Dispatch app for iPhone:
I’ve tried some of the alternative mail apps that have made their way to iOS — Sparrow, Gmail, Mailbox. In each instance, though, I’ve find my way back to the built in Mail app. But after a week of trying Dispatch, I think I’m making a change. I like the simple and clean design, but most of all, I love the functionality. My main tasks for email are archiving, replying, filing in Evernote, or creating a task in OmniFocus. Dispatch, for the first time, allows me to do the latter two well, and especially creating a task in OmniFocus. I didn’t think it possible on iOS, but Dispatch creates a link back to the message, so I can archive it on my phone, and then click the link to pull it back up for a necessary reply. I’m finding that I want to do an initial sweep of all email on my iPhone before anyplace else.

The National | Trouble Will Find Me & M83 | Oblivion Soundtrack:
These two albums are getting a lot of play. The National album I liked from the start, though I’m not finding that it has a slow and steady growth curve of deeper appreciation like their last few records. We’ll see if it’s still getting a daily play in a month or so. I’ve appreciated M83 from afar, but never been a consistent listener. I enjoy soundtracks though, and M83 proved a great match for the visuals of Oblivion. I’ve been listening to this one a few times a week since it was released, and I’m not close to tiring of it.

Yirgacheffe Kochere Coffee Beans:
I like to mix up my home coffee brews, buying something different from my friends at Houndstooth Coffee each time around. But I keep going back to these beans, only varying between the PT’s roast and the Coava roast. I brew at home with a Clever, with generally good results. But these have been the most forgiving beans I’ve ever brewed at home, offering a good cup no matter how much my attention to the details of the brewing process is distracted by my young ‘uns.

Call the Midwife:
I started watching this with my wife on the same night I watched the first few episodes of the resurrected Arrested Development. At my current rate, I will easily finish two seasons of Call the Midwife before I finish the new season of Arrested Development (if I even finish it). Season 1 is available on Netflix streaming, and season 2 can be watched on the PBS iOS app. Seeing how these midwives care for the pregnant and newborns in the East End of London in the 50s leaves me pondering the parallel of how a church is meant to care for the souls in their own neighborhoods and parishes.

Manage Your Day to Day:
This is a collection of essays about doing creative work. It is broken into four sections: Building a Rock-Solid Routine, Finding Focus in a Distracted World, Taming Your Tools, and Sharpening Your Creative Mind. I don’t know that there was much new ground broken for me in reading it, but it served as a helpful reminder and re-evalution of my own rhythms. I picked up the Kindle version on the cheap, but based on the photos in Blaine Hogan’s review, the physical book looks mighty nice.

(Discerning eyes may even recognize my hind quarter around the 1:10 mark of the video.)

We anticipated kids were in our future, so we were excited that the dealer had a ‘special offer’ that week. Along with our minivan, we received a free console that sat between the front seats with a built in VCR and a 5 inch screen. Yes, VCR, the kind that played VHS tapes. “Why not?” we thought, expecting it be handy for occupying our little ones when they came along. Sadly, we abandoned VHS tapes about a year later with the purchase of our first DVD player, and never really used the VCR at all. We purged it in a garage sale for $20 a few years later as we prepared to move five states away.

Since then, cars with screens are commonplace, often with individual screens per seat so every child’s entertainment fancy can be satiated. We are still driving the same minivan, now with car seats and decaying gluten free pretzels, but no built in screens. We’ve found ways to balance laptops for DVD playback, and in the last few years, hang an iPad between the driver and passenger seat. (Clever, you say? Yes, but not the family road trip hack I have in mind.)

As of yesterday, here in Austin, school’s out for summer. (You did just picture Alice Cooper, didn’t you?) With summer’s arrival, families are eagerly anticipating hours of bliss in the car together. Screens are being polished and headphones are being replaced to keep the peace. As an alternative, though, may I present the family road trip hack? It’s really not so new. It’s an old idea, in fact, but sometimes the best new ideas are old ones revisited.

