When Microsoft set its sights on a market, it would squeeze the life out of the market leader like an anconda wrapping itself around its prey. Before it was done, the company struck numerous segments, including personal computing (Apple and IBM), word processing (WordPerfect), spreadsheets (Lotus), databases (Borland and Sybase), networking (Novell) and Internet browsers (Netscape).

It’s not hyperbole to say that Apple’s phoenix-like rise and Google’s ascent are directly and positively correlated with Gates’ decision to step away from running his company as CEO in 2000.

A remarkably prescient look at Apple and Google’s recent strategies compared with Microsoft’s in times now past.

★

I'm delighted to announce that on May 2nd, I will be relocating full-time back to Paris and joining the Pompidou Centre, one of the world's most original cultural institutions, dedicated to modern and contemporary art and the encouragement of artistic creation in all its forms, as directeur des publics—a job in which I will have responsibility for optimising all aspects of the Centre's visitors' experience. I'm thrilled and deeply honoured that Alain Seban, the Pompidou Centre's President, and Agnès Saal, the Director General, are giving me this opportunity to work with them to build further on the work they've undertaken, since 2007, to extend its activities into new creative areas, both sectorially and geographically—harnessing new technology and partnerships worldwide to reach out to new categories of visitors.

The boldly modern vision of the Centre's founder, Georges Pompidou, the Fifth Republic's second President, vividly symbolised by its groundbreaking, brutalist headquarters in the heart of Paris, is unique in allowing—indeed requiring—constant rethinking to stay at the cutting edge of creation while providing a suitable environment for curation of a constantly-growing contemporary art heritage.

The Centre's team have been true to this ideal since its 1977 inauguration. I'm humbled by the fact that I have much to learn from my new colleagues, and I'm also hugely excited at the opportunity to work, in conjunction with them, to enrich and broaden the Pompidou Centre's existing achievements and record of excellence in this field.

In the last twelve months I’ve actually been steadily moving away from the notion of stuff, and material things—so it’s a bit harder to get enthusiastic about it than I used to. But for what it’s worth, here’s an update of my previously-listed categories and items.

Hardware and accessories

iPhone 4S

No surprises here. And, yes, I use (’British’ English) Siri for some stuff and, on the whole, he understands the Queen’s English even if he doesn’t really speak it.

Macbook Air

I can’t even remember the time when I didn’t have one of these, and literally every single one of my friends who’s bought a new computer in the last year has got one. I don’t expect anything new here—bar an increase in hard disk and RAM when the newest iteration is made available, inevitably, at some point later this year.

Beyzacases

One of the hardest things about owning a piece of Apple hardware is how difficult it is to find a decent case for them: I’m not quite sure why this is, but cases are a market segment in which the hoi polloi’s inclinations towards bad taste seem to flourish well beyond reason. Beyzacases’s zero series Macbook Air case and the matching iPhone version (some Apple stores also sell their own rather nice custom version of the latter) solved my problem nicely. They’re made from the finest leather, are delightfully cheap and service is superb.

iPad

I still don’t use one, except an old iPad 1 for reading my RSS, tweets, The Spectator and The Economist. I hate the inordinate amount of time it takes to type anything on the iPad, or send anything to Facebook or Twitter, and just don’t buy the lack of keyboard that slows everything one does to a trickle. I may yet convert it to update my supermarket shopping lists if I can find a suitable hook to fix it to my kitchen wall.

Software

Sparrow Mail for iPhone and Mac

The hottest software I’ve seen in years, now on my iPhone as well as my Mac. Enabling notifications on the iPhone for Sparrow, despite despite everyone complaining about it and despite Apple trying to make it not happen, is a child’s play if you use Boxcar for iPhone, with the added bonus of being able to switch off notifications at night.

Google Search Duck Duck Go

I extolled the virtues of DuckDuckGo last year, but in the intervening period, Google Search has actually been getting massively better and Duck Duck Go worse, despite being very effectively ramped by the Fred Wilson propaganda machine. Having said that, it still makes sense to set DuckDuckGo as your default search engine on Safari, so as to use its powerful !bangs syntax to carry out searches… in other search engines (it makes your Google searches anonymous by default).

