not going to be using the App.net API in anyway for the newsletter, as I'm still essentially testing the validity of this idea. Yes people voted on it and said it was a good idea, but when it comes to getting paid subscriptions will people still be so positive about it?

In order fully test this idea, I will be moving ahead with publishing a newsletter for the App.net community but it will be limited to a number of editions in order to test whether the idea has enough subscribers to carry forward.

I've still got a number of questions about sign ups, cost of the newsletter and hopefully the possibility of making the newsletter free until the number of sign ups has reached a set limit.

This week I'll be announcing the account that will act as a contact point for the newsletter and where people can submit ideas or content for the newsletter. I'll also hopefully be releasing the sign up page for the newsletter next week. A couple of weeks after this I'll be releasing the first edition of the newsletter.

When I started freelancing I used email to store lots of things my clients would send me. I would get emails with logins, scripts, web addresses and other important information. Where did I put it? In a folder of course in my email. There in lies the problem though. Email is for sending and receiving information. It's where it excels. Where it doesn't excel is in the storage and organisation of data.

Rather than be burdened with a tons of different folders I opted to have a folder for each of my clients. However, some clients generate a substantially greater amount of email than others do. With one particular client I get a handful of emails from them on a weekly basis. Over the last nine months I have accrued hundreds of emails from them, but finding some of the information has become difficult to do.

Email just wasn't designed for storing and organising data. Yes emails can be indexed and searched using a number of different search parameters now, but it only searches on the information the email already has. Also not all email clients and services allow you to tag emails with any information you want. Then there's the email itself. How do we edit it? By forwarding it to ourselves with some notes on it? Nice idea, but that in turn generates even more email. That's really not what we want.

Today I spent over an hour clambering through a series of folders looking for important information so I can transfer it to Evernote. Armed with Evernote's system I was quickly able to organise all the information from emails and tag them accordingly. Now when I need that information, I can not only search for it by the content of that information, but I can also search using the tags I have assigned to each one.

Tools have their uses. Email excels at sending and receiving information, but it's an inferior contender to applications like Evernote. Do yourself a favour and start using the right tool for the job.

A while back I talked about looking to get back to mind mapping again but in the last few months I've found it quite a struggle to get back into it. I just don't feel comfortable with it anymore. It just doesn't flow as much as I thought it would. In fact I've found it quite cumbersome.

The ideal mind map radiates from a central topic and breaks out into branches that represent related topics. These branches break down further and further until you've got to the topic you need. The problem is that mind maps only radiate from the center. By the time I've added a number of top level topics I've already ran out of space on my paper and no, mind mapping software is not the answer. I'm strictly a pen and paper person when it comes to that initial capture.

So I've decided to jump back to scketchnoting again. I looked at this a while back, but I didn't give it enough of a chance. Now that I'm armed with the Mike Rhode's book on sketchnoting, blank notebooks, blank index cards and a pen, I'm ready to give sketchnoting a fair try again.

The thing that I like about sketchnoting is that it's more freeform than mind mapping. While mind mapping is restricted to a radial layout, sketchnoting can take many different forms of layouts. You fill your page in a way that makes it easy to read. I'll be sketchnoting various things like book notes, quotes and other things just to get the practice in.

For the last two weeks I've been using Trello instead of Taskpaper for managing projects like Journalong. It's really an experiment to see if I can get more things done with a visual system. Previously I was using lists in Taskpaper. It worked to an extent but anything that was at the bottom of list would frequently be forgotten.

So what is Trello?

Trello is a generic organisation and collaboration tool. Yes it sounds like a vague description, but Trello isn't tied to any one particular workflow. Basically Trello is a simple workflow and list manager.

A Trello board consists of several lists like so:

You create cards that you move through the lists from left to right. The lists themselves can be called anything you want and can be modelled after any iterative workflow that you can think of.

The cards are used to represent individual items of work. It could be a task, a feature for a product, an article you want to write or even part of your wild scheme to take over the world.

The cards themselves contain a title and a description but can also contain a set of tasks, attachments and even comments from yourself and other users collaborating on the same board.

How I'm using Trello

I'm using Trello in two ways at the moment.

Primarily I am using it to get my finger out on moving some development projects along. Journalong was first to get the Trello treatment and work on it as picked up again since I started using it. I use it mainly to mimick the Kanban way of software development as you can see from the board below:

As well as using Trello as a way of managing software projects, I'm also using Trello to manage my blog. In particular, my weekday posts to the blog and the writing process involved for each post.

I have a backlog of ideas that I want to write about. It ranges from software development to personal reflective pieces. At the weekend I pick five ideas from the backlog for the coming week and assign each of them a day of the week. Then I stick them in the drafts column and start writing each one.

As they are completed they get moved on to editing and then they are ready to be published. While the Journalong board is fine, I might change the process for my blog posts. I don't want to get too bogged down in different steps for each post. I tend to write, edit and queues posts for my blog in the one sitting.

Great device support

What makes Trello great however is the support they have for different devices. It's one of the few applications that I have installed on by my iPad and iPhone. Initially I was hesitant of how Trello was going to be implemented in iOS. However since using it for the last few weeks, It's steadily becoming a favourite in my day to day apps category.

The iPhone UI is particularly nice as it lets you zoom in on a list within a board so that you can see all the cards for that list. Everything that you have available in the web UI is available here as well. Checklists, labels, attachment and comments are all there.

It's free!

One thing that you thought I may have skipped over is that Trello is a free for anyone to use. I had reservations about this until it was pointed out to me that the makers of Trello, Fog Creek Software, wanted Trello to be a free product from the start.

There is a business plan that allows organisations to use Google Apps for authentication and to get all their users across without any pain. There is also paid plan called Trello Gold that adds a number of nice touches like changeable board backgrounds and bigger file uploads. The free version of Trello is ideal for most people.

A great visual tool

I've enjoyed using Trello over the last few weeks and I've decided to stick with it for managing projects and my writing. Whether I'll use it for other things like sales leads, invoicing or anything else I can think of will be decided as and when I think I need something beyond a basic list to manage them.

I love the visual side of using a board. You get a clearer picture of where everything is and it means that you instantly know what you should be picking up next. Coming from a background of using mind mapping for a few years, I love systems that use visualisation to convey a message or intent. The nice thing about this tool is that it's visual, portable and adaptable to just about any process that you can think of. It isn't the silver bullet to everything, but if you're having problems getting projects organized and trying to determine where the bottlenecks are then Trello just might be worth checking out.

This post contains a referral link for Trello for which I receive a free month of their paid plan, Trello Gold, for each sign up. If you don't want to use the referral code, you can use this link to checkout Trello for yourself.

At any one time there are usually three devices sitting on my desk. A laptop, a phone and a tablet. They all have different apps running on them but some of the apps they use are for the same service. So for App.net I have an app running on my laptop, but a different app running on my phone and tablet.

Here's the problem. I haven't really paid too much attention to configuring notifications for each of the apps so sometimes I end up getting multiple notifications going off on the different devices for the same event. For example, in App.net when I get a new follower, I get an email notification in my phone as well as a notification from Felix, and also a notification on Felix on my tablet. Just little bit overkill if you ask me.

So here's my question to all of you. What's your strategy for dealing with notifications on multiple devices?

I sit in front of my laptop for most of the day, so ideally most of my notifications should come through there, but then what notifications should I enable for my phone? Are there any type of apps that you recommend I should completely silence?

If you've got any thoughts on this then please reply back to my original post on App.net or drop me an email here. I'd be really interested to hear your views on this.

I've been building web applications in Ruby, on a full-time basis, for a couple of years now. During this time I've been exposed to a number of different testing strategies and approaches. Test-Unit, MiniTest, RSpec, Cucumber, Steak and many more. I've used many of these test frameworks to some extent, but despite the many choices I have in this area, I'm still befuddled by the right tools to building a web application in Ruby using test driven or behaviour driven development. The Rails framework has shipped with Test-Unit for years but the most popular testing framework is probably RSpec.

In order to quell my confusion, I thought I would expand on the three approaches that I have used most often in my time using Ruby.

1. The True Agile Approach

Perceived by some as the holy grail of testing, and in some cases with an equally preachy opinion, is the true agile approach. Being part of an agile team with a customer on hand to flesh out user stories, daily stand ups, retrospectives. Just about everything that embraces an agile approach to building software.

In this approach, test driven development and behaviour driven development tools reign supreme. If your approach is TDD, you'll most likely be using RSpec or Test::Unit for testing all aspects of your web application. If your approach is BDD, then it's Cucumber all the way. This is pretty much a no brainer really. With so many hands available for development, it makes sense to always write tests first.

2. The Solo Developer Approach

The true agile approach is fine when you're part of a team, especially when that team advocates pair programming and you have a customer on hand to flesh out user stories. What if you're a developer with your own product or service though? You understand the business domain enough to eschew the behaviour driven development approach but you still want to test your product?

I had this problem with the early iterations of Journalong. I understand the business domain, so is it really necessary to use a BDD approach? Can I simply just switch to a TDD approach with Test::Unit or MiniTest?

I'm still on the fence about this.

3. The Side Project Approach

This is simple, and I embrace this approach 100%. No testing framework or just enough tests to handle the complicated stuff. Hacking on your own ideas is a good time to really explore the frameworks and languages you are doing. Getting these setup correctly with all the proper test frameworks can be a chore though. If it's just an initial idea or throwaway solution you're working on then why bother investing the time in writing tests?

I want to be a good developer and develop solutions that are thoroughly tested but when was the last time you just hacked on a bit of software to try something out? If I know enough of the framework and language to get by then I don't bother writing tests. It might take me an hour to come up with something or half a day, but if that's all it takes then why bother getting all the correct bits in place to test it.

There's definitely a time and place for testing strategies in development, where you're part of a team building a product or building a revenue generating product or service on your own, testing strategies can give us the confidence we need to ship code on a frequent basis.

For my own ideas though I would rather roll my sleeves up and get into the parts of the code I know or even try new things with a part of the language or framework I haven't used. Kind of like code exploring, filling in the blank edges of the map if you like.

When I started using Sublime Text 2, I didn't use Sublime's projects feature. This year though, I've started to really get to know my preferred text editor and since then I now save all my code as a project in Sublime. It really does have some great advantages and with a little time it can make working in Sublime a better experience for you.

Sublime's projects are typical of projects in other text editors and IDE's. You open the folder that contains your source code with Sublime and then you can save that source code as a project.

When you save your code as a project you end up with two files. The first is the project file which contains references to folders for your project, project based settings and build commands for your project. The second file is the workspace. This is simply a file that tracks what layout you're currently using and what files you have open in each pane. Using the workspace file means that you can switch to another project, do some work and then switchback to your original project knowing that the layout and files you had open will be restored back to the state you left them in. Handy.

Opening Projects

Let's start with opening projects. You can open a project from the command line by using the project switch from Sublime's executable.

>> subl --project deathstar.sublime-project

Nice, but a tad too much to type. Rather than keying this out when I need to open Sublime, I prefer to alias the opening of a project file into a command that I can remember.

