The State of Instant Messaging

Apple's iMessage was the warning shot that things were changing. Some embraced it and didn't look back. Some didn't know they were embracing it -- for them it was just a matter of having a blue text bubble versus a green one. Others saw it as a way to get out from under the thumb of greedy cellular carriers who charged outrageous prices for text messages. However you look at it, iMessage affected everyone who uses text messaging or instant messenging -- and it is proprietary.

Microsoft's purchase of Skype is finally changing the face of their instant messaging backbone. The popular MSN Messenger is widely used, especially among businesses, due to its ubiquity on the Windows platform but recently Microsoft announced that they were forcing all users over to Skype for voice and text chat -- and it is proprietary.

Google, after having a huge success with Gtalk, has just introduced Hangouts. It is a souped up combination of Gtalk and Google+ hangouts and has the promise to be the best of both worlds with synced conversations across all of your devices (a la iMessage), best in class video and sound conversations (a la Skype) and integration with Google's ecosystem (a la they get all of your usage data for free) -- and it is proprietary.

The big three seem to be circling the wagons in an attempt to lock their faithful users in to their platform of choice. While there is solid logic behind this, it is the users who are the ones made to suffer for their choices. Over the last few weeks, I've been trying to build a comprehensive view of the instant messaging landscape in an attempt to pick the best tool for the job (and then attempt to push everyone I know onto it).

What Features Are Important, New and Useful

With such a wide reach among tools, I felt it was best to start by boiling down what features I wanted in an instant messenging application. Deciding what was important would naturally push some of the choices out of the nest, making it easier to make a decision.

Here's what ended up being important to me:

• Synced conversations across devices - This was something that I didn't know I needed until iMessage made it a reality.
• Reliability - it sounds like something that would be an easy-to-add feature to an IM designer's list of features but the latest crop of IM applications often drop the ball here in a big way.
• Interface clarity - Seems like this would be high on the list for designers, but try and find a specific Hangout on the Google+ page and get back to me. Some folks clearly forgot to add "interface clarity" to the whiteboard in their brainstorming session.
• Accessible to people I care about - Whatever the choice eventually is, I will need to convince people I know to use it or this entire exercise is pointless. Having friends scattered across four or five services is bad, but given the state of IM, this is about to get a lot worse.
• History search - This needs to be toggled for each user for security reasons obviously, but having the ability to search through certain conversations later or use them to excavate notes from a chat session is a great feature.
• Group chats - The ability to have a chat with more than one person can be helpful on projects or with certain groups of friends. These little group conversations echo the functionality of a small IRC private network when done right.
• Open protocol - I know this is "a bridge too far" at this point but a non-proprietary network would greatly encourage innovative interface designs and competition for the mantle of "best app". In the end, this means the user would win.

The Contenders

There are a lot of choices out there. I'm only going to list the good ones. I am not going to waste time on things that are platform-dependent[1]. I am also not going to waste time on the "text message replacement" apps like What's App, HeyTell or Kik because making a friend pay a dollar to talk to you seems like a bad idea. I'm definitely not wasting my time on anything with the word "Facebook" in the title.

So what's left? Not much, that's for sure. Here's the rundown.

Trillian/Adium - These apps are very similar and they entail creating an account on AIM, Gtalk, ICQ and the like. They function as a multiprotocol client that shows all of your contacts, and manages all of your conversations, in one place. Of the two, I find Trillian more capable because it has an iOS client which allows you to continue synced conversations between your Mac and iPhone/iPad. It is very powerful and it is one of my most-used apps. No group chat though.

iMessage/Messages - This is Apple's entry into the scene. The Mac client builds on the old iChat model and tries (and ultimately fails) to combine the old paradigm with the new. It supports cross-device chat for iMessage conversations but if the user is on one of the other protocols or devices (like Android), you're out of luck. I love that Apple completely routed around the text messaging monopoly held by the carriers and the way it falls back on text messaging if the device has no data connectivity is a work of genius. The Messages app has a serious bug that causes it to re-order entire conversations randomly. Continuity issues aside, the conversation sync feature is powerful and useful. If your devices are registered with iMessage/iCloud, a conversation can be continued seamlessly across all of your devices or machines. Facetime is integrated as well for voice and video chat. It is Apple-centric however and I doubt Apple will make it an open protocol anytime soon. If they fixed the message-reorder bug, this would be a major contender. It is so comprehensively powerful I'd gladly shun my Android friends (more) to consolidate on the platform. Group chat is well-implemented and I use it daily.

