I’m a firm believer in the whole mind like water spiel that David Allen preaches through GTD. I jumped on the Gettings Things Done bandwagon around 2004 I think – the first of my two senior years in college. And here we are in 2020, which means I’ve been practicing this methodology (with varying levels of success) for over fifteen…
Remember standing in line at midnight to literally pay $129 for Jaguar? Or in 2007 for the iPhone launch? There could be no more literal embodiment of the Futurama SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY meme than the way I felt at those and many other Apple community events. It was a momentously joyful whirlwind of nerdery and consumerism run amok in truly the best way possible. The Apple of old used to earn our money by creating products we loved. Now it feels like they take our money by locking us into services we have no choice but to use.
I’m filled with rage and despair and also just sad thinking about what we in the tech industry unintentionally unleashed upon the world and then willfully made worse through greed and arrogance. This is my small contribution to make things better. It likely won’t matter. But it does give me some relief to have done something. Anything.
I live and die by my keyboard. And here are the shortcuts I couldn’t do without. (Maybe this post should have been titled “A Love Letter to KeybaordMaestro”.)
Maybe the documentation has disappeared online, or maybe it was only ever available via word-of-mouth fifteen years ago, but I lost about four hours the other night trying to figure out how to make the dropdown choices in my NSPredicateEditor show user-friendly names instead their actual key paths.
So, I did what I almost always do when I face a situation of deep despair on my Mac. I reached for the greatest Swiss Army knife of them all Keyboard Maestro and came up with an incredibly lo-fi solution that isn’t as feature rich as what those other apps offer or as convenient as Dock folders (when they don’t disappear), but it works for me!
As apps deviate further and further away from the HIG with custom UI, whether for design reasons or in the pursuit of a mythical, cross-platform code base that management thinks will cost less, we lose the benefits of a well reasoned platform that was formerly easy to work with and a joy to use.
…I’m just glad I’m to the point in my nerd existence where I can be happy applying a fix and not caring about the real underlying issues that don’t concern me.
If you’ve been following along at home, you might remember that I started building a Mac app for managing my personal finances last April. Think of it as a powerful, privacy-focused, native alternative to Mint.com. Quicken, but not awful. Since then, I’ve helped shipped a huge redesign to the app at my 9-5 job as well as two major updates…
For a small software company whose product really is the app – as opposed to a SaaS with a companion app, or some other type of business that can bankroll an app by virtue of their real source of revenue – I don’t see any other sustainable path forward than subscriptions.