Byword Writeroom

I switched to the fabulous Byword minimalist, Markdown-enabled text editor for Mac last year. Since then, it’s been belatedly discovered by Shawn Blanc, who swears by it, and by Ben Brooks, who prefers iA Writer ^[i]. It’s also been successfully ported to iOS: read my excellent friend Brett Terpstra’s review of the mobile version—and bear in mind that iA Writer for iOS doesn’t even support Markdown. And, yes, I use my iPhone 4S to dictate texts using Byword: it works really well and is much faster than typing stuff on an iPad.

Google Apps Premier

No change here. I’m not using iCloud—Apple’s mail server is a joke—except for contacts, which it does a rather good job of syncing. ^[ii]

Dropbox

On the subject of shunning iCloud, I’m sticking with Dropbox—if only because it has become the de facto standard for syncing most server-based applications, such as 1Password, Byword, etc. I also use it to sync most of my Application Support data, using symlinks, so that my iMac and Macbook Air preferences are always in sync for all my apps. iCloud support is, however, growing and I expect within a few months it may be worth taking a second look at this. But at the moment Apple’s solution doesn’t seem to have proved itself yet.

Reeder

Still the best—indeed, the only—RSS client out there. I also still don’t see any good reason to ditch RSS and rely only on Twitter for reading new blog posts: Twitter offers no good way of hadling the flow once it’s stale—and many sites aren’t mechanically posted to Twitter in the way that they are to RSS.

Sublime Text Coda

The most exciting new app of 2012. Sublime Text, which I hope to review in detail soon, is a fantastically powerful coding tool that’s replaced Coda almost overnight after I tried it out a few weeks ago. I now use it for all the code I write.

MarsEdit

Still the best way to draft and publish blog posts. I still wish it offered a Byword-style distraction-free full screen mode—but, that minor gripe apart, it’s pretty perfect.

1Password

No change here either. This has saved me several times this year. I’ve gradually switched all my passwords to 22-character-long items and tend to change them every six months. This superb, beautifully-maintained application is one of the best investments I’ve ever made.

Evernote

As I’d expected, Evernote, which I’ve used since it launched, has gradually become a core component of any serious geek’s online presence. I’m still lukewarm about their rather uncertain design choices, but the app has unquestionably improved dramatically since I started using it. You can store absolutely anything you like in it and find it later pretty easily.

WordPress

Periodically, new, competing platforms such as the very clever Octopress or, more recently, the ultrahyped svbtle (membership by invitation only) crop up, but no one has convinced me to shift away from the solidity, flexibility and reliability of WordPress. Recent versions have been notably more responsive and user-friendly than previous ones. No bloat here.

Edgecast Amazon Cloudfront

Around the middle of last year, I started noticing issues with the static assets in my site (images, css and javascript files) which I’d been storing and serving on Amazon’s cheap and effective Cloudfront service. I took advantage of my switch to a new (ve) server at Media Temple to move all these assets to an Edgecast CDN, resulting in much faster performance, albeit for a lightly higher cost. The guys at Edgecast’s support team have provided some of the best assistance I’ve ever received while I was setting up my new installation.

Things Omnifocus

I recently moved my todo lists from the venerable, but rather clunky and finicky Omnifocus, to the minimalist, ultraflexible Things—which finally implementated over-the-air sync between its Mac, iPhone and iPad clients last year (currently in open beta).

Real-world stuff

Although I hate changing my custom for real-world stuff, the last twelve months have seen a few long-standing suppliers bite the dust, for a variety of reasons.

Hermès

I actually hardly ever need to go there any more, as I fully expect my ties, wallet, belts and briefcase, all made to the highest standards in the days when the nouveau-riche clients who now throng the place were still a reasonably unthinkable prospect, to last a lifetime and more.

Uniqlo American Apparel

Superb Japanese cotton jeans, cashmere jerseys and down-filled jackets at absurdly low prices, although I’d feel happier wearing them if I knew exactly in what conditions they were made. I’d still go to American Apparel for hoodies and tshirts, of course, but there comes a point when one has so many of those that one just doesn’t have room for any more, let alone need any.

Turnbull & Asser New & Lingwood

Unquestionably the most traumatic experience of 2011 was a summer visit to New & Lingwood, who have been supplying shirts to the male members of my family since (at least) the 1930s. They have recently started ‘branding’ the mother-of-pearl buttons on their shirts—effectively turning their customers into sandwich men—and in the process appear to have recruited some absurdly young salesmen who seem to think making this outrageous change is cool. I was thus compelled to cross the road to Turnbull & Asser, which my father regarded as rather flashy, but which has maintained traditional Jermyn Street standards unchanged.

