Entries Tagged 'Original' ↓

There are a few new faces around here today, and I wanted to give you a little head start on what to read on TightWind:

• Things in Review — my extensive review of Cultured Code’s Things GTD application.
• The Brent Simmons Interview — I talked to Brent, developer of NetNewsWire and all around nice guy, about developing for the iPhone and how it’s different than developing for the Mac.
• The Strange Tale of MobileMe and Apple’s Post-PC — I contemplate where Apple is heading with MobileMe and the iPhone platform.

That’s more than enough to get you started. You can browse the archives to read more, and are more than welcome to contact me if you have something to say. And, as always, TightWind is available in-full in your favorite feed reader — just visit the feeds page to subscribe.

John Stuart Mill, ostensibly a proponent of individual freedom, wrote in Principles of Political Economy:

But it is not so with the Distribution of Wealth. That is a matter of human institution solely. The things once there, mankind, individually or collectively can do with them as they like. They can place them at the disposal of whomsoever they please, and on whatever terms. Further, in the social state, in every state except total solitude, any disposal whatever of them can only take place by the consent of society, or rather of those who dispose of its active force. Even what a person has produced by his individual toil, unaided by anyone, he cannot keep, unless by the permission of society. Not only can society take it from him, but individuals could and would take it from him, if society only remained passive; if it did not either interfere en masse, or employ and pay people for the purpose of preventing him from being disturbed in the possession. The distribution of wealth, therefore, depends on the laws and customs of society. The rules by which it is determined are what the opinions and feelings of the ruling portion of the community make them, and are very different in different ages and countries; and might be still more different, if mankind so chose.

Mill argues that, because an individual’s keeping of their property depends on government protection, then the decision-making power of who has wealth and who does not, and to what degree, lies with the government, or for Mill, a majority decision of the people.

This is false. First, an individual does not rely upon the government to protect them from a thief — they can defend themselves if they choose. They depend first on themselves, just as they depended upon themselves to create the property in question, or earn the capital to obtain it.

But second, Mill has this relationship backward. Humans, individuals, exist before government or society. They can create without it. Government is as man-made a tool as any other, and like all tools, was created to serve a purpose — and that purpose is the protection of the individual’s rights.

Why do we have rights? Because humans are rational beings, which exist and succeed only through our ability to use our minds.

Some claim that this is false, because man is not rational, but an emotional animal, one that feels rather than thinks, holds deluded wishes and flails blindly when they are not met. They point to examples of people committing terrible atrocities — murder, genocide, holocaust, robbery — and argue that no rational being could do that.

Others claim that man is all too rational, that reason leads to these atrocities, and if only man felt more, the world would be a much better place.

But see the inherent contradiction in the first claim. If one claims that man is irrational, and then attempts to justify it with evidence — they are using reason, they are thinking. Their very thought that man is irrational, as wrong as it is, makes it impossible for it to be true.

The second claims that harming others for your own gain is rational, and thus reason is our problem. Is it rational to rob someone? To murder them?

Reason — and by its extension, self-interest — is quite simple. At its base, reason is the recognition that one thing is itself. A tree is a tree, and not a dog; that A is A, that reality exists. Reason is to recognize this, and apply it.

The first objection is partly correct — no rational being could commit those acts. Reason is not a state humans are locked in — reason is a choice. They have chosen to deny reality.

Reason, rationality, is a choice, and it is man’s means of survival. Humans cannot live through blind struggle — they can only live through thought. Fire was not discovered by unthinking beasts, but by individuals observing, learning, and creating. But it is by choice.

Humans can either choose to live, or choose to die — that is their choice. But their life is their purpose. I exist to live, reason is my means, happiness my measure.

Individuals cannot live without recognizing reality. I will die if I claim and believe that I do not require food and water to live. No matter how faithful I am in this belief, no matter how strongly I deny I require food and water, it can only lead to death.

For any human which wants to live, and succeed, their life is their value. To hold your life as your value is also, if one is honest, to grant that other people’s lives hold the same value. If you value your life, you must value the lives of others, which means you cannot harm theirs. You must deal with them through voluntary choice, just as you would want them to do unto you.

