My Twenty Primary iPod/iPhone Apps

As people do seem to be asking me about iPhone/iPod apps quite a lot these days, I am posting this here so that in future I shall have something I can link to. Borrowing the format established by the excellent First and 20 website I have listed the twenty apps that are most useful to me and thus have earned a spot on my home screen. I am forever adding and subtracting apps off my iPod, but this core set remains consistent and any new app needs to really make an impression on me to knock one of these twenty off my first screen in SpringBoard.

My Cloud Library

(or “No, it will not be meta-ironic if I call it Spellr”)
The inline spell-checker in FireFox 2 is one of its most useful features. Particularly now that I am writing much more text within the browser. The days when I really only typed little more than passwords and occasional email addresses into browsers are well past. Today I am typing long blog posts, short comments, and all sorts of data into web applications.
I habitually work on more than one computer. A practice which has revealed an (perhaps unforeseen) opportunity within this dictionary/spelling space.
The pre-loaded core dictionary that the spell-checker begins with is of limited utility without all of the custom words: names, surnames, brand names, and industry-specific terms that I am constantly adding. Extrapolating from the individual to the collective, each of us has our own unique, arguably valuable, collection of words
FireFox caches my unique wordset onto my hard drive. When I write a first draft blog post on my work Mac, I correct all of my mis-spellings and add all of the unrecognised, yet correctly-spelt, words into my custom dictionary. Later, when I complete that post on our home laptop, the screen is once again littered with red underlines as that second instance of FireFox is checking my text against its own local custom dictionary. I then have to go though those words again, adding each of them to this custom dictionary. (Once you have published a few blog posts with screaming typos in them, you get pretty careful about copy-checking before hitting the Publish button.)
Therefore, why not have my custom wordset out in the cloud, and not stored locally at all? Think of doing for spell-checking what Del.icio.us does for bookmarking. Actually best not to think in terms of spell-checking at all. That is really only the task supported by, and enhanced by, your personal wordset. It is more helpful to think a lot broader than the specific example I gave above. Think of your custom wordset as data that you continually add more value to every day. There have to be great benefits to having that dataset be accessible across multiple platforms and also to-be portable. For example, say a FireFox-killer arrives in a few years time, do I want to have to start the whole process of generating a complete new custom dictionary again if I migrate to a new browser? Or if I change job and am issued with a new laptop? Do I want to have to teach my friend’s names to every new mobile phone that I buy?
I did a quick search and the existing model for online services in this space are basic spell-checking sites: paste in a block of text and have it checked. A closer model to what I envisage is Google’s inline spell-checker (which seems to override FireFox’s, although I am unsure how that pecking order works). What I cannot divine is whether theirs is fully integrated or not. I want to teach GoogleSpell a word by adding it while writing a Gmail today and have it recognise the same word in Google Docs tomorrow*. If I include someone’s nickname in their contact details in Gmail, then I want Gspell to not flag that word as misspelled in my Gmail. Making this happen within a suite of products yoked together with a common user profile and log-in has to be more manageable than aiming for the Internet at large. Building this within a related suite of applications could provide short term lock-in.
Back to creating this as a stand-alone web service then, technically speaking there would be some a lot of non-trivial issues to overcome to achieve this. Would you have to log-in to your browser to activate your wordset? Or, if the service is disassociated from the browser, would it need an open tab at all times? Interoperability with all my devices and platforms would be ideal: I imagine writing something in my smartphone on the morning commute; giving it a polish in Google Docs over lunch, and then publishing via Blogger that evening. Would it be better for my smartphone to simply cache the most current wordset when I sync it, or to pull it live directly out of the cloud?
Another issue is that a service like this adds another component to your online data shadow. If someone (say a potential employer) could gain access to your personal wordset and run statistical analysis or personality profiling over it, what are the implications there? As usual the Faustian trade-off appears to be increased functionality versus having your private data residing out of your absolute control.
Batting this one around with David, he pointed out that, apart from giving the Google Conspiracy Faction even more to fret about, this class of solution will probably evolve into a component of a master personal dataset stored online. This ultimate dataset facilitating everything from spell-check, drag-and-drop files/data/ in and out, to whatever your having yourself. Therefore not being computer/browser/Google-specific. All of which gives me a few more ideas...

