Year: 2012

Things and Cloud Sync

Today, Cultured Code has shipped versions 2.0 of their Mac and iOS apps as well as their Cloud Sync. I bet even the team at Cultured Code would agree when I say, finally.

It has been 20 months since they first began talking publicly about over-the-air cloud syncing of the Things application suite and 6 months since they kicked off the public beta of their syncing engine. And Jürgen’s blog post from December 2010 starts by saying that it had already been two years since the Cultured Code team had first begun thinking about bringing cloud sync to the Things suite of apps. Which means that from the first internal talks at Cultured Code’s offices to the public release of their syncing service nearly 4 years have passed.

There is no arguing that over-the-air sync for Things has been a long time coming. Jürgen himself quotes a user who called the speed of their progress “glacial.”

When their Cloud Sync transitioned from private to public beta earlier this year, 35,000 people were already signed up and waiting for it. I too installed the beta apps and ran an AppleScript to port all of my to-do items and projects out of OmniFocus and into Things. I then spent the next few weeks using the beta version of Things and Cloud Sync.

After backing up my OmniFocus database, I ported all my currently-non-completed tasks (about 275 active to-do items) into Things on the Mac. I then launched Things on my iPad and set it up to sync. It downloaded the whole library of tasks and was set up and running in 10 seconds.

I also like how Things triggers its sync events. Basically, any time you do anything, the app syncs. The Cloud Sync is fast, impressive, and feels extremely reliable. I also like how they handle sync conflicts.

In my review of Things over three years ago, I wrote:

Each of us has our own way of dealing with responsibility and our own expression of productivity. Tinkering and then switching is usually not the fault of the software. We’re not looking for the best app, but rather the best app for us.

Things held my to-do list for two years before I switched to OmniFocus, and I have now been using the latter for two years.

I have a lot of respect for both of these apps. Though they are similar in some regards, they are also quite different. In a nut, OmniFocus is extremely powerful and can bend your to-do list five ways from Sunday to show you precisely what you need to do.

In contrast, Things’s task-bending power ends after the ability to assign a due date and a project to your task. But, that “limitation” is by design. Things stands as a premier example of an app which handles well the balance between ease-of-use and depth-of-features.

Among my friends who use Things, I know they love it because of its simplicity, its clean design, and its low learning curve. For many people simpler is better, and an app that is less powerful is more desirable. Even for myself, in most cases, this is how I feel towards apps — I very much prefer simpler apps. But not in the case of OmniFocus.

What I love about the power and flexibility of OmniFocus is that I trust it completely with my to-do items. I trust that a task I put into OmniFocus will come and find me when it is time to be completed. Not to mention OmniFocus on the iPad is one of my favorite apps of all time. I don’t know how I could ever give it up.

What I love about Things is its clean design and now its fast syncing engine. I find Things on iOS to be noticeably quicker at syncing on start. Unfortunately, in my past experience using Things, I often felt that I needed to babysit my entire to-do list for fear of something falling through the cracks. However, with the new daily review feature, this may no longer be the case.

Only the team at Cultured Code knows why it took several years to ship their Cloud Sync and updates to their apps. Did they really need all that time to build their syncing engine? I don’t know; and without all the facts I refuse to criticize them for it. But what I do know is that the end product — what they have shipped today — is extremely fast and reliable. The updates to the apps, the new look of their website, the way Cloud Sync works, all of it is very well polished. Cultured Code should be proud of their finished work.

In an interview on Technology Review, Drew Houston of Dropbox said that excellence is the sum of 1,000 little details. While Cultured Code’s suite of apps has been slow to adapt features in some areas, what they have shipped so far is certainly not lacking on excellence and attention to detail. I hope today’s updates lay a foundation for the future of Things to be a bright one filled with details of excellence.

Things and Cloud Sync

Backup

It’s unfortunate that many people don’t think about backing up their data until it’s too late. I can’t imagine how devastating it would be to lose weeks, months, or years worth of family photos, important documents, project folders, and more.

External hard drives seem to get cheaper by the minute; off-site backup services are more affordable and easy to use than ever; and heck, OS X has been shipping with built-in backup software for years.

With very little effort and cost you can set up an automated and trustworthy backup system. I can only assume most people don’t back up their data because they are either lazy, unsure where to start, don’t see a need, or all of the above.

Assuming Mat Honan’s horror story gives you the motivation for backing up, here are some tips on how to set up a rock-solid backup system.

* * *

A great backup system looks like this:

  • Local: an external hard drive at your desk that has a copy of the same files on your computer.
  • Off-site: Cloud storage of your most important files.
  • Automated: everything backs up on its own without you having to initiate the backup every time.

For Local Backups

Keeping a regular backup on an external hard drive is the smartest way to keep your data backed up. It’s also the easiest way to restore something if your computer has a catastrophic failure.

