The Graveyard of Good Ideas

Posted on April 4, 2014 by bluedepth

Earlier today I wrote an email to one of my recruiters who is helping me find gainful employment as best as he can. During this composition it occurred to me that there is definite value in some of these “Really Big Ideas” that I have from time to time. I’ve written about this subject before, but this time I started to consider if there was any way to sell this skill that I have, and that it would be a good thing to write about it and perhaps doing so would ‘seed the clouds’ and maybe help me somehow in the future.

It’s an odd skill with an elusive name. What could it be called? It was something that I only started to understand myself late last year after my 38th birthday. There are a lot of things that go into this particular knack, there is brainstorming, mind-mapping, and extensive applications of imagination. I love the notion of a “Thought Palace” which I picked up from reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes stories and for me, it’s not as structural as it might have been for the protagonist of those stories but the metaphor really rings true for me. It all starts with a problem statement. As I look back on my life I find that this pattern has been with me for a very long time and it’s only recently that I’ve been able to put a finger on it and approach the task of devising what it actually is all about. These problems sometimes are very deep, and sometimes not; sometimes they are filled with deep personal importance and sometimes not. The procedure, if there could be something procedural to it tends to follow the same overall pattern, brainstorming leads to a froth of ideas, images, opening up like a sea of possibilities before me. My mental landscape is littered with all of this material, laying about in boxes and just resting on the metaphorical mental ground. This seems to work even if I don’t brainstorm first, but it seems to hasten the entire operation if I do. The key for me is to quite literally sleep on it. I keep the problem firmly in mind, I’ve got a field of mental raw material littered about my consciousness and then I turn my back on all of it. In a few days, and as oddly as it seems, during a relaxing hot shower or bath usually, the end product arrives in my mind. It is an unusual sensation, just standing under the flow of water and a tightly coiled spring appears in my mind and then uncoils. The problem stands solved before me, and all I have to do is write it all down. I know it will work, and there are indelible certainties that any rough spots couldn’t possibly be show-stoppers.

Examples of these great ideas then get written down. And here is the rub for me personally, that I’ve got what amounts to a rather full suburban graveyard filled with these marvelous and certain to be successful ideas. I have to write them out, and then bury them alive because they are too valuable to actually share. It comes down to idea ownership, to actually make good on all this work that I’ve done for people who never asked me to do the work in the first place. These ideas could be very lucrative to me personally and in my current stage of life, having any of these ideas get stolen and benefitting someone else chills me right to the core.

Some of these ideas I can characterize without having to expose them, because without copyright to protect all this work, I would be exposed, and I can’t stand that risk. The first one was the most elegant and most important to me personally. It took elements that I had picked up in the non-profit philanthropic space that I have been orbiting for the last fifteen years and synthesized a complete plan that could be put into action by any institution of higher learning which would have the effect of integrating admissions, student retention, development and advancement, and also directly harness young alumni engagement. During my time speaking to people in that sphere of influence in Austin Texas last November, I was asked many times especially about young alumni engagement, and it was all I could do to resist not sharing my great design. I can’t trust that my work would benefit me, so the only people I could share it with are my blood kin, who are the only people who would never betray me for greedy purposes. Once I did share my grand design with my kin, the response was very gratifying. It could be a really great way to “have your cake and eat it too” when it came to encouraging and keeping students in higher education and quite possibly also address the giant mountain of student debt that these students are accruing during their time studying in these institutions. The idea that a student could possibly walk away from their Bachelors of Arts and only have to pay $125 for the entire experience was something that took my breath away. The ability to start your life without being chained to a giant millstone of educational debt keeps this particular idea alive, deep underground in a coffin, but alive still.

Then most recently I had the opportunity to interview for a local “hypermarket” style company that has business throughout the region. Quite by accident while reading the background material I had assembled for this interview experience I accidentally began “priming the machine” and the day before my interview with the company I had another one of these spring-loaded epiphanies strike me square in the head. Again it came during a hot shower, and I found myself speed-talking through the entire package of work, as I find that sometimes self-talk helps me retain all the details, sometimes these ideas can evaporate like the memories of dreams. I discovered that I had everything, mental images of whiteboards, hardware lists, procedure binders, business plans, project visions, even so far as to create marketing and a jingle. It would have led the “Point Of Sale” experience to it’s most extreme limit in terms of speed and convenience. It could have been a Holy Grail for this particular company. Alas, the company did not want me for my baser skills and so the idea was boxed up and buried.

