In other words, the decision to buy it is already there, I will just need to think of a valid justification. Further, the decision is there because I have a lot of speculative reasons to buy it, but still the purchase will be compulsive. Hats off to Apple for getting me in this unconditional purchase mode…

In my defense, I believe that whatever reason I would concoct at this point (and believe me, I have read books worth of postings and discussions about this issue), by the time I am using it and depending on it, I will discover that, all along, I was blind to the most powerful reason to get it, and that such reason was the “naked emperor in the room”.

So, I thought, let’s commit to this blog the reasons I can think of at this time. We’ll see how I do in a few months, when I already have it and depend on it:

1. CAPTIVE ENTERTAINMENT – I spend a large enough amount of time captive in planes, trains, and hotels; I also like reading, movies and music (almost as much as my iPhone games) a whole lot. One-plus-one equals $500;
2. A GREATER WAY TO USE EVERNOTE – Everybody who knows me knows that I am a fanatic of Evernote. I have written in this blog a couple of times how, being able to maximize my use of only Evernote is a pet project. Well, I see the iPad as more portable than my laptop and more comfortable to annotate on (in the extended sense of what is a note for Evernote). Yes, I know that I will miss the camera, but I also know that the second iteration of the iPad will have it, and in the meanwhile the iPhone will fill in;
3. I LOVE WRITING BY HAND – Yes, I am an old f#rt, I still love hand-writing, and I believe that the gap between ink and interpreted ASCII text is quickly going away. So much so, that I have bought every reasonably different implementation of tablets, all the way from the three Newton generations, to the Nokia tablet (so close, yet so far), to the frustrating Windows tablet (which, if Microsoft had not been so anti-innovation, would probably dominate the category today) to the iRex e-readers you can also write on (very badly implemented by iRex, but intriguing). They have all fallen short, and I have complete faith that Apple will crack that nut open;
4. CONFIDENCE IN APPLE – I have for months told everyone who asked me about the iPad that when it came out, it would prove that it was a market creator, like other legendary Apple products were. It would do so by finding an activity that is not only compelling, but also unthinkable of in other devices (like, say, listening to music in an iPod, or playing a game in an iPhone, or similar). I would’ve loved it for Apple to make that application obvious in the pre-release, but that hasn’t yet come through; yes, we already know that watching a movie in it, or using the Calendar for appointments, will be something else… but not a category-creating experience. I was hoping that Apple had found a killer social app that would justify the tablet (if something new is about to happen, almost certainly will be in this domain)… I still have confidence that a killer app exists or will emerge soon: either Apple knows, and is not talking yet, or the brilliance of the engineering in the iPad will be so compelling that somebody else, an app provider probably, will create a new category (like Aldus on the first Macs).

Can’t wait to comment on this post four months from now…

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

My iPad time capsule

The fact is, I need to enable sudden, serendipitous posting, or this blog won’t get anywhere. Because I have twenty things to write about each day, but I just don’t stay put too long behind a desk (and when I do, I have a zillion work obligations to wrap-up). In Airports, traveling in the car (my wife drives most of the time), in coffee stores… that’s were I need to have access to the blog (Otherwise, I will just write a note in a piece of paper and NEVER write it on the computer).

The phone? Nope, too small, too hard to type. The computer? Yes, sometimes, if I have access and am comfortable (as right now, traveling north along the California coast, my wife driving and Satie’s music cranking). The Nokia N810 tablet? MOST certainly, all I need is access (the N810 and the wireless portable keyboard fit in a large pocket – and at 265 pounds of weight, believe me, my pockets are already huge). So, all I need is access. Not any more: I got a MiFi today.

In a nutshell:

• The size of three credit cards glued together back-to-back
• A wireless hot spot that goes with you wherever you go (like now, on the 405 in Ventura, many miles away from any place where I have ever connected from, in the car, at 80 mph)
• Up to five computers or PDA’s at a time can connect to it by just sharing a password
• Speed? I would say 5 or 6 times faster than an iPod connecting via 3G.
• Cost? Verizon service, barebones $40/Month, beefed-up $60/Month, no more than 5 GB a month, 5 cents the extra MB

Nuf’ said. This thing is awesome. Without even thinking, I was looking just for ubiquitous connection for my laptop, and in the process I made an iPod killer from my old Nokia N810 (bigger screen, more memory and processor, better –and free– apps). The only thing missing (THE PHONE!) is now in thanks to the MiFi connection and Skype or any other VoIP running on top of it     Haven’t tried it yet, so let me go off and try it. See you in my next post!

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Back thanks to the MiFi?

Don’t blame me for being buzzword-agnostic: twenty five years in technology are enough to kill buzzword sensibility. Perhaps I should clarify that rather than agnostic, the right qualifier would be antagonistic: it’s not that I don’t believe in buzzwords, it’s really  that I believe (and know) that they end up used for inflicting much more damage to reason and the collective IQ than benefiting it. The 2.0 postfix is no exception. Wired-to-tired.

From a wonderful way of grouping equally wonderful technologies that empowered hyper-connected users (as if such a demographic really needed any further boosts beyond those of wealth, class and education), the 2.0 ‘thingy’ got increasingly appropriated by young X-ers, who wield it with the same acumen as a scalpel ready to castrate anything “old”. 

Social networking is technically 2.0. Hard to disagree with that, just look at the technology and functional stacks, right? Well, yes, in principle, but not necessarily in execution… Trace the Web 2.0 technology stack back a few years, and you will find that early users of the term were, and most of us still are, in love with concepts such as the semantic web, topic maps, ontology, semantic meshes and much more as the true inspirational forces justifying a technology refresh; the 2.0 technologies were just early moves in those directions. And yet, try to find anything substantially semantic done beyond tag clouds and better online usability, even in social networks and collaboration products, and there is very little to show for it (the truth is, semantics is not a trivial game to be played by a handful of AJAX and WS hacks in a few agile iterations).

