Category: Articles

Some time ago I tried Todoist as a replacement for OmniFocus. It didn’t stick, largely because they don’t seem to take encryption seriously, so I was back on OmniFocus. But the one thing missing from OmniFocus that I loved about Todoist was the email I received every morning telling me the tasks for the day. It was a really nice way to look at my day’s overview before I sat down at my Mac.

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I’ve struggled with the personal journal concept my entire life. It’s something that I envy when I see others doing it, even back when it was a spiral notebook journal, but no matter what I do, I can’t keep it up for more than a week or two.

And I love Day One — it is a gorgeous app. I love many of the other journal type apps too. But none of them stick. And it’s not a problem with apps, it’s a problem with my approach.

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Just about every 3-4 months I used to reformat my computer, doing a fresh install of the entire system. It was the best way to speed up the computer and clean out a borked registry.

I am, of course, talking about when I used a PC. I could do the whole process in an evening, and thought it was just an elite skill I had.

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Over two years ago I wrote a post about how to design a site for reading experience. In that post I explored visual clutter by looking at ad placements, image use, and image placement, as a method of determining what attracts your eye, and thus detracts from the reading experience.

My first stab at talking about a readable site was very focused on clutter, and yet very flawed, because of the fact that I looked just at clutter, and not more elements of the site design.

A good, readable, design is far more than just clutter.

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Now that I have posted such a positive MacBook review, especially after talking so much about just wanting an ‘iPad Pro’, a lot of people have been wondering where the iPad fits in for me. That’s a tough question as I don’t see many huge benefits of my iPad Air over my MacBook.

Size isn’t a great advantage anymore, and battery life is par.

I am about to go on a longer trip, and I won’t be taking the MacBook, but that is largely because I don’t plan to do anything but read on that trip. If were planning on writing at all — I would most certainly take the MacBook over my iPad.

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After years of dedication to LaunchBar, I made the move to Spotlight a while back. It’s been about 5 months now, and I honestly am perfectly happy. That’s odd to say, because Spotlight was something I always wanted to strip out of OS X, but with Yosemite (and now El Capitan), Spotlight really has become a powerhouse.

What prompted this move has nothing to do with what Spotlight can and cannot do. It came down to an issue with my computer. For whatever reason my computer showed the pinwheel every time I invoked LaunchBar and I would have to wait quite some time to use the app. Naturally this kills usefulness eventually I figured it out and I got it fixed.

After I fixed it though I wondered: do I need this tool? Does Spotlight work better?

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I hadn’t touched my contexts inside of OmniFocus in, well, years. There was a ton of cruft in there stemming from various different techniques and ideas that I have tried over the years. Device based context, person based context, time based contexts, and location based contexts. For the better part of a year, all of my new tasks in OmniFocus simply went under the Mac context and — well — that’s not really using the tool very well.

But I struggled, because dicking around with my contexts is not productive, is tedious, and frankly it is quite annoying. More than any of that: I didn’t have a single idea of what to change it to.

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Recently, I found out about Paperback.

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Why did I choose this format for my review? Starting almost a month before the new machine and including such minutiae that you cannot believe it? I have no clue.

The Foreword

Below is a timeline of my thoughts, and actions that I took in the lead up to receiving my MacBook. Since the product was severely supply constrained, I was able to take more time to prepare for this change and for writing a better review than I typically have the chance to write.

The entirety of this review is not a chronological explainer, but the forward to the review is. The reason being: showing you my thought process should help you gain additional perspective on where I am coming from with this new MacBook. I took great care to try and best represent an easily comparable baseline for myself. Things like only using my MacBook Pro as a laptop in the lead up, instead of like a desktop, helped to reduce any shock I might have from the new machine being very much a laptop.

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Most reviewers only tell you why they have the perspectives they have. Saying why, in detail, they do or do not like certain things — or why they believe something is truly important. These reviewers tend to base too much on assumptions — assuming that the reader knows far more about their background than they likely do in reality.

The reviewer just asks you to trust them. They know.

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A lot of people only see me from the perspective of this website, and so to the readers of this site, I am a writer. Naturally then, a lot of the email from this site whittles down to: how do you write so much? ((For the record I do not think I write very much.))

So much?

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I’ve found myself traveling a lot more this year, and as such I’ve been able to test out some things that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to in a true travel environment. In most cases I demand two things when I travel: small and reliable.

With that said, here’s a random list of crap that I’ve really liked when traveling this year.

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I didn’t know what to expect, and in a lot of ways I still don’t know what to expect, from the Apple Watch. I’m a person who wears a watch everyday, so looking at my wrist for the time is habit. And like many others, I wasn’t sure I wanted an Apple Watch, well I wanted one, but wasn’t convinced I needed one.

Still, I got one.

And it is, by far, smaller than I thought it would be. I thought it would be some bulbous G-Shock style gadget, but it’s small and sleek. So sleek that my chronograph automatic sits off my wrist higher.

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When I first entered into photography I was never happy, as I didn’t like the delay between snapping an image and waiting to seeing the image after it was developed. I am far too impatient for that. Then digital came about, and while I was slow on the uptake, once I got a dSLR I acquired gear faster than I acquired money. A common problem for photographers, hobbyist or otherwise.

At the start of 2014, more than a year ago, I had a massive kit of photography gear. I had Canon full-frame gear, micro four-thirds gear, and of course the Fujifilm gear. It was madness. The Canon setup had four lenses, three lenses for micro four-thirds, and just one lens on Fuji.

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One of the constant struggles that I face is what do I take with me when I want to, say, go to a coffee shop, or the library for a few hours. Realistically I could take everything, I mean my bag has room. I could also take just my laptop, that would likely cover me as well and would be as minimal as I could get.

It’s just a few hours, why is it so hard to decide what to bring?

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Where I was perfectly happy standing before, I am now prone to switch heights two to three times throughout the day.

That’s what I wrote about the Jarvis adjustable height desk at the end of February 2014. It’s a really great desk, but back in November 2014 I switched jobs and no longer had that desk. This meant trying out new things as I had become accustomed to adjusting my desk height throughout the day.

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I hate mangled up Field Notes, crumpled up business cards, or any number of other small bits of paper I find hanging out in my pockets getting trashed — if I didn’t want these things I would not keep them in my pocket. To combat this, I immediately purchased the DDC Stuff Sheath after reading Josh Ginter’s review of it.

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How in the world does a $10,000 watch make a better dress watch than a $349 Apple Watch? Ok, the more likely question you’re asking is: how does a $349 ever make a better dress watch than a $10,000 watch?

It’s all about style, right?

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