I remember when podcasting first became a thing, and listening to podcasts meant, to some degree, listening to people talk about what podcasts were. In this sense, podcasts were about podcasting, which was kind of weird but also exciting in its way: what is this new medium, and what is it for?

In the intervening years, we’ve seen podcasting hold on to its vestigial name (the “pod” in “podcast” refers to the iPod, which was the dominant audio player in everyone’s mind at the time) while turning into a nearly perfect form of what they could become: hyper-specific radio-like shows that we can find, and listen to, when we want to listen to them and for however long we have to devote our time and attention to them. Podcasts didn’t replace the radio or listening to music or audiobooks, but they compete with them for our time and attention.

But this post isn’t about podcasting… it’s about blogging, and more specifically, the why. Here’s Chris J. Wilson on being an “unprofessional blogger”:

As an unprofessional blogger, I can write about what I want, when I want not write when I don’t want to (and not apologize!) try out something stupid and fail (but have fun) make grammar and spelling mistakes (and thank kind souls who point them out while deliberately annoying pretentious pedants) make a mess of my website as I change the design

Basically, I can have fun.

These kinds of posts–what is a blogger?–have the same solipsistic ring to them, in a sense, but I think it’s a question that comes up because people who write on the internet for no particular reason (ie they’re not trying to make a living from it) wonder about it. I certainly do.

And here’s Greg Morris, responding to Chris’s post, and defining a difference between a “writer” and a “blogger”:

Bloggers do it for themselves, not for the income. Writers, on the other hand, won’t bother if the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Being a blogger means that writing online, even when your posts are scruffy and error-prone, is something you do for the enjoyment of it, and that’s the best place to be.

Pickled Cabbage

Shaken vs. stirred: The ultimate cocktail showdown – The Manual

I mentioned in Sunday’s Serial that I prefer a stirred Martini over a shaken one. The Manual does a nice job of explaining why, but rounds out the discussion of when shaking is preferable.

The truth is that most experts would strongly agree that a martini should be stirred, not shaken. Shaking a martini will give you a watery, cloudy, and frankly rather sad drink, while stirring it should result in a crystal clear, elegantly proportioned drink.

Shaken vs. stirred: The ultimate cocktail showdown – The Manual

I grabbed a head of red leaf lettuce at Shop Rite this morning after a leisurely 10k row, and it’s soaking now using this recipe from Spruce Eats. I have certainly used this one before, but I can’t remember how we liked it.

While writing up my thoughts on what a notes app is, I had a thought about my own genesis of where and I why I developed this predilection.

My first portable device was a Handspring Visor. I did have a laptop at the time as my main machine, but wifi was anything but ubiquitous, and the notion of typing notes in class (I was in grad school) never really occurred to me. in fact, at the time, it was sort of odd to see someone using a laptop in class.

I really enjoyed using the Visor; it was small, kind of hot at the time (everyone was into Palm Pilots and Handsprings and shortly after, Compaq and Dell handheld PCs). It synced with your Mac, so your calendar events and contacts and to-dos were always with you. Assuming the sync went as expected, of course.

The issue with the Palm handheld was the alphabet you had to learn to enter input into the device. Called Graffiti, it was a modified version of English print that required you to write individual letters without lifting the stylus from the screen.

Palm’s Graffiti Character Set

This was hard for two reasons: first, you had to learn new gestures for characters you had been writing to everyone’s satisfaction since elementary school. Second, even when the letter or character was gesturally identical to the printed alphabet you knew, you sometimes had to learn a new way of transmitting it to the screen. So for example, Z was basically still Z, but A? A missed the crossbar between the legs, and you just wrote an upside-down V. Super weird. And let’s not forget the handwriting input area: you had to write letters to the left of a subset of the screen, not directly on the page where you would eventually see the notes, and numbers to the right. And never the twain shall meet: Palm’s OS didn’t recognize alphabet characters on the numerical side, and vice versa.

Palm did replace Graffiti with a previously competing product called Jot, which allowed for multiple strokes in a character, and did not object to the stylus lifting off of the screen. What’s more, you could write anywhere on the screen, obviating a third of your digitizer in favor of a more natural handwriting process.

I had actually purchased Jot, because using regular Graffiti was crazy-making. Jot was immediately better and “right” in a sense. Palm rebranded it as Graffiti 2, making it a bit simpler than Jot, but it was a marked improvement from the original.

Me, being curious about technology, started peeking around on eBay in 2002 at Apple MessagePads (aka Newtons). I was able to get a fairly worn out MessagePad 2100 as my first device of that make and model. I opened the box when it arrived and attempted to apply my Jot/Graffiti 2 skills to the screen, and initially concluded that the Newton must have been broken: the digital recognizer made odd lines and marks on the screen, and then attempted to interpret my handwriting, but my message was not getting across to this newish device.

I learned by watching the tutorials on device, though, that you just used your natural handwriting. And it got better as you used it; you could tell NewtonOS what you meant to write, helping it learn your particular version of print or cursive (yes, cursive was supported too), but it would make guesses about what you were trying to convey as well. My impression of the device went from “this is broken” to “this is amazing.” It was truly remarkable to write with, and like coding up a page and then seeing it rendered in your web browser or spit out of LaTex and into a PDF, its own brand of satisfaction seeing your handwritten words converted into digital text.

Newton OS did another cool thing: interpreted what you wrote into other kinds of data. If you wrote “Lunch with John at noon on Thursday” in the notes app, the MessagePad would offer to create a calendar event for you in the calendar application. It did the same with tasks. While these features often worked and made for a great demo, they could be fiddly and not always work the way you wanted them to.

