Vesper Use-Case

When i first read about Vesper, the note-taking iPhone app by John Gruber, Brent Simmons and Dave Wiskus, I rankled a bit. Really? Another note-taking app? For five bucks? And no sync? 

But let's face it: I like Gruber — I like his website, I like his writing, and I like what he has to say about how digital tools work. Five clams for a notes app with no sync was almost a non-starter, but my curiosity got the best of me. If nothing else, I could test this thing out, see what all the hype was about, all the while supporting, in some small way, a guy whose site I've been reading for years. 

I've used iOS's Notes app for the bulk of my mobile note-taking, and it's mostly been great. But there's one area where I've needed some help. See, I make this webcomic called Malcontent. And I keep all my ideas for Malcontent — and, believe me, there are a ton of them — in one giant note. And, if I may be colorfully frank, this well and truly sucks major ass.

So I decided to dedicate my experiment with Vesper to this particular problem. I decided to take each and every Malcontent idea (did I mention there are a ton of them?) and transfer each to an individual, tagged note in Vesper. This is all I use Vesper for. It is my dedicated Malcontent comic idea app. And you know what? it works beautifully.

For one, Vesper is very easy to use. I can get a note down and properly tagged very quickly and intuitively. Compare to the olden days, using Notes.app, in which I'd have to scroll to the bottom of the über note, write the note, and then, without the joy of tags, promptly forget all about it until the next time I spent an hour going through the entire über note. Note taking is now far easier.

It's much more functional as well. Because now, with tags, I can find stuff really easily. I have a few basic categories that make doing this a breeze, and these are all easily accessed in Vesper's sidebar. 

Also, once I've used a comic idea, I can archive it without throwing it out. Doing this means I no longer have to look at it, but I still have it in the archive, which pleases to no end the completist in me (or maybe the pack rat). 

So far this process has been lovely. it works well and makes both storing and accessing these ideas a joy. But did I mention there's no sync?  

Now, I always have my phone with me. There's pretty much never a moment when I am phoneless these days. Maybe on a Sunday morning in the brief interim before I've transferred iPhone to jammies, but that's about it. Since Vesper is currently an iPhone-only app, sync is not a huge problem. If I need to access my Malcontent ideas, I get my phone. No biggie.

But sometimes I work on Malcontents on my iPad. And when I do, it might be nice to not have to look over at my phone for the ideas or the dialogue. It might be nice to see these things — drawings and text — all on one device. So: sync. 

As time's worn on, and as I've become more and more invested in Vesper as a creative tool, I've hoped more and more for sync. With the advent of iOS 7, Q Branch — the company behind Vesper — released an update. And when it contained no mention of sync, I started to worry a bit. 

So I was extremely pleased this morning to read on Daring Fireball that sync is the next big milestone for Vesper. Vesper has turned out to be a terrific tool for me without sync, but sync will make it even better. Mr. Gruber refuses to give an exact timeframe for the feature, and that's okay. Just knowing it's on the horizon is, frankly, good enough for me.

I'm very much looking forward to it.

Mailbox Revisited

I take it all back. 

Well, maybe not all of it, but I have found a use — a thing I love about it, even — for the popular iPhone mail client Mailbox. 

I wrote about Mailbox back in February, and not altogether flatteringly. And while I still think there are problems with the basic premise of the app, and I stand by my conclusion that it's not the be-all end-all of mail clients, I recently fired Mailbox up again and discovered something about how I access email. 

It turns out that I don't read most of it. 

You see, a huge amount of my mail is short notifications of one sort or another: someone emailing to say they're out sick, a server notifying me of a change, that sort of thing. These kinds of message can be read quickly right from the preview list of the mail client and then filed away forever. And that's something Mailbox excels at.

In the past, getting an email like this would require me to do two things: 1) open the email to mark it as read, and; 2) archive the email. But now, using Mailbox, I can do both steps in one easy swipe, because Mailbox's swipe both archives the message and marks it as read. It doesn't sound like much, but when you get a ton of this sort of email — and I certainly do — it really adds up.

I still don't really like reading longer emails, or responding to emails in Mailbox. It just feels not right somehow. Anything that requires more effort than filing away I'll do in another mail client. But for simple scanning and archiving of basic notification-type emails, Mailbox has saved me tons of time and effort.  It's now the first stop in my email management workflow.

Error Message of the Day

Well done, Filemaker. I guess this is what I get for upgrading.

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Torch Browser Bad

If you ever start seeing alerterdaemon crash logs in your Console, you've probably installed the Torch Browser at some point. Maybe you were just curious to try a browser with a media bias; maybe you wanted to see this new flavor of Chrome; maybe you'd heard it was a good way to download videos from YouTube. I don't know, and I'm not one to judge.

After seeing these logs, you get curious, you start poking about a bit more and discover that alerterdaemon lives here:
/usr/local/libexec/alerterdaemon

You Google this /usr/local/libexec/alerterdaemon and there are no results. None. Whatsoever. And now you're getting nervous.

