March 22, 2012
March 21, 2012
March 20, 2012
March 19, 2012
March 17, 2012
March 16, 2012
March 15, 2012
March 12, 2012
March 11, 2012
Went for a walk down the Ridgeway today - the oldest road in Britain, perhaps the oldest in the world. The White Horse is always a delight. The greatest bit of public art ever.
March 7, 2012
Sorry to interrupt the flow of synthcats and archery, but this last month I have become enamoured of Teux Deux, which is an organisational tool that came out of the studios of Swiss Miss, a design blog I read from time to time.
I am a fairly organised person these days, given my simply fabulous, busy life. I need a notepad as much as a “to-do list” and I like having things all in one place. I use a lot of the strategies by David Allen in his book Getting Things Done - the only self-helpy type book in the world that might actually change your life. A lot of it is straight-up common-sense-innit, but if you genuinely want to be more organised, it’s the only thing that works.
I used to write down everything on an RTF file which I had on a memory stick which I shuttled between the computers I am chained to daily. Why an RTF file? Because I am PC at work and Mac at home. Ernest in the town and Jack in the country. An RTF file is the best solution to transporting cross-platform text that retains bolding, underlining, and italics, which are the hallmarks of nicely readable, well-organised type since the fucking 15th century. I understand the more ‘real-ale’ interweb Getting Things Done people prefer plain text for notes and lists, the better for compatibility - apparently if you are really hardcore you’ll store every bit of information in one huge text file and just search it when you need it. Sod that. For me, organised text equals organised thoughts. Like page, like brain. Days. Lists. Headings. Preferably in Garamond, which makes you feel like Hemingway just listing what you need to make the dinner.
At first I looked around for a thingy that could sync a single RTF file between an iPhone and cross-platform networked computers. Oh dear. The handful of paid for apps that can handle RTF files sync with Dropbox, which is unfortunately verboten on my work machine - plus ‘RTF’ seems to be a dirty acronym to Apple. I spent a tedious few hours testing almost every syncable note-taking application, from Simplenote to Springpad to Evernote to Remember The Milk to Wunderlist. All of these have a web-based interface that cloud syncs with an app on your phone. All of them offer powerful, whizzy features. All of them are cumbersome, annoying and/or unintuitive to various degrees - which is a shame, because they were clearly designed to be awesome, but all of them force you to mould your way of doing things via theirs. Despite a raft of “Your life. Simplified.™”type platitudes, they all distance themselves from a sheet of paper in a variety of why-the-fuck-do-I-have-to-do-that ways. I tried various permutations of Google Docs and Chrome extensions too. Someone must be doing something this simple, surely? I despaired slightly. Ah, first world problems.
Then I tried Teux Deux. Teux Deux is not a digital “sheet of paper”, but it’s pretty close. It’s a web-based to-do / calendar that syncs with a paid for iPhone app which costs £1.99. It has the clean, elegant, nicely designed well-of-course interface that the best Apple stuff has, without the punchability.
It’s quicker to just give it a go, rather than explaining it, but whatever. Things go in a little box, get dragged as necessary, and roll over to the next day if undone. Notes or undated things go at the bottom, which you can order as you like. You have a choice between deleting done tasks or crossing them off. (Some people like looking at lists and seeing loads of stuff done and crossed off - I prefer the tabula rasa approach). It syncs with the iPhone without problems, and (crucially) the iPhone app works in exactly the same way. No extra thoughts, no extra clicks or strokes. I miss my bolding and underlining, but it does allow you to interline. At first I nearly dismissed it for the lack of being able to dick around with the text, but have come to realise that the limitations -such as a character limit - are good for forcing you to condense things to a simple ‘actionable task’.
It’s not perfect, and hasn’t been updated in a while, but it marries a lot of nice and easy things together, without a load of things I don’t need. Like Global knives and Nutella, it does one thing and does it really well. Maybe you’ll like it too.
Amazing Troy Wembley house action:
http://www.theclustermag.com/blog/2011/05/on-raptor-house-minitecas-and-jacked-up-german-techno/
I love the sound of dance music off many-copied cassettes; crunchy and echoing. More ‘real’. Chillwave-y nostalgia maybe, but fuck it. Still do.