Google/Gtalk/Google+/Hangouts - Google, as usual, has made a mess. Gtalk was built on an open protocol (XMPP) and was easily integrated into chat clients like iChat, Trillian and Adium. As Google marches forward with Google+, it waves goodbye to consistency and convenience, replacing them with a Creepy Uncle hug to the integration between its half-baked, proprietary Hangouts effort and Google+ interface design fiascos. Google has decided to start pushing its closed protocol and combine it with its Gtalk "product". I wouldn't be surprised it if moved users over to their closed protocol in the coming months and shut down their XMPP service. Hangouts does support group chats and seems to aim squarely at making that a focus. Today, after extensive testing with Hangouts, I noticed that all of my Circles are now mashed up in my normal Gtalk user list on all clients[2]. Some of these faults could be redeemed if the Hangouts app was good, but it isn't. At times, the chat delay is pronounced, I had issues with lack of sound during some video conversations, the interface lacks some very basic options and the iPad app is a stretched-out version of the iPhone interface. It is a shame. After a few minutes, I thought the app held promise. After about an hour, I was slightly frustrated but bemused. After a few days of use, I couldn't delete it fast enough. The tech press was trumpeting "Google wins with voice chat and synced messages" last week while Apple users have been using these features since the release of iOS6. The state of Google chat is bad, folks. Really bad. "Open always wins" though. Yup. Ok.

Skype - Out of the Big Four, Skype has the worst chat interface. It is a trainwreck.[3] Admittedly, its voice chat is very good; it is practically a standard across all of the businesses I work with day-to-day. Most of the time, however, I just need to send someone a quick text message and this app isn't the one I'm going to do it in.

Social Networks (Twitter and ADN) - Twitter and ADN have private (or "direct") message capabilities. Unfortunately, both of these are at the mercy of two different potential issues. The first potential issue is the social network's ability to handle and support direct messaging. Twitter has downplayed its direct message capability and even floated the idea of doing away with it at some point (hard to feed ads to direct messagers, I guess). It clearly isn't a focus for them so I'd rather avoid getting caught out by building a reliance on it. ADN has a rich direct/private messaging capability but it seems dependent on the quality and consistency of the client. As ADN relies heavily on the support of third party development, they also rely heavily on the developers understanding and ability to exploit the full potential of the protocol. So far, in testing, I've had spotty results. While you can successfully send messages back and forth to a user, it doesn't seem to work very well for conversations that stream back and forth quickly. Twitter's implementation is the inferior of the two but it is also the most ubiquitous so its a case of "pick your poison". ADN has some interesting efforts like Project Amy which integrates ADN with Apple's iChat/Messages app. I tested it but have yet to put it through heavy paces. In a cursory test, it seemed to work surprisingly well. ADN supports group conversations you can use apps like Patter to take advantage of them. If ADN were more universal, its great third party developer support coupled with smart considerations from its attentive owners would make this a nice contender. No voice or video chat though (yet).

Goodbye Status

One thing is clear -- user status is going away. In the old days (last year), the ability to mark yourself "Away" or "Extended Away" was seen as a key feature for a chat client. These days, with device-synced conversations coupled with the fact that we are now used to disjointed and discontiguous text messaging, it seems less important than ever. I am happy to see it go since it was easy to forget to change your status. I gave up trying years ago.

Conclusion?

