So this is my workflow for blogging from Craft at the moment. It is fine, but I’m eager to write an extension that does this automatically, maybe with post formats and image uploads too.
2021.12.21.
I should try to create a Craft extension to post stuff here directly. They have some examples which can post to Medium or Ghost, no WordPress though… Although the best would be to have real-time sync of an outline, something similar to Dave Winer’s workflow. I almost automated this for OmniOutliner once before.
Reply to hheJhsbjkJb8hhsj:
I’ve never understood why people use high/low energy contexts. For myself, what constitutes a high energy task can change from day to day. Some days I’m in the mood for creative work like mindmapping and brainstorming, and digging into financial spreadsheets can seem like heavy work. Other days Im in the mood for procedural work and creative thinking requires more brain power.
Me neither.
I don’t even understand how you can get an objective filter on being in a “high level” or “low level” state. It’s too black and white, I usually somewhere in the middle.
When I feel tired, I don’t even remember that I use GTD and have a menu of options to pick something from. Even when I do remember to review appropriate context lists, I don’t start to think about energy levels. I’m tired, I just naturally pick something easy from my Computer or my Home list, or just don’t give a damn and watch something from my Read/Watch list (or start scrolling RSS/Twitter/Reddit)
2021.12.10.
11 of my favourite tips for Safari
- If you have bookmarks on the Favourites Bar, you can quickly open one by pressing
⌥⌘-1 through⌥⌘-9 where the number corresponds to the number of the bookmark. - You can do the same thing for tabs by pressing
⌘-1 through⌘-9 and Safari will switch to the corresponding tab. - If you do a Google search and go deep into a result, you can pick Search Results SnapBack from the History menu which instatly goes back to your Google results.
- You can reopen your recently closed tabs by long-pressing on the plus button in the top right.
- If you quickly want to switch to a different tab from your keyboard, you can go into the Address Bar with
⌘L and then type the title of the desired tab. Safari will show you search results in the Switch to Tab section. This even works across tab groups and iCloud Tabs. - If you search for a video on YouTube, Safari will remember that. Next time you can type “youtube whatever you want to search for” into the Address Bar, and Safari will give you an option to search YouTube directly. This works with a bunch of websites, like Amazon, Wikipedia (with autocomplete) DuckDuckGo (with autocomplete).
- You can quickly switch your default search engine by going into the Address Bar, pressing
Space , then picking another search engine from the list. - If you want to keep and eye on a long-running download, open the Downloads popover from the toolbar, then detach it by dragging the popover off the main window. This will keep the Downloads window open until you close it or quit Safari.
- To disable auto-play on a website (like YouTube), go to the site, Control-click on the Address Bar and pick “Settings for website.com”. This will bring up a popover, where you can disable auto-play for videos.
- In the same popover, you can turn on “Use Reader when Available”, which will automatically bring up the Reader view on the website when you open an article. Useful for cluttered news sites.
- If you regularly want to quickly open the current tab in Chrome or Firefox, you can enable the Develop menu in the Advanced preferences, which will give you an option to “Open Page With” any browser installed on your Mac.
2021.11.16.
Always show proxy icons in macOS Monterey
You can choose to always show proxy icons in Accessibility preferences.
2021.10.28.
Using Shortcuts to remind me to charge my iPhone
I ran into the issue a couple of times where my iPhone ran out of battery, and I forgot to charge it. In the morning, it was completely dead when I needed it.
To avoid this problem, I created two Shortcuts automation, which makes sure that I won’t forget to charge my iPhone.
When my iPhone battery is below 15%, Shortcuts creates a new reminder 5 minutes into the future to remind me to charge my phone.
When I’m sitting at my Mac, Reminders will ping me to charge my iPhone. I can grab my phone and plug it in.
The other automation runs when I plug my phone in. It finds all reminders created by the previous automation and marks them as completed.
This automated reminder requires no work from my side, but it saved my bacon a couple of times.
2021.10.27.
Apparently, you can change the mouse pointer’s color and outline in macOS Monterey. Go to System Preferences/Accessibility/Display/Pointer and pick your colors.
2021.08.14.
Where to go after 1Password 8?
After this week’s news on 1Password forcing users to the crappy experience of being an Electron app, I started to look for alternatives. I haven’t decided yet, but I’m considering the following options.
- Elpass: subscription-based, native iOS and macOS apps, looks good.
