rare pattern thoughts in a blog

MacJournal gets all kinds of raves from the various software reviewing sites, but I have to wonder why.

The raves were enough to get me to overlook the very "web 1.0" style of Mariner Software's website. The MobileMe sync feature was enough to get me to pony up $34.95 instead of going for Journler, which is cheaper now and has a very nice feature set itself. I wanted this app to serve as my new business journaling software. The sync ability is important to me because I often do my best thinking at home, away from the daily hubbub at the office.

Once installed, MacJournal worked fine.

But then I tried to sync it across two computers. Every time the MobileMe sync ran, it wanted to delete several entries.

Right now, after a series of updates, my MacJournal journal has been whittled back down to the first entry I made. Good thing I had saved the rest as one-off backups, because I saw the problem coming thanks to MobileMe's warning about massive changes due to sync.

In the Mariner Software email receipt, it says:

* Have a question or comment? Join the Mariner Software Discussion Forum.

http://www.marinersoftware.com/forum/

Like most forums, you have to register to post. However, once I registered, I was informed:

Before you can login and start using the forum, your request will be reviewed and approved. When this happens, you will receive another email from this address.

Lovely. Nothing like the warm welcome of customer support! Mariner offers no support email, so this is it: A discussion forum jailed off from the real world.

–Not that I expect much from the forums. The existing threads have very stale content, much of it about problems syncing, with no clear resolution. One poster even goes so far to advise everyone to skip MobileMe sync for MacJournal altogether, and use a direct syncing application to pass the database back and forth.

That's not what I wanted!

So MacJournal is turning out to be a major dud software purchase and likely a waste of $35. Maybe I will just stick with Bare Bones' Yojimbo, which I use for note-taking, and expand my use of it to include journaling. The problem there, though, is there's no way to export Yojimbo except one entry at a time, which again is pretty frustrating for an application in 2008.

*sigh*

Update September 16th:

Not one to just rant and quite, once my user account was manually approved today, I posted this issue in the Mariner forums. So far, the only response is from someone else experiencing the same problems. Alas.

Update September 19th:

No other responses. I would say this does not bode well for expecting any kind of support. Mariner MacJournal is not at all recommended by me.

This is really just a test to see how MacJournal does with Drupal sites. In this case there’s the added challenge that I am not blogging using the “blog” content type -- a detail that stymies some blog apps like ecto.

Anyway, I’m curious to see how this works.

Today I downloaded and installed Firefox 3 Beta 4. I could not do it before, but now that the Web Developer tools are updated and Firebug has a 1.1 beta that works in FF3, that's enough for me.

I don't know about you, but on both Macs I use regularly, Firefox 2 was crashing all the time. Last night, while writing a blog post for BlogHer, my browser crashed at least a dozen times. On my Mac Pro, Firefox completely melted down -- twice -- requiring complete rebuild from the start, manually adding one plug-in at a time. But I had to stick it out because I need those developer tools. I cannot imagine working without Firebug.

The new UI is clean, and seems to take up a bit less space. And so far FF3 is fast. Me likes.

As a citizen and computer user, I agree that Apple is wrong to push Safari on Windows users:

Debate is raging today over the news that Steve Jobs has made good on his summertime promise and is now sending Apple's browser Safari along for the ride when Windows users are prompted to update iTunes or Quicktime.

Users can deselect the additional software download, but let's be realistic - there's got to be millions of people unwittingly downloading Safari onto their computers right now. Downloading software has to be opt-in, not opt-out.

As a web developer, however, I am quietly thrilled that there's a real possibility that a significant number of people will stop using the crapware Internet Explorer -- especially IE6, which cannot die a soon enough death, in my book. Microsoft's browser has been a huge sap on productivity in web development, thanks to its continued refusal to adopt CSS standards.

So "boo" to Apple, but a bigger and pre-existing "BOO" to Microsoft. Here I prefer the lesser of two boos.

