Scattered Mac Experience Thoughts

Trouble focusing on a Friday afternoon. Thoughts until a pot of jasmine and some dubstep settles my mind:

All-encompassing organization tools like Yojimbo and DevonThink don’t make sense to me. Why would I trust my essential data to a proprietary app built on a data store that’s been less thoroughly tested than the filesystem? Being able to assign multiple labels or having semantic linkages guessed at doesn’t sell it in the age of Spotlight. Why do these apps insist on duplicating other features: text editing, encryption (Keychain), RSS reading, web browsing, bookmarking? Every problem domain has its own method of organization; amalgamating them just produces a single point of failure.

How I stay organized: I put things in logical hierarchies of directories and then use the right application to search through those directories. Outboard brain lives in text files, edited in a TextMate. Pictures in sub-dirs in the Pictures folder, just use Preview or Finder slideshows. Useful PDFs and web archives in topical sub-dirs of a “Knowledge” folder.

Mail and iCal feel like loss-leaders for .Mac, and nobody I know wants to use .Mac when they can use Gmail and Google Calendar. I tried switching to Mail and was surprised by its clumsiness, didn’t last an hour with it. Leopard shows no sign of fixing any of Mail’s flaws (or, really, email’s flaws) and instead tacks on dumb features like stationary. Encouraging more HTML-ridden email should be punishable by flogging.

I don’t use any calendaring app regularly: my life isn’t too complicated if I can’t remember what happens in the next seven days, and I prefer calendars strictly for longview planning and keeping track of friends. Until I can share my iCal with friends as easily as I can in Google Calendar, it’s out. CalDAV support in Leopard’s iCal may fix that, but I want iCal to be out of the way most of the time.

Is Apple losing its touch with information management, or are desktop apps simply unable to deliver in the post-Google world? Being able to drag and drop between apps just ain’t enough anymore. Where’s the integration, the desktop advantage that keeps us all from running a stripped-down Linux distro that boots straight into Firefox?

I continued to use OmniWeb for well over a week but I missed Inquisitor and the general Apple fit-n-finish of Safari. Ditching PithHelmet and upgrading Saft improved performance and plugged some leakiness. Little things about OmniWeb feel experimental. It’d be nice if Drosera and the WebKit nightly builds didn’t conflict with Saft. I mean, shit, just don’t load it if you know enough about the problem to harangue the user with an alert and die.

Apps like OmniWeb and Adium clearly do more than their Apple counterparts. Safari and iChat require extensions like Saft and Chax to be up to snuff, but they make banal aesthetic decisions for you. Somewhere down the line “power user” got confused with “spends all day picking themes.”

The iPod management screen in iTunes 7 is nice. It also looks straight out of Windows Vista.

I like Xtorrent as much as I like other David Watanabe apps, which is to say a metric asston, but web search APIs mean you don’t have to embed a browser into your app.

FileVault, secure virtual memory, keychain, password on wake from sleep and screensaver: use ’em.

That’s about enough of that.