Mark Whitcher

Today is Father’s Day, and I wanted to take just a minute to honor my Dad here before God and the world (and try to make up for not getting a card sent in time).

I am very thankful to my Heavenly Father for giving me the earthly father that he did.

Since leaving home for college, my dad has been a constant source of wisdom and counsel for the situations that have risen as I try to become a man of God. There have been countless phone calls asking for help about topics ranging from building a relationship with the young woman who became my wife to changing the intake manifold on my 1983 Chevy Monty Carlo to getting rid of credit card debt to raising up my son in the way that he should go.

Dad, there is no way I could put words together that would adequately communicate the blessing you are to me. So I’ll stop talking (before this gets too sappy) and just say “thanks” and I love you.

I was asked by my wife’s friend to retouch some old photographs of her family in China (the spot healing brush in Photoshop became by best friend). One scene, in particular, was very engaging for me—a bride being whisked to her wedding through a crowded street. (I haven’t gotten permission to use her photograph here on my blog, but here is a small crop of it. We’ll call it fair use until I get permission.)

I don’t know any of these people, and I wouldn’t be able to communicate with them if I did. As I am working on the image, removing the worst spots and scratches caused by decades of being stuffed into envelopes and transported around the globe, I see the faces of these people with their varied expressions and am reminded of how caught-up-in-my-own-world I get. I get overwhelmed by circumstances and start feeling sorry for myself, but on this one little square piece of paper is a snapshot of many different people, all with worlds of their own. Each one is worried about something, or happy about something, or excited about something. These aren’t just shades of light and dark on paper, these are souls at a specific point in time who were just as real as I am right now with my thoughts and feelings.

It takes a lot of effort on my part to look at this and try to think what they are thinking and feel what they were feeling—to feel the reality of it. I love old photos.

Ten years ago, I was an avid user of a Palm V pda (personal digital assistant). I would try to get as many real work items on my Palm as I could so that I could be productive anywhere I wanted to be. Sometime later I got a data cable so I could connect my Palm to my cell phone and have “internet access” anywhere I wanted. And this wasn’t just playing around, I was doing real work on my Palm.

The promise of what the future could hold for this device was very alluring to me. Imagine a small device that you always had with you that would let you read, write, play, communicate. This would let me use my time however I saw fit, wherever I would happen to be (full disclosure—I am sure I spent as much time playing as I did working).

A year and a half ago I got my first iPhone, and for me the future had finally arrived. It was everything I wanted my Palm V to be—small, powerful, and connected. It was, and is, great.

Two weeks ago, however, I got an iPad, and I now realize realize just how restrictive the small screen of the iPhone is. I was reading, writing, and playing on the phone, but the productivity of these (the reading and writing anyway) was severely hampered by the size of the devise. I didn’t realize it at the time because the ability to have the device with me wherever I was seemed to make up for the fact that my activities were held back by the size.

Nowadays, my iPad is my constant companion, much the same way that an artist might carry a sketchbook everywhere to sketch in, or a writer might carry a notepad to write in. I carry the iPad around to live my digital life in. I can read, write, and play, unrestricted by a small screen. If I want to view a webpage, I don’t tag it for viewing later on my laptop, I read it. If I want to draw something just for the fun of it, I do it on the iPad. If I want to write a blog post about how the device is changing how I do things, I write on the iPad.

You might be asking if the size of the device, compared to the iPhone, hinders it’s utility. Since it is bigger, I don’t have it constantly with me in my pocket. I have to consciously decide to carry it, and I don’t carry it somewhere when I think that carrying something might not work (like a long walk on the beach). This fact, however, is more than compensated by the fact that it is big enough I can do actual work on it.

Yesterday I was asked by a young man what the iPad was like. I said it is a big iPod touch; this answer seemed to disappoint him. This criticism has come up in many places since the release of the iPad, but if you think about the promise of a device like the iPhone or iPod touch, the iPad fulfills on this promise in a way that those smaller devices never could. It is a gloriously large iPod Touch. It’s size has relegated the iPhone to listening to music, making calls, and playing games. Oh, and in a pinch, I can read and write on it.

[Update] I’m now using Reeder for iPad and it is the best thing since on the iPhone. I highly recommend it.

