art-language-code

Jumping to the conclusion of "organization schmorganization"

Argh.  Well, I lost Internet in the middle of this posting and didn't notice, so TypePad ate it.  Ah well, I hadn't said much anyway.

I'm sure I'll get back to a detailed version of what's so hatefully wrong with Apple Sync Services at a later time, but for now I'm going to fast-forward to the end of the story.  Partly because I am bored with it, which makes me worry that you might be bored with it too, but also partly because this weekend while having breakfast with the "popcultural kids" the subject of people using Twitter to complain about software (especially email) and travel and report on writing progress came up.  The verdict of this conversation was that all of the above are kind of annoying, but I had done all three within the last week.  So, I'm succumbing to peer pressure and trying to tweet responsibly.  But fear not, I'm sure my tendency to go into "teacher mode" and "critic mode" will bash its way to the fore at some point soon, and I'll write up the whole bloody mess.

The short of it is, I have now 100% switched over to using Microsoft Entourage.

OmniFocus (which indirectly started this whole mess by being so temptingly cool) is deleted, since I've discovered Entourage's "Project Center" has an equally useful and usable organization system: you can assign tasks, calendar items, address book items, notes, and even mail messages and files on your machine to a "project", and then view those items in one easy-to-read dashboard.  It doesn't let you look at all your projects at once, really, but you can do "custom views" that present whatever data you want in list format, so you could make something that is, say, all your "personal" tasks, if you use your PDA's categories religiously (I am trying to be better about it, but I often do data entry with one hand while walking and forget to hit the menu item to change categories.  This, my life, like everything, is "miscellaneous").

The Calendar view is very nice and flexible, although at least in Entourage 2004 (more on why I'm not using 2008 in another post -- short answer: Sync Services!) you can't change much about the task view that appears with the Calendar.  Ideally this would be sort of an "uber dashboard" view in which you could create filters that showed certain calendar items or to-dos... but as with the Project Center, instead any custom views end up being in a list form.  What I'd love to see (but haven't seen in ANY program yet) would be a mode in which tasks with start dates and deadlines actually appear IN the calendar, instead of next to it.  They should still carry over from day to day to nag you that they haven't been done yet (which most organizer programs do), but to have them start in the right spot on the calendar would be great.

Address Book seems pretty usable, and unlike with Apple Mail, I can edit addresses without opening another program, and there seems to be a better understanding that an "address book" entry should be more than just an email whitelist.  My Apple Mail address book was so filled with one-time email address adds (added by the system when a new user was declared "not junk") that I basically planned to chuck it when I moved to Entourage.  However, I forgot to uncheck the box to prevent address book imports so now I have a huge zombie address book mess to clean up.  Not Entourage's fault, though: it did what it was told, unlike iCal, Mail, and company.

Tasks and old calendar events from my Palm seem to have come in correctly, although the last trip I made through the dark forest Sync Services (when I foolishly briefly tried upgrading to Entourage 2008, which disables direct Palm syncing) gave me a bunch of unfiled duplicates in these categories.  There are some nice little Internet scripts to clean these up, although the one I found seems to want confirmation of every deletion.  I love "undupe" on the Palm, an ancient little program that hasn't been upgraded in years but that does a great job cleaning databases when dupes happen.

Microsoft really should have built in an "undupe" tool like Now Software did with their product, but then again this is where Microsoft sometimes fails to come through: thinking about what happens when disaster strikes.  I am a little wary of having ALL my data in a Microsoft product, given that on any system upgrade, Word is one of the likeliest programs to find a new way to crash (with the Adobe suite following close behind... hey, Apple, these are the two biggest software sellers for you, so why don't you give them a little help instead of focusing on giving us useless UI magic like CoverFlow?), but for now, I will go with it.