But that is OK, I guess, technologies and paradigms (oops, as an old friend used to say, wait for the word paradigm to emerge and then leave the room really fast)  take time to mature. The problem is, in the meanwhile, 2.0 got hijacked and became something else. Web 2.0 is

• Young, specifically, generation-X-er. If X-ers do it, it’ll take the world by storm, and it’s archetypically good. By default, you are old if you don’t do it. And of course, the fact that you don’t do it is bad. Take twitting. You may be just humble enough to know that infinitesimal changes in your state of mind don’t matter more than the noise of cars in the freeway to others. Or, you may be the kind of person that needs long, quiet, contemplative moments of inspiration and concentration in your daily routine, away from twitts, toots and tettes. Because of any of those reasons (many more available), you don’t twitt. You are old. You are (like I keep hearing from so many beautiful, 2.0 people) “so 1.0-ish”, or “so 1.0!” for short.
• Anti-restrain, anti-hierarchy, anti-confidentiality, anti-structured. By association, any hierarchically, control-based, structured collaboration system is 1.0. Protection of intellectual property? Corporate liability? Compliance? Management structures? Project management? Accountability? Nah… don’t bother
• A vague, increasingly threatening, ad-hominem attack, one that is accepted beyond PC-filters and netiquette. You can find it wielded in reverse (as in “this that I am saying would be just another unproved and unsubstantiated generality… but wait! I am an X-er, I have been around 2.0 all my life, so I don’t need to be rigorous”)

And all of the sudden, strange things like “Enterprise 2.0″ are engendered. You can read postings from very articulate and intelligent people (some of whom I have in my RSS list), who start to fly away from reality and talking about bringing FaceBook into the corporate network, and start announcing the funeral of Office (specially spreadsheets, so structured, so 1.0 ).

Uhhh? I don’t know, call me skeptic, or perhaps it’s that I am “so 1.0″… But I’ve been around a zillion of 2.0-like iterations, seen their fizzle go up and down, and when the dust clears, 1.0’s are still around, yes, irreversibly changed for the better, but still around. From mainframe to PC to LAN to Client-Server to networked computers to n-tier to … (can keep going at least for four more lines). Every time, the 2.0 would eliminate the 1.0. Yet, I know that there quite a few PDP-11s still buried in the organic systems running mission-critical applications out there (how about flight control computers? or nuclear monitoring apps?). Don’t believe it, OK, let’s replace them with those so-long-ago-extinguished mainframes, or PL1 programs, whatever.

The truth is, not only 1.0 turn out to be much more resilient than expected: 2.0 tend to have quite a lot of weak spots as well (how else would we sustain the next iteration?). Ad so, the 2.0s get looked at, taken apart, deconstructed, resisted, imitated, plagiarized, even perverted, by wise practitioners of the 1.0. In the process, some memes and genetic material gets lose, like a fine pollution, just like polen, and spread around the crevices of the 1.0… The rest of the ecology parable is easy to imagine…

So, call me 1.0-ish, but I know that change, REAL change, the one that change peoples’ lives, doesn’t happen in 2.0 waves, but rather 1.1.17 ripples. Today, tag clouds are as far as it gets, but hey, you can find tag clouds even in mainframe apps. Web services are starting to permeate all existing systems, and now even mainframe apps have gone beyond encapsulating a Cobol routine into WS wrappers. Like tides, each one of those cycles got organically deconstructed, and a few memes and genes stayed around for good

So, I am not interested on disqualifying the old just for the sake of it. I have no presumption that radically new ways of doing things will put the old to rest. I am skeptical as it relates to such profound transformations. Instead, give me concrete, benefit-bound memes that we can insert into every-day people’s routines. Yes, Office apps are SO 1.0… but you know what? Hundreds of millions of users use them every day, in most cases not by their own decision. So, can your wonderful, 2.x app do away with the need for Office? That is great, I truly believe it can, and I am sure at some point, many years from now, it may (I even helped conceive a few such apps years ago).

In the meanwhile, PLEASE give me a way to save those hundreds of millions of users headaches when they want to edit an Office document from ANY Web 2.0 app, and I will get really excited as well; I can’t avoid it, I am very 1.0, and I am growing old… I just can’t get off from my mind the thought of giving millions of people a happy second or two. And you will have contributed to the next iteration, Enterprise 1.1.17.b, not an easy feat…

More important, by not alienating ‘the natives’, we will have managed to increase 2.0’s chance of growing into an unstoppable tsunami. Remember, I didn’t say that I don’t believe in those wonderful 2.0-ish thingies. On the contrary, I am just getting irritated by the irresponsible BS and prepotence that slow them down by creating antibodies faster than infected cells. 

Be well, in peace  :)

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Intelligentsia 2.0

From what I hear, most collaboration vendors are trying to tackle this problem, some by making the desktop edition even more proprietary (guess who), others by trying to improve RTE’s. Well, there is another vendor, one that doesn’t have a collaboration platform of its own, whose product (Evernote) is quite relevant to this issue…

What is your workspace vision?

