Wednesday, August 3, 2022

the swagger of the right apps and the right interface

Admittedly, this probably reflects a bit of a "slow season" for my devblog (not that I have much of a permanent audience base), but I just want to pontificate more on the apps I use for my personal information management, and wouldn't even mind hearing from others (kirkjerk at gmail dot com)

Recently I wrote about switching the core of my task tracking from 2Do (iOS + Mac, but the synching via dropbox was spotty at best) to the app Tot. Besides the superior synching between laptop and phone, I'm really appreciating the "freeform" aspect a text-ish document offers for sublists and task order. 2Do was special in presenting color-coded categories for tasks, and having contents of all categories viewable in a single scrolling list, but didn't have great facility for manually reordering a list or easily changing creating and changing and reordering categories. I do plan to continue using it for recurring and due-date based tasks.

The temptation to hunt for "one app to rule them all" is great, but I think there's much to be said for different apps for different kinds of information recording. Besides different apps having various strengths and weaknesses, the visual differences between apps aids in mental "muscle memory". (I think this was why Steve Jobs was fond of textures in apps, like that provided by skeuomorphism - it adds a flavor, or mental hook, to raw information)

Like when the app gets just the right fit, it has almost a certain swagger for me (albeit... the nerdiest possible kind of swagger). That's amplified somehow by having open windows across my three screens at my home office, and switching between them w/ keyboard controls.

Apple Notes: love this for work notes. I think it synchs well, to devices  and you can embed images and what not. Somehow I don't have a good feeling about Apple managing my data as a forever home, but work notes is generally not needed on that kind of scale.

Simplenote: excellent synching and search, and cool in a minimalist text-only way. This is sort of my catchall, and my using the text string FINDME as a casual tag, I've stopped trying to keep it at all sorted... it really akin to a big pile of stickies. ("Bear" was another similar app with more of a focus on markdown text)

Tot: as mentioned great for my main Todos, with its 6 extra notes used for various "To Get Tos" (music to get, books to check out, movies and shows to watch, games to play, etc)

2Do: Still like this for recurring todos, daily or weekly tasks or other time sensitive stuff. (Appigo Todo was pretty good as well, but didn't have as rich a sense of categories.) The free synching via Dropbox always felt slow, so I didn't keep using the desktop client for it.

Apple + Google Calendar: Google seems to be the easiest way to share a calendar - huge in a relationship. And I can import work's Outlook Calendar into it as well

k/db: this is a weird little homebrew database I made for keeping track of stuff like "media I've consumed" and "old coworkers"

But it's funny even with all these systems I always know what's what and where to go to look for stuff.



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