This paper describes an experiment to merge freeform document-style text and structured computations into a single interface.
We think a promising workflow is gradual enrichment from docs to apps: starting with regular text documents and incrementally evolving them into interactive software. In this essay, we present a research prototype called Potluck that supports this workflow. Users can create live searches that extract structured information from freeform text, write formulas that compute with that information, and then display the results as dynamic annotations in the original document.
The idea is to prioritize the open-endedness of documents with the benefits of some schema, to enable computations and structure. Documents are powerful for their flexibility to accommodate all kinds of information, but the trade-off is a static environment, whereas applications can be dynamic and responsive. Potluck gives a look at what happens when you get some of both worlds.
Try out some of the examples. Itās impressive and shows promise for the future of the low-code / build-your-own-software movement.
Iāve gotten back into brewing coffee lately. I used to be an avid Aeropress user, and I also use a Chemex or French press occasionally, so I got them back out to use instead of relying on my lower quality (more expensive), lazier Nespresso setup.
I had my own trial-and-error based methodology for brewing with these tools. My best brews happened with the Aeropress. But I went down a research rabbit hole to look at the best techniques for using them.
In searching for a brew timer for my phone, I found this app called Filtru. Itās a super slick, well-made timer app that guides you through each stage of brewing with your equipment of choice. Highly recommended.
App launchers have been around a long time. Way back when it was Quicksilver, then it was Launchbar. A quick keystroke would pull up a search box, and a few letters of typing would open what you wanted.
For many years the go-to has been Alfred, which added a whole category of other automations, customized searches, and an entire workflow engine for building your own. I still use it now for certain things, but lately Iāve been kicking the tires on a new entrant in the category called Raycast.
The basic usage of Raycast does the same thing Spotlight or Alfred do. Invoke a hotkey (in Raycast itās ā„ + space), type something to get a list of things to open. It adds a whole bunch of built in macros for things like window management, local calendars, and more.
The main thing Iāve seen that Raycast gets you that the others donāt is a ācommand barā for any application. Or any one with a Raycast integration, anyway. What I mean is the cmd-K-style quick action bar that many modern apps are adopting ā the likes of Superhuman, Linear, or Height. Productivity tools are rediscovering (again) the benefits of never taking your hands off the keyboard for raw speed.
Raycast takes this approach and extends existing apps with a centralized command bar. So through different Raycast integrations, through the single command bar I can do common operations on my calendar, todo list, Google Drive, GitHub, Slack, and a ton of others.
I ran across this little Mac utility recently. My left thumb and ring finger are always tethered to the alt-tab keys, muscle memory programmed to toggle between apps routinely on my machine. I must flip through the alt-tab menu hundreds of times in a typical day to switch between apps. If you combine this behavior with having lots of apps open all the time, Iām constantly switching to the wrong things accidentally.
Charmstone is a clever alternative to alt-tabbing. It uses a combination of key press and mouse movement to pop up a programmable switcher menu from anywhere on the screen. You just hold ā„+ā and move your mouse, and a radial selector pops up with icons for your chosen most-used applications. In just a couple days of using it, Iām finding it super handy to getting back to my most-used windows, like Brave, chat apps, and email. No more messy mistaken alt-tab switches getting me confused.
Last year I switched to Airr as my main podcast app when they launched the beta, and have used it exclusively just about every day since.
Airrās killer feature is the āAirrQuoteā, which lets you clip snippets of podcast audio to share. Thereās no other podcast app like it with as many integrations, like highlighting and syncing to your Readwise knowledge management workflow. It also has transcripts for tons of shows, which is a feature I didnāt know I wanted til I tried using Spotify or Overcast again and couldnāt scan through the shows in text form.
An AirrSpace for [Norman Chella](https://twitter.com/NormanChella)'s excellent [RoamFM](https://twitter.com/roamfm)
Hot off the presses last week, the Airr team shipped a slick new feature called āAirrSpacesā, which adds an audio chat room sort of functionality, an interesting innovation in a podcast player. An AirrSpace is like a combination of a podcast, Discord group chat, and Clubhouse room ā hosts record clips and post into the room, which can be played in top to bottom sequence, like a normal podcast conversation. Others in the room can submit clips, too, like questions or comments for the host to review and post to the room or reply to. The Airr team hosted an introductory space you can take a look at as an example.