I have been pondering about the competing notions of “workspace” implicit to different collaboration products and companies. Here are a few:

• The ultra-unified collaboration and communications story (i.e., Microsoft’s, Cisco’s, IBM’s) – All of these visions start from the pragmatic assumption that the Microsoft Office apps are around, and will be around, as the standard desktop environment, and then imagine the workspace as this virtual space where people meet to collaborate around the artifacts they have produced in Office. Emphasis: mostly private authoring, with a collaborative icing on the cake. Not surprisingly, Microsoft promotes this vision of the workspace where you and I meet to discuss a PowerPoint deck you produced, and in order to work on that .ppt file, we would use chat, SMS, IM, VoIP, conferencing to bring in Mary’s opinion, and so on. That workspace vision is very natural to people who still spend forty or more hours a week in conservative organizations dominated by Windows, where each PC comes with Office and Explorer (and practically nothing else outside of the occasional VPN), and where most of the work is done individually, by individuals. On the other hand, if you are an occasional user of Office (most SMB’s, small virtual teams, most creatives, and so on), and you have come to dread using it because of its over-featured characteristics, you might found that scenario very limiting. Further, even if you are a frequent Office user, you may (like me) fear the sheer accumulation of synchronous and asynchronous communications modalities (phone, VoIP  phones, IM, SMS, email, voice mail, presence-enabled clients, automated assistants trained to find you, and so on; I don’t know about you, but I already have more interruptions that I can handle, and more communication modalities that are comfortable to keep under control… So, in a nutshell, Office-artifact-centric collaboration workspaces are a natural, possibly more productive, extension of their networked desktops of today for intensive Office users, and somehow convoluted and overwhelming to people who are not, or who have their quota of interruptions already full. SharePoint supports, creates and maintains archetypical Office-artifact-centric workspace. Because SharePoint (both WSS and MOSS) are here to stay, the Office-centric workspace model is sure to get a long list of adopters for years to come (we will discuss in another posting whether that is good, bad or neutral for collaboration progress);
• The collaborative-artifact-centric workspace (Atlassian, WordPress, most open source CMSs), which is harder to find usually because the workspace concept itself is downplayed (but still there in the form of “spaces”), where users collaboratively work on documents they collectively produce, whether the collaboration has an opportunity to start from inception of the document (wikis), following a central thread of postings (blog) or triggered by “questions” or “issues” whose resolution is important to many people (forums). Whatever the publishing model, this workspace model does not put so much emphasis on people talking on the phone, holding conferences or sending and receiving SMS and email, all while they write on the wiki, and therefore adoption patterns for this type of workspace are quite dynamic and persistent. The collaborative content is the center of attention, and users mostly are something close to a second thought. Atlassian’s Confluence, for example, is a great example for this modality of workspaces, as are WordPress MU for enterprise blogs. Before you object, telling me that SharePoint also supports the modalities above, I must preemptively answer that wiki, blog and discussion support in SharePoint is minimal, primitive and barely enough to make that statement of support, and also that despite the accumulation of several servers brought about by MOSS and the layer after layer of functionality (user profiles, SSO management, etc.) it still remains an Office-artifact-centric workspace manager (I have even stronger opinions about the usability of the communication pieces, but that will wait for another occasion). Let’s just agree for now that collaborative-artifact-centric workspaces are characterized by strong focus on collaboratively produced (and immediately auto-published) documents, with users as a somehow secondary-priority object, which is there mostly to create, serve and maintain those collaborative documents. To make justice to Confluence, I must say that there seems to be a recognition in Atlassian’s part that users and their own personal experiences should be more relevant, but the transformation has not yet completely taken place. In any case, this type of workspaces are specially attractive and productive for technical users (whether technical means computer-savvy or some other specialty); that is the case for many reasons, prime between them that collaborative documents are usually much more complex structurally than flat Office documents because of hyperlinking (Office supports links but it doesn’t make sense to put links to files that are in your private disk, or have to go to SharePoint to find the URL of something else – not for now), macros and plugins that allow the representation of many types of objects in the content (from workflow, to relational data, to media, to…), and also the fact t hat many people together think much better than a single one, and therefore the collectively produced documents they originate are much richer and interesting. On the other hand, this type of workspaces tend to irritate Office-only users (a large percentage of today’s users), for whom bold is control-B, tables are (a) a menu on the top right and (b) indispensably finely tuned and precisely colored, titles and other styles are carefully crafted by font, size, font style, etc. It would be unfair to say that those things cannot be done in this type of workspaces: the problem is that those things are done differently, and asking people to use a browser-based Rich Text Editor or textile (*bold*) is already asking too much. I am amazed when I talk to collaboration experts and some minimize the importance and size of this population, as if it were made of sick people, and I remind them that (a) at least 4 out of 5 CEO’s fall in the category, as well as an even higher percentage of white collar personnel and (b) many people learn to use a computer by using Office applications… and never need to go any further;
• The user-centric workspace, where the focus is carefully kept in the user itself, by “personal workspaces” containing artifacts related to anything that that user has going on at the time. Those artifacts may include blog posting, discussions, Office documents, and any other type of document and/or media, as well as tokens and avatars of other users, brought into the personal workspace by their participation on any of these things going on for that user. A very popular representative of this vision is JIVE Software’s Clearspace, as well as IBM’s Connections (when put together with other IBM products).  A typical landing page for a user-centric workspace is the personal workspace, where the user finds notifications about updates to documents she may be working on, articles published on areas she has interest on, users she is friend with who may have new contributions, and so on; as the user follows any of those links, she will enter other people’s workspaces, as well as group projects, and in the process land on content documents, either privately or collaboratively produced. User-centric workspaces have the attraction of focusing (by definition and architecture) on the things that matter to each user. It is not uncommon for any two different users to have totally, radically different views of the same collaboration hub, because each one of them configured his/her private space to show precisely what they wanted to see and do. Even when the notion of workspace is radically different, social networking collaboration hubs complement document-centric ones quite well. Except for issues of Single Sign On, Unified Search and simplified access to content across environments, there is usually no procedural or process-oriented regimentation to maintain, because the content-centric and the user-centric workspaces serve the same user at different times, for different purposes; I may use my social networking site first thing in the day, to plan my day and update my knowledge about things I care, just to continue one of the threads in it into a content-centric collaboration where I may work for hours in MS Office, or vice-versa, and my interest will drive me naturally to the correct workspace hub. The characteristic of a user-centric workspace is, then, that the focus of attention for the user is her own state of work and collaborations, as well as other users that are actively participating in them; only from there do users usually access documents to work on them. Another strong typifier of such products is that other users, as well as the networks they define (networks, team, buddies, etc.) are at least equally visible, and finally, that such user visibility brings with it a corresponding highlight on user interactions themselves (and in most cases even more) than content objects (there are other technical differentiations of such products, but I am concentrating on Workspaces for the moment).

