(no subject)

[roadrunnertwice]

It has officially been months since I've wasted everyone's time talking about computer bullshit up in here, so let's geek out for a second.

• Git is the shit and I'm basically in love with it. That's pretty much all there is to say about that.
• I'm out of love with Simplenote, alas. It was the first iPad writing app that made sense to me, but it started corrupting my text (while I was watching, even!), which is pretty much the one thing I just can't forgive in an app. After I lost a sentence in one of my Turkey diaries and couldn't remember what it'd been, I ditched Simplenote for good, got a Dropbox account, and started using PlainText instead. It's better in some ways (it plays very well with Garbage Book and FMP, for instance) and worse in a few (no search), but since it hasn't thrown away part of my brain as of yet, it currently wins by default.
  • By the way, Dropbox is the shit and I'm basically in love with it. Yes, I am late to the fucking party; what of it.

• The developer of PlainText also has a to-do list app called TaskPaper, and after extensive consideration I have decided that—evidence of an unfortunate addiction to InterCaps aside—it rocks. The deal is that I've tried working with task managing apps before, and I apparently can't handle any of their interfaces; if it's more complicated than a piece of paper or a text editor buffer, it gets in my way and I eventually just stop using it. (Bonus Kill It W/ Fire points for any app that has a concept of calendar-tied due dates.) Which, fine: I've always just fallen back to using paper or a text editor buffer, and they're perfectly respectable tools.

  As far as I'm concerned, the following are the only problems with using paper and text for to-do lists:

  • They're hard to maintain. Eventually, a to-do list is going to get clogged up with finished tasks, and the only cure is to spend way too long on either re-writing it or deleting the dross.
  • They're not very introspectable. You can do a single-aspect hierarchy pretty easily, but it's a lot more annoying to, say, make an ad-hoc sub-view of tasks you've picked to do today or which have to happen when you're at home.
  • Also, and this is basically less important than anything but it gets on my nerves anyway? "Crossing out" an item in plaintext is kind of fiddly and abstract. Like, how do you even do that? Put an "x" in front of the line? Turn the - bullet into a +? Guh.

  TaskPaper solves all of those without actually making the interface any more complicated than paper or a text buffer, so it wins. I used up its 30-day trial and thought it wasn't really all that special, and then I proceded to get incredibly annoyed at its absence on an almost daily basis, so I ponied up. If you like to-do lists, you should give it a try too.

• I think my favorite thing about that rubberized iPad folio Apple makes is how schmutzy and gross it gets. No, seriously, I mean it. It signals that its contents are for use and/or abuse, and for someone with a mild fear of Owning Nice Things, that's more useful than it sounds. Also, the unique patterns of filth make it easier to tell otherwise-identical iPads apart.
• So in Vim, the D key generally indicates destruction, right? dd = delete the current line; D = delete to end of line? Except that ctrl-d means scroll down half a page. This is my Vim face: -_-