I was tempted to add MenuMeters to the “VPZtms Compendium of Tools” post because if I’d added it (and Growl), the list would have included all the applications that I am always running on my machine. I refrained because technically they have nothing to do with information management. But I still wanted to write something about system monitors.

Quicksilver users often say they feel crippled when using a machine that doesn’t have Quicksilver installed. I feel the same way when I use a machine that doesn’t have a menu bar system monitor installed. To me it is like driving a car without a dashboard. Sure, you can guesstimate how fast you’re going just by looking out the window, but what a waste of mental energy that a dashboard just solves.

When is a System Monitor Helpful?

These are questions that come up while you use a computer that a system monitor can answer.

1. Are you really downloading or uploading anything?

   This is particularly helpful when uploading to a website, since web uploads often don’t give any visual feedback as they happen. It is also helpful when loading a web page is just plain slow.

2. Can my computer handle opening another application right now?

   An implication of multithreading is that if you start to open two applications simultaneously, then they will both take longer to finish opening than if you had opened them successively. This is because the more threads you have running, the more of your system resources are devoted to the act of juggling the threads rather than the threads themselves.

   The same rule applies if you open an application while your computer is already working hard. Basically, the more you tell your computer to do at once, the longer it will take to do everything. (In addition, from my personal experience, overburdening a computer increases its likelihood of crashing.)

   Managing your system resources effectively means not starting new processor intensive tasks when your computer is already working hard.

3. Is the application process that you believe is happening, really happening?

   Encoding video and music, creating archives, and copying large files are all tasks that take a long time and don’t always give good visual feedback. Progress bars, if they are even present, sometimes stop moving even though stuff is still happening. A quick glance at a system monitor tells you if your computer is really doing anything. Another advantage of checking this way is that it doesn’t require finding the process’s window.

How to Configure your System Monitor

There are three pieces of information that I find useful to have my system monitor tell me:

1. Upload and Download Rates
2. Total Processor Usage
3. Number of RAM Pageouts (With all the memory management voodoo modern operating systems do, the actual used/free RAM numbers don’t seem useful to me.)

With MenuMeters configured to show this information, it should look something like this:

Definition of Good Software

When selecting software tools, I want to assure the following:

• The software will continue to be available and actively developed.

• The software will be stable and free from memory leaks and other performance flaws.

• The software will be of high quality and avoid common design problems like poor OS integration and feature bloat.

Choosing Good Software

To increase the likelihood that the software I select satisfies the above conditions, I look for software in the following order:

• Stage 1. Built-in to OS X

• Stage 2. Open Source Software

• Stage 3. Free Software or Free Versions of Paid Software

• Stage 4. Shareware and Commercial Software

I suggest only moving up a stage when you have already outgrown the current stage. For example, I still use Terminal.app, despite the fact that iTerm has tabs (and I love tabs), because I don’t use enough terminal windows at once to really need tabs. I also used iChat over Adium X up until I actually needed MSN support, even though I knew in advance that one day I might need that feature.

The idea is that the lower you stay on these stages, the more your computing environment will be stable, of high quality and in continued development.

Finally, these rules are made to be broken. They are just guidelines.

All of these tools satisfy my requirements of being simple, flexible, and easy to use.

Discovery

NetNewsWire - I’ve already written 2053 words about RSS, so I’ll refrain from adding more now.

Safari - I prefer Safari’s simple, straight-forward approach to web browsing over Firefox’s more feature-rich, extension-enhanced browing experience. In my opinion, most Firefox extensions allow you to do things in a web browser that are really better served by separate applications anyway (such as writing, storing notes, and RSS feed reading).

Sogudi - Quick Search plugin for Safari.

fwit - Incremental Search plugin for Safari.

Storage

The Finder - Yes, I use the regular old Finder (with a couple of basic customizations) to manage most of my stored information.

FolderOrg AppleScript - An AppleScript folder action that, when attached to a folder, automatically moves anything placed into that folder into a subfolder named with the current date.

Refinement

VoodooPad - Danny O’Brien’s research of “prolific alpha geeks” found that large numbers of his interviewees stored their information as plain text. VoodooPad’s wiki functionality combines most of the advantages of plain text with the incredibly powerful ability to dynamically add any number of hierarchical sub-levels to any piece of text. VoodooPad is at the heart of my time management system.

Roaring Penguin’s Remind - I use Remind in conjunction with VoodooPad’s built-in “run” functionality to give follow-up dates to to-dos.

iCal - I use iCal to manage to-dos that must happen on a specific date, or at a specific time, such as scheduled meetings. iCal is missing a key software calendar feature, namely a way to automatically add reminders to all events, but I stick with it anyway hoping one day Apple will give it some attention.