Of course, the abstractions above are separated by thin and ambiguous lines, and you can expect to see them crossed constantly by products. But they are also good tools of analysis: I have found that most requirements documents for collaboration products quickly zero into these variables.

Workspace patterns

So, we can see that several patterns emerge as we differentiate philosophies of workspaces:

I have productively worked with (and in most cases deployed across an enterprise) most of the modalities above, and several combinations thereof, and found them all attractive and productive, each one on its own capabilities and special applications. I have also found that any product exhibiting any combination of the parameters above can be a productivity sinkhole when used in the wrong manner; that is the case because all of the products I mentioned above as archetypical of one modality or the other also manage to “almost do” what makes the others archetypical as well: using them in that “almost as good as” manner is an almost certain disaster and waste of time.

The gray zone between private and public content work

I have also found that  there is a corner of my way of working (with emphasis on my, just because I don’t know if its yours as well) that is not covered by any of the modalities outlined above, and that is the corner where private note-taking overlaps with online collaboration. When I tally the time I spend working on the computer, I realize that a major chunk of my time is spent clipping, gathering, writing, annotating, organizing content by myself, on my desktop, privately, even when the content I clip, gather, write, annotate and organize comes from the web, email, wikis, etc. and is, in most cases destined to become part of a collaboration.

The problem is, when the moment comes to use that content in a collaborative fashion, a major usability fracture emerges: that of re-purposing the “private”, carefully integrated multi-source content into on-line collaborations I may be working on. I call this corner “the moment of taking my brain store public”, and if you have attempted it, you hate it as well:

That’s why I have been an avid user of OnFolio, until Microsoft bought the company and killed the product, then OneNote  (until I settled on Evernote for Windows), then Notebook, Omnioutliner, Caboodle and about ten other apps in the Mac (until I settled on Webstractor, a fantastic app that proceeded to become unsupported when the vendor died and immediately proceeded to bomb while saving in OS X 10.5), then several notetakers on my S60 phones, and so on… All of them imposed the heavy price of making the private notes public that I described above…

Well, NO MORE! Now there is a new Evernote for Mac, combined with a new hosted synchronization model, that I believe will shock the world, and in the process help solve a significant part of the pain caused by one of the discontinuities that has most troubled collaboration products (and a big hush-hush for those products, except for IBM who has a relatively slim advantage in the area): the chasm between offline and online content. Whether because you travel on site and have no access to the VPN from your customer’s network, or because you spend two hours working on the train getting to and from the office and home, or spend too much time in airport, the fact is, your private knowledge and your collaborative knowledge are sitting in different places, one on your machine, the other online… and you are always bound to need the one you have no access to!

Evernote to the rescue, rocking the world

I hope you tried or used Evernote at some point on Windows. Talk about a neat, clean, superbly designed product. It basically sat in the status bar, ready to be invoked at any time, and ready to receive web clips, copy/pastes, selected chunks of graphics and/or text, hand-written notes (switching to hand-writing if you were using a tablet),and so on. You never needed to save, if you clipped it or wrote it or annotated it, it was permanent. Then, you could highlight, add to it, delete, edit, etc., and still love it more.

If that wasn’t enough, Evernote had something that looked almost science fiction, even for OCR-savvy users: it would process your handwritten notes, or pictures of signs, or whatever pixel-based, and turn them into searchable text! Did I mention that the search in Evernote was lightning fast already? I am sure you are logving it by now… No? Ok, consider this: tagging of notes, categories, a ticker-tape metaphor for chronological display, templates, c’mon, you’ve GOT to love it! OK, OK, you could buy it for $39, do you love it now? No?

If no, it maybe because there were a couple of problems with the Windows version:

1. Did not run on Mac (Ouch!)
2. DId not do much (actually, ANYTHING) to solve the private/public thing…

So, it was still by far the best note taking app in the world, but it fell short…

Until I found out about the Mac Evernote beta. The mac version is, as anything Mac, sexier and neater than its Windows counterpart (albeit a little less functional yet). But hey, it solves the multi-computer thing (because there is also a version for Linux and phones –sort of). That is quite nice, but the private-public thing…

YES, IT SOLVES THAT PROBLEM TOO! And it does it through a feature that makes it infinitely more powerful than it was before: a hosted model through which notes can be synchronized between an online store and different computers, accessed online at any time, and SHARED with other users online as well.

Wow, are you starting to see the possibilities? And… did I mention that the online version of a note you see on your browser is identical to that in your computer, the one where graphics, tables and other niceties looked so well? Or that you can also edit it ONLINE? Or that the client version runs on Windows, Macs, phones and Linux? Or that you can send a quick email with notes from your phone and they will become notes? What about pics in online-synchronized notes being automatically tagged with their contained, searchable text?