After comparing many programs for my regular note-taking, I keep returning to Yojimbo. The tagging system and spotlight support are enough for me to find my misc notes. Syncing via .Mac has a nice wrinkle in that it will merge changes to individual files, so if you update a file on one computer, and another file on the other computer, when you sync them both changes are reflected on both machines. Still, while the tagging approach can be fast, creating more complex relationships is difficult, if not impossible. In the end, Yojimbo is not ideal, and I'm still planning on trying alternatives, but this is what I have.

What's worse, I'm kind of painted into a corner because BareBones has decided, in their wisdom, to provide no way at all to export your items except one at a time. There's also no way to export for backup, unless you want to manually back up the Yojimbo Application Support folder in your user Library.

This means that, out of the box, the only way to move files or back up your notes in Yojimbo is to use .Mac ... which is not ideal, when you consider the rather objectionable .Mac EULA, that includes such lovely items such as:

Subject to any specific license agreements for various .Mac software
features (including third party software), Apple may change, suspend or
discontinue any (or all) aspects of .Mac at any time, including the
availability of any .Mac feature. Apple may also impose limits on the
use of or access to certain features or portions of .Mac, or restrict
your access to any part or all of .Mac, in all cases without notice or
liability.

In other words, they can just kill your stuff without consequence. Oh sure, they would never do that! But if not, then why do they claim the right in the agreement?

And:

Apple reserves the right to terminate your access to .Mac at any time,
with cause or without cause, in the event of any breach of this
Agreement by you (or anyone using your account or any sub-account),
your infringement of Apple's or .Mac's or others' intellectual
property, or any other circumstances which, in Apple's sole discretion,
merit termination. Any such termination may, if Apple elects (and
subject to applicable law), be without any refund to you of any prepaid
fees or amounts.

Translation: Apple can arbitrarily cancel your account and keep your money, and you have no recourse.

And:

APPLE RESERVES THE RIGHT (SUBJECT TO APPLICABLE LOCAL LAW), IN ITS SOLE
DISCRETION, TO MONITOR ALL .MAC FEATURES AND CONTENT, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO A USE OF A USER'S MAIN ACCOUNT AND ANY SUB-ACCOUNTS, FOR THE
PURPOSE OF INVESTIGATING VIOLATIONS OF THIS AGREEMENT.

Translation: Apple can look at all your private files.

Why would I pay $99 a year, or more, for service under such terms? So this is now what I'm trying to avoid.

So does anyone out there know of a way to synchronize Yojimbo between machines without .Mac?

I have a new technological love affair: SpamSieve. 200+ fewer love notes in my in-box every day.

Alas, I'll just have to do without all that helpful unsolicited information. I'll miss notices that I need to go tell my bank my bank account number. I'll not see all those customer inquiries about my eBay items I didn't realize I'd put up for auction. I'll be oblivious to the fact that I've been approved for a $347,978 mortgage. Warnings to avoid enhancement pills will escape my notice. Forget about cureall [sic] stores and veiny illustrations of male appendages. And the Nigerian Minister will just have to find another lucky soul.

I never realized just how much baseline stress receiving so much useless and offensive crap was causing me. My email is clean, and it's quite a lovely day today.

Shelley directs our attention to Anne Zelenka's SXSW-prompted rant, which includes this:

4. Too many to do list applications. As a Web Worker
Daily writer, of course I’m interested in to do lists and applications implementing them. But just because you can build one with whatever web framework you’re trying to learn doesn’t mean you should release it as a beta and expect me to write about it.

...

8. Getting Things Done. The productivity virus so many of us have been infected with in 2006 and 2007. Let’s move on. Getting lots of stuff done is not the way to achieve something important. You could be so busy planning next actions that you miss out on what your real contribution should be.

Ken Camp chimes in:

It’s the weekend. I’m quite focused on getting little or nothing done. And finding a different sort of appreciation for tools like Twitter that allow my to note what friends, colleagues, and strangers are doing
in passing. Send a little chirp of input if I like, yet still step back and recharge batteries, and in what would be an anathema to David Allen acolytes everywhere - get nothing done.

Stephanie Booth pushes back:

To me, GTD is “a solution to finally be able to enjoy free time without feeling bogged down by a constant feeling of guilt over everything I should already have done.”

