I am constantly adjusting my app usage for work meetings and facilitation sessions. Today I went back to beautiful basics: iThoughts on 3/4 of the screen, OmniOutliner in 1/4. Capture where possible straight into iThoughts, but use OmniOutliner for parking lot/unrelated notes.
Great to have Miles Plumlee in a Perth Wildcats uniform. It’s a pipe dream, but it would be great to get him back for a full season next year. 🏀
🔗 Link Post: “Clayton Christensen dies at 67 after lifetime of business, spiritual influence - Deseret News”
Tad Walsh writing for Deseret News:
“A true disruptive innovation, he taught, first appealed only to a niche market and appeared less attractive than the powerful incumbent it eventually usurped. In fact, the incumbent typically looked down on it as inconsequential until it ate up huge swaths of its market share.”
This article rightly focuses on Christensen’s impactful theory of disruption.
In my work I often crib Christensen’s case study about the utility of a milkshake as part of the ‘jobs to be done’ theory.
Rest In Peace, Mr Christensen.
Little America is one of the funniest, heart-warming, enjoyable series I’ve seen in a long while. Brilliant stuff. 📺
My pre-order of NoteBooks 10 for iOS arrived this morning. This has led me to re-install Dropbox on my Macs so I can experiment effectively. WebDAV syncing sucked too much. DEVONthink remains more powerful, and I have so many other note-taking apps I don’t know why I’m bothering trialing another one. It’s an addiction. An affliction. It’s fun; and I’m not sure I’ll ever be satisfied. At least I’ve stuck with the same task manager for years and years.
🔗 Link Post: “Middle Age Is Actually Good - The Atlantic”
James Parker writing for The Atlantic:
“You’re not an apprentice adult anymore. You’re through the disorientation period”
— via Things to Click
In this 4-way dogfight, who ya got?
We are enjoying the quintessential Australian summer caravan park holiday. 
🔗 Link Post: “Playdate December Update”
Panic writing for Playdate newsletter:
“We’re a smedium-sized crew — 25 people, 5 on Playdate.”
The Playdate gaming device is coming along nicely. Amazing what a small team has achieved, with this device and across other projects.
I like that Panic aren’t taking money in advance and that they are cash flowing the production. It’s real business.
Staycation hotel life. We spent most of the day in the pool but this was a moment of TV time.
Downlink is a great free app for putting satellite images on your Mac Desktop. Now I can look at my country from above.
🔗 Link Post: “Girls on Tour in Beirut — Long Distance Call”
Eliza Harvey & Geraldine Doogue: Long Distance Call Podcast E88:
“Geraldine and one of her oldest friends (and Eliza’s godmother) Mary Ciccarelli are in Beirut for new years celebrations.”
My Mother-in-Law Mary in what I’m sure must be her first podcast appearance.
The processing of creating a zettelkasten is gelling with me. I’m finding it’s clarifying my thinking and helping to capture knowledge in a way that other methods haven’t. I’m primarily using The Archive, additionally indexed in DEVONthink.
It has been kind of so many people of micro.blog to reach out after reading about my dog, Jeff. It’s a great community to be a part of; thanks everybody!
We had to say goodbye to our dog, Jeff, today. As much as I know it was the right thing to do it’s still a sad time. He had a good 12-year run. I’ll never forget Jeffenhausensteinenberg.
Agenda and NotePlan: two apps that ostensibly do the same thing. They provide a method by which to take notes with regard to meetings, projects and daily happenings.
Both apps have been carefully designed but have ended up operating quite differently to one another. Agenda feels practically overwrought. It feels slow in operation, fiddly with a range of sliding panes, non-standard drop-down menus and a hybrid rich-text/markdown environment. Everything that is put into the app is tied up into its proprietary datastore.
In use, I often feel as thought I’m fighting against Agenda’s design. Yet it has the killer feature of being able to link together meetings in a continuous timeline.
Additionally, it allows me to attach files, take photos and create a rich tapestry of notes in relation to a project. The only problem is that because the note-taking itself is so obtuse, many of my notes say something like “refer to notes taken in OmniOutliner”. Not great.
NotePlan feels lightweight. It feels like I’m writing in a straight-forward text field that supports markdown. In essence, behind the scenes this is what is happening. NotePlan creates a .md text file for each day that a note is created and stores it in the file system. It supports tagging which is how project notes can be tied together with the support of a search filter.
I used NotePlan consistently for about 6 months, but realised that I wasn’t getting any benefit from the history of notes I had taken. Things were getting lost, rendering the whole use of the app almost pointless.
So I purchased Agenda and moved in. This does a better job of enabling the review of notes, but the friction associated with getting data in is the roadblock.
Both apps offer feature parity across macOS, iOS and iPadOS.
NotePlan is available via Setapp or as a standalone purchase. Agenda has a fair freemium/pseudo-subscription model whereby you keep forever the features the app has at that moment, plus anything added in the coming 12 months. If you want features beyond that, you pay once again.
It’s hard to say which is better. They are both great, and both infuriating. I’m currently in the Agenda camp, but only just. I continue to look over the parapets to see how the other is performing. I own both, so the barrier to entry is low. Switching costs associated with data migration is the major factor, and that is not much.
I cannot provide a recommendation to others, but I am interested in alternative views.
At the beginning of 2020, an update on my current app toolbox. Of course, it is overflowing with too many tools. My ideal state would be to have one centralised repository for everything. Yet each app offers a different set of features and benefits, and scratch particular itches. So I think the unified data store remains off in the distance.
| Purpose | iOS Primary | iOS Secondary | macOS Primary | macOS Secondary | Best Cross Platform |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blot via Git | Drafts | 1Writer | iA Writer | Drafts | iA Writer |
| Micro.blog | Drafts | iA Writer | MarsEdit | Drafts | Drafts |
| Report Writing | Ulyssess | Word | Ulysses | Word | Ulysses |
| Meeting Notes | Goodnotes | OmniOutliner | Curio | Agenda | OmniOutliner |
| Daily Notes | Agenda | Goodnotes | Agenda | Agenda | |
| Zettelkasten | 1Writer | iA Writer | The Archive | DEVONthink | iA Writer |
| Tasks | OmniFocus | Goodnotes | OmniFocus | Curio | OmniFocus |
| Brainstorming | iThoughts | OmniOutliner | iThoughts | Curio | iThoughts |
Other alternatives available include:
I’ve got bloggers' block. I’ve got a few ideas for posts but can’t summon the motivation to write anything. They continue to sit as drafts, waiting…
I had migrated away from WhenWorks due to its shutdown. Now I receive an email saying that it’s been acquired by @rosemaryorchard. Wonderful news but now I’m financially invested in an alternative scheduling platform. Timing not so good for me, but great news for @macgenie
