Matthew Lang

For the last few years, I’ve been using Day One as a digital journal. However, over the previous few months, I’ve been using it less and less. To the point really where I want to stop using it altogether.

Too much meta

The thing about Day One is that while it is a great journaling app, I’ve noticed that I am becoming more and more distracted with the meta-data for each post. Weather, tags, location, starred. It’s all just a little bit too much.

All I want to do write an entry, attach a picture or two and then move on. Day One does let you do this but it’s the meta-data that I find to be too distracting.

The alternatives

Bear is a great note-taking app. I love it.

I use it for many different things, but the one thing that I would like to do is use it more as a digital journal.

I’ve tried to do this before however, I ended up importing all of Day One’s tags when I did this, so I ended up with more tags than I needed. This time I hope to opt out of importing the tags (or try and remove them before the import) and then start from there.

Sunlit is also on the cards as a digital journal, but I would use this for day trips, weekends away and holidays. I’ll be honest and say that I haven’t tried this yet with Sunlit so it might not meet my expectations.

We’ll see over the next few weeks as I gradually move my journal entries out from Day One.

I missed the Apple education themed announcement yesterday. The time difference means that I’m always in the middle of something else when these things are announced.

A few observations.

A cheaper iPad?

Judging from the reviews on various tech sites though, it seems people were expecting a much cheaper iPad to be released. Something that competes with Google and Chrome OS.

Well they released a cheaper iPad, at least here in the UK they did, however I’m sure it’s not what the tech sites and consumers were hoping for.

It’s not the first time that Apple haven’t met expectations. In fact, they rarely meet perceived expectations, especially when it comes to price.

I’m always amazed at how well Apple does with a range of products that are always priced much higher than their competitors.

I think the day that Apple drops their prices to that of their competitors is the day that Apple is in real trouble.

Schoolwork app

The biggest benefit I seen from yesterday was Apple’s Schoolwork app. A step in the right direction when it comes to digitising education.

However, given the time it takes for school’s to adapt to new digital practices, I don’t see my oldest son, who starts high school this year, being able to take advantage of this for at least a couple of years.

Space gray accessories

One thing that caught my eye was the new space gray accessories that are now available. Sure it doesn’t go with the silver MacBookPro but the black and gray accessories do look nice. I’m not saying I’ll be buying them anytime soon, but if I’m in the market for a replacement keyboard or mouse then I may give them a look.

I wonder if a space gray iMac is on the cards?

A post over at The Guardian highlights a great idea that I would love to see implemented by any social media platform.

I like Derakhshan’s idea of obliging Facebook and others to open up a marketplace of algorithms: if you don’t like the current social media preference for popularity (retweets) and novelty (“latest”), you should be free to choose a different algorithm that acts on different values.

— The people owned the web, tech giants stole it. This is how we take it back

The automated delivery of daily writing prompts from my PenMuse website is stable enough now that I want to consider expanding on it.

Cross-posting to Twitter

I’d like to start cross-posting now from PenMuse’s Micro.blog account to a PenMuse Twitter account.

Cross-posting from Micro.blog to Twitter is the most straightforward and easy way of doing it. It’s nothing more than another way for people to get a daily writing prompt.

The drawback to this is that I’m not exactly the greatest Twitter fan although I do think it’s the lesser evil of the social media platforms.

While I am moving away from Twitter, it doesn’t seem right to set up an account there when I won’t be really using.

The benefit though is that I’m not doing this for myself, I’m doing it for others. Others who don’t use RSS feeds, Micro.blog or visit websites that often. Maybe they just want to use Twitter.

A random afternoon prompt

Each morning the newest writing prompt is published through the site’s main RSS and JSON feeds. I’d like to add another feed that publishes a random feed for the afternoon.

There is one problem with this though. Some of the writing prompts in the collection are seasonal, so I would need to exclude these off until at some point they could be considered based on the time of year.

Staying within the constraints

PenMuse is just a playground app. It’s place where I can experiment with a few coding ideas and techniques and see them working in a product environment. I also don’t spend more than a couple of hours a week on such a app.

To do this the playground app has a few constraints on it.

1. It needs to be free.
2. It needs to be something people will use.
3. It needs to only take up a couple of hours of my time a week.

These constraints take out of my hands decisions that would stop me using PenMuse what it is for. A place to experiment with some Rails code.

These two new features aren’t going to give me any problems coding wise, but it’s going to put PenMuse in more places.

Also these features are still small enough that I can do them within the confines of a couple of hours a week.