Before I got my iPad, I was using my iPhone for reading all my rss feeds. If I was working on my MacBook and needed a quick break, I would read it there, but for the most part it was all on my iPhone.

When I got my iPad, however, most all of my reading started happening on it, instead of my phone. The larger screen is much better for doing this, especially if I ever have to view a real web page. Google Reader has an excellent version of their web application for the iPhone. It looks and works great, and that is where I spent most of my reading time.

However, that same application doesn’t translate as well on the iPad. On the iPhone it is all about maximizing use of the screen. They cram as much as they can in the tiny space. These features in the iPhone though just look awkward on the iPad. Line lengths are too long and it just looks off.

I switched to the desktop version of Reader for awhile, but the click areas are somewhat small and some of the tabs require two taps when it should only be one.

So I broke down and bought NetNewsWire. It is far from perfect but it gives me a pretty good experience for reading so I am happy with it.

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Along those same lines, I am using Twitteriffic on the iPad, but I cannot wait for Tweetie to come out with their ipad version (yes, I know it will be called “Twitter” when they do).

Also, it looks like Instapaper tweaked their site today for iPad. The pages have a wonderful margin and are a joy to read. Really like it.

I have had my iPad for almost a week, and I wanted to give you a short review of my experience with it. This isn’t a review of the iPad, as in listing features that it has or doesn’t have and telling you what I like or don’t like. Maybe the better word would be that it is an overview of my experience with it.

It replaces 80% of what I used my iPhone for

I realize now that my iPhone was just that, a phone. I was constantly using it for reading rss feeds, checking Twitter, checking email—it was my primary means of doing that. It still is when I am on the go, but when I am at home or someplace working, the phone has been replaced with the iPad. The form factor makes it easy to handle while doing these tasks, but the large screen makes it so much easier to do these things. I realize now how much time I spent hunched over my tiny little phone screen.

Previously, if I came across an article that was a bit too much to read on my phone, I would go to my MacBook Pro to view those. Now, it is all iPad. The screen makes keeps me from the mobile web and allows me to use the real web. I don’t have to zoom and pan; I can just view it as it was meant to be viewed. Originally I feared that the 1024×768 screen resolution would bother me; it has been a long time since I have used a computer with that low of a resolution. Something about how you are holding the screen, and how close you are able to get to it, makes that a non-issue. The ability to quickly zoom into an area of interest on a web page also helps.

Looking for ways to replace my laptop

The laptop, which has become the new desktop, is not going to be replaced completely. I am not going to try to give up my dual screens for coding and graphics work. It is perfect for that. In the new world of touch computers, that is where the old way of doing things is still going to win. Setting up large work areas with multiple screens and being able to move quickly between different tools with just a keystroke or two, all the while keeping everything else in view, can be very productive and very intuitive.

But there are many things that I will be trying to accomplish with the iPad instead of running to the laptop. One area is all the pre-work work that I do. Brainstorming, writing, planning, sketching. Those are all things that I can do on the iPad and have constant and easy access to it.

In fact, one of the ways I justified the expense of the iPad was how far behind I am in writing proposals for work. By keeping the iPad with me constantly, I can work on this anytime. I use simplenote as my text editor which is constantly in sync between my phone, laptop, and iPad. It works great and is a big help.

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So I am really enjoying the iPad, and am looking forward to seeing how it changes my work methods over the summer.

If you are just getting started as a freelance web designer and developer and are planning on offering hosting for your clients (which you should do), and you have a little bit of linux systems admin experience under your belt, and you feel pretty comfortable setting up a server—I have a little warning for you.

First off, website hosting is no big deal. There are plenty of options available, my very own Net-at-hand included. You can get everything from shared hosts to dedicated servers and they are pretty simple to set up.

Email servers, however, are not quite as simple to set up. My email server has five different pieces of software that all have to be configured to work together, and it is the biggest pain you can imagine. It would be fine if I were setting up a server like this for a living, but I only mess with it every few years. So each time I have to re-educate myself and try to make heads or tails out of a bunch of config files.

This last friday, I found that the version of ClamAV that I had installed was no longer supported. So that link in the chain of programs that make up an email server stopped working so email delivery halted completely. There was no package for my linux distro of choice that would update it like I needed, so I ended up installing everything but the MTA and MDA from source. I spent two days messing with it and fell behind on my real work.