The humor of all of this is not lost on me. What a foolish thing, to be struck with amazing work that was totally unbidden, unexpected, and not-asked-for. I seriously doubt there are ways to even approach unveiling these ideas because they come from so far afield that it’s doubtful they are even standing in the same ballpark. What sort of communication channel exists where you can chat up a company and lay all this out on them all at once? It’s impossible without sounding like you are a lunatic crank. Nobody volunteers such work out of the blue, it just isn’t done. It’s a small bit of entertainment imagining a world where this sort of thing is if not expected not ruled out before it can begin. What would such a world look like? People like me who have what amounts to having accidental revelations just wandering in off the street and changing entire market segments and entire industries, blowing up higher education affordability problems and revolutionizing POS systems willy-nilly.

So that leads to the graveyard of good ideas. I wonder how many other people are out there who have similar experiences. How many other life-changing, utterly disruptive epiphanies are buried in shallow graves? Then I get to wondering if all of this is a flash in the pan or if it is like I suspect, a new talent of mine that will be with me for the rest of my life. How many more holes will I have to dig?

PAD Book – 1/1/2014 – Stroke of Midnight

Posted on January 11, 2014 by bluedepth

January 1
Stroke of Midnight
Where were you last night when 2013 turned into 2014? Is that where you’d wanted to be?”

On the last evening of 2013 I was alone with my two boys during the winter storm raging overhead. My partner had the day before left to visit his family in Albany and I was tending to duties around the house and keeping my two boys safe and occupied. Actually I don’t know who was keeping who happy more. I certainly was a warm lap to sit on and the food-giver, but in a lot of ways they were almost always with me, keeping me company and keeping me occupied with their adorable (and sometimes destructive) antics.

I found a bottle of bubbly wine in our collection from M. Lawrence winery up in the Leelanau Peninsula that I had purchased long enough ago that I don’t really remember when. Around 11pm on New Years Eve I inspected and uncorked the bottle and puttered about the house, a small plate of christmas cookies and a champagne flute that I thankfully found hidden in the rearmost of the top cupboard in the kitchen where we keep all our wine glasses.

At 11:50pm, my iPhone rang and it was Scott with an incoming FaceTIme call. We spent the interval from New Years Eve to New Years Day linked virtually by FaceTime. It was a great use of technology and in many ways we had our cake and got to eat it too. Scott got a chance to visit with his family and we got a chance to spend New Years together, after a fashion.

After 2014 had arrived, I disconnected from FaceTime and finished my glass of wine and with cats in tow, padded off to bed.

Was it what I wanted to do? It really was a matter of what I had to do. I couldn’t leave my two boys on their own for a week as the eldest is the most fragile and I frequently worry after his health and activity level. I was able to use technology to cheat around the edges as it were, to be both at home and in New York with my partner at the same time. I’m so glad I was able to take advantage of the technology and it’s just one more, amongst a gallery of other reasons, why I’m so very glad that I have Apple technology in my life. It made it all seamless and easy. I could have done it other ways, but it would have been a mess. The Apple way is smooth and simple and just as easy as answering the phone.

– This is also the first of the Post-A-Day prompts from the book that WordPress.com assembled to inspire bloggers like me to write more and more frequently.

PAD April 25 2013 – Second Time Around

Posted on January 11, 2014 by bluedepth

Tell us about a book you can read again and again without getting bored — what is it that speaks to you?

I read both 1984 and “What Dreams May Come” regularly for different reasons. 1984 is worth reading because it speaks to the dangers of NewSpeak. When I was growing up I decided that expanding my vocabulary was the best single thing I could do for myself, to make me a better person. In 1984, that whole thing is a thread the book challenges and it terrifies me. The quality and the lessons it teaches I think are incredibly valuable. As for the latter book, I read that when I was at the lowest point in faith and it helped by inspiring me to seek out a new faith. I enjoy Richard Matheson for his other works as well, but that book really speaks to me.

Engagement

Posted on January 1, 2014 by bluedepth

I just read this article and it reminded me of so much of what I was doing back in November of 2013.

