My old reading list was getting long in the tooth, and it was a pain to update, so yesterday I replaced it with the Shelfari plugin. If you’re on Shelfari, click through and add me as a friend. I know, it’s yet another social network, but they have a Facebook app, so you can keep all of that sort of thing in one place.

Speaking of Facebook apps, Bryan took his Facebook application from zero to live in about five minutes. If you’re interested in liturgical music with a modern edge, please take a look at Sharebit.

I have the day off today, so I’m going to go knock out some chores and then get to all that writing I’ve been putting off. Somehow, it still creeps down the priority list even on free days.

If you have a blog of your own, you know what a CAPTCHA is; for the rest of you, you’ve probably cursed at more than one. CAPTCHAs are those garbled images of words that you must decipher on many web sites to prove that you’re a human and not an evil spamming robot. If you’re like me, you find them at least mildly annoying. Until now, anyway.

I stumbled across reCAPTCHA over the weekend. Most CAPTCHAs use random words to prove you’re human, but this one shows you images of actual scanned text. The text comes from books that the Internet Archive has scanned but not digitized. You get to do the digitizing yourself by typing in the word. If enough people complete enough CAPTCHAs on enough sites, pretty soon that adds up to a bunch of books archived for posterity.

I love this idea for several reasons. It’s crowdsourcing at its best. It’s also a perfect example of what 37signals calls judo: break a big task down into many small steps; better yet, take something negative and turn it into a positive. It’s a good cause that happens to be book-related.

When I saw there was a WordPress plugin available, I installed it right here for you all to try out. Now go help save the world.

Plus, I could use more commenters.

I’ve attempted to manage my time using the Getting Things Done method for about a year. A cottage industry of GTD aids has sprung up, from the humble Hipster PDA to the fancy Tracks and everything in between. I’ve used Gmail, as outlined in Bryan’s whitepaper, for most of the previous year.

The big selling points of Gmail are:

• labeling
• search
• as a web application, it’s accessible anywhere
• your inbox doubles as your GTD inbox, which means that email message you need to answer is already in your GTD system as an action

I’ll let you read the paper for more details.

After a few months, the system started working against me. Gmail is not the fastest web application on the block, which made weekly reviews (a cornerstone of GTD) a pain. I’d click on all my project labels by rote, wait for the list to load, nod my head, and click on the next one. I wasn’t really processing much.

Your mileage may vary on this next point, but for me, it’s not such a great idea to mix my email and actions. I hated checking email because I’d see all the todos and feel swamped. I hated checking todos because I had to wade through spam and content to get to them. I setup rules to automate some of that, but I was always tweaking my rules in lieu of just Getting Stuff Done. Merlin remarked that your GTD system should be like your coffee cup; mine was a British roadster that lived in the shop (and I know a thing or two about that).

What did I do about it? You’ll have to wait for the next post, because this one has been sitting in my unfinished queue for way too long.

As of Thursday, October 27, my main brain once again has an Apple logo on it. You may recall that I was expecting to wait until Halloween to get it — ground shipping from Shanghai and all that — but FedEx really pulled a fast one on me. It showed up at my door on Thursday — twenty-five hours after leaving China. Yeah, there may be some International Date Line magic in there, but I don’t believe so. Major cool points to Apple and FedEx for managing customer expectations and then brilliantly exceeding them.

The Powerbook is a great machine, and I’m really enjoying it. I’ve even been able to buckle down and do some actual writing with it. I expected to spend a good week tweaking and playing on it, but as soon as I got all my settings and apps copied over from the iMac (a process that occurred flawlessly while I slept), I wanted to start writing with it. So here’s my first post from the Powerbook (well, yesterday’s Startup Junkie ping was the first, but who’s counting?).

I had to sell my first Powerbook because it wasn’t suited for the job I was trying to use it for. It feels good to know that this one is serving its exact purpose so far.

If you haven’t read this series of posts from a few weeks back, I’ve been itching to sell my Tablet PC and make the Switch to a Powerbook. I made myself wait until Apple came out with new, higher-resolution models — which was originally rumored to take place a month ago. Uncle Steve made me wait until last week, during which time I halfheartedly watched two dozen Powerbooks come and go on EBay, but after last Wednesday, I have no more excuses.

I took the plunge on Monday and surfed on over to the Apple Store. After a brief but violent disagreement with the Apple Credit application, which I lost (I couldn’t convince those automated anti-fraud questions that I did not know anyone named “Barbara Rd”), I dropped the order on my poor Amex card and eagerly awaited the email that said… my order should ship by the end of the week, and should be here by the end of next week.

Like Tom Petty said, when it comes to gear lust, the waiting is the hardest part.

(Continued from Part 3)

OK, I’ve given a few reasons why I love and hate my Tablet PC. Here’s the reason I’ve come down on the hate side, and why I’m selling mine:

The Tablet PC is terrible for writing.