To value their own life, and make happiness their purpose, the rational man creates a guiding rule for them: they will always recognize reality.

If I mean to write a great novel, but rather than write it I steal someone else’s work and publish it as my own, I have gained nothing. My novel, even if it is a financial and critical success, is a fraud — I still did not write it. I have only tried to deny the reality that I did no real work and the novel is not my genius. I gain no happiness — just the sadness, shame and guilt of defrauding myself and others. What is wealth and recognition worth when I have gained it through stealing? Nothing.

To value one’s life, then, is to live for real achievement. Real achievement cannot come from defrauding others — it is only derived from productive work, thought, and mutual consent of others where they are involved.

This is where rights are derived. Because people properly value their life, and with it (because they are inseparable) their liberty and property, they form, or accept, government. Government comes after the individual. It is created to protect their rights from violation, and that is its only proper purpose.

In this way, Mill has his relationship backward; he states that the individual can only retain his property because of government, but in reality, government can only exist to protect the individual’s rights and still be moral.

The “distribution of wealth” in society depends on the voluntary arrangement of individuals, not the laws and customs of society. How wealth is “distributed” properly depends as much on “laws and customs” as it does robbery, but it is an unjustifiable distribution. Any law which requires the taking of an individual’s property is robbery, a violation of his rights, and thus a violation of the government’s reason to exist. Any government which does so is illegitimate.

Note: This is part two of a two-part series. To read part 1, click here.

In the first article, I explained how I would keep my handouts and school emails organized. There are two other things that need organized, however — tasks and events, and work done on my computer.

Tasks and Events

Large school events, such as tests, papers and projects, are easy enough to manage. Their dates are usually given in the syllabus, and thus can be inputted into iCal. Class, however, is never quite that simple — even in the most basic courses, students are assigned a number of smaller assignments, and iCal’s meager to-do support, and cumbersome input form, is not optimal to use for managing these assignments.

Moreover, as the semester progresses, I tend to forget assignments and lose a big picture view of what I need to be doing each week. I become so lost in the minutia of class, reading, studying, papers, assignments and work that I simply lose track of where I am relative to important events, such as midterms and large papers. I end up rushing to finish a paper or study for a test, and thus fail to do my best work.

Strategy

There are three parts to solving this.

1. Events This one is simple. As soon as I receive a syllabus, I input when papers are due, and when big tests are, along with a three-day reminder, along with relevant details in the notes section.
2. Tasks To manage tasks, I use Cultured Code’s Things and Things Touch on the iPhone. I have a “Courses” Area, which contains all tasks associated with my classes. Rather than assign each course an Area, I created a tag (e.g. “ECON 310,” “CHIN 120″) for each course, so I can more quickly switch between courses.

   Whenever I receive a new class, I input it into Things through the quick-add panel (if I am in a class where I use my MacBook Air to take notes), or write them down and enter them when I have access again to my MacBook Air. The idea here is not to properly tag and categorize each task, but quickly add them into Things’s inbox so I can organize them later, and thus review them.

3. Big Picture To insure that I know where I am in the semester, and midterms and large papers do not catch me by surprise, I keep a small whiteboard immediately above my desk. At the beginning of each week I go through each class, review my last week’s work, see what is coming up, and write out a simple to-do list for every class. To-dos tend to be as simple as “read pp. 120-175 by Wednesday,” or “Write Econ paper outline.” My intention is not to go into the minute detail of everything I need to do — Things and assignment descriptions are for that. My goal is to review last week’s work, what I need to do in the future (this week and next week, usually, but sometimes I must plan farther ahead because of more complex papers, projects or tests), and to remind me of the big things I need to get done for each course this week.

   I also try to have some meaningful quote each week, which helps keep my overarching goals in focus.

The whiteboard is the most important tool here, because it creates a review ritual each week where I can evaluate how well I worked last week, what I can do to improve my work, and what I need to accomplish in the near-future. It also provides a feeling of satisfaction in completing a to-do that a computer cannot — crossing out a to-do on the whiteboard feels much better than clicking a checkbox.