Kikoy

While visiting Kenya last summer I bought a stock of comfortable, super-trendy and elegant sarongs from Kikoy. Wearing them them for luncheon in New York or Paris will probably not be simple (London is not a problem), but I’d definitely recommend giving them a try.

Thresher & Glenny

My tailor, Mr Deone, has now retired, and the City branch where I had my habits has closed—a victim of the financial crisis. But the firm is still doing strong. A welcome spot of stability in an ocean of change.

Converse

If I had a valet, I’d ask him to wear them for the first couple of years (a tip given to my father by the late Duke of Norfolk—for suits, of course, not for plimsolls): I simply can’t bear them when they’re new and end up wearing ones with holes in them.

Cassina

I’ve recently become totally addicted to this wonderful Italian furniture. It really sets off my Apple stuff to the best possible advantage.

1. Just for the record, the reason I don’t buy the admittedly very hyped-up iAWriter is that the developer refuses to enable spelling suggestions in it. He does this, apparently, in the name of providing a pure minimalist experience. But any ism taken to extremes is just plain silly.
2. Syncing of Google Contacts has actually finally improved last year, at long last segmenting names into prefix, first, middle, last and suffix—so my previous objection to using it has vanished, but there still doesn’t seem any good reason for ditching iCloud for this now that it’s free.

We launch about 500 changes to search a year, more than a change a day. So if you look at search like a complicated machine, like a giant jumbo jet—although it's probably, in some ways, more complex than that - this is sort of like changing the engines in flight before you land.

It's been fashionable dissing Google recently. Their search has actually been getting massively better since I pinpointed a low point last year. This must-read article explains why.

★

It only took a couple of minutes before I’d installed it and another ten before Mail App for the iPhone was archived in my ‘undeletable Apple apps’ folder and Sparrow had taken its place in my dock.

I’ll start of right away by saying that Sparrow for iPhone only has one major drawback. It’s a major one, but it isn’t at all the Sparrow team’s fault. It doesn’t do push notifications. To find out why, I’ll simply quote their press release on the subject which couldn’t put things more clearly or concisely:

There are 2 ways to deliver notifications on an iOS application:

• On our side: if Sparrow was to do Push today, we would have to store your credentials (login/password) on our servers to frequently poll your accounts, and send you notifications.

  This is a responsibility we’re not ready to take. As a startup focused on iOS/OS X development, we do not have the skills to secure your data on our servers and we do not want to put sensitive information at risk. That’s why Sparrow iPhone 1.0 doesn’t do push.

• Directly from your mail provider: on Sparrow for Mac, your credentials are secure because we communicate directly with your mail provider via SSL.

The difference between the Mac and the iPhone is the Mac version is awake at all times. On the iPhone, iOS systematically suspends all apps activity after 10 minutes maximum making it impossible to send you notifications.

However, Apple provides an API that allows an app to be woken up in case of a network event meaning it is virtually connected at all times like Sparrow on the Mac. For example, VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) apps take advantages of this specific API so you can receive calls even when the app isn’t opened.

This solution is the most secure because Sparrow iPhone will be directly communicating with your mail providers via secured protocols.

We submitted a first version of Sparrow iPhone using this API but it was rejected.

Leaving that aside until it’s solved (and in the mean time, all you need to do is leave your email settings untouched in Mail App (which you will have to do anyway, see below), and you will get notifications from Mail App, which you can then follow up in Sparrow. I did the same using the Tweetbot notifications for Twitter when Twittelator Neue did not have them yet. Bar this issue, my initial impression is that, as I expected, the app is going to be a sensational success and is massively better than Mail for the iPhone. You won’t, however, be able to do without Mail App completely. It remains the default email client on your phone, so it will always be opened (as is the desktop Mail App in similar situations) when you need to send email from an external app—e.g., when you want to send a photo from your photo stream. But that doesn't necessarily happen very often, and the iPhone Mail App is not as bloated as its desktop cousin.

It presents you with a simplified unified account with all your main folders. For Gmail users this means an immediate improvement over Mail App as you can quickly move between folders, especially the crucial All Mail folder in which all your archived email resides.

Archiving email once you’ve read it is a snap, as it is on the desktop version. My only (minor) gripe is that, on the iPhone, you don’t have the option to apply a label (I use ‘hold’ for anything I don’t want to or can’t deal with right away but needs to be followed up and thus stored separately from anything I don’t need to see again).

As in the desktop version, Sparrow provides a powerful and effective search function, something Apple for some reason has signally failed to come up with.