Because of this, I debated long and hard about switching to Entourage Mail.  I had previously looked at it and for some reason which I can't remember now, I had rejected it in favor of Mac Mail.  However, Mac Mail has been flaky, sometimes cutting off ends of messages I am sending, or halves of messages I am receiving.  It's the weirdest thing!  It's minor, and I've usually caught it, though one time a colleague was very confused by my brief email instructions -- which were in fact two pages, but Mac Mail had only sent a paragraph!  This is only my first day using Entourage mail, and I can't give a full report yet, but so far it's actually far more responsive than Apple Mail, both in terms of speed and user interface.  There are some lovely little things, like a divider between your daily emails, so you can see what came in today versus what came in last week and prioritize accordingly.  There are, of course, also the Microsoft "practical UI" things, like the rather ugly "urgent" flag exclamation point, but it's a great step forward... and my brief time with the other tools in 2008 showed even more potential.

So my conclusion about all of this is: Apple wins for product and operating system design, but Microsoft, much as I hate to admit it, wins for business applications.  Apple has been doing some great work with their pro-level music and video applications, and while iLife has had its ups and downs, it is mostly a solid tool (I use GarageBand more than Logic Express stil, just because it's so easy to bang out an idea!).  Even iWork is pretty good, though Keynote is the only one to really catch on.  Pages and Numbers feel a bit weak compared to Word and Excel, but I'm not even sure Apple needs to compete here  But even if Apple does decide to let Microsoft have the office tools market, I stillI hope eventually they will apply the same care that went into Keynote and Garageband to their core organizing products.  For now, Apple Mail and Address book and iCal and the rest of the tools that come with the OS come off as too entry-level, not to mention buggy and in places poorly thought out.

Organization, Schmorganization! (or, I love you but I hate you, Apple)

Phew!  It's been over a week since I blogged?  Figured I had to give you people a break after that slew of articles last week, including one that I "unpublished" after reviewing it the next morning.  Speaking of editing, last night "Root of All Evil", Lewis Black's show which is mildly funny most of the time and hysterical occasionally, pitted Bloggers versus Ultimate Fighters.  One good crack was that neither activity requires brains; another was that bloggers are from the shallow end of the typing pool (I suppose that joke is just a ripoff of "shallow end of the gene pool", but it's still funny).  Of course, I love bloggers and blogging, but you know the bad blogs I'm talking about (certain advice columnists may be lumped in here too)

Oh but here I am, doing exactly what Lewis Black and the prosecution decried: quoting other people's stuff instead of writing my own.  So on to the main topic: getting organized!

Although the whole Addirol thing has made me even more eager to get organized, I've always gravitated towards making lists, jotting down notes in a central location, keeping a calendar, etc.  The problem is: I often make lists that are way too long for even a personal organizing program to keep up with; I jot down notes and file them away never to be looked at again; I keep a calendar, but unless there's alarms going off to tell me when I need to look at it, it doesn't happen.

About a year ago, I purchased Now Contact and Now Up-To-Date, programs that I'd used back at my old company in the mid-90s, but never as fully as I intended.  This time, I began using at least Now Up-To-Date in earnest.  Since around the same time I switched over to Apple Mail (after years of being "HTML blind" with Eudora), I found myself wedded to the Apple Address Book, and Now Contact remained an occasional fling.  I purchased the Now products because they promised an upgrade coming in 2008, which would change everything to work much more closely with the Apple products.  In the short term, I figured I would "make it work", as they say on Project Runway, and not let another month go by without being organized.  Good thing I didn't wait for that new program; 9 months later and the baby's still in beta.

Everything was going fine, although Apple Mail occasionally seemed to lose part of a message on send or receive.  Also, I hated the Mac Mail Leopard version of Notes, so continued to use a third-party program (SOHO notes) to keep my desktop notes handy... until they removed Palm syncing.  Around this time, I started playing around with different note programs, hoping to find something that would keep all the random thoughts that I put down in my Palm while walking around every day (I am a danger to society with my walking and typing and studying Japanese in my iPod... good thing I haven't started driving yet!).  I can't remember the culprit now, but some note program's method of syncing began the deterioration of Palm Desktop to the point where Hot Syncing no longer worked, even after reinstalls, removing preference files, and all sorts of fun.