The possibilities for this product are UNBELIEVABLE, and I hope you see what I see… Let me outline possible scenarios:

• Evernote decides to sell the server as an enterprise collaboration server, where people share some of their notebooks (Evernote’s personal workspace metaphor), and enable collaborative content (all that lays in the way is a simple authentication and granular access control mechanism);
• Remember that notebooks can contain ANY KIND of media, including voice annotations (directly from your phone), videos, etc, each one of them procured in the device that makes sense to you in the moment. This is intrinsically more UNIFIED than anything in the mega-monolithic UCC vision by Microsoft… with one millionth of the footprint, and leveraging personal devices without heavy weight IT budgets!
• Now that your ultra-flexibly produced private notes are online, with nice formatting, graphics, and such, why would you use convoluted mechanisms for attaching documents, then referring to them? Yes, there will still be Office content, but I can guarantee you that many, like me, will get rid of most needs for Office and STILL share nicely organized and formatted content online. I will spend a large amount of time taking light-weight but rich-enough notes, knowing that if I am online my content is synchronized as often as I want, and if I am not it will when I get back on line (and that I carry a fairly actualized copy in the meanwhile).
• Evernote notebooks will keep adding richer and richer mechanisms for clipping, annotating, etc. I can see a point coming where it can match the mind-boggling fidelity of clipping that Webstractor used to have, and the PDF-to-RTF correctness that other Mac products have, and the intra-page linking beauty of Voodoo Pro, etc. The richer the desktop mechanism, the richer the online verison will become, without additional pain of any sort. All of it automatically synchronized…

The perfect condiment

I realize that my excitement may come as out of place to most of my audience. Unless you have worked, and DO work, with several collaboration platforms, on a couple of computers or more, you may think I am exaggerating: even if you have experience note taking you have not experienced the pain of transferring to online collaboration platforms. Yes, if you use .Mac you will share the excitement for good synchronization (which is not a trivial problem to address any way), but still… only if you have experienced the pain of sharing your private notes in a collaboration platform you will sympathize.

Now, if you DO use at least one workspace-based collaboration product, and you DO take notes, clippings, cut-paste, etc., try it and stick to it until it starts synchronizing. Once it does that, try installing the client on another computer. Now share your notes… YOU ARE HOOKED, this is an awesome thing.

Now, there is a possible company play I don’t care much about, which is Evernote trying to become the world center for all notes (As you read above, what excites me is the possibility of a server you can acquire for internal collaboration). Well, not less than a week ago the company posted user quotas (limits) of 40 MB per month. For a company that (presumably) wants to be the Google of notes, the number is a real joke… but the potential for an enterprise collaboration move is still there, and that is still cool…

Getting a beta for Mac

You can go to the Evernote website and request the beta. The problem is, it took me a couple days for me to receive the user ID I need for the hosted component. That tells me beta subscription is quite limited… but I have 18 invitations left from my membership, drop me a comment if you want one, and I will send it out until I run out of them. You’ll love Evernote, and you’ll like me for it.  :)

Nota Bene: [Correction] When I wrote the original article above, I blamed Evernote for leaving previous users of the stand-alone Windows note-taking app hanging dry… Well, it turns out that I was wrong, and I am happy to report it (See Phil Libin’s comment). My apologies for the short-lived slander  :)

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Evernote: new collaboration modality emerging or just note taking?

But GTD is also a naked emperor of sorts: chronicles of failed adoptions are pretty much as common (or more) as discussions of GTD itself. Typical postings about it go as follows:

1. Excitement about the discovery of either GTD itself, or even more common, a toolkit, software or smart implementation that promises to ease adoption (the “GTD thing”);
2. Review, description and analysis of the “GTD thing”, whatever it may be;
3. The sharing of a decision whereby the poster decides to start using it, with a comment of the type of “I promise, if I can stick with this for 3 weeks, I will write another post“
4. A series of follow-up posts by *readers* of the original post, but no post that fulfills the promise above… the original poster failed to adopt it;
5. Sometimes, successful adopters post their follow-up notes, highlighting that they in turn *were* able to stick to it. Somehow, those posts tend to sound somehow religious in tone, not in the spiritual sense but rather in the canonic sense: they all contain a very detailed canon which, if followed, will produce enlightenment.

I must confess, in three different occasions I shared the experience. Adopted it (as well as one of its variants), constructed my version of “the GTD thing”, and then dropped it. Each iteration left me wanting more, but also a little frustrated at myself (I have grown up in a culture that enshrines efficiency and condemns failed attempts at organization, blaming it on personal characteristics of laziness, procrastination or worse). But I am also stubborn, and I decided to keep trying. Having gotten much closer to success this time (several months using GTD), I would like to share the secret sauce: the experience only applies to me, but I hope it helps you…

Background

The principles of the methodology are quite simple, and I won’t go through them here; there is already a great place to go for GTD resources and , if you really want to dig GTD, the place to go is zenhabits (In the process, you will discover one of the best blogs in the web for all things that are really productive).

GTD is extraordinary in that it maximizes the user’s ability to (a) go with the flow –you don’t need to change WHAT you do as much as making minor changes to HOW you do it, (b) leverage serendipity –when things need to be recorded, whether a to-do or a project or a calendar event, it’s easy to do so and (c) utmost simplicity of process. Either do what needs to be done, record something that needs to, or review what comes next.

With such positive pedigree, why does GTD adoption typically fail? Armed with my personal experience, but also that of many friends who have tried it with varying levels of enthusiasm, plus an abundant corpus of web testimonials on the issue, I would venture two abstract principles:

How ubiquitous is your “GTD thing”?

