tech ronin

iPod Radio

I've been getting into podcasts lately. For a while, I was resisting this sister medium, but hey it's cool even if I'm not quite ready to do it myself.

Right now I'm listening to Adam Christianson's MacCast. He's sincere, has a pleasing voice, thinks well on his feet and does a high quality Mac-focused show.

As an information delivery vehicle, podcasting is hot. It's human-scale radio with all the advantages of portability, timeshifting and narrowcasting. Podcasting gives us flexibility, convenience and control. Now if only we could keep podcasting free of advertising, we'd be set.

And, if you are a heavy computer user, your eyes will thank you when you give them a break and listen to a podcast. Because you don't have to read, you are free to listen and learn while walking, running, driving or lying down in bed with your eyes shut.

The one big drawback to any kind of cast is that they are serial programs. Many of us hate voice mail, preferring to skim and skip through our email. The risk of listening to podcasts is that of being trapped in a sequential experience that you can't control. This risk can be easily enough mitigated by slicing up, indexing and documenting the content so that we can find, skim and skip between slices.

Since I'm a self-employed software developer, I don't have a commute which is one of the best places to listen to podcasts. But I do take walks daily and lately I've been loading up some podcasts with my music. There is some competition there between Podcast talk shows and music.

By the way, when I bought my 1 gig iPod shuffle, I thought I would use it as a USB drive on the side. Not. I don't want to give up any megabytes at all for potential data storage. I would rather carry my tiny 512 mb cruzer mini for data. Sure glad I got the 1 gig shuffle.

One more thing on the shuffle. It's great. But I still would like a little LCD on there. Sometimes I download a bunch of music that I think I might like and then put my shuffle on, well, shuffle. And then I hear one of these new songs and don't know who the artist is. I would like to just glance over and see that information. I'm hoping Apple will release a shuffle with a tiny screen before too long.

Technorati Tags: podcasting, podcast listening, iPod shuffle

FlySketching

FlySketch 1.0 by Gus Mueller at Flying Meat, maker of VoodooPad, is a cool new Mac tool for doing screen shots and then drawing on top of them with a nice little set of drawing and texting tools. Lets you adjust the opacity and size of your overlay so that you can see through what you add to the original screenshot underneath. Priced for the impulse buy at $19.95.

Flying Meat's sales pitch is: "Draw, highlight, everywhere." The FlySketch window can float above your other apps any time you want by clicking the keyboard shortcut of your choice. With it's adjustable transparency, it feels kind of like a resizeable magnifying glass that you are moving around the screen.

FlySketch has a basic line drawing tool with optional arrow head(s) and a highlighter that can do any color highlight. There's a workflow menu which can do all sorts of tricks with other applications and remember the action so it can do it again next time you need the same thing. I haven't tried out the scripting piece yet but was able to send the graphic I created to a new email in one command.

As a FileMaker software developer, I can see using FlySketch for both my user manual and user support. I can quickly markup a screenshot of my product to explain something and then in one click get it into an email. That's going to be handy.

This is an obvious blogging tool. And the more our work goes online and is delivered by email, FTP or what have you, the more an ultra-light-weight, work-anywhere annotation tool like this makes sense. I've got Snapz Pro X and Fireworks already, but I'm betting I'll use FlySketch more often than either of them due to its simplicity and convenience. This is a tool that won't slow me down with its complexity.

iPod Prices Down Today

Thank you Apple for lowering the prices. We got a $199 iPod mini. We got a huge drop in the iPod photo to $349 for the 30 gig model. I'm most tempted by the 30 gig color (face it - it's a color iPod) which feels like you could stretch a little and consider it in impulse buy range. But then, I start thinking I should just spring for the 60 gig version and then the price is out of my impulse buy range. Oh well...

So, what does it mean that they lowered prices? This is 2 major price drop actions for Apple. Here are some possibilities:

The iPod Photo was outside too many people's comfort zone and needed to be reduced in price to get better sales volume there - after all, it's the iPod's flagship. There were indications that most people were opting for the $299 20 gig model and not signing up for the pricey but sexy photo models. Probability: High.