There is no clear winner here. As I mentioned before, the user is the real loser because the pitched battle for users and a lock-in model serve to create a wide range of favorites with each user deciding on what is their most important feature and then trying to convince all of their friends that their solution is the best. Out of all of them, Apple has the most comprehensively thought-out messaging model but it is plagued with a few serious bugs. Facetime serves the voice/video spectrum and the iMessage protocol (with its smart switching between text messaging and online-based chat) does an admirable job of syncing conversations amongst all of your Apple-based technologies.

And there is the problem -- what about people who use Windows all day at work? If they can't access chat on the desktop easily and take those conversations with them, it presents a large hurdle to building a consensus. This is the main reason why I end up using Trillian so much -- it spans desktops, platforms and devices for users who aren't me. After all, if you had the best chat client but no one to talk to, what fun would that be?

For now, my solution is going to be the Gtalk XMPP protocol via Trillian in order to span my desktop and iOS devices regardless of my chat partner's choices. For friends who have Apple devices on both the desktop and devices, it makes sense to consolidate on iMessage, despite the occasional bugs in message continuity. The bugs will eventually be fixed but what will remain is the best platform from top to bottom. The real challenge will be convincing all of my friends to use it. For my Android-using friends, there's always email...[4]

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1. As much as I think my friends who use Android make bad choices in life, it doesn't mean I never want to talk to them. ↩

2. What was a once a manageble 20 users is now up to 108 people I almost never talk to. Nice job, Google. Thanks for letting me know this was going to happen. ↩

3. I do have to praise its consistency however as it has the worst chat client on all platforms, without exception. ↩

4. Have fun with that. ↩

Putting Things In, Taking Things Out

Most of the things I do to stay organized are to reduce friction and have something at my fingertips when I need it. I collect a lot of things that ideally I'd like to get to quickly -- a running list of books I'd like to read, meeting notes from a month ago, ideas for a story I'm working on, brewing notes, tasks, reminders, scanned paperwork or bills, product manuals, game rules, in-progress blog posts -- the list goes on and on.

Leave aside the question of why I care so much about this (that's probably the topic for another lengthy post), the simple truth is that technology has taken over as a form of outboard brain for me. I'm not alone in this. Others have mentioned this concept in their own lives in much better posts than this one. The worthiness of the goal aside, we spend a lot of time to deciding how to put information into all of these systems but have we really given adequate though to getting it back out again?

Putting Things In

When I really look at it, I have what I'd refer to as a "meta-system". The system itself is a group of applications that collect data and put it in places that I can get to easily. The system doesn't just deal with notes; it also governs my task management, reminders, and contact and password management. I have distilled the process of putting things into this meta-system down to the essentials. While I'll often try out new apps and tweaks, new things that come into my orbit of activity have to be really good to dislodge the processes that are already working.

I guess you could say I'm done with the tinkering that comes with getting these systems tuned up and doing what you want them to do. Wait... let me rephrase that -- "doing what you need them to do", not "want them to do". If these processes you are taking the time to build or the apps you are buying aren't needed, then they need to be dropped.

The key to all of this is to keep things simple but not too simple; as complicated as it needs to be, really. The boundary of what "complicated" is will be different for everyone and the boundary can change along with job changes, life changes or family changes.

Here are the apps I use to put things into my meta-system of content creation/content gathering and remembering/reminding.

Writing

Dropbox is key to my writing workflow for any task. It is essential to pretty much everything I do involving words (plus a whole lot more). A quick search through the apps and applications below will show that everything in the list has deep Dropbox integration.

On The Mac

• Byword for posts I make on this site.
• Scrivener for long-form writing or general writing organization
• Fade-In Pro for screenwriting
• FoldingText for note-taking and organizational writing tasks
• DayOne for journaling
• nvALT for everything else
• Pinboard for links
• Instapaper for saving long-form articles to read on the iPad

On the iPhone/iPad

• Drafts for general text entry
• Nebulous Notes for editing, searching or viewing things created in Dropbox
• Fade-In for screenediting
• WritingKit for writing blog posts on the iPad (and writing in Fountain markdown format)
• DayOne for journals
• Textastic for writing Python stuff

Contacts and Calendaring

There have been some exciting advances on the calendaring front recently. While I love Fantastical and use it for all of my meeting entries on both my Mac and my iPhone, Tempo has taken over the task of daily calendar viewing on the iPhone and I find myself interacting with it in meaningful ways throughout the day. Other than that, it's Fantastical all the way.