Audiobooks.

Last year, I wrote about how I had rediscovered audiobooks, and I passed along the experience to my family and our forest green minivan. We worked through a few audiobooks on a road trip or two, and we’ve even listened to a few while driving around town together. It’s a shared experience and I’d like to think a healthier one, filling every imagination in the car with characters and settings. We love it. The kids love it, and they ask if we can listen to a book anytime we are in the car together.

Digital audiobooks are easy to find between your local library, Amazon/Audible or iTunes, and just as easy to listen to on your smartphone. Your favorite used bookstore probably has shelves of audiobooks on CD, or even cassette if you have the means to play them. So, as you make plans for a trip to Walleyworld, I’ll leave you with a few of our family favorites from the last year, most of which came from our public library:

• Winnie the Pooh – This one may be for younger kids, but I enjoy the Pooh books more than anyone in our family.
• The Invention of Hugo Cabaret – The movie was a visual delight, but the imaginings that come with the audiobook can hold their own.
• The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane – Anything by Kate DiCamillo is a favorite of my kids.
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone — We’ve been working through this one for months on short trips around town.

We’re always looking for new books to listen to together, so if you have some favorites too, please share them in the comments.

When I’m thinking about how to use an iPad for speaking notes, there are three criteria I have in mind:

1. Easy Interaction and Navigation – When I’m presenting, I don’t want to distract myself or the audience with cautious scrolls or pinpoint taps.
2. Formatting and Details – I don’t speak from a manuscript, but use outlines with various levels of detail. But, because much of my speaking is preaching, I want the means to include chunks of text in the form of Scriptures or quotes. I need a method that helps main points stand out while also being able to focus in on a longer chunk of verbiage.
3. Multi-device Sync – As important as anything, I want to be able to work with my notes on any device, able to work in depth on a laptop, make changes outside in the parking lot or even as I walk on the stage.

So, with the above criteria in mind, I offer my methods to consider. All of these are written with an iPad in mind, though I imagine you can find parallels for other devices.

• Word Processing Document – This may be Pages, or a Google Doc. I think many go this route because it’s what they know, a carryover of the days when notes were printed. On the plus side, you can format to your heart’s content, whether manuscript or outline, and notes are easily accessed from any device. But I find it too clunky to scroll my way up and down, always having to take care to not lose my place, especially in a document that stretches over multiple pages.

• The PDF Method – This is the method I have previously written about. The advantage was the full formatting of a word processing doc exported to a pdf that matched the dimensions of a screen. It worked better than a word processing document for me, because PDF viewers allow the pages to be flipped one at a time with a swipe. I found easier to navigate sideways through pages than scroll through a long document. The negative is that you can’t as easily edit on the go once it’s published to PDF. (Though this is possible with PDFPen for iPad.)

• Keynote Presentation Mode – The first time I used an iPad for speaking, it was a Keynote presentation on my iPad. I created slides that functioned like index cards, pressed play and flipped my way through them right there on my screen. It works well, but my notes weren’t gathered and formed in Keynote, so it was an extra step to format them there with no easy means of importing them outside of copy and paste.

• Keynote Presenter Mode – Keynote presenter mode is what happens behind the curtain when you have a Keynote presentation broadcast on a screen. You are given the means to see the current slide, plus, either your notes attached to that slide, or the next slide in the deck – but not both. It’s convenient when you are driving the presentation yourself and have the technical setup (ie AppleTV) to do so, but suffers from the same problem of extra steps for formatting described above.