Events and to-dos, however, lend themselves to the computer, because I need access to them wherever I go. The great thing about iCal and Things is that they both sync with the iPhone — iCal syncs automatically over MobileMe, and Things syncs over my wireless network. This means that no matter where I am — in my dorm room, a classroom, or away from campus altogether, I have access to my events and tasks, and that is, for me, invaluable.

School Work

I do almost all of my work on my MacBook Air, whether it is a paper, assignment, presentation or spreadsheet, so I need a way to organize it. Last year, I created a smart folder for each course and tried to apply Spotlight Comments for each document I created, but for obvious reasons, I lapsed in doing so.

This year, rather than use smart folders, I am using regular folders. I created a “School Work” stack in my dock with a folder for each course, so I can access them quickly. I would still like to use Spotlight’s power to find and sort my documents, however — so I am using folder actions.

Attached to each class folder is a folder action I created in Automator which, when you drop a file in it, simply appends the file’s Spotlight Comments with the course code and title (”ECON 315 History of Economic Thought”), so I can find any document related to a course by searching for its course code or title and the document title. This makes finding documents, even in the middle of the semester when I have created too many to count, simple; I can search for them in Spotlight or find them in the School Work stack.

This idea is not exactly complex, and that is why it is useful. Complex organization systems, however elegant they may seem, tend to go unused when the individual realizes just how much effort it takes to maintain it. I love this because I can save a document to my desktop, drag it onto the School Work stack and drop it into its appropriate folder and never worry about it again — I can move on to other things with confidence that I will be able to find the document again within seconds.

School is once again approaching, and I am entering my third year in college. I am anticipating this to be my most difficult year because I am taking Mandarin for the first time, and I am terrible with learning new languages — I barely managed to survive Spanish in high school. This is as about as far as I can get from being comfortable.

During this semester, I do not want to be buried in papers, caught unaware of something that needs done, or unable to find a file I need on my computer. Whereas in other years I could afford to be somewhat disorganized, I have very little room for error this year.

There are four different areas of disorganization that a student (and any professional) deals with — paper handouts (syllabi, project descriptions, information sheets, et cetera), email, events and tasks, and actual school work. In preparation for this year, I have created a system of sorts for each area. This will be a two-part article, and I warn you now, will probably bore most of you. These articles are as much for me to think through how I am going to do this as it is for you to read.

Paper Handouts

I receive much too many handouts from my classes, and it is quite easy to overflow with them. In my first year of college, my organizational method was to stick them all in a desk drawer and go fishing for the right one when I needed it. Not only did I lose many important sheets, but my desk was a mess, and this disorganization creates a feeling that I do not have control of my work, which creates unnecessary stress. My second year I bought a simple, 3-area desk inbox. This helped, until I realized I had no system for how to use it. As it filled with more and more papers, a mess once contained in desk drawers moved itself to my desk top.

While thinking about how I was going to be more organized this semester, I realized handouts break down into two types — syllabi, and class-specific papers, such as project descriptions, paper descriptions, and information sheets. These are the important ones, and the rest are mostly junk.

Strategy

There are only two physical elements to how I am going to organize my handouts. First is the desk inbox I have, and second is a hanging file frame to put in a desk drawer.

1. Circular It is difficult for me to delete or throw something away, because I have an anxiety that I may end up needing that paper for some reason, so I end up keeping most papers, which take up space rather than provide value. This needs to change. As soon as I receive handouts, I will decide whether I need to keep it or not. If I do not, it immediately goes in the trash. If I do, I put it in my desk inbox.
2. Review This is the most important step. Every few days I will empty my inbox and decide again whether I need each handout or not. If I do, it moves to step three; if not, it enters the circular. This step is important because it forces me to review my handouts and thus what work I need to do. I cannot file it away and forget about it — it will enter into my mind at least twice before being filed.
3. Filed Using the hanging file frame in my desk drawer, I will use a simple file system. The first folder is a syllabi folder, which will hold each class’s syllabus. The reason the syllabi get their own special file is because more than any other handout, students reference this one the most so they should be immediately available without any searching. Then each class will have its own folder, and will hold its handouts. Simple to understand, simple to file, and simple to maintain.