All of that is a cool mixture of some existing ideas, but theyāve not been done before in a podcast app. Podcast creation has historically been surprisingly lacking in client apps. What Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, and AirrSpaces are bringing to the party is participatory audio: lowering the barrier for creating and enabling direct audience involvement. One of my favorite features is the asynchronous nature of an AirrSpace. One can be active for days with new conversation to return to, just like entering a group chat and catching up.
The āaftershowā genre has been a pattern catching on in Clubhouse; perhaps AirrSpaces will create a form of audio comment threads per episode that can spin up a new AirrSpace for post-show discussion on each one.
I just installed this iPad app for sketching, which intrigued me for a few of its features. Iāve tried dozens of apps, but they tend to fall too far into the art camp or the note-taking camp, without very many that serve both categories well.
My go-to for the last few years has been Notability. Itās great for most of what I want, which is for writing with interspersed sketches and annotations.
Though I havenāt used it much yet, Concepts seems to do well at both. My favorite feature is its infinite canvas, where I can continue sprawling out a sketch in any direction, versus a vertical or constrained sketch space. I guess my main use case tends to be a hybrid of note-taking and brainstorming / mind-mapping, so this one is intriguing so far.
With the boom in popularity of podcasting, itās surprising their arenāt more podcast players popping up. Iāve been an Overcast user for years, but there are only a few other big players these days: Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Downcast, then what seems like a long tail of small, undifferentiated options. Most of them provide similar functionality, but Iāve stuck with Overcast because of its simplicity and independence. Many of the other alternatives have shifted toward āplatformā models where theyāre looking to monetize content as well as their software. Overcast has been steady and independent, with no sign of changing. Podcasts should stay part of the open web.
Through the Roam ResearchSlack community, I found out about a new app called Airr. I was chatting there with one of the founders who turned me onto it, so I downloaded it to check it out. Importing my OPML data was easy, and a couple taps and I had my subscription list added.
In its basic functionality, Airr is like many other players. Itās got good search, subscription management, a queue, and more. But what Airr brings to podcast listening is its ability to extract, annotate, and transcribe clips from episodes.
One of the things thatās challenging to do with podcasts is to capture segments or take notes while on the go. Overcast has a tool for clipping segments, but mostly designed for sharing clips with others or on social media. Airr has a feature they call the āAirrQuoteā ā just tap and hold the Quote button during a show, slide backwards to the beginning of the segment to clip, and save. Theyāve also gone to the next step, transcribing the audio using speech-to-text algorithms. As I understand it, the eventual goal is to be able to take those transcribed note segments and save into tools like Roam, Evernote, or whatever you use for document-keeping.
Iāve only been using it for a few days, as itās in a sort of āpublic betaā on the App Store, but Iāve been impressed so far with how reliable and easy to use it is. I like the premise of the AirrQuote for annotations, so Iām looking forward to seeing how it fits into my listening flow. Iām switching over to it for now to see how I like those AirrQuotes.
This 2013 piece from Dexter Filkins gives an excellent background on Qasem Soleimani, an important figure now well known after his killing a couple of weeks ago, but prior to that hardly known by anyone other than experts, even with his massive influence in the region.
Iām always intrigued by complicated simulation games. I remember a few of these āreal-timeā MMO games being popular in the early days of online gaming. Glad to see the genre still kicking in an era of low-attention-span gaming largely taking over. From the Prosperous Universe website:
At the heart of our vision lies the concept of a closed economic loop. There have been thousands of browser-based sci-fi strategy games before that emphasize military conflict. By contrast, Prosperous Universe is all about the economy and complex player-driven supply chains in which every material has to be either produced or purchased from other player-run companies.
Roam is an interesting note-taking tool thatās like a hybrid graph database and wiki. I tinkered with it a little bit. Seems attractive as a way to take meeting notes to try it out.
For a long time Iāve used the full 1Password desktop app and its browser plugin that installs alongside for support inside of Chrome. But recently I set up the 1Password X browser extension they first released a couple of years ago, and Iām converted. Since access to accounts is most useful in a web browser context, implementing it as an extension makes sense. I donāt know much about the tech backend or advantages of building a Chrome extension versus a āthick-clientā browser plugin, but it seems like itās certainly a benefit to conform to the browserās best practice for building add-ons; and extensions are the way to go in Chrome. One of their big motivations here was deepening the cross-platform support since you can install Chrome (and Firefox) on so many OS platforms, including Linux.
