Things (Todo App)

20 May 2009 — eric

After reading and commenting on these 2 blog entries by rbowen: iPhone Todo Apps Things and iPhone Todo Apps; I figured that I would throw my $0.02 on here.

Things by Cultured Code does come with a high price tag. But it is by far the most useful todo app that I have come across.

Let’s do a quick salient point pro/con analysis of this. One of my favorite parts of Things is the concept of context. When you create a todo item, you can tag it with what context it is in. Then you can sort or show your todo’s by context. You can sort by multiple tags. This can be shown with the following example, “How can I see what phone calls I have to make for work?” You can click on the items tagged with work and phone. Then you’ll have which phone calls to make.

The biggest con here is the hefty price tag. It definitely does cause some sticker shock. Between the USD $10 for iPhone app and the USD $50 for the laptop/desktop version, USD $60 can be quite a bit for the simplicity of a todo app.

I have found that since spending the USD $60, I have become a lot more efficient and productive. There are also a lot fewer things that fall through the cracks. I have to face facts that I have a pretty poor memory. So when I have something to do, I immediately put it into Things and then sync it as soon as I am in the same place as my laptop again.

One of the beautiful aspects of Things is its simplicity. It has a simple interface and a very succinct group of menus. The only thing that I believe that Things is missing is alerts. I like the iCal sync and iPhone sync, but I would like it to integrate into Growl. This would be even more useful if you could give specific times that you want the Growl notifications to pop up. I know this isn’t possible in the current state of the iPhone OS (until push notifications from the background are available). But this is certainly an available on the laptop/desktop setup.

I am a big believer in FOSS and Open Source in general. However, I am also a big believer in the right tool for the right job. Sometimes that tool costs a little bit of money. Although it may not be the right tool for everyone, it happened to be a tool that made me a more efficient worker and person.

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More Wolframalpha Easter Eggs

18 May 2009 — eric

While finally getting to play around with the new Wolframalpha search (computational knowledge) engine. I found a few more Easter Eggs in addition to the ones posted on Mashable here and here. It appears that the creators of WolframAlpha believe that proverbs (more commonly referred to as aphorisms) are a handy trait for a computational knowledge engine to have. Regardless, they are fun to play with.

  1. I should probably listen to this one myself. Starting out with this cause it is just amusing.
    All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy

    All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy

  2. Another instance of WolframAlpha being health conscious.
    An apple a day Keeps the doctor away

    An apple a day Keeps the doctor away

  3. It wants to be smarter so it tries to learn from its mistakes (not really, but we are being proverbial here anyway).
    Fool Me Once, Shame On You

    Fool Me Once, Shame On You

  4. In the spirit of the Back To The Future (and other cult film references):
    1.21 Gigawatts

    1.21 Gigawatts

  5. Another great proverb reference ignorance.
    Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind

    Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind

  6. This isn’t really an Easter Egg. I was just expecting a response more like, “There is a season” or something a little more 60s ish. So I am including this one purely for amusement’s sake.
    Turn Turn Turn

    Turn Turn Turn

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Designing Towards The User

13 May 2009 — eric

Any Systems Administrator who hasn’t heard of Tom Limoncelli should probably do some reading. His latest blog post ‘Gorillas in the Mist’ or ‘Sysadmins at the Keyboard’? over at Everything Sysadmin talks about how sometimes the time spent on designing a product or interface could have been better spent if the organization had just spoken to the people who will actually be *using* the systems.

Those of us that actually do the administering of systems and “grew up” without the GUI for the most part, feel more comfortable in the command line environment. Even when I have to fix something in Windows as simple as networking, the first thing I do is open up a command terminal and type ipconfig /renew. All the time that Microsoft spent developing the end user networking GUI was for nothing when dealing with a user like me. But then again, most users that use Windows aren’t like me. And the time Microsoft spent creating the interface was well spent.

The issues come in when someone like Cisco spends hundreds of thousands of dollars writing interfaces for something like the ASAs (which is actually an excellent GUI as far as GUIs go) and most people who deal with ASAs use the command line. I do most of my Cisco work directly using the command line within IOS. All the *nix machines I administer (which is actually quite a few more than I would like to think about at times), I don’t install any of the GUIs. I do everything via the trusty old command line and I know a lot of others do the same.

Even taking this so far as the development world. Even when I write code, I do so using vim on the command line and not an overkill IDE like Eclipse. Even the long time developers and engineers at my company use the command line when given the opportunity. Now this isn’t to say that GUIs don’t have their place, since they certainly do make some tasks, easier, faster, etc. But the fact remains that companies like Cisco will make these GUIs that costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop/test/deploy/maintain, when the majority of the people that use it usually just want a solid debugging tool where they don’t have to keep clicking over and over (as Tom notes).

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Social Media Information Propagation

12 May 2009 — eric

This morning I read the news story Irish Student Hoaxes World Media With Fake Quote. To summarize the article, an Irish student put a few quotes on Wikipedia on the page of a composer who had recently passed away to see how quickly people would use them. He made up the quotes and they were quickly on the editorial sheets.

The point is that we are all too quickly grabbing information without verifying. Although Wikipedia provides an invaluable service to the online community, it is all to easy to abuse. It seems as though writers have forgotten the scientific part of their career; fact checking. Although I am not a journalist, nor will I ever be, I think that sacrificing fact checking in order to make a deadline may be the wrong approach.

This is just my point from the perspective of Wikipedia. Let’s take this from another social media perspective like Twitter. For example, let’s say that someone wrote on Twitter:

RT @mattcutts Google will no longer honor the rel=”nofollow” aspect of linking

This could cause a pretty big uproar. There will be a massive amount of Tweeting both letting people know that Matt did not say this as well as people blindly retweeting this. Blog entries will show up saying why Google shouldn’t do that. Matt Cutts will likely have to write a blog entry saying he said no such thing. And I am sure all sorts of other hilarity will ensure. The speed of information in this day and age is so fast that misinformation can quickly wreak havoc. This is also a testament to the fact that people are generally more likely to spread negative information than positive information.

And to think all of this could have been avoided by a simple fact check by the first person who did an RT (after the person who made up the quote). And although it would be an interesting social experiment to test such a fact (as above), I think I’ll pass. Just keep in mind, fact checking is not something that should be left by the wayside.

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