PhoneFinger v1.1.1 is released, fixing a crash that occurred on newer MacBooks with multi-touch trackpads, and fixing a bug with the smudges “feature.”
A special thanks goes to the folks at NSCoder Night in San Francisco for helping me troubleshoot the problem.
Today, Wonder Warp is announcing an iPhone/iPod version of ShoveBox that syncs wirelessly with the Mac version!
The new iPhone app has many of the features in the desktop app including folders, labels, comments, and the quick capture of incoming information.
One particularly useful feature is a bookmarklet for the Mac version that, when pressed, makes a complete archive of the current page for offline viewing on either device. You can also use a bookmark in the iPhone version of Safari to import the current page to ShoveBox.
The new iPhone app is available on the iTunes App Store for $3.99 USD and runs on any iPhone or iPod Touch with OS version 2.2 or higher. Existing users of the Mac app will need to download version 1.7 (a free upgrade) to enable syncing.
This is old news, but today I got my copy in the mail of Macworld Sweden’s December issue, and it appears they’ve given it a 4/5 rating, as well as a “Bra Köp” award!
I haven’t the slightest idea what that means, but it sounds awfully good — I mean, look how many stars there are on that thing!
Thanks, Macworld!
You can read the full article here.
ShoveBox 1.6.5 is out, fixing an issue with text clippings that was accidentally introduced in an earlier update.
You can download the update here or through the auto-update feature.
ShoveBox 1.6.4 is out, fixing a few browser-related issues:
You can download the update here or through the auto-update feature.
ShoveBox 1.6.3 is out, fixing a handful of nasty bugs:
You can download the update here or through the auto-update feature.
Twitter developer Alex Payne recently criticized apps like ShoveBox, lumping them into a category he calls “everything buckets”:
The Mac software ecosystem faces a plague. A plague of Everything Buckets… These applications claim to be “your outboard brain” or “your digital filing cabinet” or similar. They go by many names: Yojimbo, Together, ShoveBox, Evernote, DEVONthink. …
An Everything Bucket, since you‘re probably wondering, is what I call applications that encourage the user to throw anything and everything into them. They‘re virtual scrapbooks, applying a lightweight organization system to (often) unrelated data of varying types.
He goes on to make essentially two arguments that get muddled a bit:
My counter-argument is:
Structured Data Isn’t Always Best
Structured data is great when you know what structure your data needs to take. And even when you do know, the trouble is there’s an up-front cost to capturing it that isn’t always amortized over the rest of the life of the data.
What I like about ShoveBox and even my competitors’ apps is that I can quickly enter in some data that’s nothing more than a thought, an AIM handle, an interesting article I plan to read later, or even print a receipt to it.
Then, at the end of the day, I can quickly drag these bits and pieces into todo list programs, address books, web apps, and more. I can take the time to massage the data a bit so it fits into other systems. Or I can delete it and decide it wasn’t worth it.
Being a east coast guy myself, I’m convinced that the "Worse Is Better" philosophy of engineering is right on a lot of things.
Does anyone remember when search engines used to look like this?
Google didn’t become popular because it had a powerful interface for nested Boolean queries and let you specify where to look for your query within each document. It became popular because of a very simple, unstructured approach.
It ended up being great for users, but it certainly wasn’t the easiest thing for a computer. It required vast infrastructure, not to mention some incredible linear algebra. Users don’t care what’s easiest for computers; users care about what’s easiest for users.
And though it makes geeks cringe, Excel is probably the most popular database, despite not being a database at all. It’s simple and you can whip together solutions around loosely-structured data in an ad hoc, generative fashion. Huge departments in multinational banks rely on Excel rather than custom solutions, just because it’s the easiest to start using.
The idea of rich structured data is very appealing to engineers like Alex and I. It’s nice to think of a world where every one of my documents has rich (correct) metadata, where I can strew my data all over my disk (and cloud-based sites) and still pinpoint them in seconds.1
But the fact is, most people don’t have time for rich metadata and consistent, taxonomically-satisfying structure. They just want to get their work done.
And even as we find better ways of entering and using structured data, there will always be classes of data that are best left unstructured. That ill-defined category of data is what ShoveBox was made for.
The Trouble With The Filesystem and the Windowsization of the Mac OS
Before I continue, I should emphatically state that ShoveBox is not meant as a replacement for the Finder. It’s not a file-management tool. It imports data in a great many ways, and the only reason you can drag certain types of files into it is that, well, it’d be a shame if you couldn’t.
