I have tried the other combination. By keeping all those interesting links from friends in my bookmark and hope that I will go there later. However, I end up forgetting all those links when I have time and doing something else.

Hahaha… now, I’m gonna get back to work. Thanks Jono!

I think it solves many issues. The rest is self discipline and actually making use of the new notification system.

*: see the first link in http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design

However, as interesting as it is, a lot of app developers don’t seem to really be providing a lot of Activities for use by external developers, or other people aren’t tapping into activities and the like that are available.

Part of this is, I suspect, due to the fact that there have been no efforts to standardize Intents, for instance, a standard intent for todo-tasks, so as an app developer, you need to develop against specific other applications, instead of classes of applications. The potential for a great ecosystem exists, but it’s going to take a bit more of an organized push to make it happen.

Yes, there is a lot of crap, but there’s a lot of crap in more traditional media as well, it was just more expensively produced crap.

There are two things we need to manage the flow: 1. Better filtering. There are several people I follow on Twitter, but that I’m not interested in over 50% of what they have to say, the problem is that I’m really interested in the rest. I just need a better way to filter that content. 2. Intercommunication between apps like Stuart mentioned. If I could hit a button or keyboard shortcut to have Evolution fire an event over to Getting Things GNOME then I can follow up on non-immediate material more easily. The idea of mashing up data and applications really needs to find a stronger home on the desktop.

I do okay most of the time, but I don’t know how often it happens where I suddenly realize I haven’t really been listening to whatever is on my headphones for the last five minutes.

to make things worse, you can get shot of Jaq on iTunes as an .mp3 and you can download it from this very site in that very same format.

I was just using examples from my day to day workflow. Not intended as promotion, but as a comment on how having information manipulation programs start working together can make it simple to start doing things with that information. Which is why I also reached towards the pipe.

If it redeems me at all, I develop using a free software license.

“Shot Of Jaq is an irreverent take on the goings on in the Open Source, Free Culture [...]” – About Page for Shot Of Jaq

Does not compute. : /

I’m one of these mac using orange sunglass wearing twats; the reason is simple enough: mail.app. What a killer mail client. It’s totally integrated with iCal, so that I can read an email, click on the part that reads “so you want to meet for lunch tomorrow at noon?” and assign it to a meeting in iCal, which I will have a reminder of on my iPod.

It’s amazing how much simpler things are when your programs talk to each other. It’s easy to send a movie project from iMovie to iDVD to burn it, easy to have relevant programs talk to each other. It becomes much more powerful.

It’s a lot like the pipe. A simple way to have programs talk to each other, because the format they all use is standardised.

At that point, it’s not a distraction rich environment any more, it’s just integrated information that’s useful. A twitter feed is often about stuff that interests you: someone’s life, or a band you like, or specials from the local pizza shop. Having all this stuff integrated with my calendar means that I’m getting useful, rich information that’s being integrated in a relevant way.

As far as reddit and digg and those kind of news aggregation sites go, though, I fall squarely in the information overload group. The only way I was able to get any real control over that was ’sudo echo “127.0.0.1 reddit.com >> /etc/hosts”‘ .

I think the way to solve the distraction problem is a global way to turn down the volume. Similar to status (away, busy, offline). It would be something like a focussed level, (high, medium, low, none), with a way to choose which messages from which people alert you before hand at a particular focus level. Messages that don’t pass the filter would que until the attention level is lowered. It should have the ability for granular filtering. (So I always get the alerts from my girlfriend no matter what communication medium is used) and categorical filtering (So I can block all twitter messages). Of coarse granular should override the categorical filtering.

I am convinced there is a way to unify these different streams of consciousness and build in a project management approach. I was knocking together some sketches for solutions to this on a plane ride recently. I might try and knock something up. No idea whether it would work, of course.

Ironically enough, I bought GTD, and never finished reading the book. For me, it was rather daunting going through every piece of paper and email and what not and categorizing it. It seems like a good method once you get the initial setup done, and as long as you keep to the program. However, the nature of workflows today is things popping up and doing its best to interfere with that flow.

For the world in general however, I think that any solution is going to have to work with existing protocols and add utility to them. It would look more like an infrastructure component that ties things together like Telepathy or D-Bus rather than being a user application in itself.

I am too. At 36, I’m already thinking “WTF is the point of Facebook and Twitter?”

I’ve worked the GTD method, and I’m getting cranky about people in my life trying to contact me through yet another new inbox. Inboxes full of spam, v1agra, advertising, Zombie vampires and ninja kittens. How am I supposed to get good at anything when the UI/OS/format/required skills/learning curve of the inbox-du-jour keep changing?

I’ve become quite content to browse the web with links & lynx. It’s not stylish, but it drives home how little substance there is on some sites. Laugh all you want, but it’s getting to the point that all I really want from my computer is fulfilled by Slackware and a few thoughfully constructed shell scripts like Mashpodder, a BASH script podcatcher, which fetches the podcasts I want for my screenless mp3/ogg player. Maybe I’m evolving into a neo-Luddite looney…

For those of you who like this topic, the CBC’s SPARK podcast and blog does a fine job at presenting perspectives about the impact of connected technologies.