Those are my first impressions, but I haven’t ever felt so positive about an iPhone app: this comes as close to perfection as I believe was possible, especially in a field (email) which comes with quite a steep technical learning curve and in which the competition—especially Google with their laughably bad attempt at an iPhone Gmail client—have all failed. If you want to discover the app before purchasing it, there’s an excellent interactive demo on the Sparrow website.

Basically, Dominique and his colleagues have just made Mail for the iPhone obsolete.

The difficulty of maintaining several stylesheets at once

Until now I hadn’t invested much thought in the tools I used for writing and maintaining my code: I did switch from a Textmate/Transmit combo to the all-purpose Coda a couple of years ago, and last year complemented this with Espresso as a way of testing CSS before it went into production. But the current spate of frequent design revamps has put strain on this carefree approach, essentially because I have been maintaining three separate stylesheets for (i) the home page, (ii) the contact form and (iii) posts and pages: there wasn’t that much overlap between these three stylesheets, so it made sense to keep them separate and small—but this came at the cost of considerable pain whenever new versions were required. Ensuring the three stylesheets were consistent ended up wasting so much of my time I spent some time looking into ways of getting the job done more efficiently.

The tech sector isn’t lacking in imagination, and quite a large number of new tools have emerged in the past few months to make code editing and maintenance more efficient. The ones I’m actually using include the following:

• html5boilerplate;
• Modernizr;
• OOCSS.

What CSS preprocessors can do

Reading about the latter, in particular, set me thinking about ways of making my CSS leaner and more future proof. Essentially this meant making the static content in my stylesheets dynamic, so that the process of drafting, storing and updating them could be made automatic and consistent: and the solution was to switch to using a CSS preprocessor ^[i] with this exact purpose. My objective was pretty well summed up by Aaron Ackerman on his blog NittygrittyJS:

CSS preprocessors are starting to become more apparent to a lot of developers. The point of them is to write less source code that maps to greater source code, but is hopefully more readable, understandable and programmatic. For example grid layout are very easy when a preprocessor can divide a full content width into a number of columns. Using variables can help keep colors consistent by always referencing a number of preset variables. Using mixins can prevent us from having to rewrite code and letting the preprocessor do it for us. Preprocessor are simply reaching for what CSS should already do. There have been proposals for this to happen in CSS but the indecision for the CSSWG has slowed this down considerably. But why not use some form of it now? We can use a preprocessor syntax can compile to CSS that works today.

LESS or SASS?

When Alexis Sellier’s LESS, was launched I had taken a close look at it, liked it but, doubtless through sheer apathy, never got round to using it. I eventually got kicked into action a couple of weeks ago, after reading a rather thoughtful post by Ken Collins, who makes a forceful case for SASS and Compass over LESS:

I want to treat CSS as a language and use features like loops, lists and custom functions.

Smashing Magazine published a rather good comparison by Jeremy Hixon, An Introduction to LESS, and Comparison to SASS, which decided me in favour of SASS as being the easiest way to migrate my existing CSS, into which I’d already put a lot of effort, to the discipline of a preprocessor.

The reasons for using Compass

I chose to apply SASS using Compass, an open-source CSS authoring framework: it comes with a number of built-in modules that you can choose to include in your build, or you can build your own if preferred. I decided to install Compass.app, a powerful yet unobtrusive menubar utility meticulously developed and maintained by Handlino for Sass and Compass that helps designers compile stylesheets easily without resorting to command line interface. Compass.app brings support for two additional design frameworks, 960 Grid and html5boilerplate, in addition to Compass’s built-in extensions, Blueprint and Compass ^[ii]

Compass will set up a directory structure corresponding to the type of project you’re building (960 Grid, html5boilerplate, etc.) and you can then work from those files—in which you’ll be able to use the powerful SASS markup—to achieve the desired stylesheet while keeping control of it.

Fine-tuning your code with partials

To make the most of Compass, I found it best to divide up my stylesheet into ‘partials’, prefixed by an underscore and stored in a separate partials folder. Each partial file can be made up of styles fitting a pattern. My current list looks as follows:

• _author-reset.scss
• _banner.scss
• _base.scss
• _basic-reset.scss
• _contact.scss
• _fonts.scss
• _helpers.scss
• _home.scss
• _media.scss
• _mixins.scss
• _overrides.scss
• _primary-styles.scss
• _search-box.scss
• _sidebar.scss
• _single.scss
• _sitewide-styles.scss
• _style.scss ^[iii]

The Compass client will continually ‘watch’ the folder in which you’re working for any changes to any of your .scss files. Whenever you save them, it will update your actual .css files, which are stored in a separate folder:

If a bug finds its way into your scss files, it’ll never get into your css: SASS will flag them when you save the file, and Compass.app will display a warning message, usually explaining what you got wrong. This is an incredibly useful feature.

