I’ve been using Things as my task manager for some time now, both on my desktop and on my iPhone, and have absolutely loved it. It’s clean, super-functional, and generally trouble-free.

But then last week I found something even better to love about it. It allows you to set recurring tasks, of course — all decent task managers do. But it allows you to set those tasks pegged not just to a certain fixed span of time, but to a certain time frame since the last time you did the task. Which is excellent for those tasks you really need to do more frequently but tend to stall a bit on.

Say, for instance, you need to clean out the litterbox, and you want to do it every other day. For the sake of argument. If you’ve got a regular recurrent every-other-day task set up, and then you don’t clean out the litterbox on the first day the task appears in your to-do list, but do manage to clean it out the next day, you run the risk of being annoyed when a second “clean out the litterbox” reminder appears the very next day. In fact, you’re likely just to delete that one and wait for the next one. Not that I have any experience with that.

But if you set the task up with an interval that only begins after completion, and you stall one day on cleaning out the litterbox, the next reminder appears two days later, at the point when the task really needs to be done again.

It’s a small difference, but it’s really changed my relationship to some of my recurrent tasks, and how I respond when they appear in my list for the day’s tasks.

I finally got a chance at the very end of the MLA to sit down for coffee with Dave Parry, whom I’d tried but failed to catch up with at several earlier moments of the conference. Among the things we talked about (writing in public, digital scholarly publishing, etc.) was a brief bit of chat about our preferred writing technologies. Dave asked what I’m composing Planned Obsolescence in, and I told him that my initial chapter structures generally get put together as a massive text-editor brain dump, which at some point I import into Pages for finer writing and editing.

Dave mentioned doing a lot of writing in Scrivener, a drafting program I’d written about experimenting with some time back. The conversation made me ask myself why I’d decided not to draft in Scrivener, given how excited I remain about the package — and I never really came up with a good answer.

So I took a morning and imported the draft as it stood into a Scrivener document (or a “binder,” in fact, a cluster of documents and snippets that are working toward a draft), to see whether the interface might actually provide some benefits for the project as it stands.

Thus far, it has: being able to focus in on one section of the text, while maintaining a sense of the relationship between that section and the overall textual structure, works far better for me here than in the endless scrolling word processor window. And, as I mentioned in my last post, given my propensity for writing my way into holes, but my desire to keep writing and fill those holes later, Scrivenings’ annotation tools are quite useful.

Scrivenings is another system, like DEVONthink, that I’m pretty sure I’m not using to the fullest extent of its abilities, as yet, but I’m enjoying the process of figuring out how it can help me envision the structure of a big project, while keeping its bigness from becoming overwhelming.

Having blogged my excitement about the public beta of DEVONthink 2, and trying to get myself re-organized for my winter break projects, I spent much of yesterday poking around in my various databases, thinking about how the data I access frequently is organized and trying to imagine better workflows. Over the last year or so, I’ve adopted a number of software packages and systems, and I figured I’d share some of what I’ve been using.

First off, of course, is DEVONthink itself, which I’ve been using to organize my reading notes, pdfs, and other bits of research data. I’ve also, as I noted, been using Bookends as my reference manager; it’s a little costy, but nowhere near so much as EndNote, and far, far friendlier.

This summer, for a whole series of reasons, I found myself getting a little paranoid about data security, and it suddenly occurred to me that not only had I not changed my primary passwords recently enough, but that I was reusing passwords in far too many places. The problem is, though, that I’m far too stupid to be able to remember as many passwords as I’d need to keep things really secure. Enter 1Password, a program that generates strong passwords and securely stores them for you. It also synchronizes beautifully with the iPhone, so that you need never be without that data.