• Dedicated Apps – There are a few iOS apps that are dedicated for the purpose of speaking notes:

  1. Podium Cue is the first that I saw. It seems to have good potential, including the ability to track your timing, but is locked into a format that seems to prevent longer chunks of text. It has a well constructed concept of how to structure main points with connected supporting points in a way that allows for easy navigation to the next main point, though I found this restrictive to how I put outlines together.
  2. Promptster Pro offers a similar means to time your speech and offers more flexibility for longer passages, but I find the extra on screen features and overall aesthetic distracting.
  3. Speeches looks nice, though I’ve only previewed it within the App Store. It seems to have a similar feature set to Prompster, but with a cleaner interface and navigation between notes.
     The problem, for me, with all of these dedicated apps, is the ongoing interaction with your notes. You are either stuck developing your notes within the app, or importing a finalized version from another document. They are not agile enough, for my purposes, to mange both the development and the presentation phase of your notes.
• OmniOutliner for iPad – In recent months, I’ve discovered how handy OmniOutliner can be for presenting from an iPad. Most of my ideas are formed in and out of outlines in OPML format, dragged around within MindNode or coalesced through a fantastic, but under the radar MacOS app called Tree. Thus, they are easily pulled into OmniOutliner, where I can collapse them into main points and expand as needed. The only negative of this is the careful tap required to expand a section.
• Daedalus Touch – In more recent months than the recent months described above, I’ve been using Daedalus Touch. It helps that it syncs with Ulysses III (written up last week), which has become my favorite environment for writing. Everything is updated and ready to go when and where I need it. The layout is a virtual stack of expanding note cards of different lengths, allowing me to develop a point and any required materials on one card, and then swipe to the next when it is time to move on. It syncs between my laptop, iPad and iPhone in a way that I don’t have have to think about. It’s just there.

As you may have noticed, this outline generally proceeds in the same way my own experiences of using the iPad for speaking notes have proceeded. I’m now using both OmniOutliner and Daedalus Touch, depending on the setting and content. If I’m leading a smaller meeting or workshop with more details to track, I tend to favor the unfolding elements of OmniOutliner. When doing something in more of a monologue format which is generally committed to memory, I turn to Daedalus for easy access to longer passages to be read and easy navigation.

Of course, I know someone out there has tried other methods to. I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Last month Ulysses III (App store) rolled out and it is rewritten and renewed in every way. And I just might be all in. (I wrote this review shortly after that, but the app was so unstable I didn’t publish. A small update seems to have taken care of that.)

My recent writing work has split between two app sets. Shorter projects, under a few thousand words, have formed in Byword, syncing beautifully between a Mac version and an iOS version. Larger projects have lived in Scrivener, synced to a dropbox folder and edited via WriteRoom for iOS. It’s worked. But not quite. I don’t like the indecision of choosing where to start writing for a project, and process of syncing a larger project in Scrivener to external folders was equal parts cumbersome and convenient.

With sidebars the allow for easy navigation through documents, Ulysses serves well for both longer and shorter projects. Here’s what I like about it so far:

1. Ulysses is very Markdown friendly. I have never fully jumped on the Markdown bandwagon, though David Sparks and Eddie Smith have me experimenting with it again, and I’m even using it as I write this post.
2. There is a seamless sync available to a companion iOS app called Daedalus Touch. It has a unique, but very usable, way to manage all of your writings and projects. And again, it’s nice to have a one spot of my home screen for both long and short form writing projects.
3. It looks great. I find I prefer having a sidebar with quick access to other related writings, as thoughts about one section often come to mind while I’m working on another. For those who prefer it as minimal as possible, though, the sidebars can be switched off easier than C3PO.
4. There is a lot of flexibility on how to store and move your data via local folders, iCloud or Dropbox. The downside is that all these options can be confusing as well. If you drag folders from Ulysses iCloud to Daedalus, it copies them and suddenly you have two versions. It’s best to choose your ideal sync method from the start and hide the others.
5. Once the words are written and ordered, they can be exported to PDF, HTML, or an .rtf for further layout in Pages or, Lord have mercy, Word.

