I have tried many task management solutions and I haven’t found any that I really like. I have a few criteria for an acceptable solution but nothing I have tried so far meets them.

• Multi Platform
  • I need to be able to access my tasks from the web, my iPhone, and if possible a Mac.
  • Many solutions hit 2 out 3 of the platforms. I can accept not having a desktop app if the web app is available but I don’t like it.
• Effortless Syncing
  • I want to be able to enter/close tasks on one device and have those changes propagate within a couple of minutes across clients.
• Due Dates/Times
  • I want to be able to set a due date and time on a task.
• Reminders
  • I want to be able to set a reminder time on a task and preferably be notified on my iPhone.
• Cheap
  • I am willing to pay for task management software as evidenced by the numerous iPhone task managers I have bought in the last few years. However I am not willing to let a company siphon money from me indefinitely and I find the companies trying to charge extra for syncing particularly distasteful.

I have tried OmniFocus, Things, The Hit List and none of them have kept me using it for more than a few days. OmniFocus is to expensive and has no web app. Things has been promising sync forever and aside from a limited beta test hasn’t produced it. Cultured Code the make of Things also doesn’t seem to updated their website since last August. The Hit List was presumed dead for a long time until it’s developer popped up with a new version and added syncing for an extra monthly charge. So I have encountered show stoppers with all the big Mac task managers that preclude me from using them.

I have tried many web applications however most of them aren’t available on any other platform. I have been sporadically using iPhone clients that store their data in the Toodledo web application. This gave me the 2 platforms I needed the most web and mobile. However I haven’t been particularly pleased with any of the iPhone apps and Toodledo’s UI is ok but not great.

I am currently giving Wunderlist another try because it’s available on practically every platform Mac/Windows/Web/iOS I would want to use it on. Wunderlist is very simple however it does support multiple lists, due dates and times, syncing, and reminders on the iPhone. Wunderlist is free which isn’t actually a good sign in my book because they have no revenue to keep them in business.

I am going to try and stick to using Wunderlist for two weeks to really evaluate it. There is one thing that annoys me already and that is the custom backgrounds they use everywhere, I would prefer that the app use the native window background on iOS and Mac/Windows. I also wish Wunderlist would use black text in order to increase the contrast and make the test easier to read.

I had a very frustrating experience today where I suggested a very simple automated solution to a problem that would take the responsibility of dealing with a whole new category of customer support issues away from the company. My idea was to escalate the issue from one class of user to another and have them be able to quickly address the issue thus avoiding any need to have one of our employees spend time on it. This solution would be relatively simple to implement and would be done fairly quickly. Unfortunately I was shot down in favor of having developers handle these issues manually.

There are so many things wrong with this that I just had to write about it. I am venting in this way because I had to refrain from saying something I would regret after this decision was made.

First we are software developers not clerks in the 1950’s doing everything by hand. Our job is automate business processes not make them more inefficient.

We want to empower the users to address any issues they have rather than having to contact us. We want users to feel capable and that our product meets their needs.

The only way developers can fix this support issue is to go into the database and delete records since we have no superuser capability in the system. This is exactly what you never want to do unless it’s an emergency and then you better think twice before touching the database.

I believe once this solution is in place and the extra work is factored in we will end up developing a different solution to the problem so we won’t save any time overall and I wish we were doing it right in the first place.

When git is working it’s a dream however when I get outside the regular workflow it is easy to get lost.

I have two projects where I have the need to pull commits from an upstream github repo and then push to my own github repo. I kept finding myself with a detached head after pulling from the upstream repo. I could resolve any conflicts, commit my changes, and merge them back into HEAD but pulling from upstream would just result in a detached HEAD again. I went around and around with this issue until I was ready to cry uncle. I tried resolving this both through the command line and several Mac Gui git clients.

Fortunately this project contains my files in a couple of isolated directories. This let me copy those directories out of the repo and then delete the repo and start over with a fresh clone of the upstream repo and then add my files back in.

This shows me that I need to spend more time using git or stop trying to do oddball things with it.

As I was sitting on the couch last night I checked Twitter on my iPhone and one of the first tweets I read said Steve Jobs had passed away. I quickly pulled up Safari and checked CNN and Steve Jobs passing away was the lead story. I was greatly saddened by this news. Steve Jobs helped to create the personal computer as an idea. He drove the entire industry to create better hardware and software and to make computers more intuitive and easier to use.

My mom bought a version of the Apple II around the time I was starting high school at the time I didn’t get into it that much. Since my mom was teacher she had older model Macs for several years. My first real exposure to a Mac was when I was working for a publishing company and we used Quark Express on really old Macs running System 7 as the operating system. By this time in my life I loved computers of all kinds and was learning everything I could about computers and operating systems of all types.

It wasn’t until years later when I was attending college and that I was able to buy my first Mac. With the release of Mac OS X I had developed a real interest in Apple. I was studying computer science in college and I wanted a laptop computer to use for school so I bought a 12” PowerBook. I loved everything about that computer the portability, the aluminum enclosure, the joy I got from using it. From that day forward I primarily used a Mac at home even as I was a Windows developer at my day job.