The full features of the 1Password desktop app are available from within the extension ā access to multiple vaults and all your accounts, editing and organizing your accounts, and creating new ones. In addition to the same handy integration for filling 2FA codes and their helpful password generator for new sites, X adds a built-in form filling utility, similar to the āautofillā capability that browsers have had for a long time, but with access to your 1Password account if youāve got it unlocked. The feature even supports an inline generator and account creation wizard for when youāre signing up for new services, which in my experience is one of the biggest barriers to getting new users to understand and use 1Password: they donāt add new accounts they sign up for into their vault. Helping users make sure things are always added (and updated!) in their vault is one of the key steps to reaching the āwowā moment as a user. Once youāve got a few dozen (or in my case hundreds) of entries set up and well-organized in your vault, itās magical to never have to worry about losing access to accounts.
The one thing thatāll take getting used to is that you canāt unlock the vault with the Touch ID sensor on my MacBook Pro anymore using the X extension. Itās been surprising to me how much I mustāve relied on this, as well as the Cmd-\ shortcut to autofill. You never realize how baked-in a behavior is until you upset the routine! This should just be a muscle memory thing to get used to.
One of the things I admire about 1Password is that itās clear their product team are all constant users of their own product. Every time I think of something thatād be slick, it seems theyāve already thought of it, or if not they eventually build it. And not only that, theyāll even go the extra mile and tie in keyboard shortcuts and all the other accoutrements that demonstrate that they themselves are power users of their product.
My appreciation for their effort doesnāt stop at the technology or product. From a business standpoint, I admire what theyāve been able to do with their pivot from desktop app to SaaS with their Business and Family plan offerings. Many app developers have made moves over the last few years toward subscription pricing, sometimes with mixed results. Iāve always been a fan of SaaS models for services I rely on ā without continuous funding, how will they make their excellent product even better? Itās not just about changing the billing model from perpetual to recurring either; theyāve actually converted to a hosted service that offers something distinctly different than what a desktop app can do.
My most-used app on my iPhone is easily Wikipanion, the app Iāve used for a decade for reading Wikipedia. Itās one of the first apps I remember downloading and using heavily when the App Store launched. Itās probably one of the first apps I purchased the paid version of. I probably do 10 or more Wikipedia searches per day on average just from my phone. So adding that up weāre talking tens of thousands of articles browsed from this app. Itās always had top billing on my home screen.
But Iāve noticed over the past year or so it being slow to load, slow to focus the search box when I pop it open to look something up. It wasnāt bad enough to warrant disrupting a 10 year old habit, but I thought Iād take another look around to see if other Wiki apps had gotten better.
Some of the other alternatives out there like V and Wikiwand look great, but to me they prioritize form over function. Iām almost always in it to read text and get as much information on the screen as possible. Presentation needs to be good, but utility and performance are priorities.
Which brings me to what Iām trying out now. For a long time the first-party Wikipedia app from the Wikimedia Foundation was subpar. I donāt recall specifics of why I never got into it, but Iād tried it multiple times and just couldnāt get used to it. I reinstalled it a week ago and it beats out all the other options easily.
Itās got plenty of settings to tweak the experience, a bookmarking feature, a āread laterā queue, personal browsing history, and most of all, speed. A nice bonus is a front-and-center āPlacesā view to display geocoded articles on a map. Itās also open source. The āExploreā view is also excellent ā one of my favorite aspects of using Wikipedia on desktop browser is the discoverability of interesting things.
I posted a couple weeks ago about moving much of my computing activity to the iPad full time. Part of what I had to crack to make that possible was a writing workflow that supported using the tools I prefer, and a method for publishing and previewing with Jekyll.
Iāve been using Jekyll and GitHub Pages for this site for 5+ years. Other CMS systems are interesting and getting better, but thereās something about the total control and simplicity of static sites that keeps me here. This workflow is great with a full Mac setup, but on iPad or mobile, there isnāt a straightforward way to write and publish new content. Most writers wouldnāt want to bother with this and would move to a CMS to clear the hurdles. Given that Jekyll today still requires a working knowledge of git and a command line interface, I recognize that this is highly personal to me, so I wouldnāt really recommend this setup to people focused on writing. But I sort of get a kick out of getting this stuff working and use it as a learning experience.