>> sds

Typing these three letters into my terminal to open a project is much easier than trying to remember where the project is and the correct switch for opening a project in Sublime. Now that we have our project open we can start tweaking the project file itself to make suit our needs.

There are three sections to the project file:

1. Folders - You can define a single location for your project or multiple folders that make up a project. This also include filters on files and folders you might want to apply to each folder in this section.
2. Settings - The settings in the editor can be changed on a project basis. If a particular language for your project requires different settings, e.g. tab size, you can define these here and the changes will take affect when you open the project.
3. Build Systems - I tend not to use this, but you can keep a number of different terminal commands here that you can tell Sublime to execute without having to switch to the terminal.

Using Folders

Let's take a look at the most important section which is folders. Although this section is only small it can make a big difference to the way you work with your project and with Sublime.

The project file is just JSON and is fairly easy to follow even if you don't have that much experience with JSON.

{
  "folders":
  [
    {
      "path": "/Users/darthvader/code/deathstar-reactor"
    }
  ]
}

The path setting points to the folder that contains the files for your project. Most of the time you might just have one instance of this in your project file, but Sublime does allow you to have more than one folder in your project file.

{
  "folders":
  [
    {
      "path": "/Users/darthvader/code/deathstar-reactor"
    },
    {
      "path": "/Users/darthvader/code/deathstar-superlaser"
    }
  ]
}

I've been using multiple folders for a couple of projects now. I'm rewriting an application just now that uses multiple folders. For that project I included the old source code and the new source code in the same project so that I can refer back to the old code to lookup any old code.

Which leads us nicely onto names. Having multiple folders in your project can be confusing, especially when projects might have similar folder names or even the same name. To get round this, you can also define a name for each path in your project that will appear in the sidebar. This makes navigating code in your sidebar much easier.

{
  "folders":
  [
    {
      "name": "DeathStar - New & Improved Reactor",
      "path": "/Users/darthvader/code/deathstar-reactor"
    },
    {
      "name": "DeathStar - Superlaser x10",
      "path": "/Users/darthvader/code/deathstar-superlaser"
    }
  ]
}

Perhaps the most useful feature of the projects file though is the ability to exclude files and folders from your project. You are not going to need to see all the files and folders in Sublime when you are coding, so these filters are a great for excluding logs, temp files and other automatically generated files that are not typically needed in Sublime.

Excluding files can be done like this:

{
  "folders":
  [
    {
      "name": "DeathStar - New & Improved Reactor",
      "path": "/Users/darthvader/code/deathstar-reactor",
      "file_exclude_patterns": [
        "*.log",
        "*.pid",
        "*.tmp"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

And excluding folders can be done like this:

{
  "folders":
  [
    {
      "name": "DeathStar - New & Improved Reactor",
      "path": "/Users/darthvader/code/deathstar-reactor",
      "folder_exclude_patterns": [
        "tmp",
        "log",
        "solr"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Switching Projects

Now that we have our project file setup we can get on with using it.

Because I now have a projects file for each project I work on in Sublime, I find it much easier now to simply switch to the project I need to work on, do the work, and then switch to another project. Switching between projects is as easy as Cmd+Ctrl+P if you're working on a Mac or Ctrl+Alt+P if you're working in Windows or Linux. This brings up a list of projects that Sublime nows about and lets you switch projects without leaving the application or returning to the terminal.

The benefit of this is that I only have one window open for Sublime and I can stay focused on the code that I am writing for that particular project. Having multiple projects open is distracting to me and puts me off my work.

I'm not currently using the settings or build systems for a project, but I am looking into running tests from within Sublime and adding these to my project files as build systems.

Getting to know how your tools work and making them work better for you is the key to getting the most out of them. Investing a bit of time in organising your code with Sublime's project files make organsing and working with even multiple folder projects a breeze.

A couple of days ago I wrote about what I perceived as a problem on App.net. Finding actual interesting people on App.net through recommendations. Over the next couple of days my timeline on App.net has exploded with people talking about this topic.

I was concerned about finding interesting people in App.net given that there appears to be a high number of bot and feed accounts recommended to you in the Recommended Friends section of the App.net Passport and on Alpha. I just want to find interesting people, not bots or feed accounts.

Having had a conversation with App.net's founder, Dalton Caldwell (@dalton), over the course of Tuesday and Wednesday on App.net, it is clear that this isn't so much a problem with App.net but a problem with all social networks.

I checked out the "People You May Know" block on my LinkedIn page. Initially it only showed me three people, but none of the people in that list were people I knew, worked with or even worked in the same company as them. It was only until I expanded the results further that I started to see people that I had recognised or work with previously. However, the results still showed that the majority of people there weren't people that I actually knew.

I remember the same widget also displayed on Twitter when I had an account there. Quite often, you could see that the people that Twitter recommended to you was based on your bio, your tweets and probably other information that Twitter graph internally. It wasn't completely accurate and often you wonder get a recommendation to which you would respond, why? Why is that person being recommended to me?

It's quite simple. Machines are not good at making relational decisions. My new friend on App.net, @novia, pretty much summed it up for me.

@matthewlang long ago my answer to a question about why computers can’t figure out simple things like this: computers suck at relational reasoning: Even if we create contextual awareness, it would take years of training & they’ll still make errors.
— App.net by @noviad https://alpha.app.net/noivad/post/12500139 App.net %}

So if machines suck at recommending other people for you to follow on any social network based on your own preferences, then how do you find the type of people that you want to follow?

The answer is simple.

Engage, take part, chat, converse, interact.

Be part of the social network rather than just a bystander.

Looking back at my Twitter days it took me a good couple of years to get my list of friends down to a list of mixed interests that suited me. Based on tweets, interests and location, I managed to get a nice timeline of like minded, interesting people to follow. I did this by tweeting to people, searching for hashtags in profiles and finding users or lived in my part of the world.

The same can be said for App.net, but there's a bonus with App.net. Conversations are indeed richer there, and that's where you find interesting people. By taking part. By contributing your ideas, opinions and thoughts to conversations. In order to find interesting people you have to seek them out. You have to intrude (in a nice way) in conversations and take part. It's through this action that I found a few more interesting people to follow last night.

Looking back, I'm actually glad that there isn't an all singing all dancing recommendation tool for people on App.net, because it would take the fun out of finding people on the service and connecting with others. I still think that there should search facilities for people on the service and that perhaps the recommendation feature in the App.net Passport have a filter that allows you to only see recommended people, but that would be all that others would need.

Thanks to Dalton and everyone that contributed to this post through their many conversations on App.net.

Yesterday I read a blog post about a LinkedIn user who was unhappy with the service and had opted to delete his account. I've been here before as well.

Back in my previous job as an ERP developer, I wasn't actively using my LinkedIn account and the only emails and connections I got were from recruiting agencies.

Why am I on this network and what is it for? I simply couldn't get my head around the right way to use LinkedIn. I spoke to a few people about it and all of the said you must be on LinkedIn, even if it's just to have your details there and you never use it again.

Rather than going with the advice of many I spoke to, I deleted my LinkedIn account.

A couple of years rolled by and I changed jobs twice. It wasn't until the end of last year that I re-created my LinkedIn profile due to the fact that I had been paid off. I wanted to broaden my scope for a job so wide that I was willing to go back on LinkedIn and have my profile searchable by everyone there.

Now that I am grudgingly back on LinkedIn, I'm back to where I was previously, what is LinkedIn for? I understand that as a network, LinkedIn does require some time to be spent on it updating your profile, making new connections, sharing interesting links, taking part in LinkedIn's groups, but I tend to forget about doing this and it's only when I receive a notification that I end up spending five minutes or so reviewing my profile, maybe adding a skill to my profile that I have picked up in the last couple of months.

Faced with the prospect of deleting my LinkedIn account again or just sucking it up and trying to invest some time in my LinkedIn profile, I've decided to opt for the latter. I should be using LinkedIn to market myself as a freelance Rails developer, but how do I go about doing this? Here's one idea I had:

Sharing Rails How To Guides - In order to attract clients to my profile, I should write a number of "how to" guides on using Rails and share these on LinkedIn. These won't be small blog posts, but in fact detailed guides to some aspect of implementing a generic feature in a Rails application that will demonstrate my knowledge of Rails and what I can offer in terms of knowledge as a developer.

I'm still slightly perplexed by LinkedIn as a network and what I can do to make better use of it. Perhaps you have some idea on using LinkedIn effectively? If so, contact me with your thoughts on using LinkedIn. I'd like to get more out of LinkedIn rather than it just sitting there not doing very much.

I first discovered James Shelley through Patrick Rhone's Twitter account just a couple of years ago. Having checked out James' blog, I was intrigued. I subscribed and I have remained a faithful subscriber since.

James doesn't blog very often, but when he does it's worth waiting for. The quality of his writing is one of the best amongst my RSS subscriptions. In a world of fast paced, quick hit updates, it's refreshing to see James put so much thought and effort into his writing.

James is also the author of the fantastic Caesura Letters, a daily email subscription that will feed your brain with fresh thoughts and ideas.

Thinker and writer. Two words but two words that describe James Shelley and his blog perfectly. If you cherish quality over quantity, then this is definitely the blog for you.

When I first started working independently at the start of the year, I had grand visions of being able to dictate my own time and allow myself more time to write, work on my own ideas and follow them through to products. It was also a chance for me to explore other skills like iOS programming and web design. Just as we're passing into the last quarter of the year though, I'm shocked to see how little actual time I have spent doing this.

Aside from a three week vacation between July and August, I have taken very little time off away from client work. It wasn't that I couldn't, it just never occurred to me actually schedule some time in for myself and tell my clients that I won't be available for a few days.

I guess I initially panicked at the start of the year and thought that money in the bank was the goal, so I simply worked as much as I could in terms of client work to get some money put by. I am now in a much better financial position now, but I still need to top it up slightly to get to my goal of having four months basic salary there to live on should I find myself in a position where I am not working.

I may have mentioned this before on the blog, but I want this post to be the call to action I need to schedule some time for myself. Once I've scheduled some time, I'll write about my plans for this time and see what can I fit in during this time.

Last week I talked about why I was bored of the hype surrounding the release of Apple's two new iPhone models. I said that the debate surrounding Apple making progress was really a waste of time.

Then there’s the analysis and opinions of millions of people on whether this is Apple at their best or not. A million pointless questions being asked and everyone has their own answer. Not that it matters of course, because Apple will do what Apple want to do regardless of the views and opinions of others.

— Bored of the Hype

I then went on to write about my thoughts on a picking my next gaming console later in the week. So how can I say that the debate around Apple is pointless and then proceed to write about my first world problem of picking a games console?

Well aside from the fact that I just wanted to write about the similarities with the consoles, I had a decision to make and writing about it seemed to be the best way for me to clarify what I was looking for in my next games console. The thing about this is that the decision I am making matters to me as an individual. It's a small thing yes, but it matters to me.

The small things do matter and they warrant some of your time. Whether it's five minutes or an hour. We can't spend all our time focused and debating on the big issues of the world, we still have our own lives to get on with. So give yourself some time off from the big stuff to think about the small things that matter to you.