Synchronizing data across computers, however, has been a challenge I’ve been trying to deal with for a while now. For the last several years, I’ve been using ChronoSync to synchronize data between my home machine and my USB drive, and then between my USB drive and my office machine, and so forth. Though ChronoSync is a dream, my system was still mildly awkward — heaven help me if I forget to sync before leaving one machine, or before starting to use the other. MobileMe’s Back to My Mac feature, which allows you to access any of your computers from any other, has gotten me out of a couple of jams, but it’s too slow to be ideal, and it’s not as automated as I’d like.

So yesterday I started tinkering with DropBox, which brings together cloud storage and automatic synchronization across multiple computers. I installed the application and dropped my databases in the dropbox, and then today installed the application on my office machine, which downloaded the contents of my dropbox. Any changes I make on one machine will automatically transfer to the other. (And DropBox uses SSL for all data transport and encrypts all files with AES-256, though the truly paranoid might want to create an encrypted disk image within the dropbox.)

Now to put those databases to work…

I’ve been using DEVONthink for a while now as a means of keeping my research notes organized, and so was happy (much as was Dave) to receive notice today of the public beta of version 2.0 of the software, which I’ve downloaded and begun tinkering with. It’s got a bunch of great new features — not least, tagging — and so I’m quite excited about the possibilities it presents. But that last thought makes me wonder — if you’re using DEVONthink, how do you use it? I’ve got the sneaking sense that I’m not getting anywhere near the mileage out of the software that I might.

(I’ve blogged my use of DEVONthink once before, as it turns out. And I still wish for that DEVONthink/Bookends integration…)

I’ve just this morning upgraded to WordPress 2.7, and the nifty new interface has inspired me to actually post something. So here’s the post announcing my new toys, and, I certainly hope, the forthcoming ability to actually say something worth saying with them.

In the interim, it’s back to the grading for me…

WordPress 2.6, which was released just a few days ago, contains expanded support for versioning of blog posts, allowing an author to see all of the revisions made to a particular post, as well as to compare various versions and to revert to some previous historical state.

This is a fabulous authoring tool, but it’s all resident in the backend: only the author has access to this versioning information. And for most purposes, that’s probably sufficient. But I could imagine a number of uses — in electronic scholarly publishing, for instance — when one might want the readers of a text to have access to a text’s history. Given that the history is already available, I imagine that it’s just a matter of a plugin that accesses the versioning data, organizing and presenting it on the frontend.

If somebody knows of such a plugin already in existence, I’d really like to hear about it. If not, I hope some enterprising developer starts thinking about one…

Of which there are several:

• While I was on my last trip (to New Orleans), I discovered that the 12-inch Powerbook G4 that I’ve been attached to for the last three years suddenly had a battery life of about 20 minutes. I’d been planning on replacing it before this summer’s travels anyhow, so I stepped up the timeline a bit, and this Sunday came home from the Apple store with one of these. I’m almost completely, perfectly in love.
• I’m running a bit of an experiment on that machine, trying to see how long I can go before I’m forced to install anything related to this. I’ve left instructions for those files to open in this; we’ll see how long that works.
• This weekend, I’m in San Francisco. Yesterday, Bryan Alexander actually managed to convince me to start doing this. I’m as surprised as anyone; I was convinced that this was one of the two recent technologies that I’d never see the value in. (I’ll save the other one for another time.)
• This morning, I upgraded my system to the new version of this. So far, I really like the look and feel of it, though I’ve got the sense that it’s going to take me a while to find everything.

I think that’s all of them, for now, at least…

I spent most of yesterday working on cutting a 35-page paper down into the 15-20 minute talk I’ll be giving on Friday at a NITLE symposium on collaboration in the digital age, on a panel with Laura and Tim. Usually I find such cutting painful, but I was able to get through it fairly quickly. (That said, I am at the upper end of the time-frame, and if I were asked to whack out another two pages, I’d find it excruciating.)

Last night, I started building the slides to go along with the talk, and the irony was somewhat inescapable, as yesterday’s five years ago today post was in no small part about my skepticism at the announcement of Keynote. Did we really need “a happily Apple-y PowerPoint,” as I put it then, or should the goal really be less PowerPoint in the first place?