*It does not at the moment. I used the made-up word “Cloodliberairiewooord” to check.
Delicious Tags: Online Dictionary | Browser | | Productivity
Technorati Tags: Online Dictionary | Browser | Productivity

The Distraction Economy

At what point does the time invested in social applications outweigh the utility gained?

I am an enthusiastic advocate of online applications: they are enjoyable to use and are fundamentally useful to me. I gain the most utility from my core suite of this blog, my Del.ici.ous list, my Bloglines feed and my Flickr site. Most of the time that I invest in using these tools is productive – but not all of it. Recently, and particularly with the roll-out of some disarmingly attractive new features on all three platforms, I have found myself doing a lot more of what you might call internet-gardening: digging the weeds, sprucing up the hedgerows and moving the metaphorical flowerbeds around. This is time spent implementing new site features, revising meta-data on existing content, tinkering with administration settings or adjusting interface templates. All of which is undoubtedly enjoyable, but questionably beneficial.

The fact is that the new features that are most compelling (I am reluctant to write addictive) invariably require some time-intensive, non-automatable work: content classification, meta-tagging and the like. Flickr’s new geo-tagging feature, which was rolled out last Monday, is probably the most topical example. It is not in any way essential to your enjoyment of Flickr, but it is quite nifty. (It definitely has that ‘hey – have a look at this’ factor that creates an initial cloud of emails, posts and water-cooler chatter.) Unfortunately, the time required to fully implement geo-tagging across your photoset is a function of the amount of time you have already invested in Flickr. It is going to take a power-user with three thousand images a lot longer to geo-tag his photoset than Joe Sureshot who has only eighty images posted online.

This is unfortunate if you do not have that discretionary time and are completeness-prone like myself. I got to geo-tag some images over my lunchbreak and left the majority as yet untagged. Now ‘add geo-tags to the rest of my Flickr photos’ has become another in a long line of non-critical incompletables on my action list. It sits there alongside such classics as ‘add photos to the balance of my Gmail contact list’; ‘add category labels to all my blog posts’, ‘edit/rationalise my Del.ici.ous tags’ and ‘add cover art images to the rest of my albums in iTunes’.

The key phrase in the last paragraph has to be ‘completeness-prone’. As there is a certain personality-type invoked here. If you are the kind of person who does like to refine and improve the sorting and classification of your online data-shadow, you may find now yourself in an escalating arms race with the web apps that give you novel and ever-expanding frameworks within which to frame your data.

In a similar vein, Tom Coates wrote recently about the time many people now invest within Second Life and how it was plausible to continue with that self-imposed commitment, yet come to resent it. I have kept well away from both Second Life and World OfWarcraft for precisely that reason. I absolutely do not need any more distractions. Although such online environments need to be considered as a different class than web applications.

At least the end-result of working through implementing the various new features discussed here is that they do make the online applications more useful, either for me alone or for other users and visitors. So there is undoubtedly a pay-off to the effort involved. The trick is in finding the sweet spot where the effort needed on upkeep remains proportionate to the usefulness gained.

Note: To pre-empt a notional Blogger implementation of geo-tagging at some future date: this post was composed in transit between 53°23'8.65"N / 6°25'24.25"W and 53°20'38.79"N / 6°14'50.00"W

Gotta-Gotta Get that GTD

There is a truism which states that you will invariably have most of your best ideas when you least expect them: in the shower, walking your dog in the park, you know the type of scenarios. Basically everywhere except the time and the place that would be optimally convenient. As I spend my time thinking about, and generating ideas for, my client’s branding and design requirements, I have found this truism particularly apt. My friends who work in other creative disciplines would no doubt agree.

That I now find myself increasingly having to address this is one of the unforeseen consequences I have to live with since the arrival of ‘The Boy’ (to borrow a phrase from Homer J. Simpson). It has only now become truly apparent to me how much of my project and career-related thinking I have always been processing offline in my free time. Issues and challenges that were utterly defeating me on, say Tuesday afternoon, I would often efficiently resolve on Wednesday morning after more-or-less unconsciously working them through the previous evening. Alas no more, my evenings are now completely consumed by Ethan-related activities (and no complaints about that).

Consequently, I find myself now having to address means of maximising the hours I can assign to my career and of making every minute count. Given that I believe that I already have some of the accepted personal productivity basics in place after working for fifteen. What I need is something that will help me to move everything up to the next level. Researching this online, it seems that there is a lot of renewed talk in the blogosphere about ‘Getting Things Done’ or GTD – the personal productivity system du-jour for today’s time-poor knowledge worker. It is also obvious, from looking at Lifehacker, 43Folders and their ilk, that I am not quite as organised as I like to think I am.