The main sticking point I needed to solve was previewing content. Jekyll has a built-in web server you can run locally (what happens when you run jekyll serve) on the terminal that generates and serves the site at localhost where you can preview before you publish. On the Mac this is simple: checkout repository, run command to generate site, browse to URL in browser. The first two hurdles arenāt trivial on the iPad. Thereās no native unix-like shell on iOS, only terminal apps. This means you need to have a server to connect to to do anything.
My solution starts with running a micro EC2 instance on AWS. For about $10/month I have a full Ubuntu server running, on which I can install whatever I want1. Getting the site checked out and running locally on the server is fairly straightforward if youāve got a working knowledge of Linux and comfort on the shell2. Next I had to figure out what software on the iPad I could use to combine the writing, versioning, and pushing up to the server for preview or testing purposes. Digging around on this topic I discovered a solution thatās working well so far: a combination of Working Copy and Textastic. The first is a full-featured git client you can use to clone repositories and manage versioning. The second is a rich code editor for iOS that is very impressive in its depth. Inside of Textastic you can add a Working Copy repo as a working directory, meaning your edits happen directly in the repo. With my iPad Pro, I put the Working Copy app in the right side multitask panel so I can manage branching, commits, and pushes while Iāve also got the editor open. In order to access the server and run the site in dev mode, Textastic also has a built-in SSH terminal.
Getting through this initial setup was a bit cumbersome ā getting the SSH keys sorted out between my main machine, GitHub permissions, and iOS was a bit of a runaround ā but Iāve got it all working smoothly now. One other aspect is that I still do most draft writing and idea-keeping in Ulysses, which is my app of choice for any writing on iOS or macOS. So thereās a step to get the content moved over when ready to a real post in git. Iām good with this, though. I treat Ulysses sheets like idea scratchpads; so Iāll have dozens of partially-written post ideas collected there and little by little turn some into completed articles. Managing this collection of randomness makes for kind of a mess in a git repository, so itās nice to have it organized elsewhere.
Overall this workflow allows me to stick with the tech stack Iāve gotten used to while affording the flexibility to write on the iPad or my phone. From a writing perspective I find the constraints a helpful aid in focusing on the writing and not getting distracted to mess with other things. I have a couple of other helper tricks Iāll write about later that make working with Jekyll easier. As I work with this flow some more, Iāll make sure to note any other tricks once the comfort of habit sets in.
If youāre a podcast listener and an iOS user of productivity apps, you should subscribe to the Canvas podcast. Hosted by Federico Vittici (of MacStories) and Fraser Spiers, these guys know all there is about making the iPad into a tool for getting real work done.
Theyāve been doing a series on Workflow, the powerful app for iOS task automation. I love this app and use it a ton for a few simple, yet repetitive everyday tasks from my phone.
I recently wrote a review on the Fulcrum blog for one of my favorite pieces of software, 1Password. Itās a password management app to help you keep better organized with your hundreds of passwords, codes, and secure data that you typically have laying around in emails, documents, and post-it notes on your desk1.
Iām a heavy user of 1Password on my iPhone to look up accounts while Iām mobile. Because 1Password vault security is only as secure as your master password, the natural tendency is to have a long, complex, intricate passphrase to type to unlock the vault. And from the iPhone, you want your vault to re-lock pretty rapidly so the door to your digital safe isnāt left swinging open while your phoneās sitting on the table. The net result is having to constantly type a hard-to-type passphrase on a hard-to-type-on device. No good and no fun.
My problems were solved a few weeks ago I finally enabled the Touch ID functionality in 1Password 5 for accessing your vault using your fingerprint, versus typing the 30-character password2. After using it like this for a few days, it seemed less secure to me, since it wasnāt even requiring my impressively-complicated password to get in. I dug into some of the documentation to find out how secure the implementation of Touch ID authorization is in 1Password, and how Touch ID works in iOS.
The app documentation has a great article outlining exactly how Touch ID works within 1Password. For a long time it had a āPIN Codeā feature to have a quick access code for unlocking the vault after you had recently unlocked the vault with your master password, and the Touch ID feature works similarly. The data is still encrypted with the master password. Itās designed explicitly as a mechanism for adding convenience to the process, which is a critical component to maintaining good security best practices:
āJust as Apple has designed Touch ID not as a replacement for a device passcode, we do not use Touch ID in 1Password as a replacement for your Master Password. Touch ID is a convenience mechanism that provides a way to quickly unlock 1Password after there has been a full unlock (with your Master Password).ā
The intersection of convenience and security is interesting. Theyāre fundamentally opposite: a totally secure system is extremely inconvenient to access, a convenient one is insecure. The best systems strike a balance somewhere in the center. The problem with highly secure but inconvenient systems is that they entice users to defuse the security of the whole system by taking shortcuts. Think of the corporate IT environment with all the bells and whistles on securityāpassword strength requirements, required resets every month, canāt reuse passwords, minimum lengthsāitās this massive inconvenience that results in the post-it note on the monitor with the keys to the kingdom written on it.