The key to engagement is to be active and honest and produce the content that will get your message across. As the article states, what people want is not really what most organizations really want to share, they want honesty, heart, and (self-referentially) engagement.

A case in point, Jeri Ryan, an actress who has starred in many TV Series in her career. I bring her up as a great example of someone who gets engagement. The platform that she used was Google Plus, but it was only tangential to this topic. The important distinction was how she chose to use the service. She actually engaged individually with her fans, which is something more than a lot of other celebrities are comfortable with doing. I’ve written about this particular thing before on this blog. I have noticed that many people seeking or maintaining a certain level of fame think that they can create a social networking persona and simply use it to dump links and material to their work and leave right after that. It turns them from living people into two-dimensional billboards. When you elect to engage, you really have to pursue the entire endeavor otherwise people will notice your two dimensionality and while the initial surge will be impressive, there won’t be anything on the tail end to maintain your initial levels of engagement. Jeri Ryan proves that if you actually do engage, the rewards continue to build. In the case of a television celebrity, engaging with your fans brings them closer to you and perhaps they are more loyal, more attentive to what you have to say, quite possibly even more accepting of any causes you may want to share with them. Only Mrs. Ryan can answer the question of whether engagement with the fans was a good thing or not, as a fan, it was nice to see from my vantage point.

Which brings me back to November. Much of it is water under the bridge but there is still was a lot of work that could have been done. The level of engagement is key, and much like the linked article above, I still strongly maintain that if you have a cause or mission and you want to promote it, it has more to do with understanding your audience than it does trying to carefully construct some framework from which to launch some blind campaign. The difference is that people respond to an authentic message, one with heart, more readily than they do something that was pre-processed, sterilized, vetted and canned. To quote Chef Gordon Ramsay, if you want a successful restaurant you need to provide simple honest fare using fresh local ingredients. This wisdom can be applied to anything else, not just running a restaurant. It can also apply to engagement, with the core lesson being that you’ll get your best bang for your buck if you provide simple, honest engagement using fresh local talent. People want to engage with other people, not with a monolithic edifice. To draw back to the cooking metaphor, would people be more interested in eating a dish that was sourced locally or would they rather eat something sourced from Sysco or GFS?

Another thing that I was working on, was the notion of engaging the crowd. In the previous arrangement, it was a lead-in to the notion of crowd-funding a goal. At least from the company hosting the talk, that was their bleeding-edge analysis of where all this social networking and engagement is actually going in the future. The organizations that engage with the most honesty (heart) will have a better chance at meeting their goals.

Alas, all that is over now, but the article did move me to want to comment on it.

Medium

Posted on December 23, 2013 by bluedepth

This is how social networking works. I was just wandering along, scrubbing through my Feedly list of syndicated items on websites when I ran across an article about headline hunting. As I read along, I noticed the presentation layer, the UI/UX was pleasant enough to be remarkable and catch my attention. It became, quite quickly in fact a trip down the rabbit hole.

The source of this fascination was Medium.com. One well-written, well-presented article was all I needed to see that this is something special. I found myself enraptured, roped in, and signing up. Now I don’t know if I’ll ever write material for that system, but there I was spiraling into it and enjoying it quite a lot.

And this is what startups and social networking enthusiasts are really hoping will happen. That their creations will catch people, like I was caught, and reel them in. It’s the definition of good UI/UX, if the content and presentation are good enough, they become an entirely new thing, something like intellectual Velcro.

I was just floating along. Then suddenly I was reading a lot, enjoying myself, signing up, and then the magic hit: I started sharing. Links from the site to Facebook, Twitter and yes, even LinkedIn.

I think everyone I know would enjoy this site and get caught up in it like I did. In many ways Medium.com wins because in less than fifteen minutes I’ve become an evangelist of it. Check it out at Medium.com. I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

Did You Get That Thing I Sent Ya?

Posted on September 5, 2013 by bluedepth

This video, adapted from a character on Cartoon Network’s Harvey Birdman animated series. Asks the most fundamental question that exists and is at the center of my issues with workplace communications.

“Did you get that thing, that thing, THAT THING, … that… I sent ya?”