So you start sleuthing. This daemon was modified on July 30th. What else was modified on July 30th? Well, not that much, it turns out. But there is an application in my Applications folder called Torch with that same modification date. I still have the installer, so I run it, command-i the thing and it tells me that all it installs is Torch.app in /Applications. 

I'm here to tell you, my friends, that that is an outright lie.

A find command for the date in question reveals that the Torch installer installs a veritable buttload of junk all over the filesystem. There's stuff in /Library, there's a bunch of things in your home account. Oh, it's a scene, man, a real mess. And, yes, there's even:
/usr/local/libexec/alerterdaemon

I wanted to post about this for a couple reasons. Firstly I just want to say shame on the Torch browser installer team. You provide an installer that lies about what it installs, and you provide no uninstaller. This is a terrible practice that undermines the trust of your potential users, which I count myself no longer among.

Second, I wanted there to be some search results for this alerterdaemon. There's nothing scarier than Google finding nothing. It is truly terrifying. Hopefully this post will remedy this particular instance.

Thus ends the PSA. Please resume your regular activities.

Update

A reader emailed me asking how I managed to remove all Torch-related errata. Here's what I did.

First I got the modification time of alerterdaemon:
ls -la /usr/local/libexec/alerterdaemon -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 294980 Jun 18 15:16 /usr/local/libexec/alerterdaemon

Then I did a find for everything on my boot drive that had the same modification time. You'll need to figure the number of days ago Torch was installed and enter that numer for the -mtime option. For the grep part enter the modification time pulled from ls. Finally, I specified the -x option to prevent traversing devices other than the boot drive:
sudo find -x / -name "*" -mtime 98 -ls | grep 15:16

Then I just went through and deleted everything that looked like it was part of the Torch install.

Also, here's the result of that command. This is pretty much everything I can determine that was installed by the Torch installer. Bear in mind, this is an older version, and things will likely have changed significantly in newer versions of their installer.

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Super Initial Impressions

Normally on Keynote Day I'm right there, but today was an exception. I have a perfectly nerdy excuse: SAN Installation. So I missed all of toady's Apple announcements. I've only skimmed the info on the new products, but I wanted to get down my very initial impressions.  

 Mac OS X Mavericks

The new  version of Mac OS X was announced today. The name is a little corny, but I have to admit it's catchy and it's already growing on me. Time will tell. 

Yes. I am excited about Finder Tabs.

Feature-wise, I audibly called out, "Finally!" multiple times while skimming the list. Don't get me wrong, I'm pleased as punch about a number of the new features — tags, tabs, books for Christ's sake, yes! — but really, what took you so long? Some of this stuff is great, but a little obvious and a bit of a reach. Makes it looks like Apple might be short on new ideas.

iOS 7

When Microsoft released its mobile OS a few years back I really liked the look of it: flat, simple, classy and downright minimalist. It was a terrific contrast to Apple's bouncy translucent eye candy. 

But now iOS 7 is taking a similar approach, and while the new look holds a certain appeal, I can't help feeling they borrowed the idea from Microsoft. I also worry they may have taken things a bit too far, with control screens that look more like software prototypes than actual working apps.

Does this button do anything?

Again, though, time will tell, and reading about a product is by no means the same as using it. 

MacBook Air 

Each iteration brings the Air one step closer to a product I can use. This release is no different, with solid — though hardly surprising — gains in performance.

The real story here, though, is the battery life. A very competent computer with battery life that rivals the iPad? Very cool!  

Mac Pro 

Most of today's announcements were hardly earth-shattering. But the Mac Pro is just that. 

When I first opened the page I said to myself, "Why is there a picture of a giant lens? Where's the computer?" Slowly it dawned on me: That is the computer. 

Is that the barrel of a gun? No, it's a Mac Pro.

From an industrial design standpoint, the new Mac Pro is a wonder. It's the sexiest thing Apple's released since the iPhone. It's straight up beautiful. But perhaps more important is the fact that it's geared towards professional computer users. Here you have an extremely beautiful, thoughtful, exciting product in a category most people had written off. Apple hasn't done something this exciting in this space for perhaps a decade. And I didn't think they ever would again. 

The new Mac Pro may prove me wrong.

I have yet to even look at the specs or talk to my pro user friends. But if the new Mac Pro is only a symbol, it could just be the sort of symbol pros need to take Apple seriously again. It's the first sign we've seen of Apple making something that at least looks amazing specifically for pros since Final Cut Pro X. We all know how that turned out. Or do we? 

Apple's stance on the pro market has been unclear over the past few years. The Mac Pro makes it a bit clearer. It remains to be seen what this machine's really all about. Does it have what it takes to win over pros? But it's heartening to see Apple making a real effort. Though only time will tell if it's enough. 

Either way, I can't wait to read all about it. Which is what I'll be doing for the rest of the night.

Happy Keynote, everyone!