The security of how Touch IDās technology works is another matter, one of hardware and storage. With the release of the A7 processor in 2013, Apple introduced something called the Secure Enclave3, which allows applications to store bits completely outside the scope of the kernel on a physically isolated area of the chip. This is where biometrics get stored, along with cryptographic data for other applications. Appleās technical documentation about Touch ID security covers in minute detail exactly how iOS devices store your fingerprint data on the Secure Enclave, and the ultimate reason why Touch ID is actually more secure than not using it:
āSince security is only as secure as its weakest point, you can choose to increase the security of a 4-digit passcode by using a complex alphanumeric passcode. To do this, go to Settings > Touch ID & Passcode and turn Simple Passcode off. This will allow you to create a longer, more complex passcode that is inherently more secure.ā
This is a key point thatās relevant at the OS level and within apps like 1Password or banking apps using biometrics. If, because of the convenience factor, biometrics enable people to keep their encryption passphrases more secure at the core, then weāre all better off.
NetNewsWire 4.0 just dropped for Mac and iOS, after two years in a beta. Dan Moren is skeptical:
ā¦the real question is whether an RSS reader is still software that people get worked up about. With the demise of longtime RSS staple Google Reader and the incursion of social networks and alternative news reading apps like Flipboard, Nuzzel, and soon Apple News, an RSS reader seems decidedly last decade.
I started using NNW long ago, but only for a short while since Google Reader got good around that time (2008?). It was nice to have cached offline versions of articles on the desktop. Iām interested to check out whatās different this time around. The screenshots look like a very stripped down and simplified reader interface.
Since Google Reader shutdown in 2013, I switched right over to Feedbin and have been loving it ever since. Itās not free, which means (presumably) the developer can actually support it and keep it running. Itās well worth the $3 per month it costs, for me. On iOS Iām using Reeder which integrates nicely. I still use RSS all the time, so I hope blogs and sites continue to publish content feeds. At this point every CMS has RSS or Atom support built in, so thereās no reason not to.
A brand new podcast player for iPhone built by Marco Arment.
Iāve switched to using Overcast full time from a couple of years on Instacast. Itās got the basics covered so far, and the addition of Overcastās āsmart speedā feature is fantastic. It dynamically adjusts playback speed based on the properties of the audio.
The concept of activity tracking is getting ever closer to ubiquitous nowadays with the prevalence of dozens of mobile apps, wearable wristbands, and other health monitoring tools like Bluetooth-enabled scales and video games based on exercise. Now the worldās largest tech company is even rumored to be working on some form of wearable hardware (and software APIs), at which point the whole concept of ālife trackingā will reach 100% penetration. Everyone will be tracking and recording their lives like characters in cyberpunk literature.
Iām a casual runner and cyclist, and started testing a handful of fitness tracker mobile apps to map my activity. Since Iām a stats and data junkie, I did some extensive experimental testing with these four apps to size up the advantages of each in terms of technical capability, as well as the feature-set of services provided by each within their online social systems:
There are dozens of other options for wearable hardware for tracking activity, location, and more, but I still think most of them are either too costly or not mature enough to invest my money in. I seriously debated buying a Fitbit or Up, but Iām glad I havenāt given Appleās potential push into that market.
Letās run through the details of each and compare what they have to offer.
Basics
Each of these apps has its focus, but they all promise the same basic set of features (with the exception of Moves, which Iāll get to in a moment):
Allow user to log an activity of specific type ā running, walking, cycling, hiking, kayaking, skiing, etc.
Calculate metrics about the activity including time, distance, map location (in the form of a GPS track), speed, pace, calories, elevation, etc.