For the zen of GTD to work, it has to replace two common personal habits:

• Replace the postponement of decision about emerging and existing commitments and tasks (“What do I do about this?”) with the process of logging them down, as they appear, and if possible categorizing them right there, at that moment;
• Make the retrospective habit of slowing down randomly to evaluate status (i.e., “Where am I, what next?”), usually performed under stress, with a regular, somehow meditative, but periodic review.

The rest is gravy, pretty much: if the two habits are replaced most of the benefit automatically accrues. The “GTD thing” of choice just needs to support the two routines, and minor behavior modifications create the rest.

That could be the reason that non-computer-bound people have high success rates when they use a “GTD thing” based on traditional index cards and a portable card wallet: they are always with you, and a pencil is very little extra equipment to carry.

There is, however, a serious drawback: index cards start to impose their own overhead as they multiply with the zillion events of a busy agenda, and they interface very poorly to daily computer-based routines. Typical case? Find something on the web, want to turn it into an actionable item. Have a contact in your contact manager of pain (I was going to say choice, really), and want to record a call to that person, with a reference to a note contained in the contact’s record, and perhaps having to make the call when you are away from the computer.

In my case, cards were already part of my arsenal of choice, but I had a hard time keeping them linked to the zillion computer-based and internet-based pieces of content in my life.

Computer-bound people need to bring GTD into their computer routine; and that means, of course, some sort of GTD software. Many of them are quite good. OmniGroup’s OmniFocus is, IMHO, a sure winner, having the big plus for me that it runs on the Mac (and the big minus of not doing Windows). Further, the ability to send yourself emails to register tasks and integration with other Mac apps and the OS comes close to making this particular “GTD thing” almost ubiquitous. The problem is… one day, traffic is bad, you decide to stop at Home Depot (sorry, I dislike Walmart’s Lowe’s even more), where is your GTD list for Home Depot? You are watching TV, and there is this short mention of a movie you want to add to your NetFlix, where is your GTD? You register it in a piece of paper? Mmmm… The moment that you start using paper ias well as software (ias input as well as output), your chances to fail at GTD start growing geometrically with time, because you create conditions for loss of synchronization. Things start to fall through that crack between the paper pad and the screen… The “GTD thing” of choice needs to be more ubiquitous than either of the solutions above.

How multi-modal is your “GTD thing”?

Remember the “retrospective review” I talked about above? That is an example of just one modality for using your “GTD thing”. There are more: inspection, planning, etc.
I have found that I am not alone at using the task management routine in multiple modalities. In some cases, it is “register and move on ASAP”. In others, it’s “let’s see many things, so that context makes itself evident”. Others, it’s close to meditative: look at this project while my mind wanders and ideas emerge. There is also a browse mode, and many others. That is the reason index cards excel: manipulating them is like manipulating ideas and events, stacking them, grouping them, etc. No computer version approaches that level of dexterity (except, may be, using Tinderbox — then again, Tinderbox has huge power as an XML-based mesh manager, but also its own set of drawbacks, amongst them a distractive abundance of possible operations, each one of them obscure)…

Those modalities take place in different settings, and have different requirements. Of course, nothing better than a large screen space with high resolution for context-related tasks (nothing kills context like having to choose which of many views is on top, hiding the others — that’s one of the reasons I am addicted to my Mac’s double 30″ displays). In-store list review is better done in a succinct, unobtrusive piece of paper (or screen), unless you want everybody else in the store looking over your shoulder. Your “GTD thing” has to support all of them optimally.

My secret sauce

In my case (remember, the fact that it works for me has no say on whether it will for you), the secret sauce has two main ingredients:

* monkeyGTD – An open source, one-file, self-enclosed, single page (but multiple-view) GTD program and data file that runs on practically every browser and every computer (yes, descriptions can be correct and yet do little justice to what they describe);

* The Nokia N810 Internet Tablet – A convergent hand-held portable computer that pushes the computer concept as close as possible to a phone as it possible (without loosing its character as full-blown computer), and pushes Linux (actually, Maemo) as close as possible to the ideal usability point.

Each one of these components is in itself a brilliant piece of engineering and usability:

• monkeyGTD brilliantly addresses one of the key problems of paper-based lists, namely that they are absolutely dumb. You put all the intelligence, all the alertness about time, all the manipulation required for review and any other modality. monkeyGTD does so by consisting of a single-file web page that has the GTD intelligence built in as part of the page (I was never a fan of JavaScript, but monkeyGTD made me much more tolerant of it): all modalities are well supported, and most common operations common in GTD and its variants are supported as well. If you have access to the file containing your GTD lists and contexts, you have access to the program, because it is inside the same file. This concept is much more brilliant than it looks at first sight, but it rarely given full credit until you try it yourself.
• It may sound like “killing mosquitoes with a cannon”, but the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet only adds two capabilities that are critical to your “GTD thing”: you can now carry and use your GTD “brain” (both data and intelligence) anywhere with you, 24-hours a day (showers not recommended). More important yet, because the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet is also an unobtrusive USB and Blue-tooth and wireless device, when you sit at the computer, you have access to that same brain, all its data, and all its intelligence, from any computer you may use.