Email, Task Management and Reminders

On The Mac

• Sparrow for general mail use (which is mostly Gmail)
• Apple Mail for accounts that I don't want cluttering up my regular email
• OmniFocus (duh!) for task management
• Sticky Notifications for things I need to "post" onto my desktop
• nvALT for list management, reference files and notes via text files stored on Dropbox.

On the iPhone/iPad

• Mailbox is certainly something to celebrate. Finally something is better than Sparrow, which was incredible.
• Mail.app for work email
• OmniFocus for task management and reminders

Other Apps

On The Mac

• 1Password for getting new passwords or sensitive information somewhere where it's safe and I don't need to remember it
• Last.fm for getting songs I listen into a searchable format. Nerdy but interesting.
• My paperless system for getting bills and other documents into a searchable, backed-up format. It has saved my bacon more than once already.
• Droplr for getting pretty much anything to people on the web.
• TextExpander helps me get text into my system in a consistent format which helps with the second part of this article -- finding things when you need them.

On the iPhone/iPad

• 1Password (see above)
• Pinbook for Pinboard to save links easily on iOS.

Integration is Key

The best apps are ones that are integrated with your devices so seamlessley that they add the data you want to save transparently. For instance, if I had to log every song I listened to I would never bother. But Last.fm has a conduit (called a "scrobbler" -- worst name ever) that just reads what you're playing and sends the data to their site. It is integrated with apps like Rdio so no matter what device I listen on, the data is still saved.

I created a series of Pinboard bookmarks that quickly add links, but Pinbook can also make use of clever bookmarks on the iPhone so, again, the data gets into the system quickly and easily. Almost all of the "data consumption" apps I use have Pinboard support (Reeder, Twitterific, Riposte). Funneling all of that information to the same place reduces friction a lot.

Eventually you find that you are choosing apps because they integrate in ways that reduce friction too. Drafts (iOS) is one of those conduit-type apps, helpfully shuttling information into a variety of surprising places. The more apps you can harmoniously integrate into the process, the easier it will be to do the next part of the process.

Taking Things Out

What is the point of putting all of these things into places if you can't find them when you need them? Getting data or information back out of these systems, knowing where to look, and searching with the least amount of friction is a key to getting any system like this working.

There's nothing more frustrating that not being able to find a note you made a week ago. You look where you'd expect to find it but its not there. Confused, you start constructing alternate search strings, scanning your brain for other snippets of identifying text. Next you start looking through other apps, thinking of ways you could have confused yourself about mis-filing. Not finding what you need after a meandering search like this is demoralizing, especially if you spend so much time putting things where you expect to remember them.

Most of the things I put into my system are text-based. There are generally three places I have to look when I want to find something.

• nvALT
• Pinboard
• Gmail

nvALT has changed the way I work. It required some shifts in how I thought about things like notes, plain text, file creation, cloud storage and such, but the benefit has been massive. All of the weekly notes I wrote in FoldingText are catalogued in the same folder as everything else on Dropbox. I can't count the number of times I have heard someone in a meeting mention something that didn't sound quite right so I just bring up nvALT, search on a keyword and find the meeting in question and refresh everyone's memory. It's extremely important for stressing accountability but also reminds people I'm not just checking Twitter behind the screen of my MacBook Air.

But it is that way for everything. nvALT and my Dropbox folder act as an outboard memory, a repository for scratch files containing ephemera to jog my memory, a place to archive my writing. It is the most useful workflow I've come across in years.