The easiest way to back up your Mac is to plug in an external drive and turn on Time Machine. If you don’t have an external hard drive, here’s a big and fast one.1

For my local backups, I also use SuperDuper because there’s no reason not to use SuperDuper and Time Machine. What I like about SuperDuper is that it creates a bootable clone of my MacBook Air.

For Off-Site Backups

The point of an off-site backup is so someone breaks into your house and steals all your gear, or if your home is destroyed by a natural disaster, you won’t lose your most important files.

You don’t need to keep an exact clone of your entire computer in the Cloud so much as you should make sure that your most important and valuable files are stored somewhere other than the hard drive in your desk drawer.

For my off-site backup I actually rely on three different services: Backblaze, Arq, and Dropbox. It’s a little nerdy, I know, but I have my reasons.

Backblaze

For off-site backup of all my documents, music, photos, and other media I use BackBlaze.

Backblaze is relatively cheap for what they offer: unlimited file storage for $5/month or $50/year. They’ll even back up external media drives (if you’ve got a drive or two that only keep photos and music).

The Backblaze utility runs natively on your Mac and allows detailed control over the frequency and speeds at which your files are backed up. Your data is encrypted on your Mac before being sent to the Backblaze servers. For those who want more security (like me) you can set your own private encryption key, making your data unreadable by anybody who doesn’t know the key.

There are some system folders that Backblaze will not back up, such as the ~/Library folder. Because of this, if I were to lose all my local data, and had only Backblaze to turn to, there are a few important bits I would not have. Primarily, the data stored within apps such as Yojimbo and MarsEdit (which keep their database in their respective Application Support folders in the Library folder). And that is why I use Arq…

Update: I was mistaken about the ~/Library folder not being backed up. Turns out Backblaze does back it up, which means all of my Application Support folders are backed up. This is great. I will still continue to use Arq for the handful of files that I want redundant backups of.

Arq

Arq is a utility that creates encrypted backups of whatever files or folders you chose, and uploads them securely to a bucket on your Amazon S3 account.

I use Arq to keep certain Application Support folders backed up via Arq. So that way my Yojimbo database and other apps can be restored if necessary.

And with Amazon’s every-decreasing S3 pricing, my budget of $6.75/month gives me more than enough space.

Dropbox

Like most of you do, I assume, I also keep all my current projects in Dropbox. Since Dropbox syncs on save, anything I’m working on right now gets backed up to my Dropbox account. And so, supposing I write a 1,000-word article while at the coffee shop, and then on the way out my MacBook Air gets struck by lightning, I didn’t lose any of my work.

What else is great about Backblaze, Arq, and Dropbox is that they work anywhere I have an internet connection. If I take my laptop with me on a trip to Colorado, I don’t have to give up my daily off-site backups while traveling. (Though it may take a bit longer on my dad’s slow-as-molasses DSL.)

Keep it Simple, Keep it Safe

For $10 month and very little energy I have a system that backs up my data redundantly, securely, and thoroughly. And I don’t have to initiate anything to make it happen.

All this may sound a bit complicated or expensive, but now that it’s set up it all takes care of itself. It is great to know that if my MacBook Air’s SSD ever fails, I won’t lose any files. If my house is destroyed in a fire, I won’t lose any files.2 If somebody steals my laptop, I won’t lose any files.

If all of the above sounds like too much, I’d recommend this basic yet top-notch setup:

With that you’ll have everything you need for a rock-solid backup system: local and off-site backups of all your files and folders that happen without you ever having to think it.

  1. I always buy LaCie enclosures because they’re reliable and good looking. ↵
  2. To be honest, the biggest relief is knowing that if there’s an emergency at my house, my computer files are something I don’t need to worry about. Since all my vital documents and important projects are backed up to another location that I can retrieve later, I am completely free to focus on getting my wife and son out of the house safely. Everything else is replaceable. ↵
Backup

Michael Mulvey on the Microsoft Surface  →

Michael Mulvey:

The more time goes on and the more I really look hard at Microsoft Surface and Windows 8, the more I see a company not ready to cannibalize one area of their business in order for another part to thrive.

And for innovation to happen, you need that cannibalization.

Cannibalizing one area of your business in order for another part to thrive is easy to talk about in a staff meetings, and it’s easy to say when you’re talking about someone else, but it’s very hard to do when it comes to your own products. Because to do it, you have to be a little bit crazy and a little bit wild.

Michael Mulvey on the Microsoft Surface

The YouTube App Will Not Be Included in iOS 6  →

This is great news. In 5 years I can’t remember a single time I’ve used the YouTube app other when I get redirected to it from a link somewhere else. Apple dropping it from iOS 6 means there’ll be one less system app in my folder of apps that I can’t delete.

Update: Several clever folks have pointed out what I never realized: by disabling the YouTube app in Settings → General → Restrictions, the app icon will be removed and any links to YouTube you come across in Safari or Twitter or email will send you to the YouTube site in Safari.

The YouTube App Will Not Be Included in iOS 6

Sponsor: Igloo Software  →

My thanks to Igloo Software for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. They’re giving away a Das Keyboard this month, which is awesome. It’s the keyboard I use every day. In fact, I’m using it right now to type this very sentence.

