structured and unstructured

One of the coolest applications for the Mac is Notational Velocity, an extraordinarily simple yet also innovative note-taking program. I’ve been using it for the past year or so and really digging its UI: when I want to make a note about something, I use a hotkey combination to activate the program, and then I just start typing. I can keep on typing until I’m done, or I can type a title, hit return, and then just continue, because what I type after that will be the body of the note. To find something, I just type a word into the same box and NV runs an instantaneous search. I can have my notes in rich text or plain text: I choose plain, but even in plain text NV recognizes links and makes them clickable. Also, it saves everything you type automatically and instantaneously, and can be synchronized with Simplenote or WriteRoom for the iPad and iPhone. It’s fantastic. It’s also free.

However, I recently stopped using it. Weird, huh? But here’s my reason: what’s great about NV is that it’s totally simple and unstructured and makes text entry utterly frictionless. But, oddly, that has become a problem for me. I can get things into NV with an absolute minimum of effort and delay — but then I tend to forget what’s in there. Yes, I could search, but I don't often think to search. I forget that NV is there until I need to put something in it — but we put stuff into apps like NV because we want to get it out at some point, right?

Let me try to make this more clear. In 2005 I started using Backpack and have used it off and on ever since — and that’s what I just went back to. Entering information in Backpack is much clunkier that entering it in NV: you have to click a link to create a list or a note or a new entry in a list, then you type it in, then you click a button to save it. If you want to edit it you have to click an “edit” link before you can type anything. You have to decide whether something is going to be a note or a list, and if you have multiple pages, which pretty much every Backpack user does, you have to decide what page you want to put it on. A lot of trouble.

But see, trouble in this case equals structure: Backpack effectively forces you to impose a structure on your data, to organize it to some degree before you even enter it. And I have found that for this very reason, when I enter data in Backpack I remember it better and can find it more readily later. Or maybe it would be better to say that I am (internally) prompted to find it because of the structure I have had to impose before entering it. I also find myself scanning my Backpack pages from time to time, which reminds me what I’ve put in them.

Beyond that, I don't really understand why Backpack works with my brain, but it does, and Notational Velocity — even though it’s manifestly cooler and more innovative and features my beloved plain text — really doesn't. That’s just the way it is.

And let me just take this opportunity to say that still, after several years, nothing has come close to matching the combination of simplicity and structure of Stikkit. I would probably have been using Stikkit for the rest of my life if its developers hadn’t abandoned it and refused even to put it up for sale. Bizarre, and immensely frustrating. The product was effectively abandoned by mid-2007 and shut down completely in late 2008, and I still haven't gotten over it.

evicted!

One of my first posts on this blog was about the rather sudden and unexpected shutdown of two web services, Stikkit and Sandy, and the anger that shutdown prompted against the services’ providers. We’re going to be hearing many more such stories, I think, during the recession/depression. Sites that have been funded by VCs while their creators have been trying to come up with a business plan are going to find themselves out of cash, and are going to shut down, and their users — accustomed to free services — are going to be seriously ticked off. And of course larger companies are going to be closing down unprofitable projects, with similar consequences. There’s even a website devoted to tracking such closings: It Died.

It Died took me to a really interesting rant by Jason Scott about the closing of AOL Hometown. (And there’s a follow-up rant here.) Jason’s point is that, just as landlords can't simply evict a renter for no cause and with no warning but have to follow carefully specified procedures, so too virtual landlords shouldn't be given unlimited right of eviction. There needs to be, Jason says, some kind of website eviction law — or, failing that, a volunteer Archive Team that vacuums up the data of doomed websites and hosts it until people can rescue their data. (Jason came up with the volunteer idea after his legal ideas were descended upon by the SLV.*)

I don't know what I think about all this, except that there seems to be more and more to be said for the 37signals philosophy: if the creators of web services charge money for their product, they’re more likely to be able to keep offering it. The people at Jott, an excellent phone-to-web service for reminders and to-do lists, have come to this conclusion: they’re eliminating their free plan. Howls of outrage to commence immediately.

*Slashdot Libertarian Vigilantes