The term “Everything Bucket” is a slight misnomer — if you’re putting truly everything you work with in it, and keeping it there, you’re not using it correctly.
But from listening to developers of ShoveBox-like apps, I can tell we all get inundated with requests from users who are misusing our apps. For instance, the Yojimbo release notes pleads “Please do not try to replace iPhoto, Aperture, or Lightroom with Yojimbo: You’ll make us cry.”
It seems to me that that the problem that Mac users and fellow developers of “everything buckets” are groping around in the dark to solve is that, out of the box, the Mac OS’s tools for managing data are unsatisfying and confusing. But to be fair, I think most novice users find the very idea of a filesystem unsatisfying and confusing.
But It Wasn’t Always
When the Mac came out, it didn’t have directories, it had folders (and, originally, only one level of them!). It didn’t have rm, it had a Trash. It didn’t have symlinks, and when it finally did in System 7, it called them aliases. It didn’t have a tools menu, it had desk accessories. And everything had an adorable Susan Kare-designed icon for it.
The innovation here was not the desktop metaphor, but its implementation. Everything was concrete, visual, and almost tactile. Windows stayed where you put them when you closed them. Icons didn’t sort themselves. One window, one folder. One file, one icon. And there were almost no modes.
Windows has never optimized its folder structure very well for users, and tries to discourage direct manipulation of the file system. Programs are free to dump files in any location they please, even to the extent where many programs on Windows won’t run on a non-Administrator user account.
In fact, in recent versions of Windows, when you first open up your C:/ drive, it warns you before even allowing you to see the contents. As if to say “What are you doing, Dave?” (though, in its defense, it does say “My Computer” not “Your Computer.”)
The Mac has remained fairly resolute in making the filesystem and its folder structure something users feel comfortable taking a stroll around. Even files nestled deep in /System/Library have beautiful, seldom-seen icons to convey a little of what they’re actually for. And thank goodness, drives still mount on the Desktop and don’t warn me when I try to open them. But it’s definitely yielded to external pressures.
I’ve never been one of those whiners saying that the Finder is broken, but I think it plays a large part. Some have complained that it’s moving away from its spatial roots.
Back/forward buttons, column view, Smart Folders, Cover Flow, QuickLook, Stacks, and others are all very handy features that have clear uses. But they dilute the wonderful concreteness of the Desktop metaphor with abstraction.
Oh — and when I open my Documents folder, the number of files that I remember putting there myself are outnumbered by those that I don’t. Microsoft Office put a 150 MB folder in there whose purpose I’m not sure of. Any EA game I install puts one or more folders in there as well. And iChat, Colloquy, and Linkinus seem to find it a good place to dump log files.
I don’t always feel comfortable using it directly2, and I’m a computer nerd, for crying out loud!
There’s something comforting and pleasing in using an app like ShoveBox or Yojimbo for everyday files, even though it’s not a terribly good idea.
For a lot of users, it’s kind of like living with some inconsiderate housemates, finding a shelf in the kitchen, and agreeing “If it’s on this shelf, it’s mine. Don’t touch it.” It’s a secure place with a well-thought-out, consistent, streamlined interface. And best of all, Microsoft Office won’t swagger in at 4AM and mistake it for a sink.
The Awkward End of the Desktop Metaphor
We’ve seen consumer-oriented apps from Apple that abstract away the filesystem entirely. iTunes doesn’t play MP3s, it plays music. iPhoto doesn’t organize JPEGs, it organizes photos. Part of the reason for this is that they are not presumptuous enough to assume basic computer skills on the part of the user. The other reason is that tying it closer to the filesystem would make their interfaces less apt for what they’re supposed to be doing.
Spotlight is firmly in the camp of "one file, one datum" and Apple apps that disagree with this have either been forcibly converted to this philosophy or provided a Spotlight interface through a rather inelegant hack (take a look in your ~/Library/Caches/Metadata folder).
We’re in an awkward phase in user interface design where the desktop metaphor is dying but there is no clear successor. More abstract ways to deal with data have been gradually introduced, but we’re still in a sort of limbo.
Do we return to spatial ways of dealing with files, or are the abstract ones better?3 Do we try to keep data structured, or do we free it? Should the filesystem be more like a database to the end user, or should it be left as is? Is flat better than hierarchical?
