Expanding on Syncing

TextExpanderIf I’m going to be such a persistent critic of .Mac’s anemic state, it’s only fair that I give Apple’s service its due when it does something right. Well, it’s not so much that .Mac has done so much right lately as it’s being used by third parties for the right thing.

Specifically, I’m talking about the latest version of Smile on My Mac’s TextExpander, the keyboard shortcut utility that, in the past nine months or so, I’ve become incredibly enamored of. I’ve created dozens of shortcuts for the snippets of text that I type repeatedly — fragments as small as “<a href=""></a>” or as long as the instructions for getting to my house — and I’ve become almost addicted to the highly satisfying bonk! sound that TextExpander plays each time I successfully invoke one of them.

That’s why I was pretty happy to see that, in its latest version, TextExpander now provides support for synchronization through the .Mac service. It makes sense. TextExpander is the kind of utility that works best when it’s nearly invisible, and .Mac synchronization makes it even more transparent. Before this update, I had to manually back up copies of my shortcuts, which I’d then shuttle from computer to computer, laboriously importing them into each instance of TextExpander and weeding through duplicates by hand. Now, I can happily create shortcuts on any one of the three Macs on which I have the utility installed and almost instantly have them available on the other two.

Continue Reading …

+

If It Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must Be Enterprise Software

Enterprise software, it can hardly be debated, is pretty bad stuff. The high-dollar applications that businesses use to run their internal operations (everything that falls under human resources, typically, but also accounting, communications and, at one time or another, just about everything else) are some of the least friendly, most difficult systems ever committed to code. If you work at a big company and you’ve ever had to do something that should be simple, like file an expense report, make changes to your salary withholdings — or, heck, if you’ve ever tried to apply for a job at a big company — then you’ve probably encountered these confounding user experiences. And you probably cursed out loud.

This is partly because enterprise software rarely gets critiqued the way even a US$30 piece of shareware will. It doesn’t benefit from the rigor of a wide and varied base of users, many of whom will freely offer merciless feedback, goading and demanding it to be better with each new release. Shielded away from the bright scrutiny of the consumer marketplace and beholden only to a relatively small coterie of information technology managers who are concerned primarily with stability, security and the continual justification of their jobs and staffs, enterprise software answers to few actual users. Given that hothouse environment, it’s only natural that the result is often very strange.

Continue Reading …

+

Known Pleasures

ControlSpeaking of control, it’s only a funny coincidence that I gave a new talk with that title the same week that Anton Corbijn’s biopic about Joy Division singer Ian Curtis was released. That film is also called “Control,” and while it has nothing to do with design, it’s neverthelesss an entertaining if imperfect movie. I saw it on Monday night at New York’s Film Forum theater.

I’m a big fan of Joy Division as well as the post-Joy Division work of New Order, who formed in the aftermath of Curtis’ untimely suicide. But I’ve always been skeptical of the cultish fascination with Curtis’ demise, which has always seemed to add an uneasily pat bookend to his briefly prolific career. The facts of his death, while undeniably tragic, have always veered too far into the territory of convenient mythology for me.

Continue Reading …

+