once bitten

When I switched from desktop Ubuntu to the Mac in 2006, it was because of productivity.

I'd run out of spare hacking time to ensure my PDA synchronized my calendar and address book data, so I jumped to a platform where that worked well. The iPhone was released a few years after and I was locked in to Apple, with just faint pangs of free software guilt in the background.

This year, the story doesn't seem so simple.

The latest Ubuntu release is a pleasant place to be, and Android phones are competitive and more compatible with my personal tinkering instincts. At the very least, I'm now a bona fide platform agnostic. My personal tech armory includes iPhone and Android, iPad and Ubuntu netbooks, desktop Ubuntu and a Macbook Pro.

It's hard to give any platform a serious test unless you commit to its use for a while, which poses the problem of productivity applications. Thanks to the excellent efforts of Omni Group and others, I was rather attached to a bunch of OS X only programs, including OmniFocus, iCal, TextMate and others.

As I was determined to give Android and Ubuntu a serious chance, I had to find alternatives. Here's an overview of the choices I made in becoming platform agnostic and what, if anything, I miss from Mac OS X.

Read on, and if you don't have much time, skip to the bottom for the TL;DR.

Browser

Because of its speed, I'd been a Safari user for some years. Choosing to go platform agnostic means either Firefox or Google Chrome. Firefox is an amazing browser for web development, but when you take it onto a small screen Linux netbook setting, it is slow and uses up too much screen real estate. So, I chose Google Chrome.

What do I miss from Safari? Nothing.

Email

It was only when I left Apple's Mail app behind I realized how many years I'd waited in vain for it to get better. I really wanted it to, and put up with its tantrums and bandwidth-hungry ways, hiding my mail at random as I roamed onto slow connections while traveling. I'd even spent good money with the good people at Indev Software on awesome programs such as Mail Act-On, in order to fix the lack of keyboard shortcuts.

The choice of where to go came down to either Thunderbird or GMail. With every major release of Thunderbird I would try it awhile, but there's something about the UI that feels unwieldy and clunky to me. Also, client-side spam blocking isn't really that helpful when you regularly roam between computers. You get false positives all over the place, and always need to be checking to see you've not missed anything.

So, I drew in my breath and chose GMail. If you'd spoken to me in 2007 you'd have gotten my rant about how I wasn't going to let Google index any more of my private data than it already does, and I'll admit I'm still a little nervous about it. But I know enough good people in the company, and suspect enough of what every other agency that touches my data does, to consider this a decent tradeoff for the features I'm offered. And really, the keyboard shortcuts are awesome. It helps me to focus on what I'm doing with the content of each email when I'm able to move through them with minimal physical disruption.

The other advantage of GMail is a rocking mobile app. The GMail mobile web app on my iPhone is considerably more useful than the iPhone's built-in client, and the same can be said for GMail on Android. The main reasons? Spam filtering, again, and being able to file messages away rapidly. I use spare moments to triage my email, and the more efficient I can be then, the better.

What do I miss from Apple Mail? Being able to cut and paste the URI of a mail message into other documents and have that message open with a single click. Now I need to copy whole mails around to preserve context.

Instant messaging

GMail in Google Chrome is now my email client, and I adopted its Chat window as my IM client on laptops and desktops. If I want to be available to people, I'll have mail open, and if I don't, I won't. So it seems sane to use the two at the same time. Adium on OS X is still the best IM client out there, and the AIM app on iPhone is a good mobile choice. Using Google Chat in GMail just enables me to worry about fewer things at once. Also, with netbook use, you really appreciate the screen real estate savings from not opening other applications.

What do I miss from Adium? Mostly the eye-candy, but heck, IM's all about text anyway.

Text editor

I was a long-time user of the excellent TextMate app for the Mac. Surprisingly, it wasn't tough to switch away to vim. Specifically, MacVim on OS X, and gvim on Ubuntu. Enough people have made the TextMate to vim jump that all your favorite features have been ported to vim plugins. And having learned vi almost from the cradle, you never forget the perverse but efficient keystrokes you need to master it.

