So much has been written about the disastrous launch of healthcare.gov. But Sheryl Solberg and Michael Shear’s Inside the Race to Rescue a Health Care Site, and Obama hit especially close to home. Much of it reads like any number of software development projects I’ve been involved in over the years:

In Herndon, as engineers tried to come to grips with repeated crashes, a host of problems were becoming apparent: inadequate capacity in its data center and sloppy computer code, partly the result of rushed work amid the rapidly changing specifications issued by the government. […]

The website had barely been tested before it went live, so a large number of software and hardware defects had not been uncovered. Fixing the account creation software simply exposed other problems; people still could not register to buy insurance. A system intended to handle 50,000 simultaneous users was fundamentally unstable, unable to handle even a tiny fraction of that. As few as 500 users crippled it, according to people involved.

Rushed work amid rapidly changing specifications… No testing before going live…

Let him who has never experienced issues like that on a project cast the first negative blog post.

In The Disconnectionists Nathan Jurgenson takes to task those who speak about digital detoxes and the negative social effects of being online:

Op-eds, magazine articles, news programs, and everyday discussion frames logging off as reclaiming real social interaction with your real self and other real people. The R in IRL. When the digital is misunderstood as exclusively “virtual,” then pushing back against the ubiquity of connection feels like a courageous re-embarking into the wilderness of reality. When identity performance can be regarded as a by-product of social media, then we have a new solution to the old problem of authenticity: just quit. Unplug — your humanity is at stake! Click-bait and self-congratulation in one logical flaw.

Which reminds me of this tweet of the picture below and the caption, “All this technology is making us antisocial. Before everyone used to talk to each other.”

There is nothing new under the sun… I also love this line from the article:

Disconnect. Take breaks. Unplug all you want. You’ll have different experiences and enjoy them, but you won’t be any more healthy or real.

It turns out our anti-social behavior comes not from technology, but from who we are.

I read two really great articles this week about a couple of recent language shifts. The first is Megan Garber’s English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet, all about the “because-noun”:

However it originated, though, the usage of “because-noun” (and of “because-adjective” and “because-gerund”) is one of those distinctly of-the-Internet, by-the-Internet movements of language. It conveys focus (linguist Gretchen McCulloch: “It means something like ‘I’m so busy being totally absorbed by X that I don’t need to explain further, and you should know about this because it’s a completely valid incredibly important thing to be doing’”). It conveys brevity (Carey: “It has a snappy, jocular feel, with a syntactic jolt that allows long explanations to be forgone”).

But it also conveys a certain universality. When I say, for example, “The talks broke down because politics,” I’m not just describing a circumstance. I’m also describing a category. I’m making grand and yet ironized claims, announcing a situation and commenting on that situation at the same time. I’m offering an explanation and rolling my eyes — and I’m able to do it with one little word. Because variety. Because Internet. Because language. 

And then there’s Ben Crair’s exploration of SMS-speak in The Period Is Pissed — When did our plainest punctuation mark become so aggressive?:

The period was always the humblest of punctuation marks. Recently, however, it’s started getting angry. I’ve noticed it in my text messages and online chats, where people use the period not simply to conclude a sentence, but to announce “I am not happy about the sentence I just concluded.” […]

“In the world of texting and IMing … the default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all,” Liberman wrote me. “In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. And what they infer, plausibly enough, is something like ‘This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.’”

If you have an interest in language, you’ll enjoy both articles very much.

I hate Microsoft Word. I want Microsoft Word to die. I hate Microsoft Word with a burning, fiery passion. I hate Microsoft Word the way Winston Smith hated Big Brother.

— Charlie Stross

There is a growing uprising against word processors and WYSIWYG editors of late. This is partly because of how bad most of those products are, and partly because other alternatives — particularly plain text — have become so intriguing. In fact, please allow me a moment to declare my undying love for plain text.

I love that with plain text the focus is on the words, not the formatting. I love that it’s portable and can be used anywhere and everywhere, in any piece of software that edits or displays words. I love how easy it is to create beautifully formatted documents when needed. Most of all, I love how fast it is. I simply work more efficiently since switching to plain text.

And yet I haven’t been able to convince many people to join me in uninstalling Microsoft Word and moving most (if not all) of their writing to plain text. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find people at a party who are willing to listen to me rant about word processors. So, you know. To the internet!

This is a short post about the tools I use to do the vast majority of my writing (business as well as personal). I hope that it will convince at least some of you to take the plunge with me.

To move your note-taking and writing to plain text you need three things:

• A format to write in
• A place to write in
• A central place to store it all

With those three things in place you’ll be all set to free yourself from the shackles of word processors and WYSIWYG editors. If you want more efficiency and clarity in your writing, this is the way to do it1.

A format to write in

I cannot sing the praises of Markdown enough. Markdown is an easy-to-learn, inconspicuous syntax that lets you focus on what you’re writing without getting bogged down in what it’s going to look like once you’re done. At the same time, it’s a powerful system for formatting documents automatically when you need to print them out, or send something to a colleague or client. The syntax remains easily readable without getting in the way of your words.