SASS’s most powerful features turn it, effectively, into a dynamic language

SASS is incredibly powerful and there’s almost no limit to what you can make it do dynamically to your css. I made most leverage of two features: variables and conditional statements.

Variables

In my _base.scss, I created a wide range of variables, effectively allowing me to update my css by just applying the change to a single item—with SASS and Compass then doing the hard job of meticulously impacting each selector in all my style sheets accordingly, if required:

The variables stored in my _base.scss file include:

• paths for the CDN and image folder;
• the main site proportions and sizes (body width, page width, etc.);
• variables for each colour used, where possible expressed in relation to one another;
• colour definitions for any text not in the default body text colour;
• font sizes and definitions;
• data urls.

Conditional statements

Possibly the most powerful feature of SASS is its ability to follow conditional statements.

In SASS, after the @if keyword, we can put a statement that will be evaluated as either true or false. If the statement is true, whatever is inside the following declaration block will be executed. I made extensive use of this to turn the stylesheets into, effectively, a dynamic code component in much the same way as PHP.

First, I declared three different values in each of my scss files for a variable called $stylesheet-type: basic, contact and home. For instance the content of the home.css file was as follows:

/* Define the stylesheet as the home page sheet */
$stylesheet-type: "home";
/* Include all the content of the _style.scss file after processing */
@import "partials/style.scss";

I then scanned my scss partials, marking up (a Textexpander shortcut made it painless) code according to whether it was required in one, two or three of my css style sheets, like this:

// < - - - - ONLY INCLUDED IN STYLE.CSS

@if $stylesheet-type == basic {

    /* Any styles appearing here will only be included in style.css */

}

// [END] < - - - - ONLY INCLUDED IN STYLE.CSS

// < - - - - NOT INCLUDED IN HOME.CSS

@if $stylesheet-type != home {

    /* Any styles appearing here will ONLY be included in style.css and contact.css */

}

// [END] < - - - - NOT INCLUDED IN HOME.CSS

In this way, once I’ve applied any changes I need to the variables, added, removed or amended selectors in my partials files, the mere click of a button will result in Compass.app compiling three perfectly-drafted stylesheets,one for each scss file in the project. Compass.app can be set to output CSS in compressed, compact, extended or nested format, depending on taste. I personally like to put them in production compressed, since the process of drafting and editing them is so heavily automated that this involves no extra work or risk at all. I find that I’m now able to work on new projects much faster than I did before. It’s fair to say that using SASS and Compass has radically changed the way I organise my life.

Bibliography

• Hampton Catlin and Michael Lintorn Catlin, Pragmatic Guide to Sass, The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 128 pages, December 116th, 2011, ISBN: 978-1-93435-684-5
• Sass (Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets): The Sass reference is the most complete documentation for Sass. It contains information on every language feature, all the options, and how to install it as a Rails plugin.
• Wynn Netherland, Nathan Weizenbaum and Chris Eppstein, Sass and Compass in Action, Manning Early Access Program, 300 pages, Began: April 2011, Softbound print: May 2012 (est.), ISBN: 9781617290145
• Jeremy Hixon, An Introduction To LESS, And Comparison To Sass, Smashing Magazine, September 9th, 2011

1. This article by NetTuts gives the clearest possible definition of what a CSS preprocessor is and what the various options on offer are.
2. You can also add your own additional third-party extensions to Compass.app if desired.
3. _style.scss (with an underscore) is different from style.scss (without an underscore), since partials, unlike full scss files, are only used as feeders for full SASS files and will not be compiled into css files.

I like trying pretty much everything when it first launches, so I installed Readability clients on my iPad and iPhone and created an account with them. And since I happen to be a publisher (of this blog), I thought I'd also register as a publisher—not that I was expecting this to make me instantly rich: publisher accounts, which started last year, have been reported to earn their holders as little as one dollar a month.