Maybe not everyone has issues doing things. If you don’t have trouble getting stuff out of the way, then throw GTD out of the window and continue enjoying life. You don’t need it.

But for many people, procrastination, administrivia piling up, not-enough-time-for-stuff-I-enjoy-doing and commitments you know you’re not going to be able to honour are a reality, and a reality that is a source of stress.

To me, it seems like blogging is getting done on the topic, but the real topic is being missed by all. (Either that or we're all debating over the nature of an elephant.)

The real issue, I feel, is what Peter F. Drucker put so well:

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

These eleven words are part of premise of Franklin-Covey, the gold standard when it comes to productivity management systems.

--And no, it's not "time management": you can't manage time, it happens no matter what you do; all you can do is manage what you do with the time.

"Getting Things Done" suffers from an inept title -- and I confess haven't allocated much of my own attention towards trying to figure out its merits or lack thereof -- so I'll leave off on further commentary there.

But Franklin-Covey suffers even more by keeping their system paper-based, with the only (proprietary) software available able to run only on Windows machines or on hard-coded Palms or in a new online system where even a demo is hidden behind required registration. (Hint to Franklin-Covey: Establish value before picking our privacy pockets.) On the other hand, Kinkless has made "Getting Things Done" relevant for people who live and work primarily on computers (but not me, as it does strike me as rather focused on the doing rather than the what-to-do).

Meanwhile, on my office shelf sits my Franklin-Covey planner in its gorgeous red leather cover, rarely used because when it comes to something dynamic like planning, turning away from the computer to a paper notebook seems neither efficient nor effective.

So Jeremiah Owyang has started a media consumption diet meme, and Marianne Richmond has tagged us BlogHers, so here goes....