Apple feels that competition bearing down on them in the portable music-player market and wants to do a preemptive strike before they have to start sweating. Probability: Likely.

Apple is going for it. They've got the money in the bank, incredible stock prices and everything is looking good. They are pulling out the stops to gain marketshare. And this means they will drop Mac prices soon too. Probability: So-So. Naturally, this is the scenario that I'm crossing my fingers for. Drop those Powerbook and PowerMac prices!

DEVONthink, Part 2

OK. It's been 11 days since my first post about DEVONthink. And I'm still going strong with it. Loving it. The only downside is that it's triggered the collector in me to scavenge the web for high-quality information which is a great diversion from the more challenging items on my to do list.

I tried NoteTaker and NoteBook and somehow tired of the multiple notebook approach. Then I've been creating little RTF and RTFD files when I find content I want to save for reference and dump them into my Information folder which I sort into subfolders periodically. Then I started trying other apps and most recently was putting things into StickyBrain 3 quite happily. But now I move those clippings into DEVONthink my current repository of choice.

I highlight what I want in a webpage or RSS reader or email or whatever and press Cmd-Shift-). That creates, compliments of the Services menu, a new little document inside DEVONthink's database named with the first line of the selection copied. You can also append to your last note just as easily.

Geof's comment to my first post was about how to decide when to use which tool.

I am interested to hear of your progress through Notebook/taker, StickyBrain, OmniOutliner, DevonThink and DevonAgent. This "knowledger" stuff fascinates me too, as I wrote to you last year. What I'd be most interested in is not what is "best" but a better sense of how to decide what tool for what job. These packages are not expensive but the time needed to use them well is the real "expense" it seems to me. - Geof

Good Question, but the truth is, I don't really have an answer to that yet. I'm not sure I want to do more than one of these knowledge repository tools concurrently - but probably will use some of my other tools as I come across particular needs.

DEVONthink is oriented towards researchers and writers - a little more professional slant - than StickyBrain. StickyBrain slants more towards the *consumer* end of the scale and is actively improving in some important ways (such as Palm synching just recently). DEVONthink is more high-end with its speed, see also, auto classification, summarization and keyword comparisons. But, luckily it is not priced out of reach for someone who isn't a professional researcher or writer - just a passionate amateur here.

It's an interesting question whether to go with the tool with broader appeal (StickyBrain in this comparison) that may garner more market share due to it's simplicity and fun aspects (like colored stickies) or to go with the more powerful, higher-end tool. I often try to strike a balance because even though I want the more exotic features of the high-end tool, it may never sell enough to give the software company enough revenue/budget to make it a great product in terms of ease of use and look and feel. If you are really into this knowledge stuff, you'll find things like auto-classify a lot of fun anyway. It's fun to click the classify button to instantly see a ranked list of filing options. Sometimes I agree and, in one click of the Move button, it's there. A great way to while away a few spare minutes when I'm offline with my PowerBook.

There's an included AppleScript that moves all your Mail or a selected folder to DT too. I tried it on my entire Mail file - HUGE - but it timed out at one point and I haven't yet been able to find the partially transferred email. I'm hoping I can get this to work because there's lots of good stuff in my email archives that I would like access to with DT's cool search and organize tools.

DEVONthink personal edition strikes a balance towards the high-end but still gets the look and feel right (they recently overhauled the UI taking better advantage of Cocoa's UI toolset). This is a sweet spot that I find irresistable. Integration with DEVONagent (which I'm still trying out) plus the AI secret sauce you get in See Also is keeping me glued to DEVONthink right now.

Back to my apparent abandonment of the outliner-oriented tools. They're still strong as writing and thinking tools at minimum. When I need to write about something with some complexity, an outliner helps me gather, sort and organize the related information and ideas that I have. What I'm abandoning is outliner tools as my repository for the information I collect every day. And even then, DEVONthink works better when I put information into folders and subfolders which is essentially outlining. It just doesn't lead with the outline as it's primary feature.