Depending on whether you are a pessimist or an optimist, there are a few areas of concern or hope:

1. There is a way to connect notes to a document that won’t be visible when exported, but Ulysses still isn’t a match for Scrivener if you are working on a project that requires a lot of research you want ready access to. It’s hard to beat that Research folder in Scrivener.
2. Another thing missing from a comparison to Scrivener is the ability to import and export outlines in an OPML format.
3. I’m not sure how accessible it is for quick access through scripting for apps like Hazel and Launchbar unless you are storing everything in Dropbox as individual files. I’d love to have an idea for a new blog post come to mind and know that I can safely tuck it into Ulysses with a few keystrokes.

Overall, Ulysses is off to a good start as a go to writing app to keep everything in one place. If you spend any amount of energy moving a cursor one character at a time, it’s worth a look. At $39.99 it’s an investment. Though it’s only available for sale in the Mac App store, you can find a demo available on the Ulysses website.

Disclaimer: The app stores links in this are affiliate links, and all earnings will be used for putting food in my kids’ mouths. Or for my not so secret app habit.

Endurance, by Alfred Lansing
Endurance was written 50 years about a true story that happened a hundred years ago, but it is as engaging as any of the best picture nominees from last year. Lansing tells the story of an expedition to cross Antartica led by Earnest Shackleton. The events described in the first chapter make things clear – this isn’t a book about a successful expedition but about a precarious journey of survival. At the center of what makes the book worth reading is Shackleton’s leadership in the midst of more crisis than most of us have known, never giving up hope, nor allowing those with him to do so. I used Whispersync to do this both as an audiobook and an ebook, but I’d recommend reading this one rather than listening.

Steal Like an Artist, by Austin Kleon
I don’t know Austin, though he is a fellow Austinite. But I know of him, any you may too. A few years ago he had a blog post of the same title as this book which achieved more mentions on Twitter than there are taco joints in Austin. This book falls in the "musings on making stuff" genre which will soon need it’s own bookshelf at Barnes & Noble (or Bookpeople for you Austinites). When it does, it should be on the top shelf with the cover, and not just the spine, facing out.

Prodigal Christianity, by David Fitch and Geoff Holsclaw
Dave and Geoff are friends, so there is some bias here, but this is a book I’d recommend the contents of even if it was written by Strawberry Shortcake. Dave and Geoff describe a Christianity that navigates between the extremes oft labeled liberal and conservative, and it’s one I mostly resonate with. What’s more, they do so mostly by engaging with stories out of their own church community, connecting their working theories with tangible work.

Markdown, by David Sparks and Eddie Smith
The latest MacSparky Field Guide offers a subject matter that shows just how helpful an ebook mixing video and text can be. Markdown is a simple writing style that allows simple formatting with basic characters, keeping key strokes, mouse clicks and curse words to a minimum. Because it is nothing but plain text it is portable for use on an device, and the moving pictures and paragraphs in this book can show you just how easy it is. I’ve only dabbled with Markdown, but I’m approaching it with renewed interest since reading, and watching, through this one.

Secrets of Happy Families, by Bruce Feiler
Bruce Feiler has written a handful of books exploring the religious geography and history of the Middle East. I was on the hunt for these in our library and I stumbled on this, his most recent, book. I don’t usually like "here’s how to fix your life" books, but I checked out the audiobook to fill a few commutes. It was a good choice. Feiler doesn’t so much explain how to have a perfect family as much as he describes how different families engage in being intentional in the formation of their practices and relationships. It was more of an exploration than a how-to, and the tone was just right.

1. Those you do, in fact, judge by the cover and dismiss as books you would never read.
2. Those you start but never finish, even though you have some kind of nagging voice telling you it’s not okay to stop reading in the middle.
3. Those you read and finish.
4. Those you read, finish and recommend to others who you might share your interest in the book’s conjectures and conclusions.
5. Those you read, finish, and want everyone to read. You become a nagging voice who recommends them to everyone, threatening to stop liking anyone that won’t read them, and disliking anyone for sure if they read these books, but don’t love them.

I recognize this book taxonomy may be mine alone.

Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brene Brown, is a level 5 book. I began seeing quotes from the book show up here and there on Twitter. Each quote I saw left me either stirred or intrigued, so I investigated a little further and landed on the first of Brene Brown’s TED talks. (It seems to be quite popular, so you may already be one of the 8 million views it has received.) After finishing the video, 20 minutes and 19 seconds later, the book was finding its way through the nodes of the world to the storage on my iPad Mini.

Brown begins the book explaining the origin of the title:

The phrase Daring Greatly is from Theodore Roosevelt’s speech “Citizenship in a Republic.” The speech, sometimes referred to as “The Man in the Arena,” was delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, on April 23, 1910. This is the passage that made the speech famous: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.…”

A vibrant quote the resounds in my being. It echoes to me me I want to be something more, to engage in the pursuit of who I am created to be. This quote sets a appropriate tone for the book, ushering in seven chapters of invitation after invitation to be fully present to one’s self and calling.

My experience reading the book was not one of seeing things in a way I had never seen them before. It was of seeing truths I had intuitively known, truths about human connection, vulnerability, courage, and engagement. Reading the the book, however pulled these truths together in a way I could not, allowing me to claim them for my own life.

Would reading this book be as a rich of an experience for you as it was for me? Maybe not, but as much as I want to take hold of what Brown writes and live it for my own, I also want to be around others who also dare to live in such a way.

As I often do when posting about books I’ve enjoyed, here are a few quotes to give you a feel for the contents:

The surest thing I took away from my BSW, MSW, and Ph.D. in social work is this: Connection is why we’re here. We are hardwired to connect with others, it’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives, and without it there is suffering.

The perception that vulnerability is weakness is the most widely accepted myth about vulnerability and the most dangerous.

Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.

It’s crazy how much energy we spend trying to avoid these hard topics when they’re really the only ones that can set us free.

Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them—we can only love others as much as we love ourselves. Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed, and rare.

I’ve come to believe that a leader is anyone who holds her- or himself accountable for finding potential in people and processes.

Hope is a function of struggle.

Who we are and how we engage with the world are much stronger predictors of how our children will do than what we know about parenting.

Down there at the bottom of this post, you’ll see that the developer has kindly offered a promo code to one lucky reader, so you might soon add it to your homescreen with no out of pocket expense. But you’re totally disqualified if you skip to the end.

I love it enough that I’ve pondered hacking into the 5by5 servers to splice a mention into the recording. And I would totally do it to, except for the fact that I don’t have any hacking skillz. Also, I think Dan knows where I live.

Let’s keep this simple with a bulleted list of why I like it so much:

• It’s pretty. It’s a simple app which has a similar feel to the many great apps in the text editor genre. Like most of them, it does one thing particularly well; it offers a clean space to form sentences. And that’s how I’m using it right now.
• Support for custom post types. Custom post types have been in WordPress for a few years now, though the possibilities for them are still only being realized for many WordPress users. Poster is the first app that I’ve seen that allows me to create and edit entries in custom post types. So, for instance, I’m slowly implementing a new custom post type to display what books I’m reading over there in the sidebar, and will later add an archive of the books I’ve read. With Poster, I can add a book or change it’s status with one hand while sipping coffee with the other. That’s some livin’ right there.
• Dropbox integration. Tom, the developer, must have made the app he wanted to use. The result is some nifty little conveniences that will make this the app many will want to use. Like this one – when you sign in to Dropbox, the app lets you select a folder where you might, say, store drafts created in other apps. When you create a new post, it gives you the option to start with a blank post, or to quickly grab one of those drafts out of Dropbox. Brilliant.
• Some essential WordPress features. Works with multiple WordPress sites, either on wordpress.com or self hosted. Featured image and custom post format support. Easy editing of custom fields.
• iOS power user essentials. Textexpander support. Markdown support. URL scheme support which should be handy for tapping out a few words in Drafts before sending them over here to Poster.