I-Search - I navigate my to-do list using incremental search. This wonderful system-wide plug-in gives incremental search to most Cocoa applications.

Presentation

I am not going to list any presentation tools because these applications depend entirely on which medium you are presenting information in.

General

Apple Mail - An email client has three roles under my system: a searchable database of information, a way to manage a list of people to email back, and an application for reading, writing and sending email. These three roles commingle discovery, storage, refinement, and presentation, therefore, email will be an exception to many of the information management rules that I recommend. Later I’ll write about why I think breaking these rules is a good idea for email.

TextPander - Automatically expand user-customized abbreviations to longer pieces of text in any application. This is very flexible functionality that works as both a typing-aid and an information storage/retrieval mechanism.

Quicksilver - Quicksilver needs no introduction, so I’ll just point out that even Tog, who has written extensively about disproving that the keyboard has advantages over the mouse (although personally I think his research is inconclusive), acknowledges a speed increase when using this kind of keyboard-only tool:

“I haven’t performed or reviewed a stopwatch test, but LaunchBar [same concept as Quicksilver] should be able to outperform a visual interface for complex, repetitive switching sequences by an expert user.”

Summary

This is just a quick introduction to the tools that my information management system uses. Future topics in this series will cover both the details of how this system works, and general tips, tricks and observations about using these tools to manage information.

There are three (closely-related) reasons that incorporating a new tool into your time management system often fails:

1. It is too complicated

2. It is too inflexible

3. It is too hard

Too Complicated

A tool is too complicated when it does too many extra things that you don’t need.

For example, the much heralded Kinkless GTD is too complicated for me because it is based around contexts, and I don’t use contexts.

When you are talking about software, too complicated can also mean that it uses too much system resources for the benefits it affords.

Too Inflexible

Too inflexible means that the tool has limitations that prevent it from being useful in enough situations.

For example, iCal’s built-in to-do system doesn’t give me a way to associate additional information with to-dos (such as links and my own notes), so it is too inflexible.

Too Hard

It is too hard to use a tool when you don’t use it in an appropriate situation because of the effort it requires.

When advising clients on their office arrangements, David Allen says that one of the first things he does is position their filing cabinet where they can reach it without getting up from their desk. Because a filing cabinet on the other side of the room is too hard.

Balance

These probably sounds like common sense, and they are. The idea is being able to quickly identify when and why something isn’t working. These are the distillation of the many specific reasons that tools or approaches haven’t become permanent parts of my system over the years.

The VPZtms is about striking the perfect balance. Receiving the maximum benefits of structure, without going too far in any of the above directions.

The Scope of my System

The characteristics of your work setup define which features your time management system needs and which tools are available to you.

My time management system is defined by the following characteristics:

1. I work from home, off of one computer.

   This means:

   • I don’t need contexts

   • I use all desktop software and no web software. Because the advantages of desktop software (they work better and are available offline) eclipse the advantages of web software (they are available from any computer connected to the internet).

2. My system is paperless

   This means:

   • All my tools will be software.

3. I run OS X

   This means:

   • All of my tools work exclusively on OS X (although similar software exists on most OSes).

It’s been Field-Tested

Five years ago the company I worked for asked me to start using a Franklin-Covey Planner. Like many others, I found that using a time management system helped me get more stuff done.

It has been five years since that first Franklin Planner and I have experimented with many different tools and systems since then. But for the last couple of years, my system has mostly remained static. I still try out new tools all the time, but nothing sticks.

Last week, Apple announced that Leopard will include a system-wide to-do system. I am a sucker for operating system-level functionality, so I expect I’ll be tinkering with my time management system heavily after this gets released. This means that now is a good time to describe my current system that has already been field-tested for years.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be blogging about the time management system that has stuck with me through thick and thin and that, despite by best efforts, no new tool has been able to usurp.

I have been keeping an eye on Karelia Software’s website for news about Sandvox for quite sometime now. My interest was perked when I heard it was in development for two reasons:

1. Karelia Software was behind Watson, one of the most interesting and inspired early Os X 3rd party applications. Watson was one of the first applications to explore using custom offline interfaces for web services, an idea that is very hot right now (see Dashboard, RSS Feed Readers, Google Earth, and Cocoalicious, for a few off the top of my head). Watson was a forward thinking application that unfortunately died when Apple turned Sherlock into an (oddly unusable) Watson clone and bundled it with Jaguar.

2. Dan Wood, who is one-half of Karelia, said his inspiration to create Sandvox came from his seeing the power of CSS and in particular, the beauty and flexibility of the designs found at The CSS Zen Garden. These are exactly same influences that rejuvenated my own interest in web development when I first encountered them a little over a year ago.