Share your activities with friends, and join a social network of other active people (including professional athletes)
Compete against others in various ways
Set goals and measure your progress toward said goals
Moves is a different style of app. Itās a persistent motion tracker that runs continuously in the background on your device, mostly for calculating steps and distance per day for all of your activity. No need to open the app and record independent activities. I wanted to include Moves in the mix primarily for its deep data recording and mapping capabilities. Iāll revisit Movesā data quality later on when discussing data.
Mobile Apps
Iām an iPhone user, and iOS has matured to the point that serious, veteran app developers have ironed out most of the annoyances and kinks of basic app design concepts. Most of the conventions around app UI have arrived at general consensus in presentation, using a couple of well-known paradigms for structuring the user interface. Both RunKeeper and Strava use the home-row tab button UI layout, with standard ā5-buttonā options list across the bottom. MapMyRun uses the sidebar/tray strategy to house its options, like most of Googleās iOS apps.
The basic interfaces of all three of these apps are nice. RunKeeper and Strava are almost exactly level on features on the mobile side. They both have a basic social presence or feed of your friendsā activity, activity type selectors, and big āStartā buttons to get going with minimal fiddling. MMRās look is a little cluttered for me, but it does include other functions on the mobile side like weight entry and nutrition logging.
All of them support configurable audio announcements of progress during an activity. A voice will chime in while youāre running to give you reports on your current distance, pace, and time since the start. Each also can be paired up via Bluetooth with an array of external sensors like heart rate monitors, bike speedometers, and others. Strava even has a nice capability to visualize your heart rate metrics throughout the course of your activities if you use a monitor.
Reliability
In my testing, the reliability and consistency of all of these apps has come a long way since the early days of the App Store, back to iPhone 3G and the first devices with GPS. The only one of the group that Iāve been using that long (since 2009) is RunKeeper, and its reliability now is in another class than it was back then. Since the introduction of multitasking with iOS, apps run silently in the background when switching between apps while a tracking activity is in progress. I tested tracking with all three simultaneously without any issues.
During a couple of my test runs, Strava inexplicably stopped my activity for no reason, but didnāt hard crash. When Iād switch back to the app, the current activity was paused mid-way, which is an annoying bug or behavior to encounter when you canāt recreate your activity easily. RunKeeper still seems the most reliable option all around, including the mobile app dependability and the syncing operations with the cloud service. Multiple times I had trouble getting the activity to properly save and sync on Strava and MapMyRun, though usually it was just a delay in being able to get my data synced ā didnāt involve data loss except for the paused activities and couple of app crashes.
Services
All three of these apps function as clients for their associated web services, not just standalone applications. Theyāre not much different; each of them shows a feed of activity and a way to browse your (and your friendsā) activity details. Stacking up your accomplishments against your friends for some friendly competition seems to be the main focus of their web services, but the motivators and ability to āplus upā friendsā activity might push some to work out harder or more often. The differences here are mostly minor, and deciding on the ābestā service in terms of its online offerings will come down to personal preference. One of the features I like with Strava is the ability to add equipment that you use, like your running shoes or specific bikes. Doing this will let you see the total distance ridden on your bike over time.
Each service offers a premium paid tier with additional features. Strava and RunKeeper have free-to-use mobile apps with fewer features, while MMR goes with advertisements and in-app-purchase to remove the ads.
Data Quality / Maps
My primary interest in analyzing these services was to check out the quality of the GPS data logging. I ran all three of them on the same ride through Snell Isle so I could overlay them together and see what the variance was in location accuracy. Even though iOS is ultimately logging the same data from the same sensor, and offering that up to the applications via the Core Location API, the data shows that all three apps must be processing and storing the location values differently. Hereās a map showing the GPS track lines recorded in each ā Strava, MapMyRun, and RunKeeper. Click the buttons below the map to toggle them on and off to see how the geometry compares. If you zoom in close, youāll see the lines stray apart in some areas.
Each app performs roughly the same in terms of location data quality. The small variances in precision seem to trend together for the most part, which makes sense. When the signal gets bad, or the sky is slightly occluded, the Location APIs are going to return worse data for all running applications. One noticable difference between the track geometry (in this example, at least) is that the MapMyRun track alignment tends to vary in different ways than the other two. It looks like there might be some sort of server-side smoothing or splining going on to make the data look better after processing, but it doesnāt dramatically change the accuracy of the data overall.
I did notice that using these apps without cellular data enabled results in severe degradation of quality, I think due to the fact that the Assisted GPS services are unavailable, forcing the phone to rely on a raw GPS satellite fix. When using any location logging app without cellular data switched on, the device has to take longer to get a position lock. A couple of runs from my Europe trip exhibited this, like my run along the Thames in London, and one in Lucerne.