It then turned out, rather curiously, that you can't. In fact, I couldn't log in to my brand new Readability at all ^[i]. Grumbling about the issue on Twitter brought an immediate response from Readability support:

To their credit, Readability support reset my account credentials to reader (you can't do this out of the box) within less than twenty-four hours, and I was able to log into both my iOS accounts (though I had to delete them and carry out a fresh reinstall for this). My publisher account, alas, is now no more as I can't really fathom the idea of having to maintain two separate accounts for the same service.

I use Reeder for all my online reading—one of the reasons I like it being that it has built-in support for sharing anything you've read on pretty much any link sharing or storage service under the sun, Readability having been on the list, from day one. Sharing worked with Reeder for iPhone (though not, Reeder's developer may care to know, with the iPad version). But once that content was in my Readability account, there wasn't a lot I could do with it, other that read it, archive it and share it on Twitter or—you guessed it—Facebook:

By contrast, here are the options I'm presented with when I want to share content on Instapaper:

Because of Instapaper's built-in 'like' feature, I can also control seamlessly which of my links I want to share with my social network contacts who are also users Instapaper users. This really clever feature works in the background, out of the box, and my only grippe about it is that it isn't more widely known and is thus rather under-used.

The ability to store links in folders, and the wider range of sharing options, mean there's no reason other than the admittedly beautiful interface (it's already seduced Justin Blanton) for switching. And the interface aspect rather neatly brings me to my third point, which is what one should feel about Readability when one goes beyond the interface and looks beneath the bonnet.

Joe Clark, a Toronto-based tech blogger, yesterday posted a rather thoughtful article that actually goes beyond the scope of this short review, provocatively titled 'Hot new iPhone apps by irresponsible developers':

Nº 1 with a bullet: Readability. You can’t actually read with Readability, since most icons are unlabelled, you can’t switch fonts, and none of the navigation gestures, all nonstandard, actually work. Plus each article page secretly holds a plethora of hidden buttons that VoiceOver errantly reads out. Skill-testing question: Who was the developer on this one? (UPDATE: I filed a bug and got a form-letter response).

While he focuses on the fact that Readability fails under Voiceover (which, to be frank, most people haven't even heard of), he effectively makes a wider point: the app was designed first and foremost with an aim to be as pleasing to the eye as possible, to the detriment of real usability ^[ii]. Not labeling icons, is just sloppy. And I couldn't help wondering whether the bugs I encountered when signing in, which went beyond the fact that I was using an 'incompatible' publisher account.

None of the above negatives is irrevocable: Readability support is clearly attentive to user comments, so it could easily fix the broken code, add new sharing service, etc. But the wider point here is the bizarre trend towards superficially attractive apps that attract raving reviews from the likes of, say, Robert Scoble, and yet haven't been thought out to be easy and powerful to use: the list includes of the recent successes, starting with the much-hyped Clear. For the time being therefore, I reserve judgment and will be sticking with Instapaper.

1. If you try to log in with a publisher account on the iOD apps, the application hangs: no error message, you're just left wondering what went wrong.
2. Joe Clark followed this post up with a further look at Readability, 'When Readability harms readability', which makes further rather damning points.

Let's face it: Twitter doesn't let you hyperlink text, it doesn't thread conversations and, despite a redesign late last year, it still doesn't showcase video and photos as well as, say, that 845 million member social network that's about to go public. And Mike Brown, director of corporate development at Twitter, thinks its time for the microblogging service to drop its "command line" style in favor of something more contemporary.

(Dave Copeland, 'Twitter Executive Says Site's Interface Needs An Overhaul', Read Write Web, March 6, 2012)

Amazing how many people, even—especially—tech journalists, have been getting it wrong. Twitter and Facebook aren't targeting the same audience. What made Twitter so phenomenally successful was a combination of two things:

• the 140-character limit means you have to focus on concision, meaning your audience can quickly get the point you want to get across;

• the text-only approach means it's easy to tweet anything, anywhere—increasingly directly form your mobile phone.

Trying—and necessarily failing—to ape Facebook's 'entertainment for the masses' approach, admittedly more successful if sheer number are what you're concerned with, would set Twitter on a sure course for failure.

★

When you’ve reached the point where you feel you need to use two task management apps, the likelihood is neither is completely meeting your needs. I can see why Ben Brooks got frustrated with Omnifocus: it’s a powerful app that not only has a steep learning curve, but also remains maddeningly complicated even at the best of times. Task management is meant to help you get things done, not become an additional daily challenge, which is what Omnifocus has never ceased being for me.