Together with all the other computers I may use, both mine and somebody else’s, My Nokia N810 Internet Tablet and my monkeyGTD file create a wonderful “GTD thing”, one that has managed to stick to my routine (and viceversa). All the convergent features of the tablet come to good use as my GTD thing, and I have come to firmly believe that the almost $500 I have spent on the device would be justified by just using it with Monkey GTD:

• The tablet is always connected to anything I am using, from phone to Mac to Windows to Linux. Right now it’s sitting on the desk, but its monkeyGTD file is open on my Mac’s screen, next to the window I am typing this on;
• It is with me whether I am looking at a movie, having lunch, in the bathroom, bus, train, car, etc. Totally ubiquitous;
• If I am in a situation where I can’t type, I have my recorder always open: touch screen and talk is all that is needed, the “Check recordings” task is already there for when I do my review;
• I save the file to my web server at least once a day, just in case I lose the tablet or run out of battery (a very rare event);
• Whatever list, for whatever context, as well as whatever alerts I record, whatever emails I receive, whatever browser bookmarks I refer to, are always with me, and I can not only access them and act on them: I can also type short notes much less obtrusively than in my phone;
• The screen is large enough to comfortably show me my “dashboard” at any moment, as well as to look at a whole project in context, or at a whole context.

Looking at the notes above, it looks like the magic is in the tablet, not the monkeyGTD. But not really: of course, the tablet makes a great list manager, so you could do Zen to Done without the need for monkeyGTD, as all other benefits would still accrue. But why would you? monkeyGTD is quite intelligent, and the GTD routine is built into its navigation. Opening a monkeyGTD ona browser is much more context-rich than opening lists on a text editor.

But there is another reason why, IMHO, monkeyGTD is an absolutely critical component of getting GTD done. I can only explain it succinctly assuming you have come to depend on wikis as much as I do; if you don’t, you may find this explanation quite foreign. Wikis are an extraordinary productivity tool, as are blogs, because they favor the unobtrusive representation of those traces of our intelligence that we call knowledge, which in turn sits on lots of content (book paragraphs you may be writing, thought explorations, records of conversations, podcasts, pictures, videos, and more). When you search in a wiki, the results of the search frequently have that odd deja-vu-kind-of-feeling, as if you knew that your brain, would have come to the same answer if only you had time to spare. The problem is, they also require their own set of gestures and processes, and they usually sit only in a server somewhere in the sky. Did I mention that monkeyGTD is also a wiki? You can write as much as you want into gtdMonkey (no, you can’t store Wikipedia in a single page, but would you?). You can create a few files using monkey or the original tiddlyWiki, and then cross-link them, and still have an organic GTD thing that encompasses all of them. There is such a synergy between the two ingredients of my secret sauce, that I can guarantee you that, f you try the sauce, you will believe it’s a single, organically produced, indivisible single ingredient.

So, is this the GTD Nirvana?

I don’t know, never been there. It’s certainly not perfect, because integration between the tablet and my externally-imposed desktop productivity client at work (MS Office) is very poor, almost non-existent. Also, monkeyGTD is not supported by a large community of developers, but pretty much is the work of love of a single brilliant developer on top of another brilliant piece of software (and love), tiddlyWiki. It moves slowly forward in terms of features (then again, if it had too many more it would not be as cool).

But I would have to be unfair to find fault in the combination. This thing works and exceeds expectations: you will not only get GTD done, you will find that you have opened doors that were not available before, such as an infinitely expandable context of webs, an integration beyond belief between online and off-line info-spaces. Give it a try, let me know how it goes…

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

The “GTD thing”

 So, I am fixing the problem. Not out of the water yet, but a few things I have learned:

1. That I should always always always run Disk Utility regularly, and *specially* before touching the OS. Think about this: as DU was scanning my system disk (a disk where I intentionally don’t put music collections, or photo collections, or large backups), it reported that it had over 1,009,000 files. That is mind-boggling. Of course, a couple power glitches, a couple dead ends where I turned off the machine, a couple of applications killed while they were processing files, a couple of unplagging of external disks before totally being ejected, and so on, *have to* have caused some damage to the file system. Installing on anything but a pristine disk is calling for trouble. Mea culpa…
2. That I should never trust the brands — Yep, this is not news. But somehow, I still remember the times when the Mac used to find things and fix them before I found out they were broken. I remember messages coming from apps that sometimes made me feel like there HAD to be a little dwarf looking at me from the other side of the screen, or else HOW could the machine know so exactly what I was about to do, or wanted to do? The mac spoiled me, made me feel like I didn’t need to nderstand its complexity, “the rest of us” were not hackers, were just normal people who need the computer, just like me… But something has happenned in the last few years. We gradually gave for granted that the massive complexity of a system that, in minimum loaded state, has 1 Million files, was *managed*, not swept under the rug. Sure, OS X is a great OS, but mother, is it complex. Does that mean that I should just bite the bit and learn all of its details? Not really: for that I have already Windows (and Linux). If Disk Utility is something I need to run before upgrading, please don’t bury that fact in some obscure Read Me file that I am sure is part of the 10.5 DVD. Just run it transparently in the background, fix what you’ve got to fix, so what ya need to do, and be a MAC!
3. iPods and Macs from the same company is a bad idea. I’ve had five iPods so far (gave them all away except the Shuffle, which sits in one of my stereos). The first, I gave away because the second (and a beautiful PC clone that is still my favorite, from creative) made it look clunky. The cost, the use, the mind set of the iPod was so “consumerish” that I didn’t even think about it (the guilt of being a spoiled privileged imperial guard is a different issue). I felt a little screwed by the battery thing, but I didn’t care about been screwed by Apple, after all this was mostly a whim device. I felt a little sour when the useful life of the battery (and the glossy cover) came and went fast. So what, this is just a transitional device…

But the Mac is a different thing altogether. I have tens of thousands of pictures in my Aperture library, all of them dear to me. I have files that go back to Mac Pluses and HP LX 100’s. Thousands of digitized CD’s of which at least 20% I have lost originals for. And so on and so forth. When I work in it, the huge visual real estate of the two 30″ Cinemas is used up to the last corner (I showed my desk to a colleague, who visited me while I was running a market research. He said that the two monitors were an exageration, so I asked him to point me to a screen that did not need to be simultaneously open with the others –or that it wouldn’t distract me hunting for it if it weren’t–, or one that could be made smaller, or one of the visible apps that could be hidden without sacrificing context and awareness, and he couldn’t find waste). The computer is the mirror of my mind, where I manipulate my thoughts as a proxy. It costs a fortune (just the video card that drives the monitors does, an obscene amount of money) because it’s worth a fortune. I don’t want Apple to treat it like an iPod, but unfortunately, more and more, Apple does.