- Secrets: one-time payment, native iOS, and macOS apps, also look good.
- iCloud Keychain: free, built-in to iOS and macOS; also, it will have a couple of new features this autumn, like two-factor authentication.
- Update on 2021-08-14: Minimalist: I got this recommended in the comments, looks pretty cool as well.
I’m leaning toward iCloud Keychain because, nowadays, I like to use the built-in tools of the Apple ecosystem.
The only question I have with iCloud Keychain is where to store passwords of my servers and a couple of app licenses? I think the built-in Keychain app on macOS will be OK for this. It can store arbitrary username/password pairs (great for servers), and it has secure notes which can hold the small number of serial numbers I have.
Right now, the next step is to clean out my old passwords from my 1Password and iCloud Keychain databases before starting the migration process.
2021.08.07.
Just to have a different opinion about Safari’s new compact tab-style: I like them.
Testing app subscriptions on the long-term
Many people don’t like app subscriptions, but it provides a way to test these apps long-term.
When I see a potential tool that I’ll likely use long-term, after the initial trial, I subscribe to its monthly plan, and I keep testing it for 2-4 months. While the initial testing phase is happening, I create a new category in my budget and save money for the yearly subscription plan. Usually, annual subscriptions are cheaper than paying every month for a year, so it makes sense to subscribe to them with an app that I will use for a long time.
When I conclude my testing and decide that I’m going to use the app, I’ll have the yearly subscription price already collected in my budget. This way, I can switch my monthly subscription to the annual plan without any problem. I also keep saving money each month for next year’s payment. I use YNAB for keeping a budget which makes this process easier with its Targets feature.
If I decide that I’m not going to use the app, I cancel my monthly subscription, and I move the money I saved for the yearly plan into a different budget category.
By using this system, although I’m going to pay more for the subscription in the first 2-4 months during the testing phase, in the long-term, I’ll save money because I’ll subscribe to apps and services that I actually use.
2021.05.10.
Weirdly, I do this “interstitial journaling” for years now, without calling it anything. Although I don’t track tasks in it, just for the current session; those get captured in my GTD system.
What I don’t do habitually yet is the mindfulness journaling aspect, which could be another excellent use for Craft in an outline format. I like how Roam formats daily notes, which can be reproduced in Craft as well, but Day One and Drafts are so much quicker for capturing quick posts. I could look into how Craft can be automated, but I kinda like that Day One stores the location, weather, and so much more enhancing my journal.
Seems like this a recurring idea of mine.
2021.05.09.
For people who say Reminders can’t scale: yes it can.
Drafts is a digital Hipster PDA
- Drafts is an app optimized for taking quick notes and sending them to other places instead of storing them in the long term.
- Each Drafts note has a unique ID which can be understood as a digital index card linkable from anywhere.
- These notes are temporary, so I’m not keeping them in the system. After I processed one, it can be thrown away.
- Notes in Drafts don’t need much organization; everything is on a simple list. When I’m done with a note, it can be trashed or archived.
2021.05.05.
Donald Trump’s ‘social media platform’ has launched and it’s just a blog
The new “platform” is styled like a generic version of Twitter but hosted as a running blog of commentary from Trump. People can sign up for post alerts on the platform through their email and phone numbers and are allegedly able to like them, although that function doesn’t appear to work as of publication. Users are also allowed to share Trump’s posts on Facebook and Twitter. The Twitter sharing option doesn’t currently work, but Facebook’s does allow people to share Trump’s posts.
I don’t like Trump, but the good thing is that everybody can have a blog.
2021.05.04.
Think with paper and store conclusions digitally
- There is quite a big difference between paper and digital tools, but they can complement each other nicely.
- You can use paper to get an order in random ideas by doing doodles, wireframes, mindmaps, diagrams, or what have you. Because of its tactile feel and freeform nature, paper is a better tool for organizing your thoughts.
- Digital tools make information easier to search, so they are great to store the results of your thinking that you unraveled using paper.
- Unlike paper, digital tools are rigid, so they are not the most optimal way to support thinking.
- Unlike paper, digital tools are rigid, so they are not the most optimal way to support thinking.
I started to mess around with a new Keychron keyboard.
2021.05.01.
Finally got our first dose of vaccine (Pfizer-BioNTech) today with my wife.
2021.04.13.
