Month: September 2014

(How could I not title this post after one of my favorite David Byrne songs?) Gus has a terrific post on his blog about what he calls “the wilderness” – a period of time between major software releases “where I’m pretty lost, and I don’t know what to do.” His working theory on the matter is that it’s basically a forced period of rest put upon you by an overworked brain. How do you get past it? The same way you walk out of any wilderness – “One foot in front of the other…You can walk for miles and maybe …

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For years I’ve used on-hold “waiting” contexts named after coworkers and family members to denote tasks that I’ve assigned to other people and am waiting on them to finish. But a few weeks ago I had a realization that there are two other types of relationships between tasks and people that I haven’t been tracking. And with a few quick modifications to how I title my tasks, it’s possible to track them in OmniFocus. Let me explain. There are three types of relationships between tasks and people: A task can be assigned to another person by you. A task can …

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I’ve always gone with portability and sleekness over outright power and versatility. I bought an 11″ MacBook Air the day they came out. I switched to an iPad Mini from the bulky third generation iPad. I walk around with a slim wallet. I keep my iPhone naked in my pocket – no case. So I was hesitant but very curious about the iPhone 6 Plus. I’ve always scoffed at Android users with huge phones – mainly because I never saw the benefit. Very few Android apps adapt themselves to take advantage of the extra screen real estate. Most users spend …

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I’m probably not going to say anything new. But I wanted to put down on paper my system for staying on top of email since I so often see people with overflowing inboxes. And I’m not trying to specifically call out anyone I’ve worked with in the past with an unmanaged inbox. I’ve known plenty of very productive people who can’t stay on top of their email. This is just my solution for taming the crazy. Every morning when I wake up, I typically have 20 – 30 new emails across my three inboxes. (Personal, Freelance, and Work.) Usually, while …

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When I started selling my first Mac app in 2007, there was no App Store. I don’t even think “app” was a word. And there certainly wasn’t any ready-made infrastructure for selling software online that you could simply plug into. That meant, like every other independent developer, I had to piece together my own solution for accepting payments, hosting downloads, activating license codes, and delivering app updates. As I wrote about back then, I rolled my own web app called Shine to coordinate all the disparate services I use to run my business. August 2014 was the seventh anniversary of …

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