On Evernote and 'everything buckets'

Lately, I've been waffling a bit between Simplenote & Evernote. I started using Evernote again a couple of months ago, and while the feature set has improved greatly since my last attempt, I keep coming back to Simplenote. The reason is quite, well, simple. Like so many other products, when you look at a list of features between two competitors, one's feature set may look more suited to you until you try to use in the real world. Evernote looks amazing when you break down all the things that it does, and it's ubiquity across platforms. However, Simplenote is fast, easy-to-use, and I love being able to use focused apps like JustNotes to manage my text notes on the desktop.

Evernote's strength (or weakness, depending on your viewpoint) is the 'everything bucket' principle. Meaning, you can throw anything at the application and it will store it. You can save audio notes, screen grabs, camera photos, PDFs, images, and text notes amongst others. This encourages a user to not only throw everything they can into a storage system like this for quick retrieval, it also makes it very easy to become habit forming. It also makes you a bit lazy, because the user ends up throwing every scrap of information imaginable into the system.

But I digress - the main challenge for an everything bucket type of app like Evernote is having to plan for multiple contexts. Unlike a piece of software that's a photo sharing app, or a filesystem app like Dropbox, Evernote has to be ready to handle text, photos, videos, audio clips, location data and sometimes all of those in the same note. The allure of a powerful system that can store and sync nearly anything falls apart the first time you need to quickly add a note on the go or similarly, find a note at a moment's notice. There have been times where I'll be out and about and trying to use my iPhone, and the Evernote version is slow to respond. In fact, sometimes the app takes up to a minute to sync up the note headers before I can do anything of value with the application.

Because it tries to be all things to all people, it's very difficult to quickly get in there, add what you want, and get out. If I want to add a simple text note, I have to tap through multiple screens asking what type of 'note' I'd like to create just to get to the entry form. Despite all of it's amazing features, ultimately Evernote is unreliable to me when I'm mobile. While evaluating Evernote lately, I started simply emailing text notes to myself from my phone instead of even launching the app at all. In my mind, that's a design failure on Evernote's part. That's not meant to pick on Evernote in particular, though. They're in a tough spot trying to anticipate user needs while giving them myriad of ways to enter and search on content in multiple contexts (mobile, iPad, web and desktop). That's not easy, and they do the best that they can. Regardless, it makes for a cumbersome entry and search experience. Fixing the load time and data entry process is doable - they could optimize the app's sync functionality & perhaps make the 'new note' screen default to the last type of note you created. But the challenge that will not be easy to solve is the unstructured nature of everything buckets, and the difficultly of sorting through this information. The Evernote team has added things like tags, notebooks, location data and calendar data to notes which can be helpful for search, but it's also adding even more complexity to a an already strained sync and search process.

On the other end of the spectrum, Simplenote is just that. It's simple and focused on one thing - taking and searching snippets of text. It's fast, easy-to-use, and syncs data lightening fast. I prefer to own and use software that does one thing well - it's a UNIX philosophy favors focused tools over IDEs and things of that nature. Having reliable, structured places where certain types of data live trump one bucket where you throw everything imaginable and hope a search algorithm can save you.

Throw in things like TextExpander integration in the SimpleNote iOS apps (TextExander allows you to create short snippets for commonly typed phrases that can be trigged by shortcuts in other applications like Simplenote) and I can create notes extremely quickly on my iPhone, iPad or on my Mac equally as quickly.

I don't know which system is right for everyone else. I'm certainly not saying Simplenote is the answer for everyone. In fact, you could argue that I might just be using Evernote for the wrong thing and the app is just not for my use case. I'll always prefer a handful of focused apps or services over one 'app to rule them all'. Obviously Evernote is doing something right, and they create some pretty wonderful software and offer excellent support. I actually still use Evernote for saving things like screenshots and mobile photos - it's very helpful for saving and sorting things when shopping or researching. However, for text notes and day to day use, I do know that when I use Simplenote, I get what I need done quickly, and I can find what I need to find a lot faster.

In the real world, that's what really matters to me.

One step forward, two steps back

From the Twitter blog tonight:

As the Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, mentioned earlier today, we support Do Not Track (DNT), which is reflected in our privacy policy as one of the ways you can indicate your preference.

Awesome news! Read on...

These tailored suggestions are based on accounts followed by other Twitter users and visits to websites in the Twitter ecosystem. We receive visit information when sites have integrated Twitter buttons or widgets, similar to what many other web companies — including LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube — do when they’re integrated into websites. By recognizing which accounts are frequently followed by people who visit popular sites, we can recommend those accounts to others who have visited those sites within the last ten days.

So now it turns out that those 'tweet this' buttons that allow you to share content are trojan horses that allow Twitter to track all of my activity as well. Granted, I'll ostensibly be fine because of the wonderful Disconnect Chrome extension, but it's still frustrating to watch 'free' services make it only possible for us to trade our privacy for the use of their service. I understand that if a user doesn't want to pay and is ok with that bargain, more power to them. But for me, I'd prefer a world where I could subscribe to Twitter or Facebook (or whatever else) for a reasonable amount of money. Just give us the option for crying out loud. Twitter isn't alone here, but it's sad to see them admit it this way, as if they're actually doing us a favor.