The excellent RSS reader client, Reeder received a welcome upgrade this week in the form of the new Reeder 2 app. A new app and a new price. Yes folks, if you paid for Reeder and expected a lifetime of free upgrades then think again. Reeder 2 is a separate app and if you want the pleasure of using it, it will cost you. And that's not a bad thing.

Apps Are Cheap

Let's face it, we've sometimes spent more money on a coffee and a bite to eat than we do on apps. We don't argue over paying a few dollars for a bite to eat to keep us going, but why do some of us complain when an app is priced in the same region? Are you seriously going to quibble over $5 for an app that you are going to use practically every day when you've just dropped the same price on a coffee and a bagel?

I've 9 non-Apple apps on my home screen that I use every day. Two of them are free and the rest are bought apps. I wouldn't hesitate to pay for new app versions of these every year. That could be in the region of $60 per year, but I have subscriptions to single services that are more than the combined total of $60 so right away an upgrade at $5 per year is still better value than many SaaS subscriptions.

Also updates to apps where a new version is released are usually in the space of 18 to 24 months, so even forking out $5 every couple of years isn't going to break the bank.

Support The Developer

Many of these apps are not made by massive software companies but by independent developers working from home or small offices. The apps they write aren't hobbies or projects, they're part of the developer's business model and their income.

No business can sustain itself on free updates. There's simply nothing there to support the future of the developer and the app you use on a daily basis if they provide free updates for an app for life.

These developers make apps so that they can generate income to support themselves and for some of them, their families too. It isn't just a sideline, it's much needed income for them. It's a living.

You Get Value

App updates like this are a good thing as you the customer gets more value. New versions of apps give the developer a chance to start with a clean slate and build a better version of their previous app.

Obviously these new features take time, but they also can't be built on the developer's time without some kind of return. Safe in the knowledge that the developer has a revenue stream from the existing app, they can then focus on spending their time exploring ways of making future versions of their apps better.

So there we go. Paying for your app upgrades is worth it. It's cheap and you're ensuring that the app you gain value from will be around for a long time.

I welcome developers that push new versions of their apps and charge for them. It gives them a chance to take a good thing and make it better. Yes, it might cost a few dollars a year for it, but I see it as money well spent.

The console war has begun for the next generation of gamers, but choosing between either of these consoles as my next gaming platform has still left me mostly undecided. In a games shop, I even asked one of the staff what they thought of the specs and which one they would buy. His answer, "buy both", is hardly the best answer you're looking for when you're an occasional gamer.

Currently I have an Xbox 360 with a handful of games. I don't play very often and I certainly don't have the time to co-ordinate myself enough to play online against friends and family, but I do like sitting for a couple of hours each weekend and working my way through a few games.

The first consideration is my oldest son. He likes playing a few games on the Xbox 360 including his favourite game, Minecraft. Most of the games he does play are usually available on both consoles and there will be a version of Minecraft available for the PS4. However, what other titles are there on the PlayStation that are suitable for him to play? Mostly the same titles that he's played on the Xbox previously, so I'm not concerned about availability of suitable games for him.

There's very little between the two consoles in terms of specifications, but having had previous experience with the Kinect, I would have to say that I wasn't completely enamored with it. There just hasn't been enough games for it since its release. Yes, there's all the usual fitness and dance games but that's not the games I play.

If I had to choose between the two, I would choose the PlayStation 4. Simply out of curiosity really, nothing else. I've had a an Xbox for a couple of years now, might be time to try the other camp. Still I've got a few months to think it over before I commit to a purchase.

Right now all over the world, open source software is being used by millions of people. Most of these people probably don't even know it, but the services they use on a daily basis are more than likely being powered by open source software in some form. Since it's birth in the early eighties, open source software has become more and more prominent and should now be considered a mainstream topic that hopefully even non-programmers know about.

I've used open source software in my most of my career as a programmer, but it hasn't been until the last five years where open source software has comprised of the majority of tools in my tool belt. From software languages and frameworks to the tools and libraries that I used on a daily basis, open source software has given me a career that I feel very positive about and enjoy working in.

So to all the open source developers who give up their precious time to build software for others to use and enjoy, I just want to say thank you.

Your selfless acts of contributing your time and effort to the world of code for free is reflected in all the greatness that open source software has achieved.

Patrick Rhone. Writer, curator, Mac fan, thinker, family man and blog hero. Did I miss anything? It's hard to put Patrick into one box when his blog lets you know that he isn't just good at one thing. He's great at many things.

Patrick's blog first came to my attention when I first started using Twitter. I was simply looking for other people to follow who were interesting. His recommendation came up and I have followed his blog ever since.

Patrick's blog has a mixed bag of topics. Personal thoughts, productivity insights, technology usage and of course writing. The thing about Patrick is that despite his love of technology and its advantages, he still writes about tools like pens, notebooks and index cards and how he uses them. I see it as the perfect balance between man and machine. His blog is a reminder that there's more to getting things done than just buying the next killer app.

Patrick's blog has been daily reading for me for over five years and will continue to be so in the future.

Path, the social network that limits you to just 150 people, just pushed a new update to their app that offers a premium model with complete access to their shop. At the moment their shop comprises of only stickers for use in messages with your family and friends and filters for the pictures you send. The option to upgrade to premium gives you access to all these items in the Path shop for an annual cost of $14.99.

While I applaude Path's decision to finally offer a premium model, it's not the premium model that I envisioned. I don't want stickers, filters or anything like that. I'm looking for the ability to share my posts to other networks like App.net and to others by email. I also want to export the data in my Path so that I have complete access to all the moments I have accrued since I started using Path. There's a lot of good memories in there.

These are the features I would pay for, not stickers and filters. I'm all for supporting the products and services I use, but the product must offer something in terms of real value to me besides it's core functionality. Full access to a sticker book and some Instagram-style filters isn't going to make me upgrade to their premium model.

Perhaps those extra features I described will be available in the future but the for the moment, I'll be staying away from the sticker premium model that Path are offering.

I wrote last week about finding purpose for my iPad, a tool that I feel was underused. Over the weekend I managed to sort out the various apps that I needed and re-arranged my screens so that the apps I use on a day to day basis are on my home screen and other apps are just a slide away.

In a departure from my iPhone, I have foregone the use of folders for grouping applications. I did this for two reasons. There's more screen space on the iPad and I don't need to use as many apps as I do on my iPhone.

Another change I made that is different from my iPhone setup is the number of apps on my home screen. I almost filled the screen with apps. Om my phone I just use the top two rows for apps on my home screen, but I don't mind having so many apps on my iPad's home screen,so I just fill the screen with the apps I need and pick a pleasing wallpaper.

One of the key decisions in picking apps for my iPad was whether to use the same apps on my iPhone for my iPad. The devices run on the same platform, but the bigger screen on the iPad means that I can afford to pick apps that offer more in terms of functionality, even if it does come at the cost of some screen estate. So I ditched PlainText for Editorial and of course there is no Reeder support on the iPad yet, so I have opted to use Mr Reader to read my RSS feeds.

So there we have it, my iPad setup. Simpler than I thought it was going to be, but it did require a different approach if I wanted to get the most from using it. And if you're questioning whether it will work for me or not, I'm writing this on my iPad in a cafe. That's got to count as a good start.

I'm writing this blog post on the web application, Draft. It's been a while since I used it. I stopped using it a while back in favour of Byword, but the problem with Byword is that it just isn't sticking as an app that I like using. Functionally it works like a dream, but there's something about it that I don't like.

So I'm giving Draft another go and already I'm enjoying using it. Yes it does do a few things extra than Byword, but that's not why I am using it again. Is it the preference for a web application over a native application? I don't know, it could be.

All I know is that if you're not happy with the tools you have then you should find the tools that do make you happy while you work.

Some additions to my current reading list involve a couple of new e-books that I have purchased recently.

• Brandiing by Adii Pienaar - Bought out of the curiosity of knowing if this book could help me on a couple of side projects but also if there's was a way of better branding myself.
• The Freelancer's Guide to Long-Term Contracts by Eric Davis - I'm still light on clients as a freelancer but I am busy. With the clients that I do have, I want to build more of long-term relationship with them rather than just walk on to the next client/project. I hope this book will help with this.

That's the problem with e-books. They're so damn easy to buy!

... from Nicholas Bate and not a single app in sight. Great stuff.

Enough praise can't be given for using Markdown for notetaking. I love it. Here's more from the clever clogs at Pivotal Labs.

My first bike. A Kona Fire Mountain. I think it was the 1995 edition of the bike. Gold P2 forks with a dark green frame, cantilever brakes and of course a quill style stem. Those were the days. When mountain biking was still young. When bikes were all built to similar sizes and specs. It was like this for years.

Then innovation trickled through the industry in small, slow waves. Quill stems were gradually replaced with the new headsets. Cantilever brakes were slowly replaced by V-brakes and then after that disc brakes became the standard way of scrubbing down your speed on the trails. Rigid forks were replaced with suspension forks to allow for more comfort for the rider.

One component remained constant through all these innovative changes though. The 26" wheel. Since the first mountain bikes sold to the public, up until now, 26" wheels have been the standard wheel size for mountain bikes and its many disciplines. Cross country racing, downhill racing, trail riding, 4X, trials and street riding. Different disciplines and different types of riding, but they all used the same wheel size.

Then it started. The fragmentation as I like to call it. It started with a new bigger wheel size. The 29" wheel. The arguments for a bigger wheel were good. A bigger wheel would roll better over obstacles, the contact point where the wheel meets the ground is greater so there is more traction and you lose momentum slower than you would with a smaller wheel.

The downside? It's too big for your current frame and therefore you need a new frame and a new fork.

Then the 27.5" wheel came along. The old standard wheel size is too small and the 29" wheel is too big. Let's make a wheel that fits exactly in between they said. The benefits of a bigger wheel than the old standard 26" but without the much added weight of a 29".

Now, I'm not sure on the facts of this, but I have heard of riders who have in fact managed to fit 27.5" wheels onto a mountain bike frame with just a marginal change in the geometry of the frame, but if you're going to ride 27.5" wheels then I would at least think that I would only ride them on a frame that is designed to take them.

Wheels sizes are now forcing bike companies to assess what wheels they will pair with the bikes in their range. Already we're seeing bike companies with different wheel sizes in their range. You don't get the option of simply picking your preferred bike and wheel size. Certain models in the range will be tied to one of the three 'standard' wheel sizes.

And that's where I think it's sad for the mountain bike industry. Gone are the days where you can gradually over time upgrade your bike with better components as you know your bike is designed with sizes that almost every other bike uses.

Once you buy a bike that's designed for that one wheel size, you're basically stuck with the size for that particular bike. There will still be plenty of choice in components such as suspension forks, tyres and rims for those opting for one of the new wheel sizes, but nothing like the choice we had before.

I'm all for innovation and change. I'm a programmer for crying out loud. Most of my job is dealing with change and moving applications forward to use new platforms and software, but part of me wants to see a standard wheel size back for mountain bikes. I don't care what size it is, just a size that I know is going to allow me to upgrade my bike for longer.

Still though, part of me wants the 'one size fits all' wheel for mountain bikes.

Keeping up with posts on a daily basis is becoming a little more work than I anticipated. Previously I would try to write a couple of blogs every couple of days and then maybe a couple at the weekend.