What do I miss from TextMate? The project drawer. Yes, I tried all the vim solutions to this, but none of them work very well.

Calendar

Thanks to the general almost-interoperability of calendaring software, you can run different calendar programs on different platforms and still access the same data. However, as nothing on Linux comes close to Google Calendar, it seemed the natural place to base my calendaring system. I am a heavy iCal user, along with Zimbra and MobileMe calendars, and I've stuck with that on the Mac, just adding in the Google Calendar to iCal. On Linux, I have Google Calendar import my other calendars. I'm not totally happy with this solution, to be honest. Google Calendar only really lets you use your primary GMail identity for arranging events, which doesn't play so well with my work calendar. This part of my story is still evolving.

Task manager for GTD

I have been a Getting Things Done enthusiast for some time, and occasionally I even get it implemented properly (does anybody get further than this?) This makes a task manager vitally important to me, and for years I've been a user of OmniFocus. When the Omni folks came out with their iPhone application, it only confirmed my choice.

A mobile app is very handy for GTD, because the idea is that you should greedily capture new action items, and also be equipped with your lists to make best use of time in whatever context you find yourself. However, it seems unlikely Omni will support Android in the near future, and I'm pretty sure they're not working on either a web app or other cross-platform solution.

So I started looking around and initially gave Nozbe a look, only to turn away from it as being confusing and clunky. I was there a few months too early, it turns out, and I revisited it again this June, in time to become an enthusiastic convert. Nozbe is a web app, so it's cross-platform by default, offers iPhone and iPad apps (reasonably priced compared to OmniFocus), and – all-importantly – a great email interface.

An email interface is important for GTD apps, because email is where you'll likely receive at least 80% of all your new actionable items and notes. On the Mac, I used to use Mail Act-On to send emails to my OmniFocus inbox with a keystroke, which would put the email URI in a note field and give me one-click access to it later. Clearly, that's a non-starter with GMail.

Instead, I forward anything I want from GMail to Nozbe as an email. If I write an action at the bottom, introduced by an asterisk, it goes into Nozbe as an action, and the email body as an attached note. If I just send the email, it goes into the supporting notes section of Nozbe. That's important, as sometimes email isn't so much an action, as something you want to have to hand when considering a project.

For the interested hacker, and anybody who likes to own their own data, Nozbe has a couple of sweet features. The first is that they have an API with which you can access your data programmatically, and the second is that you can get at your data as text files, change it with a text editor, and ship it back up to the web app. That's as much security for your data as you can be offered by anybody these days.

What do I miss from OmniFocus? The pretty interface. The Nozbe web app is still awkward-looking, though the iPhone and iPad apps are beautiful.

Password management

Unless you're a fan of using the same password for every service you use, remembering your passwords is a bugbear when you're roaming between machines. I used to use the excellent 1Password app on the Mac to solve this. It has iPhone and iPad solutions too, which both work well. To give them credit, they also have a Javascript bookmarklet-based export available, so you can at least have partial functionality on non-Apple systems. Unfortunately, the full app doesn't fly on Ubuntu or Android. So, I started using LastPass, which does the job just fine on every operating system and mobile platform.

What do I miss from 1Password? The pretty interface. LastPass has some work to do on UI, which detracts a little from a fabulous product.

Note taking

I didn't so much as change tool choice here, as was pleased to find that my tool of choice, Evernote, is pretty-much cross platform anyway. It has a native OS X and Windows client, and runs well as a web app elsewhere. The Google Chrome plugin for Evernote crosses the gap to give me more usability on Ubuntu, and the Evernote iPhone, iPad and Android apps work well.

Office suite

I was never a big creator of Office-type documents in the first place, and have only ever used OpenOffice.org on my Mac. I find increasingly that the Google suite of applications covers 95% of use cases. But really, office documents make me cry.