I write pretty much everything in Markdown now, and as more and more applications start to support it natively, I only see its popularity growing. The latest email app to take the Mac world by storm, Airmail, has native Markdown support. So does MarsEdit, the software I use to write and publish to this site. The PHP Markdown WordPress plugin further allows any WordPress site to publish with Markdown.

Trust me, it’s really easy to learn. Here’s another Markdown syntax guide to get you going.

A place to write in

Once you’ve settle on the Markdown format, you’re ready for the most difficult stage of the switch: figuring out which of the hundreds of great applications to write and edit plain text files works best for you. On the Mac I’ve tried iA Writer and Byword, but I now spend most of my time in Brett Terpstra’s nvALT. It is a fork of the original Notational Velocity text editor that adds some really great features. What makes it great? Nothing beats nvALT when it comes to speed and efficiency:

• Modeless operation in which searching for notes and creating new notes happen in the same part of the interface. It’s highly efficient and there’s zero lag.
• Powerful keyboard shortcuts for mouseless operation, which further speeds up your writing.
• Native Markdown support, of course.

Even though nvALT has preview functionality built in, I prefer Marked 2 to view formatted text files. Yet another Brett Terpstra project, it’s a powerful previewer for Markdown files, and it works with any text editor. So even if you use something other than nvALT, or open a text file in another app, you can still use Marked. You can add custom CSS and export to a variety of file formats. So when you’re ready to move from words to formatting, this is the app to do it in.

On iOS I’ve gone through tons of text editor apps, but I currently use Notesy, and I’m really happy with it. It’s incredibly fast, which is, as I keep mentioning, one of the main reasons to switch to plain text. There are a few additional things about Notesy that make it one of the apps I use most on my iOS devices:

• You can use it to quickly jot down some thoughts you don’t want to forget, and the file will be waiting for you on nvALT when you get back to your desk. So you can just keep going where you left off.
• It has a URL structure and good support from other apps you may already be using. For example, if you read something in Instapaper that you want to reference in a blog post or an email, you can easily create a note with the selected text.

If you need a more comprehensive overview of iOS text editors, check out this extensive comparison (by — who else — Brett Terpstra).

A central place to store it all.

The last thing to figure out is how to make it all work together so your files are always synced and always available for use on any device. Of course, this is where Dropbox comes in. You’ll need to make a couple of simple settings changes in nvALT to accomplish this. In the Notes preference pane, do the following:

• Change the “Read notes from folder” destination to a folder in Dropbox.
• Change the “Store and read notes on disk as:” setting to Plain Text Files

And just like that, you’re all set. Now you can access your text files from any computer that has internet access and an application that can read text files. Notesy on iOS works directly off Dropbox, so you just have to point it to the folder you set up for your plain text files in nvALT.

“But wait,” I hear you say, “what about folders and things?” Well, that’s what’s so great about using nvALT and Notesy. Everything is search-based. I’ve never had a problem finding a file/note I’m looking for. And since these applications are built for speed, even on a vast amount of text files, it’s much faster than trolling through folders looking for the right file. Getting out of the folders mindset is a bit uncomfortable at first, but it really does start to feel natural after a while.

If you really struggle with the idea, nvALT does support tagging (similar to Gmail’s tags), so you can use that as a crutch for a while. But a better option is to come up with a file naming system, and stick with it. See, for example, Michael Schechter’s excellent overview of the system he uses.

“But wait,” I hear you say again (you’re nothing if not persistent), “what about collaborating on documents?” Don’t worry, there’s an app for that. Once you’re at a point where you need to get feedback or collaborate on a document, you can just import your text file into the brilliant new service Editorially, and keep going from there. It supports Markdown (of course it does), version control, tracked changes, and comments. No sweat.

I won’t deny that there are still some circumstances where word processors are useful. I’m writing a book at the moment, and I’m using Pages for that (mainly because Editorially didn’t exist when I started writing it). But for the majority of everyday writing — meeting notes, emails, business documents — there is simply nothing better than plain text. Go ahead. Get rid of Word. You can do it.

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1. I’m making these recommendations from the perspective of an Apple user, but I’m sure there are good alternatives on other platforms. ↩

This Interview with Clive Thompson About Twitter, Ambient Awareness, Socrates, and Recency Bias is really interesting. Clive has a decidedly more positive take on technology than what we’ve come to expect recently:

There’s an idea, popular with many text-based folks—like myself, and many journalists and academics—that reading books is thinking; that if you’re not sitting for hours reading a tome, you’re not, in some essential way, thinking. This is completely false. A huge amount of our everyday thinking—powerful, creative, and resonant stuff—is done socially: talking to other people, arguing with them, relying on them to recall information for us. This has been true for aeons in the offline world. But now we have new ways to think socially online—and to do so with likeminded folks around the world, which is still insanely mind-blowing. It never stops being lovely for me.