In the last two months though this plan have suffered. Scheduling time in during the day is quite difficult with the the day starting early with a school run and then I need to hit client work as soon as I get back home. At the end of the day it is time to get the kids their dinner, have a play with them and then get them ready for bath and bed. By the time that's done and everything is ready for the next day, it's nearly 9pm and the thought of sitting at the computer is just not that appealing.

I need a plan of sorts. Simply picking off ideas for writing every couple of days is becoming difficult. I have enough ideas, I just need a plan to get them written.

Here's what I'm thinking. I should schedule what I am going to publish in my calendar and then work towards writing the articles that are due to published in the coming week.

One benefit of this is that deciding what to write about is taken out of my hands at an early date. I'm planning on scheduling blog posts at least a month ahead. The second benefit is that I can start writing posts even if they are not due to be published for a week or two.

I'm tired of deciding what to write about not the actual writing itself. So I need to schedule ahead and take that decision out my hands at an early stage. Time will tell if this idea for a publishing calendar pays off or not.

With Google Reader going soon, people have been looking for a replacement RSS Reader. Fortunately for me I decided look for an alternative a few weeks ago when I wanted to go Google free. I looked at a number of different options for an alternative RSS reader at the time, but Feedbin really stood out for me.

It's a paid product. Not free. That's important for me because I want to use the product in the long term. Supporting this product by paying money to use it is just common sense. Free products can come and go but investing your money in a product provides some sense of insurance that it will be around longer. This is by no means a guarantee that Feedbin will be around forever. An annual Feedbin subscription is just $20 per year.

As an RSS reader, Feedbin does everything you expect a reader to do. You can subscribe to feeds using the textbox at the top of the screen. Underneath this are three panes. The far left is your list of feeds or folders of feeds if you like to be organised.

The next pane is the items in that RSS feed or folder. You can navigate these easily with the mouse or with keyboard shortcuts.

Finally the far right pane is the current item you are viewing or the reading pane.

Keyboard shortcuts can be used to move about between feeds, folders and items. From what I remember most of the shortcuts are similar to Google Reader so those migrating from Google Reader should be able to pick up the new shortcuts quite fast. As an ex-Reader user, I find it easy to navigate about Feedbin.

Feedbin also has support for sharing to an extensive range of services. You can share items to many services like Instapaper, Pocket and Evernote. This is done through the use of URLs that many services provide. Feedbin provides tokens that can be used within these URLs so that you can include the entry title, url and feed name within the URL to the service you wish to share to. I love this feature as it simple to customize what you're sharing. Some people may not like that it's not truly integrated with other services and instead relies on just URLs to share to other services, but given the number of services Feedbin can share to, I can wait for better integration.

Finally there's iOS support. The Reeder app is the best way to view your Feedbin feeds on your iPhone. Unfortunately at the moment there is no Reeder support for Feedbin on the iPad or OSX, however Reeder development will resume at the start of July and hopefully we'll see more Reeder support coming.

It's an interesting time for RSS readers. Many people are turning to Feedly as a replacement for Google Reader, but I just didn't like the Feedly interface or the it's iOS applications. In the time that I have used Feedbin I've had no reason to complain about the service. Aside from the unread counts being a little out on some feeds Feedbin really is a great little RSS reader. I'm looking forward to seeing what the future holds for Feedbin.

Update: Shortly after this review was written, Feedbin was moved to much faster servers. Performance of Feedbin on the previous hardware wasn't much of an issue for me but I did read about others complaining of speed and response time. On the new setup though Feedbin is definitely faster than it was previously.

I've been looking for a notes application just like nvAlt for some time. Glad to read it can also be used as a wiki.

Every day is a school day. I love that phrase.

As a programmer and daily resident of the Internet, it really does apply to me. Not a day goes by where I don't learn something new. It might be a new method in the Ruby language, or a new trick in Rails. It might even be just learning that your favourite App.net client for the iPhone does allow you to save drafts. Really, I just discovered this last week.

The thing is though, I'm usually working at such a pace where I learn something, use it and then forget about it. No more.

You only learn from the things you write down. If you don't, trying to remember it with the million other thoughts that go through your head that day just makes it impossible. So with that in mind I am aiming to log a today I learned (or TIL) a day.

Mostly this will be programming stuff, but it should feed the my blog for potential development and programming posts. I might even post a summary of the week here if it becomes more than just programming stuff.

Nitin Khanna has been enjoying Journalong:

So you like to note down your thoughts but don't want the complexity of a proper journaling software like Day One? Journalong is now free, so just hook it up to your Dropbox and start using it to write down your thoughts in txt or markdown, maybe even several times a day.

— Journalong: Easy Peasy Dropbox journalling by Nitin Khanna

It's come to my attention that I have neglected Journalong in the last few months. I had big plans for Journalong but in the last few weeks I've simply neglected working on it. I should be able to work on Journalong on my own time, but finding that time has been difficult over the past few months. That's no excuse though, but that's really another story.

I only realized how much I had neglected it when an email from the on-line writing service, Draft, arrived with a bundle of new features for users. Reading through the features I realized that I had let Journalong slide for too long.

No matter what size of product or service you run, letting it fall to the wayside for even a few weeks is bad. If you want it to be a success then you need to be gradually improving your product just one bit at a time.

Even if it's only a couple of hours a week, it better to make improvements and ship them rather than waiting for a day where you can do a whole ton of work in one go. That day might not come for a few weeks or months. What if it does come and you end up doing something else? Don't neglect your product.

At the moment I'm working on an application for a decision making tool for groups that uses email to track people's responses to a question that forms the basis of the decision. Basically this application sends an email to all the people you want feedback from regarding a decision. In the email are the responses they are allowed to reply back with. They click the appropriate response and it's done. With me so far? Good.

Collaboration tools like this in teams are okay because everyone knows one another and the team work together for the greater good of delivering a great product or service. In a team you expect to get emails from other team members that want your input on a decision.

What happens though when you receive an email asking for your input on a decision, when you know that person but not as well as you know your family or friends? Another way to look at it is this:

How would you feel about giving feedback on the decisions of others you know in only a professional manner?

This is where I am having trouble with this idea. On one hand I know that teams are always going to respond to one another's questions, but say we have a decision making tool for the masses that anyone can use. You want feedback from a group of people that you know on a professional level who opinions you might value, especially when it comes to getting feedback on a key decision, but your worried that they won't participate in your decision.

If these people who opinions you value, mark your request for feedback as spam, are they really people you want feedback from or are they simply too busy to provide feedback?

This has been a stumbling block for me for a while and it's led to two different strategies to allow people to be included in decisions.

First Strategy: No Restrictions, Include Everyone

This was the initial idea for the product. The decision maker can include anyone they want feedback from on a decision. Whether it's a member of their team, someone from a particular social network they interact with, or just someone who opinion the decision maker values.

Emails are sent out to everyone requesting feedback on the decision. The main benefit to this is that you can include anyone in on a decision easily and quickly. However there are a number of drawbacks:

• What if the email is marked as spam? - It doesn't do well for your product to be perceived an another form of clutter in the inbox.
• Should the user have the option of blacklisting themselves from all future emails from my product? - To combat the possibility of the emails from my product being marked as spam, users could have the option of automatically blacklisting themselves out from all future emails. This gives a greater form of control but it does limit the decision maker in who they ask for feedback.
• Should the user have the option of blacklisting themselves from this decision only? - A spin on the previous option, but again it does limit who the decision maker can ask for feedback from.

Second Strategy: Verify Respondents First

This is a more controlled form of getting feedback from the right people. You are pre-approving people to be included in your decisions, so you should be able to build a reliable network of people who you can ask for their feedback on any number of decisions. There are drawbacks to this though:

• You just can't include anyone in a decision - Initially I wanted a platform where people can ask others for their feedback on anything.
• More barriers to getting feedback - Even if a person does want to help we require extra steps to include them on your decision. After one click to verify who they are, they might just get bored and not bother taking part in the decision.

Test Group Will Provide Feedback

Thankfully, I have a test group who are keen to use this service to help them make decisions with regards to small investments as a group. I'll be providing a simple implementation of this application for them to use for a while as a group.

As an added test, I will ask the test group to use the application to create decisions that are not related to investments. I want to see if there is a difference in the number of responses depending on the topic of the decision. I expect investment decisions to generate more responses because that is what the application is for.

I still haven't decided whether to go ahead with this product in the long term, but sharing this here did give me a moment to weigh up the two options.

I'm in between work at the moment. It's an odd place for me to be. I've worked in the full-time job market for over 10 years. If I wasn't working, I was on holiday or I was made redundant and I was looking for another job. This freelancing lark is different though and with some time in between gigs and I want to use the time I have wisely.

With a few days free in between gigs I had two choices today:

1. Work on products
2. Get some chores done

I opted for the chores.

It was a lovely day here in Scotland so I thought it would be a good idea to simply step away from the computer and let my head rest while getting a few things sorted around the house and the garden.

We're not all fortunate to have a day away from out desks like this, but I'm so glad I'm in the position where I can do this and not worry about the implications on my income by taking a day away.

Feedly has been my choice of RSS reader for about 2 years now. Initially I was won over by a service that provided a better user experience but still allowed me to continue to use Google Reader as my main RSS reader.

Feedly was a great application but lately I've become a little bit weary of it. One particular problem I have is the number of times I need to log back in. I've got Feedly running on my Macbook, iPad and iPhone. About once a week I would need to log back in on either the iPad or the iPhone. Logging in each week can be a bit of a pain. Especially as it's linked to my Google account.

It was time to look for something else.

After some searching I found the RSS reading service Feedbin. It's a subscription service with a web client that also works with the Reeder app for the iPhone.

At just $2 per month or $20 for the year, it's relatively cheap, but as a paid service it at least has more of a fighting chance of being around in the long term.

I've taken the $20 for the year offer as I want to try Feedbin for the long term. With the use of Reeder I have a supporting app for my iPhone that can let me use my Feedbin account. It will be interesting to see how Feedbin pans out as my main RSS reader over the next year.

Last week I started work on an idea for application. Just a small prototype of the idea really. No tests, no fancy user-interface, just the bare bones of the idea. In typical agile fashion I wrote out some of the basic features that I needed for the prototype as user stories on index cards and then set to work. Then a call from a client came in and before I know it, it’s two days later and I’ve not started work on the prototype.

My problem is that I’m starting client work as it comes in and my own projects are getting done in really small pieces. I am not keeping a daily schedule.

Truth is I haven’t kept a schedule of my work for at least a couple of years now. Not since I worked at a consultancy where you could plan your day most days. There was days where you would have interruptions to your schedule, but as it was customer support calls, you had determine if the customer’s support issue was that important that it had to be resolved there and then. With interruptions like this mounting on daily basis, I abandoned my calendar of work and just did work ad-hoc.

Now though I am more in control of my own time and schedule. I am my own company and I need to schedule work to ensure that client work gets done most days, but I also allow for some time to work on ideas and products.

Scheduling your work in a calendar is a commitment to getting that work done. I have the benefit of having a laptop with an external monitor so I use my laptop as my secondary screen. On here I have my calendar and I leave it open while I am working as a reminder to stay focused on the task I have set myself.

