This user’s experienceby Matt Henderson, since 2003

1996. I remember it clearly. Recently graduated, I was working as an engineer at the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany. A rebellious type, I’d decided that either they let me keep my Mac, or I’d go work somewhere else. They let me keep it.

I’d heard about the internet, and supposedly we had it, but via an email gateway called Bitnet. To “FTP” something, we’d send an email, and get back several encoded file chunks, requiring a terminal emulation program to download for offline reassembling.

Curious one day, I downloaded, assembled and launched John Norstad’s usenet reader. I’ll never forget that day; the moment I realized I had graphical access to the internet, and a door opened to a brand new world.

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For the past few years, one of the most frequently used applications on my Mac has been Notational Velocity. It’s a note-taking application, with a unique and efficient unified mechanism for both searching notes and creating new ones. Although I usually end up editing those notes in other applications (like iA Writer), they are always created and managed in Notational Velocity.

I’ve never known who’s behind the app until today, having stumbled across a great interview with its author, Zachary Schneirov.

Having read the interview, the following thoughts came to mind:

• Schneirov is one of those super-talented individuals hidden away, working in obscurity and under the radar of mainstream social media. (In @makalu, we often talk about how that’s where most of the people we’d want working with us are located, and how hard it is to discover them!)

• I really admire and envy his ability to apply such discipline to making decisions. Whether it’s taking donations, or adding a new feature, the interview gives an insight into how carefully he weights the consequences. You can tell he’s a man who says “No” far more often than “Yes”.

• That the application is so fast, efficient, elegant and solid can almost go unnoticed; the ironic and unfortunate fate of great design and engineering effort. The interview illustrates just how great the design and engineering is behind this product! (And, it makes me want to rush out to pick-up Jeff Raskin’s, “Humane Interfaces” book…)

• Apple’s development environment provides a lot of great frameworks. But the general purpose nature of those frameworks will mean they are sub-optimal for a lot of specific application contexts. To make the best application possible, an engineer needs to deeply understand both the framework, and the problem he’s solving, in order to know when it’d be better to roll his own solution. In the article, Schneirov discusses some of the interesting areas in which he decided not to use Apple’s solutions.

Grab a coffee, and spend some quality time reading the full interview.

In the mainstream, we commonly admire the design works of luminaries such as Apple, IDEO, Frog Design and, well, why not — Makalu Interactive. But there are others out there, designers flying way below the radar, who equally deserve our admiration and respect — including the gifted ones (elegantly named, “Grupo Setex”) who designed the Spanish Parking Meter.

Pour a cognac, put on some Vivaldi, and spend some quality time soaking in the inspiration:

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The history of both science and philosophy is one in which man observes things (or studies the observations of others), and attempts to construct models for understanding those observations. Those models are borne in the thought processes of humans, and thereby limited to the realm of human experience.

Quantum physics, on the other hand, is a different story.

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Back in 2004, I wrote a popular article describing my system for “Getting Things Done”. Since then, tools have changed and my needs have changed, and so it was about time for an update.

Today’s system is simpler; it’s based on two tools — OmniFocus, and TaskPaper. Here’s how it works.

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This is a long article, but one I think could be important to you. It’s about something that, for me, has proven transformative in my life. It’s about the Paleo diet, and I hope you enjoy it.

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I’ve been reading the book, “Why we get fat” by Gary Taubes. If you’re interested in understanding the relationship between eating and getting fat, then you must read the book. It could change your life.

The revelation of the book is that some common dietary beliefs are, as demonstrated by science & biology, complete inverted. And that got me thinking about possible parallels in other areas, such as productivity.

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Like most people fascinated with the potential that devices like the iPad have to change how we read and learn, I rushed to the App Store to purchase Push Pop Press’s highly-anticipated first interactive book, “Our Choice.”

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Although it was signed by @stop, this post to the Twitter blog wasn’t written by the same Doug Bowman that’s been writing over at stopdesign.com since 2006. (That’s one of the nice things about blogs; over time, you can really get to know someone .)