Since these motion trackers rely on the GPS track and time series data for calculating total distance (which is obviously way off with this much linear error), you end up with massively incorrect pace and calorie-burning metrics. This jagged-looking run activity in London reported itself to be 4.7 miles, and in reality it was only about 3.5. Soon Iād like to pair my iPhone up with an external GPS device Iāve been testing out to see what the improvement in accuracy looks like.
If you want to export the raw data straight from the web services, Strava and RunKeeper are the only ones that will give you a full time series-enabled GPX track file for each activity. MapMyRun only exports the track point data, which without the timestamp info for each point canāt be processed to calculate pace and other metrics with elapsed time as a variable.
The location data captured by the Moves app works a little differently. It splits your persistent movement activity up into day and week views, with totals of steps taken and calories burned, by type of activity. It does some cool auto-detection of activity type to try and classify car transport, cycling, running, and walking automatically. Because itās always running in the background, though, the location data isnāt quite as granular as from the other three applications, probably due to less frequent logging using the location APIs.
One caveat important to note is that Moves was acquired by Facebook back in May. That may turn a lot of people off to the idea of uploading their persistent motion tracking information to the Borg.
Wrap up
Strava and MapMyRun also support pulling the track info from external devices like mountable GPS devices, watches, and bike sensors.
Overall, my favorite is Strava as the app-of-choice for tracking activity. It performs consistently, the GPS and fitness data is high quality, and the service has a good balance of simplicity and social features that I like.
Iām an OmniFocus-flavored GTD adherent, or try to be. The iOS apps for OmniFocus were huge contributors to my mental adoption of my own GTD system. When OmniFocus 2 dropped a few weeks back for iPhone, I picked it up right away.
The new design lines up with the iOS 7 look. I really dig the flat UI style in utility apps like OmniFocus, or any app where function truly overrides form in importanceātypically anything I open dozens of times of day as part of my routine. The new layout gives weight and screen real estate to the things you access more frequently, like the Inbox, Forecast, and Perspectives views. Iām really liking the inclusion of the Forecast view as a first-class citizen, with the top row devoted to giving you context on the next week out for tasks with deadlines.
As before, thereās a fast āAdd to Inboxā button for quick capture. But rather than a button positioned somewhat arbitarily in a bottom navigation menu, itās now an ever-present floating button, always in the bottom right for rapid inbox capture. Upcoming and overdue tasks are now symbolized with colored dots when in sub-views, and with colorized checkboxes in list views. The color highlights fit the iOS 7 aesthetic nicely, and give subtle indications of importance.
Like any effective design, the right balance of positioning and subtlety actually makes it clear how a feature should be used, and makes it simpler for you to integrate with your workflow. In past OmniFocus versions, I had a hard time figuring out how to make use of due dates (and start dates) properly, so I leaned away from using them.
With the latest iOS update, OmniFocus is now not only a tool that follows a GTD workflow, but one that actually leads you into better GTD practice.
I use Dropbox as the nerve center for all of my digital goods, keeping data, configurations, histories, log files, and anything else I need access to centralized and available from my Mac or iOS devices.
Here are a few of my daily tools or information trails I want to keep synced up, so anything here can be a few clicks or a search away:
Instant message chat history
iTunes library
Histories + log files
OmniFocus backups
Chat Archiving
I use Messages on the desktop for all chat conversations with my Jabber and Google accounts. I access the transcript history daily to find things I told people in chat conversations, look up links I sent, and other things. So much of my communication happens via instant messaging that I rely on it to keep logs of interactions (albeit securely).