I’m using Apple’s Calendar application and the iCloud service to synchronize my calendar to my phone. This makes it easy for me to schedule stuff in my calendar when I am away from my desk. I use the brilliant Fantastical app to manage my calendar from my phone. It has a great agenda view for upcoming appointments and it has a very easy appointment entry system that means you don’t need to fill in four different fields to make an appointment. It’s smart enough to know that “10am Meeting with client” should be scheduled for 10am.

Scheduling your day and your week is a great way to making a commitment to getting things done. It’s more structured than a to do list, but provides a way of breaking your day down into chunks so that you’re not working on the same thing for hours or days at a time.

Journalong is just one of a number of options that I could recommend. But there are others if saving your journal entries to Dropbox isn't your thing.

Peter Aitken kindly informed me of a new service, Oh life, that uses just email for your journal. Looks great.

Ever since the news that Google was sunsetting it's Reader service, I've been looking at alternatives for the Google services I'm already using. I've started using Path as a replacement for Google Chat, and I'm using Apache OpenOffice instead of Google Drive. I'm not against Google as a service provider, but depending one company for a number of services is not a good move.

Two areas where I haven't found alternatives though is email and calendar. The calendar functionality I'm not too bothered about as there are plenty of options for scheduling apps and services.

The big decision I need to make is whether to move my email from Google to anything else. Gmail remains one of Google's key products that continues to work well. I'm looking at a couple of services for email, but the switch and migration of data will be a key consideration.

For the moment the cull of Google services will continue.

We've all been there. You're given a link to a new great product that is going to do wonders for your productivity but when you are done installing it you get a sign up screen that let's you sign up with only two different options.

1. Facebook
2. Twitter

If you're lucky (or not so lucky), you get a third option of Google+. Where's the option to use your email address though?

Opinionated sign ups like this have always been a problem for me. I don't have a Facebook account and I barely participate on Twitter these days, to the point where I am even thinking of deleting my Twitter account. So if I don't have an account for either of these social networks (and yes there are people like this) then what's left for me to do?

It's easy. Give some other product a try that will let me sign up with my email address.

The only time where I will use a product that requires such a sign up is where it allows me to participate on the social network or platform I choose to use.

I've signed up for many products over the years using Twitter, Dropbox and Google. Each time the product was tied to the preferred login that I choose in a way that required a specific login. Journalong uses Dropbox to post journal entries to your Dropbox, Feedly uses Google to sync your Google Reader across, you get the idea. These are specialist products and services that depend on a specific social network or platform.

I will not however sign up with my social network for a product whose only connection to it is to read the list of people I follow on that network and from other networks.

Where a product isn't tied to one social network but offers the choice, I'll always use my email address. If the product wants to connect to my social networks after I have signed up then fine, I'll connect them separately. It means that I can disconnect those social networks at a later date without having to completely stop using the product.

There's a time and place for opinionated sign ups like this but for generic products we should always be given the option of using email.

I struggled with developing features for Journalong over the last six months. Always at the back of my mind was that I needed Journalong to be profitable. It was this thinking the blocked all development on Journalong. Ideas were put to the side until I could get more paid subscribers using the product.

In time I realized that Journalong as a product was never going to happen. So I let go.

Over the weekend I stripped out all the paid subscriptions from Journalong and it is now a free product for everyone. As soon as I shipped the changes I felt a huge weight off my shoulders. Now with no pressure to build a customer base I can get back to developing a few more features for Journalong over the next few months.

The loss of Google Reader as an RSS reader is a great shame but one thing that I am definitely going to miss is the trends page of Google Reader. This page provided data on what you've been reading and when you were reading it. Not only that but you could see what blogs you are following are active and which are not.

I use the last feature as a way of unsubscribing from blogs that are no longer active. Every month I look back to see which blogs were not active over the last three months and unsubscribe from them.

So now that Google Reader is being killed off, what do I do about the tracking of the blogs that I follow?

Due to the lack of products that I could find that do this, I thought about rolling my own RSS watch list so that I could see which blogs were not active over a given time period.

The idea is simple. You upload your OPML file of your RSS feeds and the watch list will monitor your feeds on a daily basis always checking to see when content on each blog feed was last posted. Alerts are emailed to you when a feed stops posting after a number of days that you specify.

A simple idea and one that I hope that I can build in the next few weeks.

Test-driven development (TDD) is often seen as the long way to developing software. The misconception perceived by many is that writing tests and code is going take longer than simply writing code. While this statement is in fact true, many don't take into account the what's happens further down the development process.

Developers that practice TDD are continually writing tests to ensure that all parts of the software work. This practice reduces the chances of bugs appearing in the code in a later date. Developers that don't practice TDD are writing code that is usually handed to another team for testing. Chances of the code containing bugs at this point are quite high, and so a game of ping pong ensues with the code moving between the developers and the testers until it is working. This can ultimately take longer than the time it took a developer to produce the same code using TDD.

Selling TDD to clients is difficult because they don't see the benefit of this practice. Clients want their product and the want it now. Writing tests takes too long. It puts the developer in a difficult position. Do you take the gig and hope to squeeze in the tests as your developing and hope the client doesn't notice? Or do you take the gig and forgot about the tests knowing that future work will come back to you in the form of bugs that the client has discovered? Of course the last alternative is to not take the gig at all.

The long path that clients see when they are told about TDD isn't as long they think it is. In fact it is actually worth their while to spend the time investing in tests that ensures their code for their product or service continues to work in the future. Following the path of not writing tests might look like the short path to start with but there's no guarantee that it will stay that way.

It’s a sad fact of life, but there’s many workers out there simply dotting the i’s and the crossing the t’s when it comes to their jobs. They start at nine, do what’s required of them, and then make a bee-line for the door at the end of the day. I'll be the first to say that even I have been guilty if this behaviour. Yes, you are doing your job, but surely there’s more to your job than doing the minimum necessary?

It’s not always the worker’s fault though, many jobs out there just don’t ask or want people to be creative. They look for the basic skills needed for the job and nothing else. Many employers just want the job done and nothing more. Is that enough?

NHS meals idea

James Martin, a British chef and TV personality had a show that recently ran on TV, where he was trying to improve the kitchen and meals service of a number of NHS hospitals in England and Wales. In one show, he improved the costs of one kitchen by reducing the amount of waste food generated. Rather than just making enough meals so that everyone had a choice, James suggested that the kitchen staff take orders for each ward and make enough food to fulfil the orders.

From one day’s service, the kitchen had reduced it’s waste and also it’s costs. That cost projected over a year ran into a saving of tens of thousands of pounds. As anyone who knows about the current state of the NHS and it’s financial problems, ideas like this are exactly what’s needed to improve the NHS to allow to run effectively and also pay for itself.

When the kitchen and meals manager was shown the savings, she did nothing more than just smile. Why does it take a celebrity chef to come in and implement such a simple idea that saves thousands of pounds for the hospital? Where’s the innovation from inside the NHS? Do employee’s even have the time to be creative during their jobs?

Be innovative on company time

In a previous job, I wanted to compile a newsletter for customers notifying them of news and events in the world of ERP software. I pitched the idea to my boss at the time, who wanted the same thing done. I suggested putting together a first draft of the newsletter together and sending it to him before sending it to customers. I was asked by my boss if I could do the newsletter in my own time. So I have an idea, but I must do in my time?

I don’t know if my employer at the time was aware of this fact but I have my own things to do in my time. Working on ideas that benefit my employer in my time is not own. And here in lies another problem. Employers need to allow their employees to be innovative and creative on company time.

I’m not suggesting that every company should follow Google’s example of allowing their employees to be creative. What I am suggesting is that employers allow their stuff to set aside some time to develop ideas and be more creative.

Being a game changer at work means doing more than simply doing the absolute minimum necessary to get through the day. Being a game changer means thinking about the work you and continually reviewing your work to look for more effective of ways of doing things. Not only does that require that as a worker you be more productive, but as an employer you need to allow your employees to be creative and develop idea during company time.

So what are you waiting for, how can you change your game today?

​

This morning I was curious about the amout of money I was spending every month on subscriptions for products and services on the internet. It turns out that I don’t spend huge amounts of money on products and services. Here’s where my money is going on a monthly basis:

• Instapaper
• App.net
• Dropbox
• Ruby Tapas
• The Changelog
• Github
• Pinboard

All in they come to just under £30 per month. The amount I am paying out each month is less than I thought, which means I have a few slots left for additional products and services. I’m already looking at taking out subscriptions to Treehouse to improve my iOS development skils, Instacast to sync my podcasts between devices and a Railscasts pro subscription.

What apps, services and products are you subscribed to on a monthly basis, and is there anything you are considering taking a subscription out on in the future?

... with Nicholas Bate.

I'm in the market for a new iPhone case. There are hundreds to choose from. I mean hundreds. There's too many to decide from. Competition is nice in business but as a consumer, sometimes I want less of a choice. Less choice means I can make a decision faster.

Software developers love their text editors. Those developers that invest a significant amount of time in one particular text editor are able to wield it with the proficiency a level 20 warrior. They’ll slice and dice the code with the mininal number of gestures needed. They have all the commands they need memorised right down to the last keystroke combination. Text editors are the primary weapon of software developers and so they need to know how to this tool with great effect if they want to make their day a productive one.

I chose Sublime Text 2 as my main text editor a couple of years ago. I just find it easy to work with. I know the commands that I need, I spent a fair amount of time getting the right plugins and setting them up so that they work well for me and of course I’ve tried hundreds of themes before getting the one that just feels right. So if I’m so happy with my chosen text editor, why the hell do I keep wanting to try another tool?The other tool I am referring to is Vim. It’s a text editor that is used by thousands of people and is over 20 years old. Every year, I ask myself, “Did I give Vim enough of a chance?”

I’ve tried Vim a few times as a replacement for Sublime but every time I try it, I find something that I don’t like and go back to Sublime. Fast forward a few months and I do the same thing again. For the last three years, I think I’ve tried Vim about five times. I’m not talking about a couple of days, I’m talking about a full on month of use. However, at the end of each month I simply switch back to Sublime. Is it a comfort thing? It might be.

Vim is a great text editor but I just don’t feel that comfortable using it.​

Automation. The programmer’s best friend. Programmers automate as much as they can. Setting up a new computer, building servers and testing software are just some of the areas where we like to automate things. We hate typing in four commands where one will do. Automation saves so much time.

Not everyone is a programmer though. So how can you automate your interactions with your computer so that you’re not doing as many manual tasks?

Check your application settings

Lots of applications and services now integrate with other applications and settings. Instapaper for example allows me to save the articles that I like to my Pinboard account. After I set this up in the Instapaper settings page, I can then like an article and it will be saved to Pinboard for me. This is just a small example of the automation you can achieve. Baked in settings to applications is great but what if you want more automation?

Checkout IFTTT

IFTTT is a service that allows you to create recipes for the different services that you use. It will then run these recipes when they are triggered. Each recipe contains a trigger and an action. When the trigger is fired the respective action is carried out.

