Things that make me happy

I have a feeling that one of the tests of "real happiness" is to be aware that you are happy, rather than just "feeling OK". For the last few weeks I have been particularly aware that I am happy, and that things are going well for me (as opposed to last year, which was quite nasty). I am getting good feed back from customers and colleagues (they like my work), and I'm past that point in my new job when I don't feel properly engaged. I've finally found floor covering for my kitchen that accords with the vision I had in my head, and I should be able to get it installed soon. My cabinet maker's sketches for my new sideboard are just what I wanted, and he thinks he can have it finished before Christmas. All good.

And Stephen Fry has started to write a blog and someone has had the happy thought of getting him to write a column for The Guardian (and if you don't know who Stephen Fry is, I can do no better than to refer you to his performances in productions such as Jeeves and Wooster and Cold Comfort Farm). To find that he is a geek in the very best sense, and verily a Mac person as well - what can I say? It's like a very large, gift wrapped, completely undeserved present!

Closer to home, the lovely folks at Zengobi have issued forth version 4.1 of Curio, which includes the plugin necessary to make Curio documents visible in Leopard's CoverFlow and QuickLook, and numerous other enhancements. Love your work, people!

On a slightly downward note, I've been told that the LookSmart people are selling some of their assets to CNET, and that appears to include Furl. As my friend Alec Muffet says Back-Up Your Furl Databases, ASAP !!! (and his blog has the instructions). Unfortunately, Furl appears to be broken, and will not let me download the zip file of my saved content. Furl is aware of the problem, and one can only hope that there is someone there who can fix the system - they've laid off 25% of their staff in the last quarter, and in my experience engineers always get shafted long before managers.

Feedback

The last post generated a few comments, and I have time to answer those now. It's Sunday evening, I've just finished prepping our tax paperwork, to go our accountant tomorrow and somewhere outside I just heard a kookaburra "laughing" maniacally. It's probably hunting in the twilight, and I wish it well - I think there is a mouse living in my compost bin!

First, thank you all for your feedback - it's nice to know that I'm not talking to myself!

There is a question from Brab, who asks how I use Curio beyond note taking, and how I decide whether to start a document in Curio or EagleFiler. The first thing I "drew" in Curio, almost the first time I used it, was a 3 page layout of how I thought a web site should look. It was extremely basic, just boxes and text, with a bit of coloured fill. I PDF'd the result and sent it to the man who owned the budget that was supposed to pay for a particular marketing campaign. Next thing knew, I'd been asked to attend a meeting with the marketing people, who seemed astounded to find an engineer who they could talk to; I'm still working with them, and so far as I'm concerned, that 3 page layout paid for Curio right then and there. I'd only been in my current job a few weeks, and I was still in that odd phase that you get at the beginning of a new job, where most of your coworkers know nothing about you, other than what they read in the welcome email that your manager broadcast: nobody is quite sure what your skill set is, or how to engage with you usefully. I needed to demonstrate a general willingness to do whatever needed doing, which I find is the secret to success in most jobs, and to raise my profile within the organization. Curio helped me do that, getting me introductions to people who I otherwise might not have met for months..

I also use Curio when I need to "collage" something together, so I can see all the related bits. And if it happens to be open when I take a phone call, I'll take notes directly into it, or jot down phone numbers, though they will probably get moved somewhere else pretty quickly.

In 2005, I had to study for the CISSP exam, which is a 5 hour marathon and not something I want to repeat (see www.isc2.org for details, basically CISSP is a well thought of security qualification). To get the huge amount of information requiredto pass the exam to stay in my brain, I drew a series of mind maps, on large pieces of paper, with markers and coloured pencils. It must have worked, because I passed the exam (to my great relief, my then employer had mandated that the entire security practice had to pass this exam, so it was a bit public, and I'm not good with personal failure). However, the mind maps (which I am reluctant to destroy) are a nuisance to store, so I am converting them to Curio documents.

Finished Curio documents get stored in EagleFiler, and Curio gets used to bring documents from EagleFiler together on one page. Not many documents get started in EagleFiler, with the exception of login credentials, which I store as text files. Generally, if I am starting a document, I start in Word if I only expect to need text and I will need to send the results to a colleague; in Notebook if I am drafting a blog or an email; or in Curio if I expect to need diagrams or graphics. I should state that mine is currently the only Mac on the corporate network, so I have to use applications that give me some degree of portability with the PC users around me (though I do believe that some of my co-workers may be considering a change of platform).

