So, what do you actually use ?

Over the past few years I've done a 'what worked' post at the end of the calendar year. As an experiment I thought I'd list what applications I use most and then review it in twelve moths time. 

I nearly wrote software rather than applications, but some of the things I want to mention aren't really software programs – they're applications and often depend on infrastructure hosted elsewhere.

Here goes

• Dropbox – used mainly to sync files across computers irrespective of file format
• Libre Office – platform agnostic document editor for off line writing. Often used in conjunction with Dropbox
• Evernote – used as a notes and document management system (Nixnote is used on Linux to access my evernote files)
• Wunderlist for 'to do' list management
• Chrome – browser extraordinaire
• Gmail – email solution
• Google docs – fast means to create quick and dirty documents irrespective of platform
• Windows Live writer – offline blog post creation
• TextEdit – android text editor for note taking and integrates nicely with evernote and Gemail
• Microsoft Skydrive – used for document backup
• Excel Web App – for these occasions when Google Spreadsheets or Libre Office Calc will not do
• Google reader for rss feed management
• Twitter for tracking interesting things – rarely for messaging
• Hosted Wordpress and blogger for blogging, and wikidot for creating structured web pages

The interesting thing is the omissions. For example I use pdf files extensively, but I often view them inside evernote or via the Google Docs viewer – hence no Acrobat, Evince, or Preview. Microsoft Office again is something I use – when I need to create or edit a complex report it's what I turn to as it is simply better than Libre Office, but it's Libre Office I turn to for day to day work.

Most of the applications are multi platform. The two that aren't, Windows Live writer and TextEdit are a reflection that (a) most of my offline blog writing is done on a Windows netbook and (b) most of the note taking I take in meetings is done on an Android tablet.

Otherwise I flit between platforms – the operating system I use has basically become unimportant – I have a Mac and a Linux laptop at work and a Windows pc and an iMac at home plus a couple of netbooks, one linux, one windows, for travelling. It is truly the applications that are important not the operating system. The reason why I use so many operating systems is because of the applications I need to use occasionally – some are not available for some platforms, and some simply don't work as well on some platforms as others.

Looking at the list it's basically a work list. If I was to include receational activities I'd add flickr an picasa. Reading e-books takes place on a dedicated e-book reader – these days usually a kindle. I'm also purposely not counting things like newspaper web apps or weather apps as they're simply an alterantive to using a browser.

I also don't use facebook – I have a facebook account that looks as if it does purely because my twitter feed goes to it, but, believe me, I don't use facebook. The only reason I have an account is because of other things that use facebook's authentication service.

Twitter and bushfires

Yesterday we had a bad bushfire day here in Canberra.

We got through and nothing really bad happened but on days like yesterday you're always a little bit on edge.

One of the important things about days like yesterday is communication, and here twitter came into its own. The Emergency Services Agency posted regular updates on events, with meaningful descriptions and links to detailed posts on their blog site.

The thing about twitter is that it stayed up and it got the message out, even when at busy times, the ESA's main site struggled.

There's a message here for all problem management guidelines. Fortunately we don't all have to manage bushfires, but I did once have to manage a major SAN failure, and learned the hard way that communication is key.

Tell people what is happening, tell them when the next update will be, and be accurate. No spin, no doom and gloom. If the problem is being worked on and there's no accurate time to fix, say so. If you're having an unexpected delay, say so.

The point is that people may not like it when you tell the truth but they'll take you seriously when you tell them.

One of the best techniques I have found is that when there is crisis, appoint someone like a moderately technical manager to manage the communications. That way he or she can ask the engineers what's going on, and understand what's being said to them. Use someone from corporate communications and they won't understand the implications of what they're being told, or worse keep on hassling the people trying to fix the problem with inane supplementaries.

Like all good management it's basically common sense, but even so it's a good idea to work out how you're going to do things in advance. Like the bushfire survival plans the Rural Fire Service keeps on telling us to make, it means that you make decisions about what you're going to do and how you're going to it in advance so you know what to do and there's no last minute arguments about what's going to have to happen ...

Copying as preservation

I’ve just posted a link to a rather worrying story about what is happening to the manuscript in Timbuktu after the jihadist takeover, but there is also a positive message in the story.