An example of this in action is the
monthly redux blog post that I put out at the start of each month. It is a list of the previous month’s blog posts on my blog. Rather than writing this by hand though, I can let IFTTT do the work for me.

When my recipe detects a new item on my blog’s RSS feed, it then writes the title of the blog post and a link to it to a text file in my Dropbox account.

At the end of the month I cut the contents of this file and paste it into my blog’s content editor and use it as the content for my new monthly redux blog post.

In order for IFTTT to work effectively, it needs to have access to the services that you use. You may not be comfortable doing this, but I find that it’s a great way to automate tasks that I would normally do by hand in the past.

Being able to defer manual tasks to services that automate them for you saves you time. Not only that, it lets you get on with more important tasks. This week watch out for manual tasks that you could be automating. Even if you can save a few minutes off your day, it’s going to add up over the year. And that’s time not wasted.

​

One of the greatest challenges I’ve had in my career as a software developer is that of expectations. Twenty years ago when the waterfall methodology ruled, you developed in isolation for months on end, passed it to a test team and then onto the client. After months of work, it was common to get the final product passed back to you. The reason was that the client’s expectations were not the same as yours. Months of work wasted.Now though, we have agile methodologies that allow us to work closely with the client and work in much smaller chunks, delivering code weekly or even daily for the client. At this fast pace it’s easy to meet the client’s expectations as we are only working in smaller periods and only delivering smaller sections of the final product for the client.

I’ve been working this way for a couple of clients over January and February and it’s been really successful but the reason isn’t just the continual delivery of features and fixes for the client, the main reason is that I am always in communication with my client. I chat to my clients daily, often more than once a day when working with them.Foggy details are a sure fire way to miss the clients expectations, which leads to wasted time for both you and your client. You can’t assume to know what your client will want, but you can make an educated guess. However, what you should be doing is talking to your client and clarifying any details you are not sure about.

If I have a question or I’m not sure, I ask the client to clarify their expectations on what I am hoping to deliver for them. I hate to be wrong and I hate to be wasting my clients time by not meeting their expectations.​

Being a software developer means that I spend a lot of time debugging code for problems. Sometimes it's obvious where the problem is but not all bugs are that easy to find. It would be nice if we could quickly identify the problem, but the real world isn't like that. Most days debugging code requires at least a couple of hours of tracking down the problem but sometimes you find yourself spending the bulk of the day finding the problem. These days can end up being very long when you're debugging for hours on end.

Problem solving takes time and patience. Fortunately for me my client understands this and left me to my devices today. I spent the majority of today debugging some code and then once the problem had been found, the code to fix it took about a hour to put in place.For days like this, it pays to be persistent.

A few years ago I ran a blog called MindMapSwitch. It ran for a couple of years before I had to give it up due to time constraints with work. It did have a small following of readers during its time, so even when I stopped writing for it, I decided to leave the website up for others to read.Last year though I was saddened to read that the service that MindMapSwitch was hosted on, Posterous, was shutting down for good. I knew then I had to move MindMapSwitch somewhere else but I wasn't too sure where. As MindMapSwitch wasn't on my priority list I decided to leave it for the moment.

Then last week, I received an email from Posterous that the service would shut down at the end in April and all accounts would be deleted. In order to keep the MindMapSwitch content I downloaded a backup of the content of the blog and deleted my account on Posterous until I decided what to do with the content.Today though I was pleased to receive an email from a university professor in Venezuela who has been using the MindMapSwitch content to teach the benefits of mind mapping to his students.

Unfortunately for him, I had deleted the blog, but I was more than happy to oblige him with a copy the backup I had. It's in a friendly format that can be easily distributed to his students.When I first started writing on MindMapSwitch, I never thought for a second that my words would reach that far round the world. I knew that I would be able to build up a number of loyal readers who were interested in mind mapping, but never did I think that it would be used a teaching aid for others to help them in their studies. It just goes to show that your words can reach far.

As a software developer I'm used to making hundreds, well probably thousands of decisions a day. Deciding on variables, class names and how I implement features is just part of the many decisions I make as a software developer on a daily basis. They're all small decisions, but they add up at the end up of the day when a section of code is tested and completed. These are just micro decisions. Really small decisions that I can afford to get wrong as they are easily rectifiable in a really short period of time.As you move up through the scale though, you see that the decisions that you make become less and less frequent as their impact becomes greater and greater.

Right at the top of my tree is a decision to emigrate that will affect me and my family for a time period that can be measured in years. It's a decision that's been on my mind for the last few years, but with every passing year that the decision isn't made, the decision to emigrate becomes harder and harder. Get it right and everything will fall into place as expected. Get it wrong, well I don't really want to dwell on what would happen if we decided to emigrate and it didn't work out.

If only the decision to emigrate was as easy as one of those thousands of decisions I make on daily basis.

I was a fan of Microsoft when I first started out in my career. It was everywhere. Jobs local to me were all about Microsoft technology and stacks. So I started working with Microsoft's development tools and languages more out of it being so popular than by personal choice. In those days Microsoft was a key player in technology.

Looking at Microsoft now and it's hard to believe that it's the same company that was set to take over the world.Yes they have the same set of development tools and updates languages for developers, and the market for developers using these languages is still strong. However there's other areas where they appear to be losing out.

The PC is dying. The Windows driven one that is. Tablets are the new home computer, and while Microsoft have released their own tablet, the Surface, they do have a mountain to climb in terms of opposition. Apple and Amazon both have had tablets out well before Microsoft and they both have their own apps market place to sell from. Apple's iPad is extremely popular and I've started to notice that more and more people are jumping on board with Amazon's Kindle tablets.

The PC might still be a success in the office, but I think time will reveal a new success in the workplace. As tablets become more powerful and better apps and services are written, I think they maybe the new success story in the workplace. As I said though, time will tell on that one.The other area Microsoft are fighting is open source software, which is now a serious consideration for business. It maybe wasn't so much 20 years ago, but now you can comfortably run your own e-commerce site with a suite of support applications to run the business without paying a single penny in licensing costs for the software or the operating systems it runs on.

Open source software has become so popular that there are even open source ERP systems that can help you run and manage your business. Having previously worked for a Microsoft partner, I know the licensing costs involved in such systems and they can easily run into tens of thousands for even an ERP backed e-commerce site.Microsoft was a great company back in the day, but today it seems that there isn't much to get excited about from it. Not only that, they are playing a game of catchup in other markets like tablets, software and of course the cloud.

I'm not writing off Microsoft and I know they have successes in other areas but looking at them now and you can't help but wonder where it all went wrong.

Journalong is up and running and I'm happy with it, but there's another itch building. Another itch to build something else and DecisionMail is it's name. The product bug has bitten me, but this time around it's slightly different. I'm not building a product as a revenue stream, I'm more interested in how the product is used and people's perceptions of using software in the decision making process.

So what is the new idea?

DecisionMail is simply a way of getting feedback on a decision through the use of email. You write the question that you want your colleagues to give you feedback on, list those people who you want feedback on the decision from, and then DecisionMail will email that question along with a link, to each of the people you want feedback from on the question.

Your colleagues receive the email and simply click their response to the question. From your select group of people you should then have a clear idea what the group's decision is.

One of my key concerns is that the email from DecisionMail to someone who has been asked for feedback on a decision will either be automatically dropped in a spam folder or will be completely missed in the inbox. I'm aware that the inbox is becoming a horrible place for people. Some people get hundreds of new email every day. I don't know how they manage it, but if this person was involved in a decision, then how can you be sure that that person will respond?

I'm not building this product to solve a particular problem, but I'm instead building this to delve more into using software as a decision making tool. I've already built a number of decision support systems for clients, but I wanted to build something simpler that involved the minimum number of steps to get feedback on a decision. Email is too complicated already for gathering feedback, which is why the email from a DecisionMail account holder, will only require the respondent to click the answer to the question that they agree with the most.

I initially perceived this as a product for virtual teams who have members across different countries, but the anyone could use it to make decisions.

The next few weeks are about getting the basics up and running. Watch this space!

... with some teaser posters from the fans. Really like this one.

via DBSW

It's been over a year now since Journalong was launched and since it's launch, the total number of customers is still less than triple figures. Okay, so I wasn't expecting to be the next Dropbox of the journalling world in terms of success, but hitting my milestone of a hundred customers would be nice.

I still believe there is a place for a product like Journalong in the world, but I'm definitely not attracting increasing numbers of customers with the current pricing model. What got me thinking about this was the recent product announcements from 37signals for their Basecamp Personal and Breeze products which are priced as one off purchases. Sure, these are products that will hang off Basecamp, but the idea of a one off price for software is something that is done in the native mobile apps area. Lots of apps are priced as a one-off purchase rather than as a subscription. Journalong has been priced as a subscription service from the start but is it priced right?

While $10 a year sounds cheap as chips to some people, others look at as expensive. I fork out about $50 (US) per month on software subscriptions and I use everyone of them daily. Some are a couple of dollars a month, while one almost hits the $20 mark. So, I'm used to seeing value that software can provide and pay for it.

Which brings me to my next question. Does Journalong provide value? For me, most definitely yes. For others? Maybe not. Journalong definitely delivers value in my eyes, but I also need to determine if that value is worth the current subscription price.

Pricing and value are two of the most important areas in a successful product. Without getting the price and value right for your product, you're going to be left with a product that no-one is going to pay for and use.

So if you've created an account for a trial of Journalong in the last year but didn't fancy it, then expect an email from myself in the next few weeks. I'm looking to get more feedback on Journalong as a product and whether it is delivering value.

I'm not the first person to realise this, but productivity apps don't work for me. I've tried countless apps and services but none of them seem to work for me. The recurring problem I have is that all of them require me to be online or have a digital device in my hand. I like my iPhone, but using a task manager app on my phone usually ends up becoming a chore that I could do without.

My latest experiment was using Wunderlist to track some projects I've been working on. I setup the necessary lists I needed and started working with them. However after a few weeks of using it I ended up with lists of stuff that I haven't looked at for a fortnight.

Maybe it's just me, but tools like Evernote, Things, Omnifocus, and Wunderlist and other apps that aim to make you more productive, inevitably become dumping grounds for ideas, todos and other stuff that I end up never reviewing or actioning.

So what works for me then?

Pen and paper seems to be the choice that I keep coming back too. It's simple, effective and cheap, but not in terms of price. In terms of focus. I never get distracted by the latest features of pen and paper. There aren't any. I just open, write and close.

There's a place for productivity apps in my workflow and that's when you are collaborating with others as part of a team. Seeing what tasks are yours and sharing information in a group of people working on a project together is essential to making progress. I've no arguments with using productivity apps in this context. Especially when that team isn't in the same physcial office as is the case with so many people who take advantage of telecommuting to their job.

However, for personal projects and products I'm working on and day to day stuff that life throws at you, I'll stick with the lo-fi option of pen and paper. It works for me and that's what matters.

The fixed gear bike. Two wheels. One gear. Brakes, optional. Simple really. And that's the reason why the fixed gear bike is loved by many cyclists. It's a simple bike. Amongst it's carbon fibre, multi-geared brethren, it looks out of place, but it has a special place in the hearts of many cyclists. It's a bike with a single function, it just lets you ride.