I’ve been using to-do apps (also known as GTD apps) since my University days—so the list of all the solutions I’ve tried over the years would be huge ^[i]. To-dos of course fall within the category of actions that (in contrast to, say, word processors or coding apps) don’t carry a major barrier to entry: in other words, it’s trivial to switch from one app to another—just install, add your current tasks, learn the basics of managing them and you’re set to go. Just going back over the past four years, I’ve used three GTD apps. I started off with Remember The Milk, probably the ‘purest’ GTD player available—it’s also the cheapest by far and in my view has the best-designed iPhone client, but the fact it doesn’t have an official desktop app, instead relying on a web interface eventually made me give up on it.

Leaving Clear and Remember The Milk aside, let’s focus on a comparison between Omnifocus and Things. After trying both for an extended period of time, I’d say they’re both excellent, but whether they suit you will depend on your personality: in effect, whether you’re methodical and good at keeping deadlines (which I’m not) or apt to shift them constantly (which I am, unfortunately).

Omnifocus: the best solution if you’re methodical and good at sticking to deadlines

Of the GTD apps I’ve used, Omnifocus, though easily the most expensive (the Mac desktop app costs $79, the iPad app $39 and the iPhone one $19) is the one with which I’ve spent most time. It offers more scope for customisation than any other, and it strictly conforms with GTD standards: you can organise your tasks in any combination of projects and contexts, complete subsets sequentially or concurrently, and use incredibly intricate ‘inspectors’ to set every possible detail about them, including due dates, start dates, reminder parameters, etc.

Omnifocus’s best feature—which goes some way to hiding its complexity when appropriate—is Perspectives, a customisable display setting of which you can any number you like, showing only the items you need to view in a particular situation (e.g., ‘Supermarket’ or ‘Wishlist’ or whatever).

While this degree of control is well suited to people able to keep on top of the routine they’ve set themselves, that’s simply not the way other people work. I found myself constantly needing to reschedule tasks or change their context—meaning I constantly needed to open the inspector window and shift between its various panes to access the setting I needed, all just for the sake of updating one task.

When I started using Omnifocus, I was partly kidding myself into thinking that by forcing me to be methodical, this app would somehow change the way my mind focused on tasks and stick to whatever path I’d mapped out for my routine in it. Instead what happened was the Omnifocus rapidly got cluttered up with overdue tasks—and the sheer complexity of shifting due dates and contexts around meant I opened the app less and less often and ended up using it only for shopping lists—ironically, something for which Clear would have been quite adequate.

Two other things annoyed me with Omnifocus.

Firstly, its ugly design: the app was never a beauty to start with, and is beginning to show its age. You can apply custom themes, but they don’t do anything to clear the cluttered interface which is the main issue here. The team at Omnifocus has a bizarre approach to this: why have three different icons for the Mac, iPhone and iPad apps, when visual unity would make far more sense?

The second issue I had with Omnifocus was how bad its sync was. It’s unbelievably slow and unreliable: the iPhone app kept nagging me for my password every time a reminder popped up, although I have to say Ken Case, the Omni group CEO, made every effort to help out—even tweeting a few days later to check whether the issue was still bothering me, something I’ve never seen another app’s developer bothering to do—but unfortunately, the problem kept coming back and was never solved.

Things is ideal for people who constantly need to reschedule tasks

Things, in many ways, is the exact opposite to Omnifocus.

To start with, its interface is stark to the point of being bare, it allows you complete flexibility either to stick with the strict rules of GTD—which have become almost a religion for some people—or to adopt your own, more flexible approach: rather than forcing you to store tasks in contexts and projects, you can apply tags to them—as many as you like, or none. In effect, this means you can combine the power of Omnifocus with the simplicity of Clear.

I chose to take a hint from Sven Fechner—ironically an Omnifocus evangelist:

Based on this reasoning and the day-to-day experience we have, it seems no longer the best setup to have contexts such as email, computer, web and so forth. It is time to find a new way to organise tasks, a way that reflects our most precious resources: time & attention.

Herr Fechner’s suggestion to ditch the old ‘contexts’ (such as ‘Mac’, ‘phone’ etc.) is far easier to apply in Things—where you can combine any number of tags: mine combine the traditional ones (‘errands’, ‘online’, ‘calls’) with the newer ones (‘>15min’, ‘>1hour’, ‘tired’, ‘focused’, ‘thinking’): and unlike Omnifocus, Things doesn’t make this an either-or solution: I can choose to apply any combination of these tags or not to bother if they aren’t needed.