The Guardian also seems to be on a definite mini-GTD trip at the moment, with Ben Hammersy’s recent interview with David Allen and last week’s Tech piece on successfully implementing the system.

GTD seems well-worth a try, so I have bought the book. I am only as far as chapter two so far (those busy evenings, remember), and I have not fully re-organised myself yet. But let’s see how it goes. Maybe I will be a super-optimised individual, with a ‘mind-like-water’ before I know it.

One niggling aspect is that GTD (online at least) seems to be at risk of evolving into a ‘Cult Of GTD’, along the lines of the ‘Cult Of Mac’. I do not have an intention of becoming a GTD Evangelist, hassling all of my friends to get with the programme.

Technorati Tags: GTD

On the (Seemingly Infinite) Divisibility of Time

It is challenging to distill one particular observation from the experience of sharing your life with a newborn baby – as the cumulative effect is so overwhelming. That said, one very noticable survival mechanism that does kick in is an ability to maximise the utility of every single one of the smaller (hitherto throwaway) segments of your day. “I have three minutes Right Now, so I can iron that tee-shirt.” and “I have two minutes Right Now, so I can empty the bins.” and so on.

Combining lots of these chronological lego blocks gets the larger tasks done. Consequently you can forget about such left-brain niceties as starting a task and then finishing it. You live in more of a right-brain state of flow, with all of your tasks ongoing at the same time in a perpetual state of near-but-not-quite-completition. Then, when you do get an idle moment, you can ask yourself “whatever did I do with all of that free time I used to have?” Write blog posts is probably my answer.

Information-A-Go-Go

Daragh recently let me borrow his copy of ‘Singularity Sky’, Charlie Stross’ debut sci-fi novel. One of its themes is the strongly disruptive effect upon a society of a technology (so-called Cornucopia Machines) that removes the cost of, and barriers to, all production and physical manufacturing at the level of the individual. This point intrigues me today, as I ponder a far, far less dramatic disruption point: I think I may have wandered into a self-induced bout of Information Overload.

Today we have our own ‘cornucopia’ to deal with – the vast silos of free information clamouring for our attention online. There are no costs (or only marginal costs) implicit in accessing so much of this information that I find it increasingly easy to become over-subscribed. I try to fool myself into thinking that I can keep on top of multiple sources of information: web news, blogs, podcasts, print magazines and books. While really not keeping up with many of them and still piling even more in on top of my mental in-tray. Seems like I have not yet succeeded in shifting my mindset from a scarcity-orientated model.

At the latest count I have about 16.8 days worth of audio on my iPod. If I had to estimate how much of that I had actually managed to listen to in the last six months, it could not be more than four days. (That would be an interesting functionality to add into iTunes: a pie-chart showing that breakdown, also some bar-charts of listening stats by category or genre, while I am at it...) But the relevant fact here is that the total amount of audio in my iPod is rising at more-or-less a daily rate. Not a weekly or fortnightly rate, which was the level of increase that I originally estimated, based on the amount of new music I thought the iPod would encourage me to buy. Last November, when I got my iPod, there was little or no podcast activity online and I had not given any thought about using it for spoken word. Today, I find myself caching audio-book chapters, interviews and recordings of presentations from IT Conversations and the like. Not to mention geekoid radio programmes. Then add in downloads from the sources of Free-To-Air licensed music that are out there. That is often 100 to 150MB of new audio going into my ‘Check This Out’ playlist file daily. Two forty-minute commutes each workday is only going to eat so much of that particular elephant.

With the AvantGo mini-browser on my Palm PDA, I get the daily feeds of all online content from the BBC News site, Guardian Unlimited, Guardian Books, Guardian Film, Guardian Media, The New York Review of Books and Reuters UK. I try to skim that lot on the commute. (When I am not scribbling down random blog musings like this one.) However, there is no real sense of cumulative information overload with AvantGo, as each time I sync my Palm it does a complete rewrite. So you only ever have access to the most up-to-date content, there is no deep archive.