What DEVONthink doesn't require of me is that I know where to put something at the point of acquisition. That's a huge advantage! I run across something interesting and all that means is that I recognize it as of interest to me. I may not know at that moment why it is interesting.

I just recently read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (great read) and he talks about the first 2 seconds of looking - the decisive glance that knows in an instant. I can grab stuff in that instant and review later to see why it grabbed me and where it goes in my folder hierarchy. And I don't worry too much if my classification step doesn't happen right away or isn't perfect because I trust the system to help me find it and take advantage of it even if it's not optimally categorized.

This is a very exciting space with lots of small players. Geof mentioned above that perhaps it is the learning time that is the gating factor in using these tools. Good point. That's why I keep my radar up scanning for better tools. I don't want to invest more than I should in any one tool if there's a better one out there. But the value is there and I want to participate in this process. And, with DEVONthink, I'm getting quick returns on my time and money investment.

When Being a Mac-User Becomes a Career Asset

If you are a creative person and are forward-leaning - liking to work for companies that are flexible, innovative and even leading-edge, you might find that those types of companies will begin to make positive associations when they find out you are a Mac user - expecially if you are a knowledgeable one.

Here's why. From the beginning, Mac has been associated with the creative industries. The 1984 ad was a huge brand/lifestyle statement. The Think Different campaign associated Mac with the offbeat, maveric, innovator and genius.

We are now entering a time where innovation, disruptive technologies, thinking outside the box and creativity are actually valued as opposed to just getting paid lip service. You don't have to be a Mac user to have a rep for being visionary, creative or innovative. But, being a Mac user will be one more piece of evidence that you are on that side of the fence. Willing to use the software you think is best and break out of the norm.

Of course, I am horribly biased. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong.

Knowledger Killer Apps: DEVONthink and DEVONagent

If you are a knowledge junkie and you use OS X, you gotta check out DEVONthink and DEVONagent. This is my discovery post. I quickly reached my purchase threshold today and bought these two little guys as a bundle for $65.

I didn't even try them first. Yesterday I read Liz Lawley's post that she had purchased DEVONthink and I made a mental note. She had some great links that got me very interested. Steven Berlin Johnson made a good case for DEVONthink in his NYT piece Tools for Thought and sold me decisively with his subsequent detailed blog post Tool for Thought. Then the NetNewsWire 2 smart search I created found even more evidence of its value and led me to the Intelligence Times Two bundle deal.

I'm an optimist and get pretty excited when I feel like perhaps I'm onto the current holy grail of knowledge apps. When I opened up DEVONagent it started out with the search field loaded with DEVONthink. I pressed the button and it went out on the NET to get me a Fast Scan of everything I ever wanted to know about DEVONthink. It found 71 pages. It didn't take long to try out the Deep Scan. How about 1706 pages and 41 megs all ranked with colorful bars for relevance?

Remember how I wanted a desktop search tool and complained about Google a while back? I've been very pleased with NetNewsWire's newsreading, searches and smart search subscriptions, but DEVONagent takes me further into where I want to go. I'll keep the NNW, but this desktop search tool with smarts and easy transfer to DEVONthink is what I've been waiting for. Cool!!!

I'll follow up with you as the dust settles!

[Note: I used the made up word, knowledger in my post title in place of the word knowledge-worker. I wanted an add-on word like worker that wasn't limited to work. It needs to include play, hobby, curiosity and passionate amateur connotations too. But, I couldn't think of a good word so just shortened the word to knowledger and crossed my fingers when I hit the post button.]

Apple should start shipping Mac mini with 512 mb now!

OK. Maybe it was a gamble to do the Mac mini. Maybe the shuffle was a risk. But, the gamble worked and you are WAY behind in your orders. Let people buy machines that work well out of the box at CompUSA, Target, Best Buy and K-Mart - wherever. Don't make them hassle with RAM after they open the box!!!! That's stupid. Stop the presses or whatever they use to make those little minis and put in the 512's now!