Here’s what the real Doug was probably thinking, while the subordinate Doug was forced to post this cheesy stuff:

Last month, we released an update to Twitter for iPhone and iPad containing a number of features that made finding friends and sharing information on Twitter even easier. The iPhone app also contained a new feature we wanted to test named the QuickBar.

“We wanted to test? I knew from the moment management told me about it, the QuickBar was gonna flop. (In fact, the whole #dickbar thing was started secretly by me.)”

The QuickBar was originally conceived to help users discover what’s happening in the broader world beyond people they already follow.

“The QuickBar was originally conceived to get advertiser content in front of our users.”

The bar was also seen as a potential means of in-app notifications for new @mentions, DMs, and other important activity.

“And Google also saw those ad blocks as a potential means of showing pictures of Missing Children.”

We want Twitter to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most meaningful to them.

“Obligatory lofty goals remark.”

In support of this, we will frequently experiment by trying new things, adding new features, and being bold in the product decisions we make.

“Being bold sounds better than being stupid.”

After testing a feature and evaluating its merits, if we learn it doesn’t improve the user experience or serve our mission, we’ll remove that feature.

“If our advertisers start shouting, ‘Get us out of that blasted #dickbar! We don’t want to be associated with it!’, we’ll remove that feature.”

Rather than continue to make changes to the QuickBar as it exists, we removed the bar from the update appearing in the App Store today. We believe there are still significant benefits to increasing awareness of what’s happening outside the home timeline. Evidence of the incredibly high usage metrics for the QuickBar support this.

“You hated it, so we’ll remove it. But our metrics show you loved it! And our metrics can also demonstrate that’s not a contradiction. Unless it is.”

For now, we’re going back to the drawing board to explore the best possible experience for in-app notification and discovery.

“I told you so.”

In short, the Doug Bowman we’ve come to know and love would have never voluntarily put the QuickBar in the Twitter client. Just as Doug left Google on the matter of principles, I predict we’ll see him leaving Twitter as well, if this kind of stuff continues.

An excerpt from “Letter to a Christian Nation,” by Sam Harris:

THE FACT OF LIFE

All complex life on earth has developed from simpler life-forms over billions of years. This is a fact that no longer admits of intelligent dispute. If you doubt that human beings evolved from prior species, you may as well doubt that the sun is a star.

Imagine your potential for embarrassment if your religious faith rested on the presumption that the sun was not a star at all. Imagine millions of Christians in the United States spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to battle the godless astronomers and astrophysicists on this point. Imagine them working passionately to get their unfounded notions about the sun taught in our nation’s school.

This is exactly the situation you are in now with respect to evolution.

Christians who doubt the truth of evolution are apt to say things like “Evolution is just a theory, not a fact.” Such statements betray a serious misunderstanding of the way the term “theory” is used in scientific discourse. In science, facts must be explained with reference to other facts. These larger explanatory models are “theories.” Theories make predictions and can, in principle, be tested. The phrase “the theory of evolution” does not in the least suggest that evolution is not a fact. One can speak about “the germ theory of disease” or “the theory of gravitation” without casting doubt upon disease or gravity as facts of nature.

In 2005, a survey was conducted in 34 countries measuring the percentage of adults who accept evolution. The United States ranked 33rd [Ed- nearly dead last], just above Turkey.

Meanwhile, high school students in the United States test below those of every European and Asian nation in their understanding of science and math.

These data are unequivocal: We are building a nation of ignorance.

When I get pulled into a discussion on the topic of religion, I usually end up leaving with many frustrating thoughts. In the most recent conversation, the following particularly stood out.

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There’s a simple rule of thumb which states that the choice of font size should lead to no more than about 12 words per line. Another establishes a relation between line length and the space needed between lines; the longer the line, the more space is needed to help the eye reconnect from the end of one line, to the beginning of the next. Others help determine the amount of margin to be found around a piece of text.

In the field of typography, there are concepts subtler and far more sophisticated than these, but consistent with Pareto’s principle, the majority of readability benefits can be achieved in the application of just a few basic rules; rules which anyone who communicates with the written word, or provides the tools with which written communications are authored, can easily learn in an afternoon.