Apparently you can safely use Typinator with iCloud Drive as well. I’m syncing snippets for about a year now without any issues.
Posting status updates from Craft
I’m tinkering with Craft, using it as a daily running journal. The outline-like logging format grouped by dates feels natural because I can write things out without much organization. The freeform nature of Craft makes this process relatively quick and easy.
It just occurred to me that I could also publish posts started as a block in my journal. I started writing this post’s idea, then turned it into a subpage inline and fleshed out more; finally, it was published via Ulysses.
Having this freeform block-level editing in Craft makes it an all-in-one tool for drafting out ideas into whatever I want.
2021.03.16.
Sequential projects
Here’s a couple of things regarding sequential projects:
- Keep future actions in your project support. You don’t want to keep them in your head. It feels nice when you can open an outline or a mindmap (or whatever), and you can effortlessly add the next action on the project.
- Get into the habit of capturing. When you complete one next action, you should grab the next one into your inbox since some part of your world changed. You have new information that you should pay attention to.
- Weekly reviews are the safety net for still need to capture things.
I know some apps like OmniFocus let you add future actions that magically pop up in your next actions lists when you complete a previous one, but they do more harm than help. Almost every time, the next step needs processing anyway, so these subsequent half-baked actions that you add in advance are going to create less trust in your next actions lists.
2021.02.26.
The readability of GTD list managers
Three was a topic I saw a couple of days ago on /gtd, where redditors discussed which GTD app is the most good looking. It reminded me of a problem I wanted to write about for a while now: their list design’s readability. I know OmniFocus, Things, and Reminders well, so I concluded my experience about their typography below:
A lot of people would say it’s Things. It has a friendly UI, but from a readability point of view, it is one of the worst.
In my daily work, I have two problems with Things:
- It only displays one line per task, which means, if you have longer task titles, you’ll end with a bunch of text clipped out, which is annoying on an iPhone. You have to open each task to see the full title, which is no fun when you quickly want to review your errands list.
- Things displays every task list grouped by project. If you like me, you’ll usually have one next action per project, so having each project being this prominent is making your lists very noisy.
I stopped using Things because of these issues, and I switched back to OmniFocus, which displays full task titles, and has nicer list readability overall. Apple Reminder is also good at showing lists, which matters the most at the end, so I would go with OmniFocus and Reminders.
Let’s see these apps next to each other. From left to right are OmniFocus, Reminders, and Things.
As you can see, Things overflows the text and group actions by projects which makes the readability of a typical next actions list much worse. It was the main reason I left Things after using it for two years and switched back to OmniFocus.
I also made a switch from OmniFocus to Reminders in December, but that’s a topic of another post.
2021.02.25.
Remote work is not local work at a distance
Jason Fried wrote a post about doing remote work, with the expectations of local employment. This post resonated with me very well since I had a couple of weird interviews lately. Just a side note: yes, I quit my current job as a Ruby backend developer at TerraCycle about three weeks ago, and I’ll start working as a frontend developer/product designer at Nearcut on March 10th.
There are still companies that refuse to accept that remote work is a viable alternative. They want you to be in the office because “this is what we did before the pandemic, and everything should be back to normal soon.” No, nothing will be like before, and companies should embrace that, not deny it.
Not everyone’s like that. Even big ones consider remote work a viable alternative but don’t have the hiring process and experience to work like that, so they’re relying on old habits.
The enlightened companies coming out of this pandemic will be the ones that figured out the right way to work remotely. They’ll have stopped trying to make remote look like local. They’ll have discovered that remote work means more autonomy, more trust, more uninterrupted stretches of time, smaller teams, more independent, concurrent work (and less dependent, sequenced work).
I’m interested in what COVID-19 will do to remote work because, seriously considering remote work is one of the positive changes of the pandemic that happened in many workplaces. People were forced to work from home. Many companies figured out how to do this successfully, and they don’t want to throw out this knowledge because “everything will be back to normal.”
Jason also writes about native platforms:
Porting things between platforms is common, especially when the new thing is truly brand new (or trying to gain traction). As the Mac gained steam in the late 80s and early 90s, and Windows 3 came out in 1990, a large numbers of Windows/PC developers began to port their software to the Mac. They didn’t write Mac software, they ported Windows software. And you could tell – it was pretty shit. It was nice to have at a time when the Mac wasn’t widely developed, but, it was clearly ported.