I would have been much better off paying a huge monthly bill for dedicated email hosting than what I am doing. It is done now, and should last me for awhile, but I sure hate it.

I am planning on writing a more in-depth article on each of these at some point in the future, but my business is starting to get a little bit organized (Ingrid is working as my office manager and is a huge help to me (thanks, babe)), and the tools I use have been changing to help my workflow become smoother.

Things vs. Omnifocus

I had been using Things for task management ever since it was available as a public beta. I really liked it and was just getting to the point where it was really starting to work for me (rather than me working for it). I use both the iphone and mac osx versions of the app and was pretty happy with it overall, except for one thing…

Syncing between the iphone and the mac version was a pain, and worked inconsistently. There would be occasions where one of the copies would have todos without names or some similar problem. The point of a task manager like this is for me to put things down and not think about it until it is time to think about it. If I have to keep track of it and make sure that it is doing what it is supposed to be doing then it kind of defeats the purpose of the software.

The nail in Things’ coffin came when my wife started acting as my office manager and I started looking for a way for keep two mac copies synced together. I use Dropbox and read the posts about using that service to keep the same Things database on two different macs. But I have dealt with two people using the same file before and I absolutely did not want to go there. It might have worked with one person using two different computers, but not with two people who might have the document open at the same time and be making changes. Things just isn’t set up for that (I know they might eventually, there is much discussion about features that are coming, but I am busy now and I don’t have time to be messing with it).

I started looking at Omnifocus because of this and tried it out for a couple weeks. First off, let me say that there is no comparison between the user experience of Things vs. Omnifocus. You start using Things immediately and there is virtually no learning curve. As you use it, you learn more about it and start using parts of it that you left alone previously just because you didn’t know (or care) that you needed them.

Omnifocus is not that way. There is an hour long video tutorial called “Getting started with Omnifocus”. Do I need to say anything more about that? Omnifocus has more settings and options and whatever than you could possibly have any desire to figure out. But Omnifocus’ killer feature (for me) made me stick it out. I eventually found a way of using that would work really well for me and I knew that it was time to switch because—

Syncing between multiple macs and iphone with Omnifocus is flawless. I set up a webdav server on my old mac server (that makes my living room sound like a datacenter) using Apache2 (the Apache installation that came with osx 10.4 didn’t work quite right with webdav and omnifocus). Now syncing happens automatically and I don’t really have to think about it. There is a sync button on both the mac and iphone version, but if you enable autosyncing then you usually don’t even need to think about that. It just works. Also, Omnifocus for iphone lets you do a quick entry even if the app is syncing.

Also, the iphone version has much better functionality when compared to the iphone version of Things. It just feels much better integrated with the mac version. So I have switched. I might be able to switch back some day, but I don’t know if I really will want to. Once is enough.

Postbox

There isn’t a huge market for third-party email clients on OSX. Mail.app that comes standard is such a great client that there isn’t really any need for anything more.

The one thing I always wanted, though, is an easier way to manage emails. I usually set up folders for different jobs or clients, and keep the entire conversation in that folder. But when you have a bunch of email to go through it gets to be kind of a pain to drag all the messages to the folder they go in. I would much rather just be able to assign tags using the keyboard. Then I have the trouble that arrises when an email belongs in both the folder named “leads” when I am working on getting a job but also in the folder for a particular job because it has information about both situations on it.

So I google for “osx email client tags” and not much comes up. There is a plugin called “MailTags” for mail.app that is supposed to be pretty good, but I read about some problems with IMAP which is what I use exclusively. Every couple months I would try again to find something, but didn’t have any luck until yesterday.

Postbox does everything I want it to. I can set up “topics” which are just like tags. So when an email comes in, I can read it, hit “t” and assign any topics I want to it, and then hit “a” to archive it. I can get through my inbox pretty quickly and put things where I can find them when I need them, but out of my way.

It also has great integration with the Omnifocus service option so I can highlight some text and turn it into a todo item for my Omnifocus in-box (yes, Things will do the same thing). Pretty sweet.

Ok, this has turned into a long post. I might not need to do a longer article after all.