For me, EagleFiler is the giant filing drawer where web pages, receipts, passwords, cartoons, Office documents and PDFs get dumped. My main database contains everything from knitting patterns to technical documents.

Dana asked what I draw with. Because my work is technical, much of what I need to draw lends itself to simple boxes and lines: flow charts and network diagrams for the most part. Those can easily be drawn with Curio's shape and line tools. If I need to mark up a graphic, I can usually manage with my mouse and the highlighter tool. If I want to draw "properly", I have a Wacom Graphire 4 pad. I'm teaching myself to use this, but because I am not burdened with any talent for drawing, it's up hill work.

I also see a note from Greg at Zengobi in the comments. He has answered Dana's questions about Curio versions Thanks Greg, love your work!

Next week I am on leave, and my husband and I are going to Western Australia for a few days. I haven't been to Perth since 1998, and I am told that it is much changed So look out for some pictures of WA next week.

Litter Sorters: A Personal Evaluation of Mac Organizer Software

Part 6: decision

Finally, after many weeks and much research, I have made a decision on which application to purchase. As I expected, my choice is based on a compromise: none of the applications that I have tested have completely satisfied all my requirements (as stated in the first part of this series). For those of you who just want to see the final result, it is:

EagleFiler

I must admit that when I started this exercise, I thought that my final choice would be Yojimbo, and I still think that Yojimbo is a fine product. But EagleFiler has some major advantages for me, personally. Your experience may vary, and I do urge you to examine both products carefully before making your own final decision. However, the critical factors for me were:

The EagleFiler Drop Pad is better behaved than the Yojimbo Drop Dock. The Drop Dock tends to "jam" when the laptop sleeps, the Drop Pad seems to remain responsive regardless of the laptop sleeping and waking.

EagleFiler supports sub folders. I cannot possibly over emphasize how important this is: I cannot live with everything dumped into large, coarsely sorted, buckets. For example, I require a folder called "Craft", and that folder must subdivide into crochet, beading and knitting. Tagging is needed to relate information from different folders, but I must have adequate folder granularity in the first place. If I have time next week I'll do a post on classification theory, to try and make this clearer.

While EagleFiler does not now support encryption, it is under consideration for an upcoming release. Further, on attempting to move my passwords into a laptop based application, I found that I still needed access in other situations: I don't always have my laptop with me. I shall have to continue to store password data on my Palm Pilot, or consider moving it to my Blackberry. I would still like encryption in my litter sorter app, but the requirement is less urgent than I had first thought.

And finally, the most important factor: EagleFiler uses a flat file storage structure, where Yojimbo uses an SQL database. I was always a little uneasy about having to run an additional database engine, with all the possibilities of corruption and loss. The flat file structure is easy to backup, to replicate, to reuse. And that last bit is important. Because my requirements changed.

I thought that I had my requirements pretty well worked out when I started this, but that was before I discovered Curio. I think that Curio will change the way I work, because it opens a range of possible ways of arranging data. "What does this have to do with EagleFiler?" I hear you ask. Simple: because EagleFiler is flat file, I can drag an item from the Eaglefiler "Records List" window straight into the Curio "Idea Space", and because Curio uses links to files in the underlying file system (unless you specifically tell it to import its own copy of a file), Curio references the same physical instance of the item as EagleFiler. This gives me EagleFiler as the "filing cabinet full of folders of stuff", and Curio as the work space for aggregating bits and pieces into a greater whole. It also gives me simple data exchange between the two applications, without keeping duplicate copies of documents, and wasting disk space.

For example, I can use Curio's Presentation Mode to do full screen presentations of material stored in EagleFiler, nicely laid out and with hand drawn annotations if I want (I got a Wacom Graphire4 tablet earlier in the week). And I can use Curio's Dossier function to track the what and why of a project. A Curio Dossier is a form you fill in to define a project's scope and goals. Curio has templates for various purposes, or you can create your own. Here's an example:

I shall probably have another rave about Curio at a later date. But for now, all that remains is to clean up my hard disk, purging all the applications that didn't make the cut (I think the next review will probably be about Mac uninstaller software), load all the subdirectories of "litter" into their new home, and get used to my new work flow. Oh, and license EagleFiler and Curio.

Until next time....