• Web: I used to use NetNewsWire Lite for RSS, but I tried Shrook and found it to me easier to use, with some of the features NetNewsWire makes you pay for. Shrook is easy enough, so I'll stick with it for now. Do I need to mention Firefox? For search, I use Google pretty exclusively (I find myself wondering how Yahoo! gets by, what with all the barriers they put up for people to get listed in their index) and if I'm blog-hunting, I go to Technorati. I blog using Drupal for platform and either Performancing or ecto for blogging client (though neither is optimal -- Performancing repeatedly loses my drafts and ecto keeps embedding cruft into my html, even when I define the tags myself). For online video, I find YouTube too useful to ignore. It can be a bit hard to take, though, just browsing at random.
• Music: I've started trying out Pandora, but in some stations they keep trying to push the strangest things -- sorry but how do you get Foreigner or Journey from Led Zeppelin? -- and they limit how many songs I can reject in a given time. (Am I just too persnickety?) I have several of my old CDs burned to mp3 files, which I play on my desktop iTunes, but as I've moved from my nearly-dead PowerBook to two iMacs to my current MacBook Pro, it's been a challenge carrying those 20GB of files along for the migration ride. (It doesn't help that some of the discs were defective bulk coasters.) I haven't signed up for the iTunes Store, though, because the DRM restrictions and poor audio quality make downloads there less than appealing, no matter how appealing and easy-to-use the GUI is. Stop treating me like a criminal guilty until proven innocent, Apple and RIAA, and you'll have my business. Meanwhile, as CD music continues to fade away at the big box stores, I'm finding my music horizons diminishing, and that's a terrible place to be. My whole live is defined by soundtrack.
• TV: I don't have much time to watch television, especially the commercial variety -- I think I'm more and more intolerant of commercials. I will watch the NewsHour if I'm home early enough, the Daily Show if I'm up late enough (and thank goodness for the 9pm rerun of last night's show), Frontline if I stumble across it and (of course) Battlestar Galactica. I don't do cable news -- it strikes me as an entire industry getting excited about the lint in their own navels. However, since getting HDTV on Comcast, I've found that I'm more likely to just watch anything as long as it's high-def. Well, not anything at all, but it's amazing how much more interesting Nova or Discovery (or reruns of Battlestar Galactica and Firefly) are when you can see so much detail on the screen. (Ironic that local news is in high-def, but most network shows are not; the Rose Parade was in high def, but the Macy's parade was not; sports are in high def but arts typically are not; and all HBO seems to play on their single high-def channel is Rome [though it could be worse].)
• Communication: My cell is a Palm Treo 700p, but I hardly ever use it. It comes in handy when I need to keep up on email or check something on the web, but I'm realizing the touchscreen I so wanted (and thus the reason I rejected alternatives like Blackberry or Q) is pretty over-rated. Ah well, live and learn. The phone part is actually great for clarity and reception, but I don't use it as a PDA at all, as the 320x320 screen is just too damned small. Other phonage is Vonage. I haven't had a land-line phone in quite a few years now. --Not that any of this matters, because I really really hate talking on the phone unless it's necessary. For IM, I use Jabber (via Adium), which we have set up on one of our domains, and the sadly unavoidable Skype, which as a relay is an absolute bandwidth hog even when it's just sitting there.
  I don't use Skype much for voice, since so many people seem to have so many problems configuring it to work well. We thought it'd be great for talking to clients overseas to save a few pennies a minute, but all too often it was too much like the Cone of Silence. I use Apple Mail for email, mainly because Thunderbird on Mac is too slooowwwwww (I wish it weren't).
• Movies: Once upon a time, I saw several movies a week, sometimes several in one day, but now that they blast commercials in your face before showing generally sucky movies -- not to mention the overpriced junk food, sticky floors and noisy patrons -- it's just not worth it. It's not fun any more. So I watch movies on DVD, where I'm not limited by the, excuse me, crap selection of the week, and which on an HDTV plasma is an entirely new experience. I tend to buy, not rent, because rented discs always seem to have scratches that make the flick skip or freeze.
• Magazines: I subscribe to Post, HOW, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Macworld and occasionally Wired. I rarely buy a magazine off the rack. It amazes me how many magazines are in print. Do people actually read all these things? Somebody must. I have to say, however, that the supermarket tabloids do keep me informed. I mean, I could've gone for weeks or even months without knowing that Brittney Spears shaved her head or that Brad sent a note to Jen! Eeep!
• Books: I live for novels, but it's hard for me to find writers I like, so I'm stuck with the five or six authors who could write just about anything and I'd read it. Maybe if my life weren't so fast-paced, I'd be able to relax enough to get into a new writer's style, but usually I can't get past the first paragraph, so I do without. Meanwhile I'm reading more non-fiction than any time since I was in college. How She Does It, Blink and Designing Interactions are three of the most recent delights.
• Newspapers: I love reading off paper, but unlike magazines I don't hold the same love of newspapers. I like the print design of the New York Times, but I hate getting newsprint all over my fingers, and at a buck a pop for something I may not even have time to read that day, it becomes a dead-tree guilt and a recycling burden more than a source of news. 15 years ago that wasn't the case -- I loved getting the paper! How life changes in these times! I still read the "newspapers" online, including the NY Times, the Mercury News and the odd site that happens to have the AP wire story I want to read.

So there's my consumption in a nutshell. Now in the tradition of tagging, and because they are such an eclectic group of geeks and artists, I'd like to tag everyone on Planet Drupal.

Technorati Tags: media consumption diet

Here.

[Update: I removed the direct link to the ftp site because, as small as rare pattern is, every little bit counts, and I don't want to hurt Mozilla.]

As I write this, it's still not "officially" released yet, but I've just installed Firefox 2.0 after downloading it from the Mozilla FTP site (Mac versions here), and I'm loving it. I've not yet explored the preferences and all that, but so far nearly all of my extensions still work, including the web developer tools, Performancing and weather.

And so far no websites are breaking. Aren't web standards wonderful? I'm good to go. I can keep working (or writing this blog post), and not have to fret about mysterious problems.

Too bad the same cannot be said for users of Internet Explorer 7, which, with its new Microsoft-only quirks, is creating all sorts of new headaches for website owners and challenges for web developers. Some websites won't work at all in IE7.

Why Microsoft has such issues with worldwide web standards, I don't know. At least we have Firefox. Maybe, with these simultaneous releases of new browsers, more people will get fed up with IE and try Firefox. After all, if a browser is breaking websites, why use it?