That’s right, midnight tonight, the new owners of EIAS take over the software [... snip ...]. It has been great working with you through the years.

Procrastination is one barrier to achieving all the things you want or should do. Being badly organized another. Of course, there is also planning more than ever could be done. But usually it is possible to do much more than you think you can, ergo, if you’re not getting all done of what you want, it probably boils down to mismanagement or some sort of dispersement.

Thus I am working currently to deliberately tighten and streamline my workflows, such as having only 1 piece of software which fulfills several requirements for my daily usage or to cutout distracting actions (of which Twitter in the morning is a biggie!).

Another aspect in this digital age are notes. Long time ago it was many separate text files and PDF’s, then came DevonTHINK which was great [but over the years never evolved into a "comfortable" piece of software, always awkward even though a powerhouse with plenty beta versions expiration dates barking at you when you're in the middle of a cycle and a once great database style sheets now gone]. The first time that it began being fun to collect data was with Yojimbo. It had its limitations and thus I moved on to Journler. Very strong in many aspects and great smart folders and import features to track all the different items. Began building up not only my code tutorials section but everything from how-to do a specific thing with Flash to anything home related. But it will no longer be developed. What a blow. Going back to Yojimbo? No, it’s data is locked in, only single text file export possible, and not worth at this point to pay for an upgrade, not versatile enough. DevonThink will remain my tool for backing up my email database, but currently I am no longer inclined to pay for upgrades. One item less. Slimming down! And once again I am at the point of finding “the right one”.

So far I have not found anything that fits the bill. I need it to be versatile to hold any type of data, easily collected and organized, with smart folders and tags but it also should display code correctly.

The best kid in town to pick up the game at this point is Evernote. It sync’s across computers including the iPhone, it has tagging support and great search options (can search text in images!), can save pages or parts of pages out of Safari. These things make it choice number 1 for all the dailies.

As great Evernote is, it does not handle the aspect of coding snippets. Currently I’m using Schnippselchen, a German little freebee which is great but has it’s handicap of not being able to share it’s database across computers nor does it allow to search across the different groups within itself. Next to that it does not support all the languages I need. I was really hoping for ONE piece of software to combine these needs, because writing down the info of a tutorial will include also code and I am tired to having to look in 2 different locations to track down something which could be in either location. Currently my wish remains wishful thinking – unfortunately.

For the coding repository? TextMate seems overkill even though it has great bundles and features. For me though the decision appears to come down to Coda, my beloved coding application and Espresso the lightweight powerhouse. I’m still debating with myself.

As usual there are some not so smooth sailing spots, one of them being that I noticed WordPress not “keeping” an assigned theme when either playing around with widgets (such as which to use, where to use and customizing a few) or installing some plugins. It’s quite an interesting bug, as in the Themes panel it shows as being assigned is design B but in reality it falls back onto the default theme A and is displaying this one. To fix it, one clicks onto activate (the now unintentional already active design A) and then again B to get B back. It does not seem to be a huge issue except that it is annoying as doing so destroys the selected and specifically arranged widgets under theme B and I have to start over (will write the positions into the theme itself I think).

Apart of that it’s an interesting study of new ways to customize, building possibly my own framework.