I find myself asking "how does this service make money?" when I come across an attractive but free service/product these days. If I can't easily answer that question, I'm very hesitant to use it. As silly as it sounds, I like to have my relationship with a company to be as uncomplicated as possible. I give them money, and I get a product or service in exchange. Things like Instapaper, SquareSpace, LaunchBar, Fever, and more come to mind. That's the same reason I pay for a membership to 5by5, bought a Dropbox plan, and subscribe to other 'freemium' services.

I'd much rather trade money for a product instead of my browsing history, thanks.

Responsive Design Isn't a Silver Bullet

I've been around long enough to remember pure Flash websites essentially ruling the web. In fact, I had a hand in creating a few of them before learning about web standards in the early 2000s. Now, I'm not here to get on a soapbox and say anything good or bad about Flash sites in particular - what I am here to do is talk about how I see an emerging trend in my industry on the web that is remarkably similar to one that was happening in 2001, 2002. That trend is the one size fits all mentality around shoehorning a technology into any solution that is offered, regardless of if it's a 'good' solution or not.

Let me explain.

About a decade ago, people would call you up and say that they wanted a 'Flash website' before telling you their needs, what they did, or who would be using their site. This of course put developers in a bit of a bind, as we then either had to talk the client out of that solution or deliver a Flash site despite the fact that it might not make sense. Costs would skyrocket, deadlines would be missed, and the client would get their shiny website that didn't actually serve the users. Eventually, web developers got better at articulating the use cases, pros and cons of developing a Flash only website and the technology found it's appropriate home on the web while the rest of us moved on to Web 2.0-style technologies.

Here we are, a decade later, and a new beast is rearing it's head. We're not quite to the place we were with Flash yet, but I have noticed a trend of agencies and shops pitching Responsive Design as the end-all, be-all solution for any website that has any need at all for a mobile presence. I won't bore you with the details, but if you don't know what it is, Responsive Design is a technique that uses percentage based widths for all elements of the site in conjunction with CSS3 media queries to manipulate page content to 'reflow' inside of a user's browser, regardless of what device they're visiting on. What's great about this is that it allows you to build one template for each page 'type', while serving the needs of most users, no matter their context. You can reflow, scale and move content so that iPhone & Android users are served an optimized version of the same site 30" Cinema Display users on a Mac or PC would see. Everyone in between is served device-width-specific content as well. I'm oversimplifying, but check out the Boston Globe and resize your browser to see what I'm talking about here. Pretty cool stuff.

So what's the problem? Responsive Design and development is hard. It takes a lot of time to work through all of the use cases, test in all of the browsers (and appropriate width/breakpoints), while keeping the page lightweight. Further, Responsive websites imply on one level or another a flexible site that isn't very image heavy (see a previous post of mine). While this is fine most of the time, some sites will by their nature rely more on graphics or fixed-width elements that simply don't make sense in a responsive context. By selling someone something they don't really need, we add a huge cost in time and money and deliver something that actually delivers something the end users don't want or need.

While I have really enjoyed building responsive sites by hand or using some of the really excellent frameworks out there that make getting started a snap, to pitch Responsive in a vacuum is asking for trouble, as it handicaps designers and adds overhead to a project that doesn't need it. If we as developers want to maintain a level of credibility & respect both with our peers and our clients, we have to be diligent about not only promoting technologies and solutions that are relevant, but also explaining the potential pitfalls of using cutting-edge techniques despite its growing popularity.

If the site is content-rich and needs to be viewed in multiple contexts, the client understands the speed v. cost/time tradeoffs and it's the best option? Let's build the shit out of some amazing Responsive sites. However, a m.yoursite.com solution isn't a bad thing, either. Responsive design isn't a silver bullet, so let's stop selling it as one.

Responsive Images and Web Standards at the Turning Point

A fantastic article about an extremely important issue in the front end development community right now. It's going to be interesting to see how the WHATWG body moves forward, as this will impact how we write code, configure CMSes and slice images in the near future.

Moving to SquareSpace

When I was in college, I loved the whole process of buying and assembling computers from parts off of sites like NewEgg.com and the like. I didn't have much money due to the whole "being in school" thing, so it made perfect sense to trade time (which is a near infinite resource while in college) to save some money. And hey, when you're bored, tinkering with computers is fun! As you get older, however, you start to run out of that precious resource of time, and look for ways to save up as much of it as you can.

With that said, I've moved DanielAndrews.com over to SquareSpace. My time is better spent designing and developing websites at work, and not dealing with server maintenance, server security, or CMS updates while at home. Right now, I'm using a pre-packaged theme from the SquareSpace folks, but I plan on working on creating my own design very soon.

The main reason that I chose SquareSpace over hosting my own Wordpress install or using Tumblr is twofold. First, I wanted to support the 5by5 podcast network in any way that I could, and this seemed like a good way to do so. SquareSpace, Mailchimp and a few other brands advertise heavily on the podcasts that I listen to, and throwing my support behind a company who sponsors some of my favorite shows seems like a nice tradeoff. Secondly, SquareSpace seems like a great option for future clients at work that are looking for a simple but flexible site due to it's powerful customization features. No better way to evaluate the solution than to dive in head first.

From a peace of mind standpoint, this means I can delete a Wordpress installation and a Piwik installation on my server. Further, I will probably move The White & Gold over to it's own 'Journal' (SquareSpace's term for another blog) and keep it separate from my main content but still serve it up from the same domain. 3 fewer things to maintain or worry about getting hacked. If you want to subscribe to the new RSS feed, the url is http://danielandrews.com/blog/rss.xml