Once digitised, artefacts, be they manuscripts, oral history recordings, or whatever can be copied, and quite simply, the more copies the greater the likelihood of the material surviving.

Museum directors tend to find the idea of letting people copy their digital holdings worrying for a whole host of reasons, such as misuse of the material (do you want your byzantine manuscript being reused in a design for a coffee can?), reduction in visitor numbers, and even conservation budgets (it’s digitised, stuff the original).

In fact what they worry about is losing control.

There are a lot of ways round this – a clockss type solution for museum collections would be one, although in the ideal world a more open solution may be preferable. Likewise one could imagine using something like Amazon glacier for an escrow service.

Solutions like clockss are cheap – the hardware is not remarkable and other than the salaries of the core technical team, all of whom would fit in a minivan with space over, the organisational costs are not high.

Otherwise we are left to ad hoc peering arrangements and arbitrary decisions as tho what is worth replicating. And that tends not to be a good thing – when the monks copied manuscripts they were selective copying the things they thought valuable, plus of course the odd salacious passage to enliven these cold dark winter nights, and that’s not a particularly good set of selection criteria …

Fun with email

I've previously written how at the day job we've changed to Office 365 for email, and how to be subversive and connect your Gmail account to harvest your Office 365 email and thus allow you to consolidate your email on Gmail.

As an act of pure geekery, I installed Alpine, the command line mail client on my linux machine and then connected it to my gmail account - as you can see below this actually lets you see your office 365 email in a terminal session:

No, I don't have a use case for this. I suppose if I wave my hands it's a way of reading your consolidated email on a cli only unix box, but that's pretty tenuous ...

2012 - what worked ...

For a last two or three years I've done a 'what worked' post at the end of the calendar year– this is the 2012 version:

Android tablet and keyboard

Undoubtedly the success of 2012. My no name seven inch tablet and keyboard combo worked incredibly well, especially as I can sit in meetings and type notes and then post straight to evernote, or indeed pull up reference information from evernote.

Virgin mobile data dongle

The star of our trip to south Australia. Data access problems solved just about everywhere apart from the seriously remote – shame though it's only for Windows or the Mac

Kindle e-reader

Light, versatile, portable. Revolutionised my reading habits, not because it's better than the Cooler, but because it has a e-book delivery solution behind it

Samsung smart phone

it just works, and couple with a decent data contract, doubly useful for checking email etc on the go

Still Delivering

Zpad

my 9inch android tablet is still useful – allowing me to read the morning paper electronically and check email and rss feeds in comfort, not to mention read and post to Evernote

Evernote

still the best note management solution around. I must admit I'm less keen on the new interface, but it is still highly effective

Back from the dead

Libre Office

after my travails with AbiWord I've switched back to Libre Office and find it a good text editor, and one which makes an excellent tool for the creation and posting of pdf based notes to evernote

Hanging in there

The Asus lightweight travel notebook and my cooler e-reader havn't seen the use that they have seen formerly, but still have a role to play even if they have been superceded by a windows netbook and a kindle respectively ...

Setting up Gmail to work with Office 365

At the day job, we've changed from Oracle Convergence as an email solution to Office 365.

Prior to the change I had set up my gmail account to harvest my email from Oracle Convergence into gmail so I could use it easily with  the native gmail client on my android phone and tablets without having to configure them individually.

It also had the advantage of allowing to quickly scan the email headers from Gmail at home without having to log into Convergence seperately at the weekend.

Of course, the change of mail solution meant I couldn't carry on doing the same thing. Actually it didn't, - seeting up gmail to harvest email from Office 365 was pretty straight forward.

I've written a basic guide as to how to get Gmail to harvest your email from Office 365 so you can do the same if you find it useful to your way of working.

The guide is a publically shared Google Doc. The guide assumes that your work email alias is of the form firstname.lastname@work.edu.au and that this is mapped onto an actual account of the form u123457@domain.work.edu.au where domain is the name of your windows sub domain.

Your local sysadmin should be able to tell you what the actual values are for your environment if you are unsure.

User interfaces and memes

Most people who use computers (and tablets) have very little technical knowledge. And most of them have only used one or two user interfaces.

People are of course conservative, which is why change is difficult.

Most people know how to use the classic windows interface – from 95 through NT, 2000, XP, Vista and 7 it became a meme – this is an interface and if I do that this will happen, so double clicking on a little picture starts an application, and there's a menu thing down at the left hand bottom corner.