So this post isn’t all sunshine, there are a few things I’d like to see from the app in future updates:

• Padding in landscape mode. In landscape mode, the editor stretches the full width of the screen. I’d like to see it add some padding on the sides for a little better readability when writing and proofing.
• Support for custom taxonomies.
• No support for comments. Comments can be turned on or off for a post, and that’s as far as it need go. I like the focus on writing and editing, so I’m happy to keep the WordPress app around for approving and responding to comments.

Now, about that giveaway. For a few bucks, Poster is an easy sell. If you want a shot at it for free, leave a comment on this post, or let me know on Twitter or app.net . I’ll collect entries until 5pm EST, Thursday, 2/14, and then I’ll have one of my kids pull a name out of a hat. I’m very scientific like that.

If you use a Mac or iPad and want to get the most out of either, I recommend you subscribe to their show. And definitely listen to more than this episode.

I have a good handle on how David Allen’s Getting Things Done system works, having first read the book about 8-9 years ago, with another reading a few years later and at least one listen to the abridged audiobook. I don’t think I could balance my two roles as a maker of websites and the pastor of a small church community without it. I wouldn’t say I get it, but I get it.

But last month, GTD’s most hippest adovcate, Merlin Mann, went back and reviewed the Getting Things Done system over the course of 4-5 episodes of Back to Work, so I queued them up and listened my way through them. Hearing Merlin’s revisitation of GTD revealed my rut, and a few weeks ago, I revisited how I do things, refining my OmniFocus to a system that helps me order things much more better. (Other than my grammar.)

I’ve been using Perspectives within OmniFocus as I think they were intended — mostly by ordering a specific view into my tasks in a particular context so I could see what next actions were, especially in my website work. I’ve long used start dates instead of due dates as another way of filtering tasks I didn’t need to see until the time was right. But after reevaluating it all, I’ve ordered my Perspectives so they serve as three meta-contexts: Being, Doing, and Tinkering.

On Being

I have had a context for Writing for years that led to very little writing. I put ideas in there that I thought I should write about, but never wrote, because it was never the right time to look at the context. Sometime last year, I also added a study/reflection context. Again, an important context full of activities that were really important to me, but not one that was regularly visited, because OmniFocus is where I’ve gone when I wanted to Do things.

My Being perspective shows available tasks in both my Writing and my Reflection contexts. And that’s all it shows. I begin most mornings in this context for an hour or two, and spend most of Wednesdays mornings in it. These are tasks I know I need to do for my own sanity. It is time I want to protect, and devoting a Perspective to it has helped me guard this time. And maybe my soul.

On Doing

My Doing perspective really only shows one context called Mac. It’s a horrible name for the context, to be honest, but when I started with OmniFocus, I only saw these tasks in front of my Mac, so it became my default catch all. It’s the place I go when I need to get stuff done.

I rely heavily on start dates here. I know that my first hour or so coming out of my Being Perspective is going to be working off a bunch of the smaller tasks, so I usually set them with a 9am start time on the day I need to tackle them. More intensive tasks, usually related to website work, are scheduled to appear at 10am. Cleaning out the smaller tasks lets me hone attention on the tasks that require more of it.

On Tinkering

I’ve written about my tinkering context before. It’s the actions that I can/need/want to do when my attention and energy levels aren’t as high. They seldom have urgency or timeframes connected to them, so I can get to them whenever. The benefit of creating a Tinkering Perspective is that it places this context alongside my two other perspectives in the sidebar/toolbar. If I have 15 minutes to fill before a conference call, or if I’m wanting to work through a few things while planted on the couch in the evening, this is where I can go.

—–

At the core of it all, the changes described to my previous system are nuanced, but important. The Doing Perspective existed before, by another name, and now has an added emphasis on start times. The benefit, however, has been in elevating Tinkering, and especially Being, to equal visibility. These were buried in my OmniFocus, tasks that had been tucked away with good intentions, but rarely did they traverse the expanse from stored bit to illuminated pixel. Now, if they are overlooked, at least I know I can attribute it to psychosis rather than systems.