I do feel odd writing an additional layer of indirection on top of what seems, superficially to be a perfectly fine metaphor. But it wouldn’t be necessary if “pieces of paper in manila file folders” was the best way to think about everything.
Maybe some things are best as messages in an inbox, others points on a map, others monsters in a dungeon, some as crazy zooming squares, and still others as rows in a database. The future will tell.
Alex paints these apps together with a sort of broad brush, but they’re quite different. Developers of apps like ShoveBox, Evernote, and Yojimbo recognize a major problem that many users have dealing with certain kinds of data. We’re all contributing ideas to a vast, distributed, multi-developer experiment on the Mac platform.
Even the lovely Together, probably the closest to the Finder of any of these apps, has a tremendous following that I envy.
ShoveBox’s contribution to the experiment is trying to apply the email client metaphor (inboxes, flags, sorting rules, etc) to unstructured data. And, if I may say so myself, I think it’s the most streamlined app in the category.
But judging by the vast, diverse preponderance of “everything buckets”, there’s a real need here. We’re all just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, and learning more about how to work with computers more productively in the process.
Footnotes
ShoveBox 1.6.1 is out, fixing several miscellaneous issues:
You can download the update here or through the auto-update feature.
Chicago Sun-Times columnist and fellow Bostonite Andy Inhatko gave a glowing recommendation for ShoveBox in Tuesday’s episode of MacBreak Weekly during the “Pick of the Week” segment.
You can hear the discussion at 1 hour, 18 minutes into the podcast, or listen to the relevant excerpt here.
I’m psyched about this because MacBreak Weekly is one of the podcasts I most look forward to hearing every week, along with TWiT, Skeptic’s Guide, and Dan Carlin.
Not to mention that Leo Laporte is someone I’ve watched ever since I was in elementary school and he played Dev Null on MSNBC’s The Site.
After some jokes about the name from other TWiTs (if someone could explain these to me, I’d be grateful), Andy spoke about ShoveBox’s design and user interface:
It’s the solution you want to use if you want something that works more like a system enhancement — rather than ‘I’m going into Yojimbo-land to file this thing.’ The central fulcrum of this is a little menu item — a box with an arrow on it.
So if you’re on the web, or in a document, you can simply drag a piece of text and it gets added to the list if things you’re keeping track of. If there’s a picture on Flickr, drag it into the drop box. If there’s a file on your desktop, drag it into the drop box.
… It’s designed to be very simple, direct, very tactile.
Leo seemed to be oddly but flatteringly impressed with the app as well. “Geez Louise! … What a find! … This is what I’ve always wanted!”
They also discuss the “Rules” feature and its potential. I’m glad they did, as often I feel like I’m the only ShoveBox user who takes advantage of it. This is one of those neglected features that I’d love to expand on.
One weakness mentioned is ShoveBox’s lack of synchronization features. This is a failing I’ve been working hard for the past couple months to address. I hope to post more on this soon — but in short, I’ve built a synchronization engine that initially will work only with the upcoming iPhone version of the app, but is written in such a way that it can be easily applied elsewhere.
Leo remarks about the vast proliferation of worthy organization apps on the Mac, and the tendency of many users to habitually use several of these at once. Andy jokingly suggests someone write a “sorter” app that decides which organization app to file something in.
Oddly enough, this was the original idea for ShoveBox. It was going to soley consist of the menu icon, the Rules interface, and Quick Jot — no real storage or organization features to speak of. But I quickly realized that it would be difficult to sell something so abstract and well, meta.
So I built some decidedly-bare-bones organization features as well, so that people less dorky than me could immediately find it useful. And now it’s taken on a life of its own.
In any case, it’s a decent discussion that I couldn’t be more honored to hear. They raise many interesting points, positive and negative. Be sure to let me know what you think, though — I’m always looking for feedback and ideas from users of the product to steer its future development.
On January 31st, I’ll be speaking at the Teens in Tech Conference. The conference begins at 10AM and is hosted at Microsoft’s San Francisco offices.
I’m going to be on the Teen Entrepreneur panel at 2:00PM, despite being too old by one year to be a teen. I’ll be joined by Daniel Ha of Disqus, Adam Jackson from DailyTechTalk, and the incredible Doogie-Howser-esque Daniel Brusilovsky, the organizer.
If you’re interested in coming, tickets are cheap, and I’d love to see you there!