Now take a look at Pop, the text editor for iOS from Minimal Tools. A single page text editor that offers no settings, no file management facilities, no synchronising with Dropbox. In fact there aren't any features about it. All you can do is write something with it and then copy what you have written to the clipboard. Why the hell would you want to buy this app then when all editors for iOS do this?

Well Pop does one thing that no other editor I have does. It doesn't distract me. It doesn't have anything to distract me with. It just lets me write.

We need more products like Pop and fixed gear bikes. Simple things that do one thing really well. Simple products let you do what you really want to do without any distractions.

It's been a busy couple of weeks freelancing. However there is one thing that I didn't factor into working this way and that was making time for building my own products.

Working on your own is demanding. You're aiming to deliver the best work you can within a set allotted time for your client as well as keeping an eye out for more opportunities in the future. I've only just seen the tip of the iceberg with freelancing. I'm sure there's a lot more things I need to be doing.

By the time I've put in a days work I'm mentally exhausted. The prospect of sitting at the computer for another hour at night now doesn't seem so appealing.

Now that I'm more flexible though in the hours that I can do, I need to start thinking about etching out some time during the week to build and market my own products. Cutting back to four days a week would allow me that chance. As well as working on products it would give me a chance to do some writing as well.

I like the flexibility that freelancing offers but I need to make sure that I am giving myself enough time to work on projects if my own.

The other problem is that I'm still stuck in the typical work week mode. I still feel like I have a job. Granted I'm way more happier working this way, but I should be working out how many days I should be doing a month to earn enough for living and putting some aside for when there are droughts in the work load.

This doesn't necessarily mean doing five days a week, but the balance should be in the favour of paid work until my products can earn enough to swing the balance in their favour.

In the meantime it's back to work.

Estimating. It's a word that can strike fear into people who are new to the realms of programming, project management, freelancing and other careers. The daunting prospect of estimating the length of time at which you will be able to complete a set piece of work.

I have over ten years experience in the realm of software development and sometimes I still get it wrong. I've seen developers get their estimates wrong by a couple of weeks and project managers miss their target deadline by months. So why are estimates so hard then?

The first reason is that the estimate is based on a bigger block of work, rather than multiple smaller ones. Estimating a project from just an outline of the project is a rookie mistake. When you estimate on a large single block of work, you are basically playing a guessing game. In fact your estimate is always going to be wrong when you do this.

Instead, break your big block of work down into smaller blocks of work. The more granular you get, the easier the estimate is going to be. It won't always be correct, but your estimate will be more accurate.The second reason is information. We are limited by our little brains in how much information we can retain when estimating on a project.

When it came to estimating on projects for ERP software customers, I had to remember that different customers had different workflows in their systems. No two systems were the same. I had to factor in that a customer will have specific workflows in their system that I need to either work around or work with. This job was made a lot easier by the fact that I used notes that I kept on each customer's system so that I was ready to make better estimates in the future.

Now I know this might not be easy to do for a new project where you have little information, but carrying any information that is relevant from one project to the next is going to make estimating on blocks of work a lot easier.

Estimating isn't a black art, it's simply something that requires you take the time to break blocks of work down into smaller chunks and if you can, have the right information at hand to make better estimates on those blocks of work.

A single device that can be used on the go as well as having the same functionality as a desktop computer when you dock it!

The Ubuntu phone marks a significant milestone that nobody else in the mobile business has managed to nail yet. It runs the same codebase as the rest of the Ubuntu family, meaning it can be docked and used as a real computer or synchronized with a slab and turned into a tablet.

— Convergence is key by Owened

This year's theme was all set to be something else, but due to the fact I am currently trying to make it as a freelance web developer, I thought a change in the theme for the year would help my identify my goal for the year. So this year's theme is independence, but it's not just career independence. Let me fill you in.

My way of defining career independence is to be an independent developer. Simple. I want to ultimately pick and choose the work that I want to do in the future. I want to be independent of another company's goals and objectives and work towards my goals.

This is going to be a long term goal, that will require me putting in a lot of hours at the start. I'll be building products, open source applications and libraries and doing a lot of writing.The flip side of this is that I will be hopefully more financially independent. No-one can argue that times are hard for many of us, but I don't want to simply get by month to month working my ass off and doing a dreadful commute to play office politics.

I want to build products that solve problems and generate revenue.With a suite of products on the market, I'm hoping that at least one of these can generate enough revenue that will allow me to be more flexible in the work I do day to day.

It's a dream that many want, but very few take up. I've decided to simply put this out there. Then in a year's time, you can email me and say, "So Matthew, how did the whole independence thing go?". I know what I want the reply to be, but there's a lot of work ahead to get the right reply in place.

Let's see what 2013 brings for being independent.

As part of a toolset reboot for the year I've decided to give mind mapping another go. Mind mapping isn't new to me, I first learned about it about 20 years ago. Some of you who know me might even remember my mind mapping blog from a few years ago.

I used mind mapping until about 3 years ago. At that point I wasn't using it as extensively as I did in the past. I was exploring the use sketch notes in place of mind maps as well. I eventually gave up on mind mapping and retired my blog. I think I had simply become bored with the use of mind maps.

With a new career direction ahead of me and loads of little ideas for products in my head, I'll be using mind mapping to explore these product ideas further before I build prototypes for them. Sometimes an idea sounds great in your head, but when it comes to executing the idea, it falls to pieces. I'll be using mind mapping to test the feasibility of these ideas on paper first and then turn them into prototypes later.

The one rule I have is that my mind maps will be created with the trusty pen and paper. There will be no mind mapping software used at all.

I've always been hesitant to use mind mapping software in the past. Mind mapping used to be nothing but pen and paper. There was no mind mapping software 20 years ago. Yes computers were becoming more mainstream, but mind mapping offered a chance to explore your thoughts and ideas away from the computer.

To me, mind mapping software constrains you in the way that mind maps are made. Pen and paper has no constraints, your mind map can take any shape that you wish.

Yup, it's time to get back into mind mapping again.

It's been four weeks now since I was made redundant. In that time I've had a chance to reflect on this horrible position that many of us go through. It's not my first redundancy either and probably won't be my last, but there's a number of things I would like to share that may help others get through a similar experience.

Being made redundant from a job is a painful experience to go through, but I think that level of pain relates to the size of the company you are being let go from.

Take for instance my job at a large payroll software and services provider at the start of my career. They were a large company at the time of my redundancy. My role was working on a payroll and personnel product. After nine months though, my development manager moved on to somewhere else and the product was shelved. Fast forward a few months and the company was bought over. I was deemed surplus to requirements by the new parent company and was made redundant.

When I found out I was being made redundant I acted calmly after hearing the news. I realised that even though my line manger was giving me the bad news it wasn't his fault and there was nothing personal about it.When you work in a large company, chances are you are just another cog in the machine. There are multiple levels of management from the decision makers at the top to those at the bottom and it's usually very rare that these two levels will mix on a daily basis.

From the way I see it, It was a decision made by others who either didn't know me or knew very little of me. It wasn't personal, and that's an important perspective to take on it. Lots of people feel anger when they are made redunandant, but at the end of the day it's sometimes just about the numbers.

Now my last two redundancies have been made at smaller companies. In each case there were less than ten employees in each company and each time I was made redundant I was more than just annoyed at the news of being let go. I had spent two and five years at each of the respective companies.

With small companies you end up knowing everyone on really good terms, well I do anyway, and you get to know everyone a lot better than you would have at a large company. In this case it can become boiling pot of emotions you feel when you are told by a colleague that you know really well that you are being let go.

In this case you need to handle things a bit differently. Redundancy in a small company is difficult to deal with.In both cases my redundancy came out of nowhere. I had assumed in each case that the company was performing well to that point. Experience has taught me though that in a small company, day to day duties can hide underlying problems the company is having.

In my first redundancy the company was entertaining prospective buyers for a number of months before myself and others were made redundant. It was kept from staff until the announcement that the company was being bought over. the company buy over was announced on the Friday and I was made redundant on the Monday. Pretty fast moving. I completely resented the company owner and the development manager for not at least giving the staff a heads up on the activity of the company. Looking back I wasted a lot of time in a negative place rather than focusing on moving myself onto another position. I did eventually find a new job, but I've always thought I was pushed into the job move rather than moving on for better reasons.

In my second redundancy I found myself in a better frame of mind after hearing the bad news.After being told that the company was going through financial problems and I was being let go, I simply gathered my things, said my goodbyes and left. Stepping out the office I was surprised by the swiftness of it starting as another day in a small company to not having a job. I learned from the past that dwelling on the negative and blaming others wasn't going to get me anywhere. I simply picked myself up and moved on.

The experience of being made redundant from a small company has taught me to expect bad news at the drop of a hat. Working with a small company with people you know well doesn't necessarily mean that you will be told of any pending bad news on the horizon. And if there is a bad news for the company then you are probably better off being somewhere else.

Also in a small company, you should accept the redundancy for what it is and move on. Regardless of what you think about the company or it's remaining staff, it's not going to have any positive input on your prospects for a new job. Accept the redundancy and move on.

A redundancy from a large company has been easier to manage from my experience. It's largely a decision based on numbers. You get the bad news and then move on. It's no-one's fault.

My last piece of advice is to pay attention to the company you are working for regardless of its size. Watch out for news alerts on the company and pay attention to shifts in company size and locations.

When external office locations are shut down, services or products are removed or other departments are closed down, look towards your own department and question it's viability within the company. Does your department still align with the companies overall objectives?Yes you might just be a line worker and not privvy to what's going on in the board room, but you can observe how the company is performing. With that knowledge, a redundancy will then at least be expected and not a complete surprise.

Redundancy is sadly a part of the career world that many of us will face, but it doesn't mean that it needs to be a largely negative affair. When you get the bad news, close the door on it and move on. I did and I feel a whole lot better for it.

Kurt Harden has a list of apps you can use without a phone.

... with Adam Keys.

No fancy hacks or software here. Just straight forward tips that anyone can do.

Ever get an email marked as important and then proceeded to wonder why it is so important?

I get them every now and again at work, but what amazes me is that people still send email and mark it as important. Do you really think that little red flag you put on it will automatically kick me into state of tunnel vision, where I stop until the issue in the email is resolved? Be honest, how many times have you received an important email asking you to complete a task and deferred the work to later rather than doing it now. It's not your fault. You know the task is important, but how important is it really? I think we can all agree that most of the time, it's not that important.

Email doesn't convey how important a task is because there is no tone in an email to indicate this. Also, we've lived with email so long now that we question every important email that comes into our inbox. How important is it really?If something is so important why waste the time on an email that may or may not get actioned? That little red flag called 'important' doesn't have any magical powers you know.

If you're about to send an email with a task that you think is important, then stop.

Discard the email and find the phone number of the person you wanted to send that important email to.Phone this person, discuss the task at hand. Provide that person with the all the necessary information that they need to complete the task.

Not only are you conveying how important the task is but you can also clarify any details that you might be asked about it.Next time you're mouse hovers over the important flag, decide whether the task is so important that it warrants a phone call. Most of the time it won't be that important, but when it is important, you'll be glad you conveyed the importance of the task yourself rather than relying on a dumb machine to do it for you.