Not so with my RSS feed reader, as I am discovering. The fact that the number of unread posts appears beside each feed has an interesting side-effect. I find that it encourages two categories of feed use. Those I check every day, keeping on top of the unread posts. And those where, once the number unread goes above a certain threshold, I keep putting off reading because of the amount of time it is going to take me. Until I eventually do a complete blitz and tackle 150–200 posts at a time from that feed. The volume of posting per feed is also an influence here – you would not want to fall too far behind reading BoingBoing or you could be swamped in hundreds of unread posts. But I definitely give myself RSS-guilt when I see all those unread posts. Because, well you never know, but one of them might contain that one insight, novel idea or relevant factoid that would be really helpful to me today...

Even posting this now has reminded me about all of the white papers and discussion papers I have stored as PDFs on this PDA filed under: ‘For Reading Later’. (Doh!)

The aspect of this which inspired this post is that, after subscribing to and accumulating and perusing all of this information, how much relevant content am I actually retaining? Because – if I do not process the useful information in some way and convert it into knowledge, opinion, analysis or new ideas – then I am really only surfing in the most literal sense. Merely gliding along the surface of this volume of content and not thinking in-depth about enough of it.

Practically speaking, I should create more elaborate and effective filters and learn to use the Unsubscribe button more ruthlessly. Perhaps I have too much free time? (A situation that will most likely remedy itself in the not-to-distant future.)

Technorati Tags: iPod | RSS | AvantGo

Bloglines (or Getting It Together – Part Two)

Following on from migrating all of my stray emails online for device-independent access, I have been getting some good use out of the Bloglines online blog aggregator. Some context here: the BFK studio is still running on System 9.N, which means that I cannot install any aggregator applications directly onto my work G4 (as they only come in OS-X flavours). So I was caching different and inconsistent lists of blogs onto the various machines I use at work and at home.

Therefore migrating all of those into one online dashboard seemed to make some sense. The Bloglines service is easy to set up and easy to use. Maybe too easy: while undoubtably I can scan the blogosphere more efficiently, the quantity of blogs I am tracking has increased so that the amount of time spent is roughly the same (or perhaps maybe even increased).

Next then is to set up some Technorati watch-lists and plug their RSS feeds into Bloglines. After that I am thinking of moving all of my dispersed favourites lists online to del.icio.us. Then I will be completely platform-independent. Which I imagine will be useful when I eventually have a 5G-Blackberry-iPhone-watchamacallit!

Getting It Together

With eighteen weeks or so to go until ‘Day Zero’, Val and I are undoubtedly progressing with the nesting phase — clearing out and sorting out a lot of the extraneous material from our house prior to the arrival of The Tribble. The mood is obviously becoming infectious as I find myself executing a similar process with all of my own flotsam and miscellanies in the digital realm.

(Attention Conservation Notice: the following is pretty much some nerd-orientated thinking-out loud type of material, so if you have anything better to do, etc.)

Inspired by the Digital Aggregation article (linked to on 7 February 2005) I have been conducting a slash and burn operation on my own ‘data silos’. Not surprisingly, email has turned out to be the biggest headache. One of the downsides of our having three computers at home is that you end up with emails stashed away on three separate hard disks. So finding any one email whenever you need to is more complicated than it ought to be. There is more joy when you factor in all of the personal emails sent to my work address and stored on my hard disk there. A further complication there is that, as work only switched to Entourage last year, the majority of that archive of emails is buried in a Quickmail client that is not even online anymore. Whatever is a boy to do?

A Gmail account with 1000MB of online storage seemed a good place to start (thanks Benny!) That is now making a good repository for all of the old content I might conceivably want to look at again. It also gives me some more useful tools than Outlook. Each email can be tagged with as many classes as I like, so I can sort and review along multiple axis. My whole archive is Google-searchable, so finding that really obscure web link from Daragh should now be a doddle. Ultimately the clincher is that, because it is an offsite cache, I will now have access to this material wherever I go online.

However, now there is the not-inconsiderable matter of incrementally going through my old emails and ruthlessly applying the 80:20 rule to find those pearls of wisdom worth retaining. Which task is going to eat up quite a few of my foreseeable lunch breaks...

Digital Lifestyle Aggregation

Now this is an idea that we could see more of in 2005. Digital Lifestyle Aggregation I could definitely do with some more efficient way of interfacing with and managing all of those ‘data silos’.

(And an easier way to manage images online too, given that I foresee a major increase in digital photography output with the arrival of The Tribble sometime in July...)