Ironic, no? Unless you’re the type of writer that writes every word out longhand first, this machine is not going to be much help. Sometimes I do lean that way. I wrote the first 4 or 5 SRC posts by hand on the Motion and then converted them to text. However. By the time you run the recognition engine on your chicken scratch, fix all the wrong words, and delete all the random line breaks, you may as well have retyped the whole thing — and retyping has its own benefits. A post often begins life in my Moleskine notebook. I do most of the editing with fresh eyes as I’m transcribing into the computer. You don’t get the same effect when you’re correcting the tablet recognizer’s typos.

When I bought the Motion, I was looking for an ultraportable machine, something that could replace my generic Windows laptop. I wanted a machine I could program on, and something that might change the way I looked at portable computing. For two years, the Tablet PC did just that. Despite its immaturity as a platform, the tablet is perfect for many users: managers, students, medical professionals, artists. Anyone who moves around a lot, and needs to jot things down literally on the go, would be very happy with a Tablet PC. That’s not what I’m looking for anymore. I want to write, and I want a machine that gets out of the way and lets me write. I’ll need something portable that also happens to be a good platform for development using open-source tools — just in case I find myself doing odd software jobs while making the career jump.

Which leads me back at long last to the Powerbook. I’m hoping for one more update to the line before they switch over to Intel processors next year. That’s the rumor, anyway.

So, anyone want to buy a Tablet PC, with docking station and sleeve, for $700ish?

(Continued from Part 2)

Last time it was all about the love. Today, as promised, here are my top few tablet gripes.

• No one has yet come up with a decent user interface for the pen. There are some decent third-party apps, but Windows itself is still very pen unfriendly. Column-based menus are a pain to navigate. Entering ad hoc text into, say, an IM, is aggravating. You can peck at the onscreen keyboard, use Graffiti-style single character recognition, or write your text out longhand and hope the tablet understands what you wrote. There is no way to teach it your personal handwriting. I hear this may be improved in Windows Vista.

• The Motion is SLOW. It’s barely adequate for development at a blazing 933 MHz. I finally got a desktop machine at work, so that’s not as much of an issue anymore. Newer, graphics-intensive apps like Google Earth tend to crash a lot. Yes, I know there are newer tablets that perform much better.

• I don’t go to many meetings. That sort of negates its usefulness in that arena.

• Orienting the screen in portrait mode is the most natural for me, but most Web pages and applications are optimized for 800×600, not 768×1024 — leaving the tablet user with some horizontal scrolling to do.

• The display driver doesn’t play well with some apps. Like I mentioned, Google Earth tends to crash, among other things.

• I can take notes in my handwriting, organize them just like I would a paper notebook, and search them later — but the format is proprietary. If I decided to leave the Tablet PC platform, I’d have to change my entire organizational paradigm. If I leave Windows, all the notes I ever took with the tablet are history, unless I print them all out. This is great for Microsoft, but not so good for me. So I never really committed to Journal or OneNote fully. I don’t want to get locked in — something I’m facing with PersonalBrain right now.

I’ll leave my biggest personal gripe (which may or may not be an issue for others) for the next post.

(Continued from Part 1)

Fast forward a year, from spring 2002 to spring 2003. The Vaio was my main workstation (work being too cheap to buy me a desktop machine) during that time. However, the object of my gadget lust was a Motion Computing M1200 Tablet PC. I just had to have something I could tote around to meetings and still run programmer-type apps on. I cashed in a developer discount, endured the long wait for the tablet to arrive, and sold off the Sony.

With 1GB of RAM, it outperformed the older Vaio slightly. The 12-inch screen was huge for a slate-style tablet. With the docking station, I could plug it in at work and use a keyboard, mouse and separate monitor. And boy, did I love taking it to meetings and showing people how I could write right on the screen. No one had ever seen anything quite like it.

After two years with the Motion, I still find it incredibly useful for many things. Here’s a short list:

• Couch surfing cannot be beat. Unlike a typical laptop, you can comfortably goof around on the Web and watch TV at the same time… as long as you aren’t doing a lot of data input or IM. More about that tomorrow.

• Stall surfing. Yeah, um, so I’ll leave the details of that one up to you.

• Ebooks are almost practical. The screen is big enough for two pages side by side if you like, and you won’t break your back carrying the tablet around.

• Notetaking is completely natural. In a meeting environment, you have to hunch over your traditional laptop, peering at the screen and banging away at keys. You aren’t looking anyone in the eye. You look antisocial. The tablet, however, balances right on one knee, or sits on the table like a notepad. You scribble your notes in it and can search back through them later. Microsoft’s OneNote is actually pretty good at this, although it tends to force you into too much structure.

• It’s a social device. You can load up something on your screen and pass it off to someone else to look at. They can mark up what you’ve done and pass it back.

• It’s a good quick-and-dirty recording platform. I loaded n-track on it and recorded several band practice sessions.

• It’s a digital picture frame. When people come over for parties, I set it up on its easel and have it slideshow through our photo library (which is stored on the iMac upstairs and accessed via WiFi).

• Instant messaging using ink is way cool. This assumes that you’re both using a current version of MSN Messenger.

I also have a list of gripes, of course. Check back tomorrow for those. Hey, I think I’m getting the hang of this serial posting business.

I love my Tablet PC.

I hate my Tablet PC.

I’m about five seconds from buying a Powerbook.

First, some background.