When writing tools don’t respect the fundamentals of typography, the consequences don’t manifest themselves in something as acute as a bug or application crash. No, the consequences are subtler yet more profound — the writer, for reasons they can’t quite put their finger on, find themselves unable to effectively put their thoughts into words.

This has been my principal frustration with the majority of writing tools available on the iPad. Text running from the very left edge of the screen to the far right, illegible fonts, lines that are too long and with too little linespacing collectively work to derail my concentration; subconsciously repelling me from the application.

So I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of Writer, the authoring tool for iPad, by the folks at Information Architects. iA know their typography, and their new iPad app doesn’t disappoint.

They’ve paid attention to detail and have introduced some useful twists — for example, they’ve extended the standard iPad keyboard with an additional row containing word and character navigation, as well as quick access to punctuation.

But the real value for me is delivered in the superb execution of the basics. After just a day of usage, I’ve already observed that I can spend hours in the app, frictionlessly emerged in thought, as the tool disappears from my consciousness, allowing me to finally achieve the single-tasking focus inherent to the device. In fact, I now find myself actually preferring to move away from the desktop, and write on the iPad.

And as we at Makalu conclude design and development of our own first iOS products, I have a particular appreciation for the skill and effort required to achieve the simplicity, elegance and effectiveness of such a polished product. So bravo to Information Architects — one of our respected peers in the digital product design industry — on this accomplishment.

As a consequence of the nightmare I’ve had with Vodafone trying to contract an iPad data plan, I happened to discover a more attractive alternative — the iPad pre-paid card from Orange.

Cellular internet access is enabled (and disabled) via the Cellular Data setting, within the General Preference. When enabled, the pre-paid card provides 3G access to the internet for 3.50€ per natural-day, charged against your pre-filled account balance.

For example, if I enable Cellular Data at 6 pm, I’ll have 3G internet access for 3.50€ until midnight, after which the next natural-day period starts (and another 3.50€ charged).

The pre-paid has proven attractive for a number of reasons:

• As I’ve discovered, I’m nearly always on Wifi when using the iPad, and rarely need the 3G connectivity — and so, for me, the prepaid option is far more economical than Vodafone’s 37€ per month contracted service.

• I like the full control I have over the spending — no more erroneous charges that require me to spend hours on a low-quality VOIP connection to an outsourced call center in South America to get resolved.

• Recharging the card is easy — I can do it at any ATM machine, online at the Orange website, or even at the local grocery store.

But there’s one problem, and it’s a big one:

It’s easy to forget to turn the data connection back off when I’m finished with the iPad. This happened once to me, and within a matter of days, I’d unknowingly consumed my entire pre-paid balance.

Apple could solve this problem by adding an optional auto-disable setting to the Cellular Data preference. I’d implement such a setting like this.

(If I can get this article fireballed, perhaps it’ll get noticed by someone at Apple. In anticipation, wp-cache is enabled… :-)

Yesterday, the SSD startup drive in my OS X MacBook became extensively corrupted, such that the computer would no longer boot from it. The process of recovering and repairing the drive revealed a number of important lessons related to recovery preparedness.

After an unbelievably bad experience trying to get an iPad microSIM from Vodafone, I decided to change gears and go for a pre-paid microSIM from Orange, as advertised on their special iPad web page. I visited a local Orange store, bought the microSIM, loaded it with 50€, took it home, installed it in the iPad, and verified that it all worked.

Great! …until I decided to confirm the 50€ balance, and that’s when things started heading south with Orange.

Varied reasons for following people on Twitter (including sheer imprudence) has resulted in a stream disproportionately populated with tweets from people that I’m either not really interested in hearing from on a daily basis, or are a bit too prolific in their tweeting. And as a consequence, I often miss tweets from certain people from whom I want to read everything said.

Until lists are supported in Tweetie for Mac, I’m going to experiment with following Twitter in an RSS feed reader (NetNewsWire — on both OS X and the iPhone), subscribing to the Twitter RSS feeds of a limited number of people. Expected benefits include:

• My stream should now be filtered on what I’m most likely to be interested in reading.

• I can read my twitter feed at a dedicated time (i.e. far less frequently), and will be sure not to miss anything said by those I want to hear from.

• I’ll now get to see people’s @replies, which I’ve long missed.