For web bookmarks and saving things to read later, Pinboard and Instapaper both serve their purpose. I put pretty much everything straight into Pinboard these days. I used to make a big distinction between articles to read later and just a bookmark I didn't want to forget but lately I just dump it all to Pinboard. Once or twice a day, I'll roll through Pinboard to tag bookmarks for later search and retrieval but I'll also star things (which will send them to Instapaper).

Pinboard is one of those things that accrued more use over time. I got it just to store a few bookmarks but it has become a hub of how I work and live on the web. I pay for the $25/year tier which also archives everything offline. I find it an incredibly useful service and I'm more than happy to pay given how much I use it and given how other bookmarking services are in the control of Google or a free service (and we all know how those turn out...).

Gmail is my other text-based archive. I am a long-time user and have email archived back to 2005 and beyond. It has been surprisingly useful to have the ability to pull those emails up at a moment's notice and it is one of the things that has made me most hesitant to leave Google behind (the subject of an upcoming post). I'm not about to throw the baby out with the bathwater yet. Soon, maybe...

I view my calendar in Tempo. It is an incredible consumer, data miner and presenter of calendar data. It also coalesces various sources of information to build a very complete view of each calendar event. Things like map locations, phone numbers, pertinent emails and documents (even attachments). When it works, it appears to be magic. Highly useful on the road as well.

Making use of the task items I put into my system is obviously going to involve OmniFocus. Having one place to look for that stuff, in the end, makes things easier and reduces a lot of friction. Apps like Checkmark and Drafts can conveniently hold some of that information for you but finding it again becomes an issue and this is all about "taking things out". Having more places to look just means more wasted effort. Reducing options and simplifying really helps here.

There are a few other little tools that extract meaning from the bits of data accumulated over time. Last.fm has an API which has spawned services that tweet your top three artists of the week or help visualize the vast oceans of data making up your shifts in musical tastes over the years.

We live in a time and place where we can accumulate, track, store and access our data from wherever we are. I love that it is all ubiquitous and electronic. I never have to scan for a pen and paper, or wonder which notebook I scribbled a nonsensical scrap of text into. Keeping things simple, accessible and organized with a minimal number of applications has taken a problem I have had all of my life and reduced it to something manageable and useful. I am so glad I no longer carry around a paper notebook and pen. It is surprisingly liberating.

Alfred 2: OK, I'm In

Up until now, I've been giving Alfred a shot here or there. I would download the free version and play around with it and then run into roadblocks with its support of some things I'm currently doing with Launchbar. I have trouble overcoming the friction and eventually give up on it. It was a shame because people who didn't use Launchbar swore by Alfred. I found Launchbar seemed very well-suited to how I worked, not to mention the fact that I had already built up considerable muscle memory with Launchbar hotkeys. My interest in Alfred always persisted however and I'm glad it did.

Enter Alfred v2. It is a re-designed (from the ground up, I'm told) new version of the app and after hearing a lot of rumblings about the efficacy of the new workflow system, I thought I'd give it a go. And this was to be a real go -- one that wasn't just a dip into the common features and a surface recognition that things weren't going to work out for us, Alfred and me. No, this was going to go all the way.

So what did I find? I found a deep, useful and profoundly productive tool which has shown more promise with each day I've spent with it. At this point, Alfred has not only replaced Launchbar for common use throughout the day, but it has extended beyond it into things that Keyboard Maestro used to do. If you've ever used Keyboard Maestro, you'd know how amazing that is. That's not to say that it is perfect. It's also not to say that there are limitations as well. But it is a really, really good product (with the PowerPack installed) and I'm happy with the results so far.

I am not going to go too far down the rabbit hole in this post but I will run down some of the things that struck me about the new version of Alfred as well as some of the features that allowed it to overcome some of its previous shortcomings.