When something’s ported, it’s obvious. Obviously not right.
Stuff that’s ported lacks the native sensibilities of the receiving platform. It doesn’t celebrate the advantages, it only meets the lowest possible bar. Everyone knows it. Sometimes we’re simply glad to have it because it’s either that or nothing, but there’s rarely a ringing endorsement of something that’s so obviously moved from A to B without consideration for what makes B, B.
Maybe Basecamp should create a Catalyst version of HEY for Mac from their iOS app, which is quite nice, instead of having a cross-platform Electron thing on the desktop called a “native Mac app.”
2021.02.23.
HEY for World
HEY for World can be an excellent idea for those who don’t want to be bothered to set up a blog.
When I write a certain kind of email — aka a blog post — why do I have to address it to someone? Why can’t I just address my thoughts to the world? Direct to the web for anyone and everyone? Rather than define the recipients, I just write and let the recipients find me.
Although we had this before and it failed miserably.
Testing Craft for my Zettelkasten with external folders
Yesterday I installed the latest version of Craft. I waited for iCloud sync because I’m very conservative about where I sync my stuff, and Craft only had its sync server.
The update released yesterday makes it possible to add external folders from iCloud Drive or even offline folders. It is a start, although I was expecting full CloudKit sync, not just an external folder.
It still has some issues and bugs related to syncing. I migrated my Zettelkasten from DEVONthink to Craft; it has about 150 notes right now. I installed Craft on all of my devices, and I’m still experiencing sync errors.
It seems like Craft is stuck in a state where it stops updating files from the iCloud Drive folder I set as a space. I have to reload the folder every time I change something, which is annoying.
The app itself is lovely, way better to use for Zettelkastens than DEVONthink on iOS. I like the initial experience, but syncing problems doesn’t make me trust in the app. I saw the developers are responsive and fix stuff quickly, so I’m hopeful. Until then, I keep testing Craft and see how it will change my habit of writing into my Zettelkasten.
2021.02.13.
There is a topic on DEVONthink forums about how people use the app’s rating feature. I shared how and why I rate my food log in DEVONthink.
I have occasional bowel (IBD) problems, so I have to keep temporary food logs when I have flares. Logging what I ate is one thing, but getting health trends out of that log is where I use ratings on my food log entries.
This way, I can export the stuff I collected in DT and create graphs of how well I’m eating via Numbers or using the Shortcut integration in DTTG and Charty to create a widget of daily rating averages.
2021.02.07.
Getting a blog
I think I’m finally done with Twitter and social media in general. I haven’t posted or read anything there in about two months now. I just stopped checking.
I have a blog, and I can post whatever I want there while people are arguing about a company having too much control over their content. Get a blog as you did in 2005. It will be yours, and nobody can delete your stuff, only you.
2020.11.11.
The icon transformation process has started.
2020.11.10.
Small surprises of Siri Suggestions
Siri’s suggestions are starting to get better on my iPhone. Let’s see the following screenshot from yesterday.
I usually write entries to my food log via Drafts and check my sleep patterns in the Health app around noon. These recommendations are spot-on. But I love how Siri recommends Handoff as well.
I was in the middle of reviewing a next action list yesterday in OmniFocus on my iMac, and I had to leave for a couple of minutes. I grabbed my iPhone to continue, and even before starting to search for that specific next action list via Spotlight, my iPhone was already recommending what I wanted to do.
I love small UX surprises like this.
2020.11.04.
zsoltbenke.me
As I refresh my online presence with a new avatar and a new Dribbble profile, it occurred to me that I don’t have a page, which I can hand to somebody, and he/she can see what my work is all about. Not a portfolio, but a more superior page than a simple “About Me” in WordPress.
So I built one, featuring some of my work I did lately and, more importantly, the first web development tutorial I promised a couple of months ago. I plan to extract this article into a separate mini-site just for these tutorials, but for now, it nicely complements my “About” page.
Anyway, check out my work!
2020.10.31.
I’m on Dribbble (again)
It was a long time since I posted anything on Dribbble. In the last couple of years, I did so many exciting things, but I haven’t shown them anywhere; I did show some bits and blobs on Twitter.
Since I like to think about UI interactions and building tools, I should have a platform to show the results. And Dribbble is excellent for that. So from now on, I try to post new stuff I’m working on.
Checkout my Dribbble profile →
(Feedback is always welcome.)