... where Patrick Rhone looks at how he's still using his first generation iPad and why it's the tools you never think of that get the job done.When I replied to Patrick's original post on App.net on how I'm still using my five year old black Macbook (believe me, that's old for a programmer) for development, his reply back was a great summary on why we use the tools we do:

It's what we believe in. ;-)

Thanks Patrick :-)

... with Caesura Letters.

Let us expose the conspiracy: success is an illusion. To be sure, the human experience is full of tantalizing tokens, symbols and rituals to represent this highly-sought status. But every diploma, certification, award, medal, pay-grade promotion and recognition is simply another construct of this brilliant mythology: ‘success’ is nothing but a humanly crafted religion that teaches us how to revere one another.

— The Myth of Success by Caesura Letters

Caesura Letters is the one bit of email I look forward to reading every day. Make it yours also.

Nothing like an Apple product launch to get a hacker debate going. Me, I can take it or leave it. I've grown increasingly immune to these product launches over the years. And I'm glad I have. I've come to realise that it's not the tools (computers, netbooks, tablets etc.) that are the most interesting thing here, but the end product that you have made with those tools. That's a much more interesting story.

This doesn’t mean new problems shouldn’t be tackled and new techonologies should not be invented. It applies mostly to reinventing wheels. That is, a project starts with level 1, not level 3 or 4. Apply a technology and improve it before you push the edge. In fact, you must push the limits of an extant technology before level 4 is the right answer. No skipping allowed.

— The Real Adam Invent The Right Thing by Adam Keys

A solution to a problem or level one according to Adam's post. That's how it all starts and that's how Journalong started. I needed a way to keep a journal in my Dropbox without needing a fancy app or special editor to write the journal entry.

I suppose you could say we're at level two at the moment based on Adam's levels. It integrates with Dropbox and uses it as a storage facility for your journal. As for level three, I don't think I'm at the stage where I can call Journalong a better journal than say Day One, but it's different. It's minimal. And that's what I wanted when I initially scratched the itch for a plain text journal.

Maybe one day, I'll take Journalong to level three, but for the moment it works and that's enough for now.

I wish I read this list by Michael Wade last week when I was at my wits end with an issue at work. I probably shouldn't have sent the email, but I did anyway. As soon as I read point three, I knew I shouldn't have sent that email.

3. Are you so upset that you shouldn't be near a computer? Don't e-mail when angry.*

Twitter's third party app lockdown continues with the removal of Twitter Triggers from IFTTT. I think the only way for Twitter to go from here is downwards. With it's focus on advertising, Twitter in my eyes is just another Facebook.

via The Verge

So, far its been good; most apps I use are web apps. I spend 70% of my time in a terminal, and 30% of my time in a web browser. Honestly its the perfect computer for me right now. So, I’m waving goodbye to the ecosystem Mr. Jobs built, and moving to the world of linux full time.

— Thanks Mr Jobs, but it seems I can use my Linux laptop now by Hyper Geometric

It's hard not to argue that Apple products are great. I particularly like my iPad and tomorrow I'll pick up my new iPhone. As for my main development machine at home though, I've started looking at using Ubuntu on an old PC. So far, I've only installed the minimum development tools I'll need. I'll be able to give a more fuller review on using Linux. Stay tuned!

I’m blogging today because computer nerds know how to make software, they tend to get exploited by people who don’t, and it is ruining America for everyone. Our economy is completely dependent on computers at this point, and I am astonished that so many of our “leaders” still haven’t figured out how to use Microsoft Outlook.

How many times have you come across managers who claim to be great at what they do, but lack even the most basic skills with a computer? Unfortunately I've come across this scenario more times than I would like. In today's world you need to learn work with more than people.

— The Programmer and the MBA by GusBook

Might have to make a wee visit to the store when we visit the in-laws next year.

via The Verge

This would make a mighty fine addition to my Langster.

I use Markdown everyday, so it's great to see TextDown, an Markdown editor extension for Chrome, that I can now use across different platforms.

Like most people I've spent my fair share of money on apps for the iPad, but recently I've found that I'm just not using them that often. The problem is that while I like the apps themselves and chose them for their functionality and their ease of use, the freqeuncy with which I use them just isn't right. When was the last time I wrote anything with iA Writer? I can't remember.With web apps though, I'm finding that they are more accessible to me during the day at work and at night when I am at home.

I looked at a number of apps for keeping a journal before I ended up writing Journalong, and the same goes for writing. I managed to write a whole book with 750words.com. The only reason I didn't use it every day after NaNoWriMo was the fact that the pressure to write 750 words became a bit too much. My journal is for every day thoughts, but typerighter is for taking those thoughts and fleshing out something more fuller and richer.

Web apps like Typerighter and Journalong also work well on my mobile devices. I don't want separate apps for each device I have.Don't get me wrong, native apps have their places where they don't require a web interface. However if a service has a web interface with no need for a native app then I will use that service as it's web interface is easily accessible from the number of different of platforms and devices I use on a daily basis.UPDATE: Since publishing this, I've deleted my Typerighter account in favour of writing using Sublime Text 2. Typerighter is a great product if you need a minimal writing interface, but I've started using ST2 for writing as it's easier to pick up my drafts which are kept in Dropbox.​ Maybe I'll go back to Typerighter when they let you connect to your Dropbox.

Buster Benson outlines what habit decisions are and provides some tips integrating these habits into your life. Here's an excerpt from the practice tracking tip:

If you’re not someone who naturally tracks everything you do in life, think about breaking off a separate habit decision statement for the habit of tracking. Practice tracking something other than a behavior that’s important to you. Experiment with tracking in a journal, and on a calendar in your kitchen, and with an app on your phone, and see which ones feel natural and enjoyable to you.

— Habit Manifesto by Buster Benson

Not everything on your wishlist needs to be things you want to own. How about attending events?Well this one should be on every mountain bikers list. An exhibition in San Francisco International Airport on the history and evolution of the mountain bike.

I've read about the Repack story so many times now but it never gets old.

The email client redesigned for today.

It's easier than you think.

Then I realized why I need to start a new company. Not for the money. Not because I'm “bored”. But because a company is a laboratory to try your ideas.

— Why you need your own company by Derek Sivers

And complexity is like a leak in your roof. It starts small. But over time, it does real damage. And once that damage has begun, it's hard to stop. Best not to let it in in the first place.
As a software developer, I'm all too familiar with this scenario. Targetting just a few big customers in a select market can have the same effect. Best avoided if possible.

— Huge Accounts Make Me Nervous.. by Jason Fried

Over the weekend I put the finishing touches to my first product, Journalong. I thought it would be a good idea to go over what led me to building it.My decision to journal was originally started by a little nudge from Patrick Rhone.

His idea is to keep a personal log of accomplishments is a great tip, especially if like me, you're constantly critiquing yourself for even the smallest decisions.I kicked open a text file on my Dropbox and put the first entry. Then I wanted to record something else, "I'll just stick it in here as well" I thought. Finally after a few lines later, I looked at what I had written. A journal of sorts. Well, the start of one at least.I kept the journal in my Dropbox and then started writing to the file over the next couple of weeks. Ideas, thoughts, completed projects all got dumped in here. Then a couple of weeks later, I wanted to write to my journal but I didn't have it set up on my phone. After a few minutes of pain, I finally managed to get Dropbox on my phone and then update my journal.

With Dropbox installed on my phone, I thought it should be easy to update my Dropbox when I want. Not so, because while the Dropbox app does a great job of syncing files across devices, the default editor on my phone wasn't ideal for appending an entry to my journal.Then the thought landed. Being able to update my journal from anywhere, without having to install Dropbox on my phone. Now that's something I would like to be able to do.That weekend I started jotting ideas down for a journalling application that is hosted on your Dropbox account. What I wanted was simple. An interface that allows me to post to my journal without having to sync my Dropbox journal on the devices that I post to my journal.

On the Sunday night I had what was a very rough sketch of the main interface to the application I wanted to build. Over the next few days, I started hacking together a very rough outline of the application to prove that it could work. All I needed to do was pull the current journal file I am writing to from Dropbox, append my journal entry to it and then upload it back to Dropbox. With the help of the Dropbox SDK, I managed to put together a small prototype using Sinatra that proved it could work. Sure it was rough, but it was a start.

Over the next few weeks I started building a more refined version of my journalling application that revolved around the idea of having one screen to update your journal. It had to be simple, non-distracting and quick. And that's how Journalong was born. I wonder if anyone else would use it? So I started building Journalong out to be an application that anyone can use.So what's in the future for Journalong? Who knows, it's only a small product but it's opened my eyes to building more products in the future. Already, I'm thinking of something along the lines of an application that aids in the process of decision making.Anyway that's the background story to Journalong. It's a small application, but a big step for me in the world of building products.

Decision making for those that like a nicely organized journal for their decisions.

via Swiss Miss

So a few weeks ago I needed a quick way to write down an idea to my journal located on my Dropbox folder. I only had my phone with me at the time, so I emailed myself the note in the hope that I would remember to write it to my journal when I got home. I failed big time and remembered the idea 2 weeks later.

Determined to find a better solution to write to my journal, I built a web application that let's you write entries to a journal on your Dropbox account. It's called Journalong.

There's no need to have Dropbox installed on the computer or device you are writing the journal entry on. You just need to authorise Journalong to have access to a single folder on your Dropbox account. This is where your journal will reside.

Journalong will then handle the formatting of the entry, write it to your journal and even create a new journal file for each month when needed.

I've been journalling since the start of the year, and I find that it is a great dumping ground for thoughts, ideas and other stuff. Based on the feedback I get, I hope to that there will be enough initial interest to release it in the next few weeks.

29er singlespeeds just look the part, and this Tomac is no exception.

via singletrackworld.com

But the brain-the mind-is not a muscle. It needs distinct periods of rest, of reflection, of relaxation to be at it best. If not-like a solider in combat who has simply seen too much- it switches off in order to be able to cope. And then the deeper problems occur.

— On Fatigue by Nicholas Bate

That's my goal sorted for 2012 then. It's something that I frequently do. Always putting things that need thinking in front of getting on the bike or taking my son to the park. No more putting this off. I'm going to start limiting my time on the computer so that I can actually do other things to keep myself healthy.

The Kindle Fire is on trial for a number of different patent violations including one for having icons lead to an action on the screen, for instance opening an application. Others include patents from Palm for the ability to run more than one calendar at a time.

via venturebeat.com

Seriously, having an icon lead to an action on the screen has been around for decades. Patent trolls in the true sense of the word.

Over the last few weeks, I've been fleshing out an idea for a product. To test the idea though, I emailed a trusted colleague who has recently launched their own product and has much valued experience in launching a product. I explained the idea behind the product.

The email I got back from my colleague was very detailed and also made me aware of things that I hadn't considered. in a nutshell, they were:

• Importance of market research
• Identifying your target market
• Non-importance of a product name
• Importance of describing the product in a sentence

Armed with this new information I'm putting my text editor down and putting on my marketing hat. It's time to determine who I'm selling to and what they really want from such a product.