The tags lie at the top of the app window: clicking on one will display any items associated with it and hide the rest.

Things is also incredibly beautiful. It’s one of the best-looking apps I’ve seen and its style is carefully reflected in all three versions of the app: Mac, iPhone and iPad.

Things’s best feature—at least for scatterbrains such as me—is how easy it makes it to shift your tasks around: you store them in one of four sections: Today, Next, Scheduled and Someday. Anything that fits within a recurring theme can additionally and optionally be added to an ‘Area of responsibility’—which I find is just as powerful and easier to set up than Omnifocus’s Perspectives ^[ii]. Any list of tasks that belongs together can be grouped in a ‘Project’—and all these types of entry can be combined at will.

The Today view will display anything that needs your attention—but if you change your mind and want to postpone it, the apps goes out of its way to make it easy to move: no need to open a complicated inspector. I found this fitted the way I actually run my life—I found Things didn’t make me waste time thinking about my scheduled tasks or feeling guilty about rescheduling.

This combination of power and simplicity has remained a well-kept secret since Things launched in 2009, for one reason and one reason only—but it was a deal-breaker for me and many others: Things could only sync across a wifi network, making it utterly useless. Incomprehensibly, it took the developers three years to bring the feature into public beta, and the Cultured Code forums are rife with users loudly complaining about the issue. The Things beta has solved this and while participation in the beta means I’ve agreed not to share any details about it, I think I can say the sync is superb: all three clients are updated instantly whenever they are in focus, with probably about one twentieth of the lag that characterizes Omnifocus.

Like with Omnifocus, you can link Things to reminders you’ve set in your iPhone using Siri (though, annoyingly, they’ll initially show up, again instantly, only in the Mac app inbox, not the iOS clients, so you’ll need to store them in one of your Things focus areas for them to appear in the mobile apps).

After using Things for about three weeks, I find I’m not missing Omnifocus at all: far from needing the extra power, I found it actually inhibited me from doing stuff, and I’ve actually become more productive now that I’m using a GTD app that more accurately reflects the way I function. That doesn’t mean Things is necessarily for you if, unlike me, you’re well organised and methodical.

1. In fact, the GTD app I’ve used for longest, over the years, was actually the dreaded Microsoft Outlook, something I’m actually rather embarrassed to admit now, though for the time it was actually not all that bad.
2. I set up seven areas of responsibility: correspondence, supermarket, appointments, wish list, blog posts, online maintenance and payments.

Until now, all the services Google has offered have been linked to one’s Google username and necessarily tied to a Google account—the ‘you’ component in the you@gmail.com mail address that always goes with your account and is used to sign in to any Google service. This resulted in pretty massive privacy issues when Google launched Buzz where, among other problems, your gmail address could be deduced from your Buzz username.

[…]

The danger in creating an instant social network around email contacts, as Google Buzz does with Gmail, is that the boundaries between what is private and what is public are not always clear.

Whereas in Facebook your username is not in any way tied to your login credentials (which are always an email address, and can’t be a you@facebook.com address), Google+ is now stuck with an unworkable system, in which most user names have already been taken and many are actually dormant ^[i].

As a result, a lot of hacks sprang up to set up an easier to remember URL, my favourite being the htaccess redirect one.

By looking this morning at the source code for a Google employee's personal website, I noticed he included a rel=me link to a http://profiles.google.com/[his name], in which the last part of the URL was actually the same as the first part of his Gmail account: when I tried out that URL in a browser, I was redirected to his Google+ profile. I then tried seeing what happened when I substituted my Google account (the one tied to my Google+ profile) for his—and, sure enough, I got redirected to my own Google+ profile

In other words, although Google doesn't advertise the fact—probably to save itself embarrassment—if you're happy about sharing your Gmail address, you actually have had a Google+ vanity URL all along, though with the crucial twin drawbacks that (1) it exposes your privacy in a way you may not like and (2) you still can't change it to something other than your Gmail address.

1. kevinrose@gmail.com, for instance, isn’t available, although one can hope that its existing owner is the ‘real’ Mr Rose and not a less illustrious namesake: thus if another Kevin Rose has once signed up for a Gmail accounts, years ago, and he hasn’t used it since, our Kevin Rose won’t be able to use that username with a hypothetical Google+ vanity URL, until Google throw in the towel and finally give up tying user names to Gmail login credentials.