It isn’t often that a developer who is capable of a visionary application lets is be known that they have a new application in the works that lands squarely in your interest zone and is inspired by the same things that inspire you. So when the first public beta of Sandvox was released today, I was quick to try it out.

About Sandvox

What Sandvox is:

1. Sandvox is an offline website creation application. Websites are created locally and stored as a special file type with the extension “.svxSite.” Sandvox offers different ways to upload your website to a server, the most basic of which is to export the website as HTML and upload it manually.

2. Websites in Sandvox use templates. You can switch which template your website uses at any time without affecting the content on your pages. But you cannot directly modify the “look” of a template in any way, not even font changes. The documentation hints that this will be changing in the future. Templates are stored inside the Sandvox application package. The templates themselves at a minimum seem to consist of a “main.css” file and the required image files. In the future, designers will be welcome to create their own Sandvox designs. They are planning on releasing a “designer’s kit (coming soon) that discusses how pages and pagelets are presented” (Sandvox Faq).

3. Sandvox allows the creation of pages and “pagelets” (bits of content that can be used on many different pages at once, such as list of links). The types of pages you can create in Sandvox and the structure of it’s editing functionality are geared toward creating “blog-style” content (i.e. blogs and photo galleries).

4. Sandvox automatically generates RSS feeds for your site.

5. Sandvox is OS X only

What Sandvox is not:

1. Sandvox is not an application for creating original website designs or editing templates to create website designs. In fact, Sandvox does not contain any functionality at all that allows you to change the “look” of your website except for the ability to switch between different templates. This means that Sandvox contains no CSS editing functionality, which I found a bit surprising.

2. Sandvox is not a particularly innovative application. Both iBlog and Rapidweaver contain a lot of overlap functionality.

3. Sandvox does not create purely semantic XHTML. In other words, Sandvox creates some XHTML tags that do not have any semantic meaning and are only used as hooks for CSS. For example:

How big a deal this is differs from person to person. In comparison to an application like Dreamweaver, the improvements to the generated XHTML are immeasurable.

With all that being said, Sandvox is a flawlessly executed piece of Mac OS X software. It follows all the right conventions and it has that extra bit of design pizz-azz that people on the platform appreciate (despite it’s beta-ness.) If want an application that performs the above functions, it would be hard for another application to do better¹.

Impressions

My first impression is that Sandvox works, both as a product and as an approach to website creation. Its ease of use and feature set can benefit a lot of people. This is despite heavy competition from other methods of getting your words and photos online, mainly from server-side blogging software.

The advantage that Sandvox holds over a server-side blogging package is that it does not rely on a web interface. Web interfaces are great; they aren’t tied to any one platform or computer. But they become cumbersome quickly when things become more complicated than a text box with a publish button. In particular, web interfaces quickly start to breakdown once photos start getting involved. Anyone who has ever uploaded photo gallery one image at a time can attest to this. Even basic blog tasks like adding a list of links and badges to your sidebar are just barely adequately served by web interfaces.

On the other hand, even if you are using a server-side blogging package instead of Sandvox, your posts and photo galleries don’t need to be managed through web interfaces. If you know CSS, XHTML, MySQL, and a server-side scripting language, a server-side blogging package’s look and behavior can be customized while maintaining the ease of updating that comes from the underlying blog core. External editors and photo management applications with XML-RPC support can be used to manage content and upload content outside of a web interface.

But the problem is that the amount of technical know-how between these two options is huge and there isn’t anything in between. Everyone who doesn’t know the four web technologies you need to customize a blog are stuck with an out-of-the-box blogging package’s limited options. Divides like that are called niches, and niches are what small software development companies are around to fill.

So there is a place for products like Sandvox. I don’t know what Sandvox brings to the table that Rapidweaver and iBlog don’t (in the case of iBlog, I suspect a lot), hopefully a good comparison review will appear shortly. My interest in Sandvox has as much to do with the developers track record as it does with what the application does.

Enter iWeb

While I am on the subject of the developer’s track record… as I pointed out before, Karelia is on the slim list of developers who have had a product (arguably) copied and added to the OS for free by Apple. But Karelia, maybe about to blaze a trail of their own in this area. “iWeb,” that is the name of an application that was accidently leaked by Apple on their website that will likely be announced tomorrow at Macworld.

I hate to say it, but after experiencing the combination of ease of use and media-suave in Sandvox, this just feels like an iApp. With that and the current state of web publishing today (exploding). We may find out tomorrow that Karelia got the short-end of the stick once again (But they’re not bitter: “the truth is that Karelia’s product ideas just happen to be mainstream, like Apple’s” (The Story Behind Karelia’s New Logo).

1. Very important to note that I haven’t tried iBlog or Rapidweaver. ↑