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.

While I am feeling giddy about it, for its freshness, its aesthetics and fluid workflow approach and especially for its surprising surfacing out of nowhere in such a polished manner and for it’s ability to be a huge contender to OmniFocus and Things – for all these positive feelings I do also feel the shadow of potential repeats of the past while following the posts on the user list twined around the application’s final beta stages.

I’ve mentioned it on that user list, but felt like needing to voice it one more time, hoping this might hush away these thoughts and that the feathered wings of doubt’s light touch will dissipate and that I can prove my inklings wrong within the year to come as being nothing else than an overly cautious attitude. So here follows the non-edited quote of my post:

… what I have seen happening with OmniFocus and then with Things is that the apps were slick and smooth when the alpha/beta cycle still was small, but once it hit the masses and then too many people had a say – like too many cooks will kill a meal – it seemed that the apps became more flakey as too many different user preferences got addressed and that the apps become bloated or less intuitive or more quirky or such after. I don’t know if this makes sense, but it’s something I’ve observed and feel it was the case.

That the apps broke down, e.g. Things when it’s Forum became huge for example. Users are vocal which is fine, but… . It is so often that on forums people loose their manners and debates get very heated and insulting and then there are so many viewpoints as there are users. So I think it can be tricky for a company which is very involved in user exchange to keep their integrity and, uhm – pure’ness of code [yeah, I just made that up].

In cases like that I feel it would be good if the company has somebody else (e.g. support) handling all forum posts and only give the summary to the rest of the team (500 people asked for bla but only 15 swear on blee and threaten to leave you if you don’t implement it).

Of course me too, I have a ton of wishes (like a NEXT for example) and am also very opinionated. And of course I often also rather talk to the coder directly as “he/she will usually best understand what I want”. It’s a mixed bag. With all this rambling I’m only trying to say that I hope that THL won’t go down that path of getting pulled into too many directions for trying to accommodate too many different user views.

But oddly enough this time I took it a few steps further and I am not even sure if I am now done or not. The probability is quite hight that it will become just one of the hot hot hot items which fades away way to quickly and then is nothing but unfinished electrons.

And so what?

This reaching out once again had me look at some software for organizing and writing a story. The best which I have found for the Mac are Scrivener, StoryMill and Stoyist.

To Storyist I can’t say much, reading the features sounds really cool and I am sure they are, but once opened I did not like the interface so much, it seems just too much like Pages and if I would want to write in Pages I don’t need another application, right?

Bear uses Scrivener and is happy with that, but after playing around with StoryMill and Scrivener my heart fell for the first – I definitely like the time line and the interface feels comfortable for me. Issues which some reviews had criticized have meanwhile been addressed (global search exists for example) and by chance I found a current MacUpdatePromo with a 25% off StoryMill deal – something I could not resist.

Happy writing!