One thing that used to kill me was that I had some really fast, custom shortcuts in Launchbar -- "OL" would fire up Outlook, "PF" would fire off Pathfinder, etc. Alfred , however, picked the target apps itself and used heuristics to push things up the list of popular choices. Sometimes it picked "OL" for Outlook but if it decided that OmniOutliner made more sense, you couldn't "brute force" the choice to always choose Outlook like you could in Launchbar. I am not a huge fan of having to hit ⌘-1, etc. for additional choices so having the first choice be exactly what I want, when I want it, is key.

With workflows, that restriction is gone. I just open the workflow designer, create a trigger, map "OL" to Outlook and I'm done. The whole process takes about two minutes and it's all clicking, dragging and minimal typing.

Some cursory perusal of the Alfred forums yielded some great workflows to quickly create OmniFocus tasks, completely control Rdio, and provide a fast way to list time zones in various parts of the world. All of this functionality comes from typing a few choice keys the Alfred command box. Brilliant.

Combine that with automating some previously keyboard-intensive things I used to do like launching a terminal and typing some common commands (like "top -oCPU" etc.) or clever ways to launch framed windows to remote machines[1] and I'm saving tons of keystrokes.

I am sure my use of Alfred will change and grow over the coming weeks and, once they launch a better way to browse community workflows[2] the tool will evolve in ways people are barely able to imagine right now. At this point, I can safely say that I won't be ditching Alfred any time soon. The app looks gorgeous, has lots of options and clearly has a keen design vision behind it. I can't wait to see where this goes.

1. Using "open vnc://MyMacMini.local" when on my home network or "open vnc://MyMacMini.{MyiCloudID}.members.btmm.icloud.com" when I want to launch a Back to My Mac session ↩

2. It looks like they are working on it. ↩

FoldingText is the Greatest Text Editor of All Time

I have been kicking various versions of this post around for months. FoldingText is an app that is very hard to put into words and I'll admit that not everyone will be seduced by its charms. All of the words I've written and deleted up to this point are just ways of saying the following:

FoldingText is the best plain text editor currently available for day-to-day use. It may be the most useful and creatively-innovative word entry application since Byword or Scrivener.

The application itself was made for nerds by a nerd. Jesse Grosjean has done a lot of work on text editing applications and implementing scripting and it shows. Others have written with more depth and include a lot of the facts of the matter, but I'm going to approach this, as I usually do, from the perspective of how I use the tool and why it fits so snugly into my wheelhouse for all of the things I need to do throughout a typical work day.

Some fancy indenting and roll-up functions on display.

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I think in outlines.

After having several conversations with Gabe Weatherhead from Macdrifter, I realized I wasn't alone in this. I've tried mindmaps and they have their place and I've tried using tools specifically designed for outlining (like OmniOutliner) but, in the end, using a plain text outline format always seems like the easiest alternative. This is coming from a guy who has spent many hours fiddling with OPML importing and exporting to various apps and device -- scripts in python, KeyboardMaestro, Applescript, etc.

Websites like Checkvist have come along (thanks, Gabe!) and have made web-based outlining fairly seamless. Ultimately, all of these tools have their place and I've wrestled with each one but it comes down to me fighting against the inevitability of a simple, plain text outline format.

Some things have happened in the last few years that make using a plain text outline a little easier. On the iPad, the keyboard macro ribbon in NebulousNotes works well for keeping things simple and fast. I'm still using the technique I wrote up a few months ago when I'm on my iPad and with a new teeny hardware keyboard arriving soon (I hope), I'm sure it will get more use.

Here's how I use FoldingText.

At the beginning of the week, I'll use nvALT to create a new file for my meetings and planning sessions. This file gets updated with text all week long, using a TextExpander snippet header/divider to delineate the text for each meeting. The TextExpander snippet creates the header text in markdown, bolds it and inserts a date-time stamp. I can be ready to type my notes within seconds of sitting down in a meeting and the headers help me stay consistent in identification and format. This consistency also makes it easy to search for specific meeting minutes later.

The way FoldingText handles indenting and bulleted lists works perfectly for me. When you use Tab and Shift-tab you're met with exactly what you'd expect -- proper indenting. The muscle memory for these hotkeys, built up over the years in similarly well-written and consistent apps, is rewarded.