Backing up chat transcripts is simple with symlinks. For me, I want all chat logs to be archived into a Dropbox directory continuously, so I donāt have to remember to back them up. Messages stores its transcript files here:
~/Library/Messages/Archive/
Since I want my chats to all be instantly backed up to Dropbox, I symlink the directory into a ~/Dropbox/backups directory, like this:
Linking those files to a Dropbox directory will automatically sync them to your account in real time, if you have syncing enabled. These files are then backed up for good, in case I need to search later. A downside with Messages is the transcript files are .ichat files, not plain text. So they canāt be searched from the Dropbox iOS app or mobile text readers. The in-app search works okay, but hopefully weāll see some performance improvement there in the upcoming OS X Mavericks release. This piece from Glenn Fleishman has some other good tips on instant messaging with Messages.
iTunes
My iTunes media is mostly secure at this point, with iTunes Match and iCloud, but I still like to keep a backup of the raw XML library data. This contains a ton of stuff I donāt want to lose, like playlists, ratings, and other metadata. ID3 tags and album art are safe with the MP3 files. A couple of symlinks make it so every time I close iTunes, the latest changes to my library get backed up. The .itl file is the primary iTunes database, and the XML file adds a software compatibility layer for other apps that read from your library (like Garage Band and others):
On a daily basis, Iām all over the place with my machine ā working with data in Postgres or SQLite, writing Ruby scripts, and just generally working on the shell doing tons of different things. I love having my command history for anything that has a CLI archived somewhere, so when I need to pull up some command or see how I had built a package from source, itās as simple as searching a history file. Many Linux & Mac applications keep themselves a history file inside your home directory, typically hidden, like .bash_history for the bash shell environment. I use zsh, with the awesome oh-my-zsh environment framework, highly recommended. Hereās a few I keep around for posterity and convenience, in a āhistoriesā backup1 directory:
~/.zsh_history
~/.irb-history
~/.psql_history
With those backed up, I can always search the logs for when I installed something with Homebrew:
history | grep "brew install mapnik"
As for OmniFocus, backups are cake. Just check the preferences for the database backup location and frequency settings, and change it to somewhere within your Dropbox folder.
In addition to the convenience of keeping this stuff linked into a secure, synced place like Dropbox, using an online backup service (like the fantastic Backblaze) is a no-brainer for keeping your stuff safe. You should be using one. Even though Time Machine is super simple to get going to an external HDD, I donāt trust the hardware enough to rely solely on that.
Through a number of recommendations around the web, Iāve started using Drafts, an iOS app with an interesting workflow model thatās helping me replace a number of input channels for capturing different pieces of information while on-the-go.
Itās positioned primarily as a text editor or note-taking app for iOS, but it introduces a fundamentally different approach to the capture ā process flow than most other solutions Iāve tried, even ones that I like. Like most heavy mobile users, I have a suite of apps I use constantly to capture different inputs: OmniFocus for task management, Mail for email, Byword for notes and Markdown content, Fantastical for calendar items, and others. I love each of these apps for what they do, but speed is paramount for capture to be truly ubiquitous, at least for me. And I sometimes find myself swiping around looking for the right app to put something.
The way Drafts handles input is novel because it puts the content first, and the action second. You can jot something down, then decide how to process it. Sometimes itās a to-do, sometimes a draft of an email, and sometimes just a quick note. I love the idea of starting with a bit of text, then picking the chute down which to send it in step two. Open the app and its ready for some text; no need to add titles to text files, create a new document, or any other hurdle, just start typing. Itās my new method for throwing things in the OmniFocus inbox1.
Depending on the exact wording of the quick note, it could end up as a to-do in my OF inbox:
Set up phone call with John ā Add to OmniFocus
Then later become an appointment for the calendar:
Conference call with John 4/16 at 2pm ā Parse in Fantastical2
One of my favorite features is the ability to write emails in Markdown. For quick replies I still use Mail (and most replies are quick from my iPhone, anyway), but for longer-form messages, Iāll open Drafts where I can include inline links and formatting using Markdown, then use the āMarkdown: Emailā feature to convert it and send as HTML email.
There are tons of actions supported for processing your input once youāve entered it ā Sending the text to email, Reminders, Messages, clipboard, printing, Dropbox ā as well as the third-party app support. Things get really geeky once you dig into the customizable URL and Email actions.
This app is changing how I capture information from my iPhone, helping me strike a better balance between ubiquity of capture and the all-important correctness of processing. Highly recommended.
's excellent [RoamFM](https://twitter.com/roamfm)](/images/post-images/airrspaces.jpg)
The new design lines up with the iOS 7 look. I really dig the flat UI style in utility apps like OmniFocus, or any app where function truly overrides form in importanceātypically anything I open dozens of times of day as part of my routine. The new layout gives weight and screen real estate to the things you access more frequently, like the Inbox, Forecast, and Perspectives views. Iām really liking the inclusion of the Forecast view as a first-class citizen, with the top row devoted to giving you context on the next week out for tasks with deadlines.