Honorable mentions

Not essential to this article, but worthy of note for cross-platform use, is Dropbox for file-sharing and Picasa for photo management. And it's not cross-platform, but it's still very hard to beat OmniGraffle for diagramming. I'll be a happy user of this tool on the Mac and iPad for a while to come.

In summary

I'm happy with the choices I've made, and find myself more focused and productive as I can be sure I'll have every tool I need regardless of computer or location. Here's a recap of what I'm using now.

• Browser: Google Chrome
• Email: GMail
• IM: GMail/Google Chat
• Text editor: vim
• Calendar: Google Calendar, maybe
• Task management/GTD: Nozbe
• Password manager: Lastpass
• Office suite: Google Docs and occasionally OpenOffice.org

Postscript: from wires to clouds

The underlying technological trend behind my changing application choices is really the movement of personal productivity from a PC-centric wire-and-sync paradigm to one of readily available wireless bandwidth and cloud-based syncing. Apple have been slow to abandon their tethered approach, leaving the iTunes application looking increasingly fat and ridiculous. By contrast, the Google cloud story is mostly a smooth one.

Alas, I feel like I probably jumped from one corporate overlord into the jaws of another. I may be operating system agnostic, but I suppose I have become a devotee of the Google web platform. This is mitigated to some extent by the fact that I know that either the applications I use are open source, or they have easy data export options in open formats that would let me easily migrate should I need to.

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I've been experimenting a little with Wide Area Bonjour. Or, if you want the neutral name for it, Wide Area DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD). This is a technology that lets your computer register its IP address and services on a DNS server and make it available for internet consumption, even if you're behind a firewall.

Why would you want to do this? You might want access to files on your home network, wherever you are. Or you might want to use SSH to log in to your machines. Wide Area Bonjour can help you do this directly without the complications of setting up tunnels and so on.

Normal Bonjour advertises services on a local network via broadcast, and is very useful for automatic configuration and detection of services. The benefit of Wide Area Bonjour is that you can locate services even when you're not on your home network.

As implemented in Mac OS X, Wide Area Bonjour does two things: it registers your IP address against a DNS server, and if you have opted to advertise the services running on your Mac, it works with a UPNP or NAT-PMP capable router to expose these to the internet. For instance, if you control the domain bonjour.example.org your laptop might be available as my-macbook.bonjour.example.org.

So, be very careful if you try this: you might think you're safely behind your router's firewall, but if you enable this service, direct internet access to your machines is possible.

If you want to experiment with setting up Wide Area Bonjour, you need access to a DNS server that supports secure updates. Instructions for setting this up are available from the DNS-SD web site.

The story isn't so great for platforms other than Mac OS X. Linux's Bonjour stack, Avahi, is irksome when it comes to accessing resources from Wide Area DNS-SD servers, and lacks the capability altogether to publish services. So, in the main, Wide Area Bonjour remains a Mac-only game.

At the end of the day, if you want to expose services from your home network, the traditional solution of using dynamic DNS and the DMZ or port forwarding on your router is going to be easier to set up and manage.

Back to My Mac

As part of their MobileMe services, Apple have bundled up Wide Area Bonjour with secure IPv6 connectivity and created "Back to My Mac". It's a much easier way to access your home network resources over the internet, although obviously a paid-for service. It's what I'll be sticking with for now. However, it's nice to know how all the bits inside it work!

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I use OmniFocus to manage my lists of projects and next actions for GTD. One of the nicest things about OmniFocus is its integration with Apple Mail. If you use the "OmniFocus: Send to Inbox" service, then your new action in OmniFocus is linked with the mail message's URI. One click and you're back in the original email message, no matter which folder you moved it to.
 
Now, OmniFocus is not really the place to store supporting reference material for projects, so I've been using Evernote for this purpose. What would make the workflow simpler is if Evernote supported opening a note by URI, the same way that Apple Mail does. That way it would be very easy to cross-link supporting material into OmniFocus, and have it accessible with one click.
 
This may seem like an edge use case, but one of the principles of GTD is that you should have your supporting materials easily to hand when you need them.

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