A few years after I got my first Mac I bought an iPod Mini. I had a long commute for years and having my own music in the car made it so much more tolerable. When the iPhone 3G came out I bought one and fell in love it. I had a hand held computer straight out of science fiction that just blew my mind. When the iPhone 4 came out I upgraded from my 3G and bought my wife one as well. The products Steve Jobs designed have made our lives better and I think that is what Steve was always trying to do.

I will be going to my first real tech conference this weekend when I attend the WindyCityRails conference in Chicago. I have wanted to attend WindyCityRails for several years but I couldn’t really justify it when I was working as a .Net developer. Now that I am actively employed as a Rails developer I am really excited to go and meet other Rails developers and attend the conference sessions.

I finally got around to make some improvements to the colors Octopress uses by default. I went with a much lighter color palate because I couldn’t stand the default Octopress colors.

I tweaked some of the styles as well. I moved the post date to the right of the post title so it doesn’t take up as much room vertically and flows with the post a little better. I tightened up the spacing between posts and paragraphs as well as shrinking some of the font sizes in order to give the design a tighter feel.

I wish a designer would pitch in a little time and come up with an actually attractive default design for Octopress. I think that would make using it more appealing to those of us who are design challenged.

I recently considered changing the static blog generator I was using from Jekyll to something like nanoc that is better maintained and has better documentation. As I was mulling over whether I wanted to do that I saw the release of Octopress version 2.0 which is based on Jekyll. Octopress adds a default theme and rake tasks to help automate various tasks. Octopress also includes plugins for twitter and pinboard along with extensive documentation which is something that Jekyll was missing.

I decided it would be the least amount of work to move my posts into Octopress rather than migrating to a different platform so that is what I have done. I have been pretty happy so far. My next task will be to start modifying the layout to be something I like better as I have never liked any blog engine’s default theme so things may look a little wonky as I make changes.

This is a first post to test Octopress.

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puts "Awesome!" unless lame

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class Fixnum
  def prime?
    ('1' * self) !~ /^1?*|^(11+?)\1+$/
  end
end

Google introduced their Facebook competitor this week called Google+. I was lucky enough to snag an invitation via an acquaintance on twitter. I then sent out a few invitations of my own and started playing with it. Google is going right at one of Facebook’s big weaknesses with the Circles feature that allows you manage your social graph relationships which Facebook doesn’t easily allow you to do. On Google+ you can keep your coworkers, family, and friends easily separate and not inadvertently over share information.

One the core features of Google+ that I find interesting is how they have leveraged their search technology to create a kind of dynamic saved search they call Sparks. I think Sparks is really cool. I created a Ruby on Rails spark and when I click on it I get job postings, news articles, videos, and blog posts.

I haven’t had a chance to upload photos yet to try out that feature or the Hangout video conferencing/chat feature.

Google’s implementation of notifications is very slick and I believe web and I like it a lot.

I don’t use an Android phone so I will have to wait awhile until Google releases an iOS application but I am looking forward to being able to use it on my phone.

I also took this opportunity to add google’s +1 button to my posts on this blog.

Years ago before I bought my first Mac when blogs were just starting to be a thing on the internet I was facinated by all the new content that was appearing. I bookmarked any site I found interesting and then proceeded to methodically visit every site whenever I sat down at the computer to see if anything new had been posted. This was not a very efficient use of time but there was no better way to check for new content at the time. Some smart people recognized this way of searching for new content was a mess and invented the RSS content format and not long after that one of the first RSS readers was released NetNewsWire for the Mac. As a Windows user at the time I wanted an RSS reader as good as NetNewsWire.

When I eventually bought a PowerBook laptop one of the first things I bought was NetNewsWire and I have been using it practically every day since 2003. I have been a big fan of NNW for years and years. NNW was created and developed by Brent Simmons first as an indie developer then as part of NewsGator when it bought NNW. However NNW now has a new home, Brent left NewsGator to start a new company and before he left he conviced NewsGator to pass off NNW to a new company Black Pixel. I have used NNW as a client to Google Reader for years and while there have been some issues with syncing between NNW and Google Reader I guess it just never bothered me enough to even complain about it.

With NNW changing hands and the release of the Reeder RSS reader in the Mac store I decided to try something new. I have used the Reeder iOS app on my iPhone for a while but I don’t actually read RSS that much on my phone. I like the iPhone Reeder app better than the NNW iPhone app. The Mac OS version of Reeder is only $10 so I thought I would give it a try. So far I like it as a stripped down RSS reader. The UI is very attractive and it looks like it’s ready to be a part of the next Mac OS X version Lion already.

I do have a few quibbles so far with Reeder. Although it’s UI is very nice it’s pretty opaque the toolbar buttons have give you no textual reference as to what they do stand for. As someone who has so much ingrained muscle memory from having used NNW for so long getting used to a completely new set of keyboard shortcuts is a bit of a pain. Reeder also has a tendency to get a little hung up when I try and quickly select the next unread item when the current item is large or contains pictures or video. I know part of Reeder’s aesthetic is that the reading pane is styled very minimally but I miss NNW custom styles and I hope Reeder adds that capability in the future.

I will probably continue to use Reeder for the short term until I see what Black Pixel has in mind for the next version of NNW. For basic RSS reading I think Reeder is a pretty good application however I am hoping the next version of NNW continues it’s tradition of being one of the best applications on the Mac platform.