Rewind to early 2002, when I started a contract job doing Windows development. After working in the server room for a few days (no empty desks in the office), I realized I’d need a laptop so I could work in the relative comfort of the conference room. I had seen and drooled over Apple’s Titanium Powerbooks for awhile. I’d also heard of this little application called Virtual PC, which would let you run Windows applications on a Mac. Time for an experiment. I bought a lovely TiBook from a nice fellow on eBay, grabbed a copy of Virtual PC, and installed a few small apps: Windows 2000 Advanced Server, SQL Server, and Visual Studio. I proceeded to work on a large web project in Virtual PC on my Powerbook.

It was a miracle (or at least a testament to Apple and/or Connectix) that this worked at all. I was debugging an IIS application in Visual Studio, running on Windows Server, in a little window on an Apple laptop. It was also like working on a 286. It took Studio ten minutes to compile the app and another ten minutes to attach the debugger. It would be tough to justify my $90-per-hour paycheck at this rate. With a heavy heart I sold the masterpiece that was the TiBook, and picked up a Sony Vaio. A little bit of color left my world that day.

(to be continued)

Bren at Slacker Manager is finally switching to Mac. He’s a longtime ActiveWords user, and expressed hope that Quicksilver would be a decent replacement. I commented that Quicksilver eats ActiveWords’ lunch:

I almost never use [ActiveWords]. Nearly every time I open ANYthing, it bugs me to add a word. It makes me stop what I’m doing to figure out what word to use. Then I have to remember later what word I picked, and move my hands away from the home row to find F8 and hit it. The interface looks like it was written in VB 5….

Quicksilver, OTOH, is invisible unless I call it up with the super quick two-thumb hotkey. I start typing and it shows matches while I type. No shortcuts to remember, except for Cmd-space. The more I use it, the faster it gets, because it learns from me. And it does so much more than just open apps or folders. And it’s FREE!

Whereupon someone at ActiveWords emailed me to find out how I really felt. I won’t name or quote him, because I don’t know the netiquette for that sort of thing. His points are below in italics; my thoughts follow.

• The auto suggest feature of ActiveWords can be disabled. I started it on purpose, hoping it would be a little more intelligent. After I’ve launched the same folder or app n times (where n is configurable), it interrupts me with a Clippy-style “ActiveWords has detected that you have been using such-and-such a lot. What would you like to do?” As a developer, I frequently access folders and sites with similar names on several different servers. There’s no real shortcut naming convention I could follow. Quicksilver would pop up a list of matching locations and narrow it down as I type. Instant feedback, with no up-front cost.

• If you have a hard time remembering what shortcut you use for a particular app, give it several shortcuts. This involves less thinking on the back end (when you invoke the shortcut), but more thinking on the front (when you create it). My goal is less thinking, period. Quicksilver interprets anything I type. Again, instant feedback. No learning curve — Quicksilver does the learning for me, to make the match faster next time.

• The interface is designed to be simple, and few people complain about it. There are two options: dock the toolbar at the top of the screen, or dock the toolbar at the bottom of the screen. Yes, I know it can be auto-hidden. Auto-hide in this context is an abuse of Fitts’ Law. Auto-hidden items pop up when you least want them, and refuse to go away at random times. For Pete’s sake, ActiveWords is supposed to reduce your dependence on the mouse. There’s no need for a permanent toolbar. If there’s a way to disable the toolbar altogether, I couldn’t find it. I can’t tell what the icons do (why do I need icons?). The one that looks like an alarm clock says “Productivity Center” when I hover over it. I rest my case.

• You don’t have to hit a hotkey to trigger ActiveWords. This one is subtle but essential. As I mentioned in my original comment, Quicksilver’s hotkey is less obtrusive than ActiveWords’ F8. I can hit Cmd-Space without moving my hands from normal typing position. Two thumbs, bang-bang. It’s even sort of cathartic. Once I’ve done that, my brain is in the right mode to talk to Quicksilver. Emacs or vi nuts will understand what I’m talking about here. With ActiveWords, I have to switch modes anyway to think of the shortcut and type it. Then I have to pick up my right hand, find F8 and hit it. Once that’s done, ActiveWords either a) launches my app or b) tells me it couldn’t resolve my shortcut. Option a means everything is ok and my brain goes back to what it was thinking about. Option b stops me cold. I never know which I’m going to get.

These are examples of why Windows software aggravates, while so much Mac software is perceived as friendly and fun. Write this down, Windows developers: it’s not about your app. It’s about the work the user is trying to accomplish. Good interfaces get out of your way; they don’t interrupt your train of thought to make you think about them.

One or two other thoughts:

• Quicksilver does a lot more than just launch stuff. Its real power is in its plugins. I can browse my iTunes content or my del.icio.us links. I can copy and paste into and out of it. I can run shell commands out of it. Quicksilver has a flow to it; you pipe information to it, do something to it, do something else to it, and get other information back out. It’s a uniform frontend for all your applications. After all, it’s about your work, not the app.

• Did I mention it’s FREE!?

Update 8.5.05: Slacker Manager has posted their own AW vs. QS cage match. This one is coming from the perspective of a longtime ActiveWords user and, as such, is probably more objective than mine.