I remember being so excited about the possibility of using this device, and the handwriting support and translation features, that I wrote up a quick note of what I thought “Newton 2.0” might look like were Apple to resurrect the idea of a handheld computer again in the new millennium. That, of course, didn’t happen, although there was a brief moment there where the “iWalk” device rumors and fake images started popping up on the internet. I was really excited about the possibility of an iWalk.

Apple’s Rumored “iWalk” Device

There has never been an iWalk, but there was an iPod, and shortly after that, of course, the iPhone. As Steve Jobs famously quipped about the iPhone’s competitors, though, “if you see a stylus, you know they blew it.” I didn’t share his dismissal of the stylus at all; I liked the idea of pen-based input, but did understand why the technology’s execution wasn’t as good as its promise.

And the size of the original iPhone didn’t lend itself very well to handwriting. But the iPad? That seemed like a no-brainer. A number of styli leapt into the void that Apple left in not supporting pen-based input on iOS, including the Studio Neat Cosmonaut. But writing on the screen with a capacitive stylus never felt like Newton OS’s implementation, and it was frustrating to know that the technology existed in Cupertino but languished on a digital shelf.

Handwriting support on the iPad has iterated slowly but steadily in the intervening years. Apple eventually supported digital conversion of inked text into typewritten text across the OS, which was a neat first step. But using handwriting that way never really jibed with my evolving preferences, and wondering if the text would be rendered correctly was (and remains) additional cognitive overhead in something that should be effortless and natural: taking handwritten notes.

Apps like Notability and GoodNotes were better than Apple’s own Notes app for a long time regarding accepting handwriting. Notability put a good inking experience at the forefront of their app, while GoodNotes focused more on conversion. I got to a point where I felt that perhaps the best way to take notes, with my first iPad Pro with a 120 Hz refresh rate, might just be Notability. That phase was short-lived, because text input was so far in the rear view for that app that I didn’t like it. I wanted to be able to print, but I also wanted to be able to type when that made the most sense. And in many cases, I wanted something that supported mixed usage: I’ll write on the go with the Apple Pencil, but when I’m seated at my desk or doing something more long form, I’ll type. If I saw a passage online that I wanted to copy, I wanted to select the text and copy/paste, not reprint.

I still really like Notability, but I don’t use it. I would still be using OneNote, were it not for Smart Script. That feature alone puts an iPad+Pencil+Apple Notes in the top spot for me now. In fact, I’d prefer a Surface Pro and OneNote were it not for Smart Script. It just makes writing more enjoyable.

There are still features that Newton OS offered that the much more powerful iPad doesn’t do. The Notes app doesn’t function as the central experience of using the iPad, where that was more the case with the Newton. And that’s not necessarily the right thing for the iPad; it’s a very serviceable laptop when that form factor is most appropriate, for example.

But that’s where so much of my hope in the potential of the iPad lies: the old technology found in the Newton. I loved using the device, but was often flummoxed by its limitations.

So, too, I suppose, with the iPad. And Notes.

I mentioned Apple’s obviating a beloved early Mac app when they introduced Sherlock on Mac OS X. It was such a phenomenon that the word “Sherlock” became a euphemism for any time Apple did this. The app, Watson, was published by the excellent Karelia software. At the time, Mac OS X was new and lacked many of the built-in solutions users needed. And to some degree, the web was still new, and Watson integrated web-based information into an app on your Mac.

Watson offered a feature set that existed in no other place on the Mac. And Watson was better than Sherlock… until it stopped working. Users vary in their willingness to purchase software, and in the case of good-enough free tools bundled with their device, probably will accept the reduced feature set.

This still happens, too. Apple likely tried to do the same thing with Masimo’s pulse-reading tech, a feature I am able to enjoy on my current Apple Watch, but which would disappear were I to upgrade my watch for some time until there’s an agreement between the two companies:

Masimo claims Apple held meetings with them about potentially incorporating Masimo’s pulse-reading technology onto iPhones. When the discussions broke down, Apple hired two executives away from Masimo and introduced a service that Masimo claims illegally duplicated its technology. Apple denies this.

I imagine the makers of password manager apps experienced a similar shiver when Apple announced their password app (although as Bradley Chambers points out, AgileBits is moving in a direction that Apple likely won’t follow).

MindNode: Of all the note-taking and writing tools I’ve tried over the years, the one that has never really stuck for me is the mind map genre. I have a license for Mind Node from a while back and I opened it up and, once again, started thinking about how I might be able to use it for brainstorming or planning. Mind maps are a much more spatial version of note taking or outlining, although what’s interesting especially about MindNode is its outline view… it lays bare to you that, for however spatial they might seem, your mind maps definitely can be expressed in outline form. In any event, I was able to sign up for a generous free six-month trial period of MindNode Plus, which is replacing the standalone license.
Mr. Bar-B-Q Natural Lump Charcoal: I used this most recently to sear off some sous vide pork tenderloin I made. It does the job. It’s no Royal Oak, though.
Powderpuff football: Aaron was a cheerleader for his class (seniors) at Friday’s Powerderpuff game. Rhonda and I went and got to see some of the game and of course the big half-time show. One of Aaron’s friends is into choreography and dance, and he directed their production. It was a lot of fun and laughs, but a couple of things hit me. First, what a fun celebration in an otherwise serious endeavor. How much do we neglect when we fail to celebrate within our professional domains? There’s a lot you can write about Powderpuff: a beacon of flexibility in a society with rigid notions of masculinity… or maybe an event that, however playfully, reinforces the same norms? But I wasn’t there to overthink it. Got some great pics too.