The little focus ellipsis in the top left of the page.

Once a few meetings are entered, you start making use of the more interesting and unique features of FoldingText. The application gives you the ability to focus on a section of a document at a time. It can also expand and contract pieces of the document based on indent levels. Those markdown meeting headers I mentioned earlier come in very handy here.

Another really powerful feature that I tend to use a lot is "Focus Mode" which amounts to honing your view of the document to a single section with the rest drawing up into an ellipses encased in a little black triangle in the upper left of the page. It's an elegant solution and, like many of the features of the app, I never expected I'd have need for it...until I did. Once it "clicked" for me, I started using the feature often. As with all seriously nerd-centric apps, while each one of these commands can be invoked by the menu, they can also be invoked using handy and intuitive hotkeys.

The Expand and Collapse commands provide more ways to hone what you see. I use them if I have a lot of meeting notes sections cluttering up a page. Selecting all of the meetings from earlier in the week and selecting the "Collapse" command rolls them up to just a header lines. You can also do that with small subsections within larger sections of your document. It's a fantastic feature and I use it constantly to keep the relevant text visible at all times as I write notes throughout the course of a meeting.

Quick jump document navigation menu

There is a handy quick document navigation feature where you can, without using your mouse, zip around your document quickly using section headers. It isn't that helpful early in the week, but later in the week, when the document has grown to massive size, this is a life-saver.

I was slightly baffled by the size of the font when I first opened the app. It seemed to big and I couldn't find any way to change it in the preferences. Then I decided to take a peek at the "Zoom" function and, lo and behold, this menu item makes the text bigger and smaller. It was pretty obvious in retrospect.

Having everything as plain text is brilliant as it allows me to access the same text documents in Dropbox that I access via nvALT for comprehensive searching or Nebulous Notes on my iPad for on-the-go changes, updates or research. The advanced document navigation and view management of those same, simple, markdown-based text files makes this an incredible tool.

There's a lot more to say about FoldingText and I may post items here or there as I find new uses for key features. If you're a plain text person who uses markdown and can use your Mac at work (that's a pretty long list of caveats!), you're crazy if you're not using this app.

If you want to listen to an interview with the creator of FoldingText, Grosjean was interviewed by Brett Terpstra on his podcast, Systematic on 5by5.tv. Go give it a listen!

Dropvox: Simple Recording Straight to Dropbox

Shout-out to Shawn Blanc for pimping Dropvox[1]. I am a long-time user and have been putting it through the paces recording lectures I attend and for saving thoughts while driving. It has seamless Dropbox integration and seems to transmit the data to its destination even with bad connectivity. I have been impressed by its stability and simplicity.

The idea is that you hook this app to your Dropbox account and hit "record". That's basically all you need to know. The mp3 file is uploaded to a special application directory and you can do whatever you like with it. These recordings can be any length and I'm finding more and more ways to use it. Some recordings become emails, DayOne entries, memos or the framework for a much larger document that I want to get a headstart on before arriving at work. I have also recorded multi-hour lectures with nary a hiccup.

For the files that I record in the car on the way to work that are destined to become emails or documents, I have a little workflow to convert them to text. Sadly, it isn't a cheap solution but it is one that works pretty well. MacSpeech Scribe ($149USD) is a tool created specifically for transcribing voice files to text. It takes some training but it works quite well.

One hiccup is that recording in the car is much simpler if I use my Bluetooth in-car voice control (and obviously its safer since it is handsfree) but the bluetooth voice quality is much lower than it is for standard recording. As a result, Scribe has a much harder time transcribing my voice files. After training it for a "car voice", Scribe started getting much better but its not perfect. That said, it is still better than transcribing it by hand myself.

I've gotten my $2's worth from Dropvox. It's a very simple and handy app and worth a look if you're in the market for a recording device that integrates seamlessly with Dropbox.

1. Affiliate links ↩