My answer today is yes, on both counts, in no small part because Keynote is less than PowerPoint: less bloated, less ugly, less of a pain. I’ve only really started using slides with my talks in the last year, and part of the change for me has been working through a non-sucky way to use them. My slides are simple: black text on a white background, no transitions and only the occasional very plain build. I never treat them as cue cards or, god forbid, a script; except for some quotations I want to call attention to, they never replicate long passages of what I’m saying; they aren’t endless bullet-pointed lists. And as such they’re pretty useless without the talk; they’re more for punctuation, and the occasional illustration, than they are for conveying ideas in any expository sense.

The slides, in effect, are utterly non-necessary, which makes me wonder whether I should bother spending the time on putting them together. I tend to find, though, that they help keep the audience focused on my ideas; the words “social interaction” on the screen can drive home the point of a sentence in a way that no amount of vocal emphasis can really manage.

So five years on: yay, Keynote! But less.

I’ve been taking all my research notes in TextMate for a while now, which, as text editors go, is really way more powerful than what I need. What I like about it, though, is the notion of the “project” — a cluster of text docs that you designate as being somehow related. I have this project called, brilliantly, “notes,” through which I’ve related most of my work-based notes, whether notes on projects, notes from conferences or conference calls, or notes on reading. In the project drawer there are several little folders that group those notes in meaningful ways, and using that drawer, I can open and close whichever of them I need at any given moment. In tabs. That’s the key point: TextMate has tabbed editing windows.

But it’s also got this groovy feature that I’ve been using like crazy in the last few days: completion. Say there’s a word you’ve typed earlier in your document, as you’ve been taking your research notes, and say it’s a word that comes up a lot, and is really annoying to type. Like “antidescriptivism.” Once you’ve typed it once, you can type the first few letters, like “ant,” and then hit the escape key, and TextMate will automatically complete the word with the last word you typed that began with “ant.” But say that the second time I need the word, I actually need “antidescriptivist”? So I complete, I hit backspace and change the “m” to a “t,” and I’m done. Now, the next time I type “ant” and hit escape, TextMate will finish the word with “antidescriptivist,” but if I really wanted “antidescriptivism,” all I have to do is hit escape a second time, to get the second-to-last word I typed that began with “ant.”

This is saving me enormous amounts of time. How much? Enough, I hope, to write this post about it.

Amusingly enough, my very last post of 2005 was about the difficulities of beginning a new large-scale project. That project, which I planned on spending my sabbatical with during spring 2006, got somewhat overcome by events, primarily the take-off of planning for MediaCommons. That project, called Archive, is one I hope to return to at some point, but it’s wound up getting even further back-burnered over the course of the year, as I realized that the conference paper I’d written about blogging was in the process of morphing into an article, and that it was threatening the boundaries of article space as well, turning into a full-length project, whether I wanted it to or not.

As it turns out, I’m excited about the blogging project, which I’m thinking of as something book-like but not book-ish, something that will almost certainly live in MediaCommons. But figuring out how to get from the article to the full-scale thing is proving, once again, daunting. Where do I begin?

Last year, Francois asked whether a technical solution might not do the trick, helping me to, as he said, “keep in focus a configuration of an unfolding.” This year, thanks to my friend G., I’ve found such a tool, one that I’m still experimenting with, but that I think might do the trick: Scrivener. The software is still in beta right now, but it’s got some awfully great features designed to help take a writer—of any kind—from a fuzzy notion of some too-complex-to-imagine text to a draft. It produces outline views, corkboard-and-index-card views, draft document views; it can contain research notes and objects alongside but separate from the draft-in-process; it allows for some complex uses of metadata.

I’m in the very early stages of imagining the full project, and I’m quite sure that I’m dead wrong about some key aspect of it as yet, but I think the malleability of Scrivener’s uses of text will allow me the simultaneous flexibility and structure that I need in getting started. Which, I hope, will make the getting started less daunting.