Now people on the whole don't know windows, they know how to do particular tasks.

This meant that you could give someone who 'knew' XP a computer with a Linux distro like College linux and one they'd found a word processor ad so on they were happy – in the main because KDE 2 kind of looked like XP and things worked the same.

The same people tended to find xfce, as found in xbuntu, a step too far thought Mac users didn't have a lot of trouble adapting.

I'm basing this on real anecdotal experience – I've tried out both on naïve non-technical users with a reasonable degree of success.

The same people, on the whole, don't like Openbox or similar user interfaces like fluxbox - ' what do you mean I right-click on the desktop to open a menu ??'

And of course when we look at Ubuntu, which is what is most probably the desktop linux in widest use by non-technical users, the major complaint is about the Unity UI – not because it's difficult to use, it isn't, but because non technical people have difficulty applying past experience. It's just a little too different.

Macs of course are different, but are consistent across the range. iOS is again consistent across iPads and iPhones. Android is close enough to allow you to transfer skills – just like XP and KDE2. In fact the move to smartphones has made the user experience consistent across models, and we now differentiate phones on capabilities, in much the same way we differentiate laptops disk vs memory vs weight, and actually we know they are all much the same.

Compare this to a few years ago, when each phone manufacturer had their own menu system and called things by different names - changing or upgrading your phone was a major challenge.

So we can say there are three user interface memes out there – the Mac meme, the tablet meme and the XP meme.

And then we come to Windows 8.

Now I havn't used Windows 8 but I've seen enough screen shots to know it looks different. How different I don't know but it looks different.

(Confession time – prior to writing this post someone from Microsoft did ask me if I'd had a chance to play with it – I was momentarily tempted to ask to borrow a Surface, but then decided that was a little too cheeky and anyway I'd like to do any usability tests on generic kit).

Looking different isn't bad for a tablet. After all chunky tiles kind of look like icons so tapping on them should work. On a touchscreen device with a keyboard you evolve a hybrid mix of swipes and keybourd commands – or at least that's my experience of using a no-name seven inch android tablet with a keyboard.

On a non-touchscreen laptop the experience will be different.

Remember that most people silo their experience and expect to transfer past laptop skills to the new environment, not either learn new skills or transfer tablet style skills.

So just like putting people in front of Openbox they're going to boggle. This is why people complain of no start menu in Windows 8.

People will of course learn new things. Judging by the number of MacBooks round campus compared to even two years ago, a lot of people have moved across from Windows.

My guess is not because of any inherent technical superiority on the part of OS X but because Macs are seen in some subjective way of being 'better' and thus it's worth moving your skills across and learning new things.

As I said above, people are conservative with regard to computers. They will only do something, like change or upgrade, if they perceive it has value. If I was Microsoft I'd be trying to work out how to sell Windows 8 as being cool rather than better.

Most people don't care if it's better as long as they can get their stuff done, but, if it's cool that's even better.

Apple is of course the classic example of being cool rather than better. In the mid nineties Apple as nearly broke. At the time I was doing a lot of IT procurement. The early old style CRT iMacs and iBooks looked distinctly poor in comparison to what you could get from the likes of Dell, Toshiba and Compaq. At the time I though the products were interesting, especially with OS X as a unix clone, but felt that they were a last twitch of the corpse, and if anything Linux might be the serious competitor.

Round about the same time I'd spent a lot of time on building Microsoft-lite environments, as a way of controlling or minimizing licensing costs by using alternative products, either as open source or commercial.

Given that experience and the fairly rich set of desktop applications, including business tools, that Linux came with, building an open source desktop seemed not an unreasonable idea, and if it hadn't been for the power of the Microsoft Office brand to the exclusion of all others, it might well have had legs. The lesson being that people won't transfer to another product if the product they're using has 90% of the market. They'll worry about compatibility and being different. Like I said, people are intensely conservative about desktop computing – they don't want to be guineapigs – they just want it to work for them

I was also wrong about Apple.

Apple came back from the dead by building a brand on being cool and being easy to use. If I was Microsoft I'd be studying how they did it, because in doing it, Apple established the OS X meme – and Microsoft needs to establish a Windows 8 meme ...