That is it. No complex system to grasp. Just an easy way to review each handout, stay organized, and have easy access whenever I need a handout.

Email

I receive most spam from my school. During the regular school year, I sometimes receive something like twenty to thirty of these emails a day, and they fill up my inbox. Worse, these emails obscure the ones I need to pay attention to — emails from my professors and fellow students.

My goal is to remove these useless messages from my inbox and highlight emails from professors and students.

Strategy

1. Filter Luckily, my school sends these mass-emails to a list (the email address in the To: field looks something like STUDENTS@LISTS.WHITTIER.EDU), so I can filter these out of my inbox quite easily. To do so, I created a local “Whittier Junk Email” folder, and a Mail.app rule which moves any emails sent to that email address into it. This keeps them out of my inbox, so only important (or relatively important) emails are in it. Out of sight, out of mind.
2. Professors I could create a folder for each professor, but that would be a mess — Mail.app’s source list would be too complex. Rather, I have created a single smart mailbox which lists every email I receive from each of my professors. This keeps their emails in one place so I can quickly find the email I need, or only look at new emails from my professors rather than everything in my inbox if I need to.
3. Projects Projects tend to accumulate a large number of emails between group members. To make managing these emails easier, whenever I am assigned a new group project I create a new smart mailbox which lists any emails from my group members. Simple.

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There is nothing revolutionary, complex or stunning about these strategies — but that is exactly the point. They are simple ways of organizing things I need to manage, and filtering out the junk. The next article in this series will deal with organizing events and tasks and school work.

Yesterday, Cultured Code updated Things for the iPhone (iPhone Things?) to include synching with its desktop counterpart. When I began using Things on the desktop, I bought Things for the iPhone as well in anticipation of iPhone synching, so I was quite excited to see this update.

Rather than synch through MobileMe or Cultured Code’s servers, Things synchs over your own local wireless network. More on this in a second.

They have created a dead-simple way to connect Things for the iPhone and Things on the desktop. The desktop version’s preferences now includes an iPhone synching tab. When you open it for the first time, it has a configuration assistant. Much like the AppleTV and iTunes, to configure your desktop and iPhone version of Things, you simply open Things on the iPhone, and the assistant will recognize your iPhone on the network. Choose it, then it will give you a password to type in on your iPhone and boom — your iPhone and Things synch.

Cultured Code deserves a lot of praise for how easy it is to synch the iPhone and desktop version of Things. Wireless synching on other platforms, such as Windows Mobile, is more black magic than science, and it is great to see a company get the synch configuration right. It really does just work.

Back to synching over your local network. This means of synching certainly has its benefits — synching does not require a $99/year subscription to MobileMe, and does not present a privacy threat by passing your data through Cultured Code’s servers, and it is also fast.

But it is not seamless. MobileMe is much maligned, but I have had an excellent experience — it lives up to what Apple promised. When I create a new contact or event on my iPhone while away from a computer, I have no doubt that it will be on my computer when I need it. The reason I can have such confidence in it is because it synchs to the server immediately, in the background. I don’t have to do anything for it to synch.

Things, though, while it synchs reliably, requires my intervention. When I get home and want to synch new tasks to my desktop, I must physically launch Things on the iPhone. This is an extra step that discourages my using it, which decreases its utility. Things’s value is proportional to the amount I use it, so anything that decreases my likelihood to use it also decreases its value.

Luckily, however, Things is not a finished product. It is still being actively developed, and Cultured Code has said in discussion that they will be adding more synching options later.

I see this as an evolutionary step, albeit a large one, in Things’s development, and it is another example of Cultured Code’s attention to detail and desire to make Things as great an application as they possibly can. This is their first step of iPhone synching, and it is a well-placed one.

Junior year of high school (2004-2005), I realized that committing my tasks to memory was not a viable strategy, but up until that year, that was more or less how I managed doing work. I was facing a memory-storage deficit; between my course load, and debate, which was a work-intensive activity, I simply could not remember everything I had to do. Due to sheer number of tasks, I sometimes turned in incomplete assignments or, worse, forgot to turn anything in at all. My productivity diminished under the strain of remembering what I had to do, and my stress skyrocketed because of what seemed like an insurmountable amount of work and obligations.