When I bought the laptop from hell, the one that was so hot that even Satan would burn his fingers on it, I ended up returning it for a 15% loss. Talk about a rip off… I challenged the “genius” at the store to keep it on for an hour, and then keep his fingers on top of the upper bar for one minute without raising them, and he declined… “It’s supposed to run hot [Verbatim]“. To add insult to injury, all posts on the Apple support forums that mentioned the word heat, hot, burn, etc, would disappear in less than 2 minutes. Censor a message that says that cover of the iPod gets easily scratched, but don’t hide the ball from the next buyer of a mind mirror…

I don’t know if I will be able to fix the Mac. But I have already invested almost three days (plus the ones I will probably need to invest to reinstall apps, plus data that will disappear, plus the confusion of one more backup that I will never get to delete, etc.). Sure, it’s more powerful, but it’s not a Mac any more.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Hell has its privileges

I use a quad-processor Mac G5, 2.5 Gb memory, Quadro 4500 Video Card driving two Cinema 30 inch monitors. The machine has 750 Gb internal disk, plus 4 Tb of external disks. Not a low end system, not one that can “barely run” the OS. Further, with OS X 10.4 the machine was a screamer, running Aperture with thousand of pictures of 20 Mb each, and at the same time flying through three or four other simultaneous heavy-load programs like Photoshop.

So, one day Safari breaks. Of course, it breaks at the precise wrong time: hours before I need to deliver a Web conference, already preset to be held on Microsoft’s web conferencing service. Unfortunately, from a Mac I could only run the conference on Safari, so I needed to solve the problem *really fast*…

The problem is, *there is no way to just re-install Safari on 10.4*. The “geniuses” (not my choice of title) at the local Newport Beach Apple store suggested that I (a) downloaded Safari from Apple — twenty minutes until I showed them that I had already tried but there is no such thing as Safari download, (b) fixed disk permissions — which I had already attempted and hadn’t worked, (b) re-installed the OS (???) or (b) upgraded to 10.5. (???)

First red alert – This is the company and OS that is supposed to be the easiest to use and best supported. After decades of using Mac, I could probably get a better answer from the likes of Fry’s “customer service” personnel.

Time ticking, decided to upgrade to 10.5; somehow, an “upgrade” looked like less intrusive a move than a “reinstall”. Notice that somehow the “fix” had disappeared from the option list

Second red alert — Don’t trust a doctor who immediately suggests open heart procedures to eliminate a whart.

Call me stupid, I decided to ignore both red alerts. Hell started…

10.5 installed to a semi-hanged state, where I had windows from “Time Machine” asking me which drive to use to back up the 3.4 GB of content I had in-line at the time (of course, I had no disk with that capacity), and a couploe of windows that I opened by clicking around the dock. But no Finder (that is, no drive icons on the screen). None of the menus in the Finder worked (amongst them, shut down, restart, log out, and all the biggies) and nothing I did in the screen (except a few clicks in the browser, invoked from the Dock) worked. OF COURSE, re-launchiing the Finder from the “Kill Apps” menu didn’t work either!

Red alert 3 — Why have a menu to kill apps that, if the Finder id broken, won’t work? Ask the geniuses, or the marketeers who trump the virtues of the OS

After waiting for two hours, I decided to shut down the power. ZFour or five iterations of this process, and somehow I managed to boot to a working Finder.

You may say: “Hey, you called the problem on yourself by dinging around with the power button”.  But no, not really: a “user friendly” OS is not supposed toleave me with a non-operational mouse, a frozen screen and a spinning wheel where the mouse arrow is supposed to be, WITHOUT A SINGLE MESSAGE or indication of what is going on. I was kind enough to wait for a couple hours before pressing it…

In any case, 10.5.1 seemed to be finally working. As soon as it did, multiple apps starting reporting upgrades available, and for the next day or so I installed a few of them. Then, I installed Aperture 10.2, which in turn proceeded to tell me that it refused to work unless I installed 10.5.2.

Mea Culpa 1 – By now, I should’ve just given up on the whole thing. Too many red alerts, too intense feelings of being abused by Jobs and Co., too many stupid answers collected from forums (who treated me like crap just because I was having problems and I am not a hacker). But I felt like I was in a one-way street with no choices to go back: Aperture is one of the apps I constantly use, if I can’t (and going back to a previous release probably would render my whole library unuseable) I much rather not use the Mac any more…

So I ran the upgrade to 10.5.2. Same as with 10.5 (NO Finder), except that now, no matter what I do, the finder is gone. Went back to 10.5… Same thing, no Finder.

I can’t get to disks, any dialog that opens a file selection dialog freezes, no cleaning the trash, no log out or restart, no system preferences… etc. I have lost exactly three days with this problem, and I feel abused, once again, by Apple, who just needed to put something out to cool down the Vista renassaince… Somehow, Apple and Microsoft have become the same company: closed, abusive of their power, unconcerned about the user, glossy only in commercials and advertisements.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Apple OS X 10.5 – Welcome to hell