So that's when I finally bought The Missing Sync again.  I had used Missing Sync back when I had a Clié (ah, Sony: such the Apple wannabe, but without the gumption to stay the course), so I knew it had good support for a wide range of systems and devices, and a responsive development team.  The Missing Sync worked perfectly with my existing conduits and added all kinds of new abilities, like being able to sync photos with iPhoto, music with iTunes, etc.  It seemed like the perfect solution.

Then the combined forces of two temptresses brought the whole system crashing down: the release of the 3G iPhone, and the release of OmniFocus.

I discovered OmniFocus shortly after starting my ADHD treatment, and it seemed like an ideal solution, giving me the outlining capabilities I always wanted in my Palm tasks list, while also giving me the ability to cross-classify items with "contexts" -- so, for example, I could ask (through a reasonably good interface, as with all Omni products) "show me all things that I can do while out shopping to get my projects done", and I'd see the grocery shopping for home, the supplies shopping for work, and anything else I'd noted as a to-do related to shopping, like buying a birthday gift.  It seemed great, and I decided to try the desktop version. 

Unfortunately, OmniFocus was designed to sync only with iCal and the Apple products that work with Sync Services.  So, against my better judgement, I "forgot" all about the hell I experienced when I first tried to use iSync with my Palm, and I did a test sync with Missing Sync talking to the Apple programs instead of the Now programs.  I figured that I would do this in an afternoon, and if it worked, I'd try it for a while, but if it didn't, I'd simply switch back to the Now programs before my data got too far out of sync.

Well, that was a nice idea, but Apple, much as I love their style, also loves trapping users in a box.  A flimsy cardboard box.  Racing down a hill towards a ravine.  With a hole in the bottom so your butt is getting scraped  the whole way down.  Melodramatic roadrash metaphors aside, the problem was that once I had synced with iCal and friends, Missing Sync no longer seemed happy working with the Now conduits.  First I noticed that my "ideas" category, where I jot down any quick ideas I have, disappeared from Now, although it still thankfully existed on my Palm.  Then my attempts at syncing with Yojimbo (another note-taking program, since iCal doesn't have a notes feature) began to slow down and eventually crashed.

I thought maybe I'd live with iCal for a while anyway, since everyone else seemed to enjoy it.  And although I love "power-typing" on my little Palm Centro keyboard, I fooled myself into thinking I could get used to the iPhone on-screen keyboard. However, I was sensible enough to test this all out on my iPod Touch first... or I would have been if I'd gotten than far in the experiment.

Going into iCal to sort through my 2,000+ task items (I use task lists for everything from the music I want to buy to books I want to read to quick one-liners about ideas... as well as for daily to-dos), I discovered a ton of duplicates, but no tool for deleting them (unlike in Now products, where it is understood that occasionally sync glitches happen).  On top of that, many of the duplicates had been changed so that one version was lowercase while the other had the mixed casing I normally use (yes, I try to write correctly in my notes, too, so I don't judge myself later for poor grammar).  Worst of all, many items had been moved to the "unfiled" category!

So, I decided I'd just spend the afternoon cleaning up the data.  The whole point of this exercise was to clean out the decade's worth of digital detritus on my Palm anyway (I've had a Palm since the first ones, and although I did stray briefly to a Symbian device, I never let go of the Palm).  "No problem," I thought.  "Apple writes great easy to use tools, so I'll just see if I can't drag and drop my way out of this mess."

Sorry to leave you hanging, but unfortunately I've been writing this while waiting for about half a dozen syncs to finish, using my latest software selection, which also was working fine until I let it near Apple Sync Services.  As a result of these mis-syncs, the notes I took about why I hate iCal have all disappeared.  So I'm going to give your eyes a rest until I find them or give up and write them all down again, and then I'll continue with part 2 of this cautionary tale.