My English teacher had a Ti Powerbook, which he used every day in class. This was my first real experience with post-OS X era Macs, and I loved its elegant design. But what struck me, in brief flashes as he switched between applications on the projector screen, was iCal. He had several calendars set up, and his month view was full of events — all colorfully differentiated. iCal, from what I saw, was easy to conceptualize and use, and most importantly, was a joy to work in. It looked like it was fun to add events to and manage a calendar.

I bought my first Mac in December 2005 (a 15″ Powerbook), and iCal was the first application I fell in love with. It made — and still makes — managing my schedule simple and enjoyable.

But when I entered college, I had a problem: I needed less to manage events (turning in papers, taking tests, study sessions, et cetera), and more to manage tasks associated with courses (research for a paper, write an outline, study for a test), which iCal is not very good at. I tried using iCal’s to-dos support for three weeks, and after painstakingly entering hundreds of to-dos, I stopped using it — because I did not enjoy it.

So for my first and second years of college, I suffered much the same way I did in high school: I mostly committed tasks to memory, with even more disastrous results. My stress rose to a new high as I struggled to keep my tasks straight for five courses and work.

What I really wanted was a well-designed, simple and beautiful application to manage my tasks, which would make managing tasks as much a joy to use as iCal.

After reading Chris Bowler’s excellent GTD Series, I decided to try Cultured Code’s Things.

Continue reading →

A Macintosh in Your Pocket: iPhone 3G Review - Michael Mistretta

Michael wrote an excellent, in-depth, review of the iPhone 3G. It is especially good because this is his first iPhone, and his impressions are fresh.

Michael writes:

Think about it, the iPhone + the AppStore could be a major paradigm shift in how people look at “computers”. For many people, the iPhone can be the only computer they need. Why do I need a big beige box, or a laptop anymore?

I’m not talking about the geeks. I’m talking about normal people: my mom, a teenager, the cashier at Wal-Mart. How do these people use their computers now? Email. Web browsing. Facebook. A bit of IM. Maybe some Youtube. Music. And a couple games. What if I device the size of a deck of cards could do all of that? It fits in your pocket, gets Internet anywhere, and costs $200.

The one downside to this argument is the lack of a proper word processor and an Office suite. If the iPhone eventually is able to pair with a bluetooth keyboard, I could see some people using it to take notes and type up short documents, but practically speaking, people want a bigger screens for that. Video editing, graphic design, and high-end photo editing will obviously be reserved for desktops.

It is an interesting point, and worth considering, because it is clear people want mobility. Notebook PCs have outsold desktop PCs, but most people do not need a notebook for what they do. They need access, as Michael explains, to email, the web, and social networking — none of which is dependent, or even better experienced, on a full-fledged PC. A mobile device like the iPhone fits this role perfectly.

It begs the question, then, of how people’s use of computers will change. Will they continue buying notebooks so they can use the web away from their desks, or will they buy mobile devices like the iPhone — the “post-PC” — for mobile use, and a powerful, affordable desktop for work?

Or will there be a mix somewhere in-between? I own both an iPhone and a Macbook Air, which I use as my primary computer. While as a student I depend on the Macbook Air’s mobility, I am not going to be a student for long. I still benefit from that mobility, though; I do freelance web design, and being able to pick up the Macbook Air and go to a cafe or a meeting with a client is invaluable.

Yet I also find myself looking at the iMac’s store page often, because I would benefit from its large monitor and, most importantly, its GPU and large hard drive.

From this perspective, which is a web professional one who works on a computer most of the time, I can see the Macbook Air, and perhaps a large swatch of notebook PCs, moving to a more niche position. Rather than have a full-purpose CPU, GPU and hard drive, notebooks would adopt Intel’s Atom processor, small and affordable hard drives, and a small, Macbook Air-like form factor. With a “full-sized” screen and keyboard, these notebooks would sell for under $1,000 — preferably for $799 or under.

We would then have three devices: a powerful desktop for power and screen-intensive work; a mildly powerful, mobile notebook for general work; and a post-PC device for ubiquitous communication.