The interview covers some of the material Clive talks about in his new book Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better, which is definitely next on my list (after On Writing Well, which is kicking my butt right now). Also, I don’t know if this will be interesting to anyone, but I share highlights from the ebooks I read on the Twitter account @rianisreading.

Brad Frost’s article on the Techcrunch redesign is a great case study of a modern responsive design process. A few things stood out for me, and remain open questions that I wish I could ask Brad about.

First, there is no mention of user research. There was a kick-off meeting, with some Design Studio work, but how did they identify user needs, and why was there no user testing on their prototypes? That’s a bit perplexing.

Second, it’s really nice to see Brad take a more nuanced stance on the whole Post-PSD Era thing, and admit that comps can be useful under the right circumstances:

Believe it or not, we did indeed create a few full comps. Gasp! Horror!

But the difference between this and all the other projects I’ve ever worked on is that we didn’t lead with the comps. By the time Dan made some comps (for the homepage and featured article page), we had established many of our key molecules and organisms, and had an understanding of the systematic nature of our design.

That’s how we do it in our agency as well, so I’m glad to find out that we’re not completely insane.

And lastly, it would’ve been great to get a little more detail on how much backend developers were involved through the process. Brad mentions it briefly:

From the design end of things, Dan went through and created an incredibly detailed list of minor design tweaks that tightened things up and got things ready for final delivery to be implemented into their WordPress backend by the fine folks at 10up (who by the way were involved throughout the course of this process).

“Final delivery” and “were involved throughout” are two phrases that don’t sit very well together, so I wonder how that worked practically.

Don’t get me wrong — this is a great process, and they obviously got some impressive results. These are just some things I wondered about as I read through the case study.

Daniel Jalkut discusses the rate of software/app updates in Stagnation Or Stability?:

As an onlooker, it’s easy to associate dramatic change and motion with competence, and quiet refinement with laziness. We must draw on our own experiences attempting to build great things to appreciate how much work takes place in stillness, to have faith that even though things may appear stagnant, a benefit of frictionlessness is resulting. An app at rest may be in that long, arduous phase of becoming finely crafted.

Daniel’s post is a response to the recent Michael Lopp article R.I.P. Things, in which he explains that he’s dropping Things as his productivity app mainly because of its lack of updates. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. How our expectations about app pricing and rate of change is placing unfair (and damaging) pressure on developers to release new versions of their apps constantly — even if it’s just change for the sake of change.

The other unintended consequence of this never-ending update cycle is that we’re starting to see evidence of what Chris Bowler calls App Fatigue:

I must admit, I’ve felt a bit of what I term app fatigue in the past year. What is this? Simply the lack of desire to either a) pay for another version of an app I already own or b) go through the steps required to update this app and become accustomed to the changes.

My own feelings about this remain wildly erratic at the moment. Sometimes I’m on Michael’s side. Like most people I was champing at the bit for Tweetbot 3, and as much as I appreciated the “It’ll be ready when it’s ready” line, my impatience got the better of me. Yesterday Apple “finally” updated their last built-in app for iOS 7. But we’re still stuck with an ugly WhatsApp, orphaned versions of OmniFocus, Tweetbot and Instapaper for iPad, and a Foursquare that hasn’t been updated in weeks — weeks, I tell you. What up with that? I turned off automatic app updates because I love going to the App Store and checking what wonderful new things I’m going to get today.

And then, at other times, I’m with Chris Bowler. OmniFocus runs my life, so I shouldn’t complain about paying $20 for the gorgeous new iPhone version, but it ended up being quite the grudge purchase. Same with Fantastical 2. And I know that my insatiable hunger for new features every day is probably doing more damage than good. Because Daniel is right: “An app at rest may be in that long, arduous phase of becoming finely crafted.” But if we show up at developers’ doors with pitchforks every couple of weeks, demanding our new features, there is no time for the app to be at rest. Eventually, Experience Rot will set in, and it will be our fault:

As more features are added, it becomes harder to make the overall design coherent and sensical. Soon features are crammed into corners that don’t make sense.

I guess I’m preaching to myself here. I’m hoping to convince myself to be a bit more patient with app developers, and give them the time they need to slow down and refine.

Thanks to Voila for sponsoring Elezea’s RSS feed this week!

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We’ve seen a lot of articles about the negative effects of social networks this year. And yes, I’ve even written a few of those. So it was refreshing to read Roxane Gay’s What Twitter does — a reflection on the positive side of social networks:

Social networking does not offer a universal panacea, but it is something far more significant than “constant self-promotion.” The bonds of this community, at least the one I have found, are sprawled and unruly, but these bonds are not merely virtual. I travel all the time and wherever I go, I meet people with whom I am acquainted online. There may be initial awkwardness, but always, always, there is familiarity. We may not know each other but we know something of each other. We are a little less alone. Sometimes, the change technology brings is simple, intimate, and still significant.

One of the main criticisms against social media is that it fosters superficial relationships. Roxane’s point is that knowing a few superficial things about someone is better than knowing nothing, because it gives you a head start on a possible friendship.

A big thanks to Techi.com for sponsoring Elezea’s RSS feed this week!

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