Are you suffering from control issues? Version mismanagement? Rage against PowerPoint templates?

Igloo can help.

When you collaborate inside a digital workplace, all kinds of great things happen. All of your content is stored in one place – conversations about documents are with them. Versions are in one spot – kind of like Time Machine for your shared corporate documents. And built-in audit trails let you know if someone even looks sideways at your brand guidelines.

And because activity streams let you see what everyone is working on, you can spot those rogue PowerPoint templates and fix them before they hit the client.

Control issues can be solved for just $99 per month for up to 25 users. It’s even better when you scale to the enterprise.

So what are you waiting for? Sign up for a free 30-day trial (or just enter the contest).

Sponsorship by The Syndicate

Sponsor: Igloo Software

Mountain Lion: ‘Save As’ Saves Changes to the Original Document Also  →

Well this is frustrating:

If one edits a document, then chooses Save As, then BOTH the edited original document and the copy are saved, thus not only saving a new copy, but silently saving the original with the same changes, thus overwriting the original.

Assuming this is Mountain Lion’s intentional behavior rather than a bug, then how bonkers is this?

So far as I can tell the only real difference between Save As and Duplicate is that the former gives you a dialog box to choose a new name as well as a new location. Whereas choosing to Duplicate a file means only renaming it, and once you do it’s automatically saved in the same location as the original.

Mountain Lion: ‘Save As’ Saves Changes to the Original Document Also

The Difficult Challenge of Media Alignment  →

Seth Godin regarding the income conundrum facing Twitter (and other free services where the user is the product and the advertiser is the customer):

Free is a great idea, until free leads to a conflict between those contributing attention and those contributing cash.

Seth proposes a paid subscription that gets you an ad-free experience along with some pro-level features (like, hey why not, 160 characters). I am sure Twitter has put this option on the table, but who knows if they would ever roll it out. I think I would be willing to pay a few bucks per month to keep using my favorite 3rd-party client and to not see ads in my timeline (as I’m sure many of you reading this would be willing to do as well). But I’m afraid the more-likely scenario is that Twitter will do what it wants and we’ll have no option but to deal with it or leave.

The Difficult Challenge of Media Alignment

How Top Executives Lived in 1955  →

From the Fortune archives, this piece was originally published in July 1955:

There are in the U.S. approximately 30,000 executives, with incomes of $50,000 or more. These men sit on the top-most rungs of the business ladder either as managers or as owners of their own businesses. Obviously there is no “average” executive among them (they are all singular men). But their lives do have certain common characteristics, and there is visible a kind of composite way of executive life.

The successful American executive, for example, gets up early—about 7:00 A.M.—eats a large breakfast, and rushes to his office by train or auto. It is not unusual for him, after spending from 9:00 A.M. until 6:00 P.M. in his office, to hurry home, eat dinner, and crawl into bed with a briefcase full of homework. He is constantly pressed for time, and a great deal of the time he spends in his office is extraneous to his business. He gets himself involved in all kinds of community work, either because he wants to or because he figures he has to for the sake of public relations.

(Via Jim Ray.)

How Top Executives Lived in 1955

Fraser Speirs’ Nexus 7 Review  →

This is an excellent review of the Nexus 7 by Fraser Speirs. What especially stood out to me in Speirs’ article is how much he compared the Nexus 7 against the iPhone rather than the iPad:

After living with the Nexus 7 for about 10 days now, I’m not even thinking about it in the same bracket as the iPad. I’m thinking about it in the same bracket as my iPhone.

But ultimately, Speirs concludes that he sees no advantage to a device that sits in-between an iPhone and an iPad:

I just find the Nexus 7 a weird mix. […] Not as portable as a smartphone yet nowhere near as powerful as an iPad.

Many reviewers have said that the Nexus 7 made them want Apple to build a 7″ iPad. I disagree. The Nexus 7 has made me want a slightly bigger iPhone. I can get all of the software functionality I get from the Nexus 7 – and more – on my iPhone. If we are going to trade off functionality for portability, let’s go all the way and make the thing really portable.

So, though it’s getting far out on a limb to take a device built by a competitor and use it as a comparison against a hypothetical, rumored, still-as-of-yet-non-existent device, but… If Apple does make an iPad mini, perhaps “a big iPod touch” (what people dubbed the original iPad) will turn out to be a pretty fair description of it.

Fraser Speirs’ Nexus 7 Review

Why Backblaze Took $5 Million in Funding After 5 Years of Bootstrapping  →

It sounds like the funding they took on was a very considered move and that they have what’s best in mind for building a stable and sustainable company.

I’ve been using Backblaze (in combination with Arq) for over a year. I never notice when Backblaze is running, their plans are very reasonably priced, and it’s great to know that all my data is routinely backed to an off site data center.

Why Backblaze Took $5 Million in Funding After 5 Years of Bootstrapping