It happens a lot, I do it, and a lot of other people do it too and it’s so annoying, irritating, and upsetting. You send a message to someone else and if it’s email, it can be like it flew into a black hole. You don’t know if they got it, if they read it, if they don’t care. Did they file it? Did they laugh when they got it? Dunno. When will whatever it is get attention? Dunno.

It’s the not knowing that irks me. We used to use GroupWise which made this particular issue somewhat of a non-event because it would record the fate of the message and you could get read receipts automatically sent back to you. Generally, this isn’t a problem either with SupportPress as we get emailed when a ticket comes in and the system enforces a receipt structure whenever we get tickets and manipulate them. It’s just, well, everything else. And it’s not something you want to include with every email because it should be a matter of common courtesy to acknowledge that you got a message and that you are working on it, or whatever is really going on with it.

Then again, my experience is that much like verbal arguments, nobody is really listening. In email, nobody is really reading. Time and time again I notice people who only pick out keywords from a cursory scan of what I send and reply to the things they feel they want to reply with, ignoring the actual message itself.

When asked, “What is the biggest stumbling block for you professionally?” The answer can be only this: Basic human communication and the lack of it. How can anyone get anything accomplished if we aren’t listening or reading or even paying attention to each other? Thank god for cognitive dissonance. It’s an absurd life if it is this way and obviously it isn’t because things get done, somehow, so it can’t be that bad, not really. But I think it is bad and I fear that it’s just getting worse.

If you get an email, maybe it’s a good idea to form a new habit and immediately reply telling the other party that you got it. At least when everyone knows, it’s one less little chunk of mystery floating out there.

photo by: Cargo Cult

Encrypt Everything

Posted on August 18, 2013 by bluedepth

Lavabit and Silent Circle have given up when it comes to providing encrypted email communications. Mega plans on providing something to cover the gap and in general the only real way to deal with privacy-in-email is end-to-end encryption. There was talk that at some point email might give way to writing letters and using the US Postal Service but there as well you’ve got Postmasters writing commands taped to mail about how everything has to be photocopied and stored – so even the US Postal Service is full of spies, the only thing the US Postal Service can be trusted to carry is junk mail.

What is the answer? Pretty Good Privacy. PGP, or rather, the non-Symantec version of it which is the GNU one, the GPG. If you really want to keep what you write private when you send it to someone else, the only way to do that is for everyone to have GPG installed on their email system so you can write email using their public key, which converts your email to cyphertext, secure from even the NSA’s prying eyes, and requires your recipient to unlock the message using their secret key, which they have.

I’ve been playing with PGP and GPG now for a very long time and I decided I would at least make a route available if anyone wanted to contact me with privacy intact – my public keys are on my blog, they are also on all the keyservers including the one hosted and run by MIT and the GPG Keyserver as well. To send me a private message via email all you need to do is get GPG, set it up, create your secret and public key, get my public key, use it to write me an email and only I’ll be able to read it. The NSA will just flag the encrypted contents for later analysis and thanks to AES–256, they’ll be hard pressed to get to the plaintext in your message.

That’s the way around all of this. GPG for everything. GPG public keys for email, for chat, for VPN, for files, and HTTP-in-GPG. Everything pumped through GPG. Since the government won’t stop spying on us, it’s our duty as citizens to secure our own effects against illegal search and siezure, and technology exists to do so.

Encrypt everything.

Automatic Tag Generator for DayOne Journals synced with Dropbox

Posted on July 25, 2013 by bluedepth

Here’s how I created a system to automatically sync up keywords to tags in DayOne Journal. The journal is stored on my Dropbox, so if you have it in iCloud, I don’t know what you’re going to do.

First Step: Get text list of tags in a text file: (do this in the entries folder of your DayOne Journal, cd to it, if you can’t, google-fu.)

Then copy this tags.txt folder to your home directory. Edit the file, be careful of phrases in XML that would confuse the system, Weather, Apple, DTD, String – that sort of thing, also be very careful around TLA’s as they can have unintended side effects. The later scripts that do the keyword searches don’t give a damn about cases, so your keywords or your KeYwOrDs will be equivalent.

You’ll need two more scripts. This one adds tags based on keywords passed to it as parameters: (be VERY careful, little L and capital I look very much the same, read man pages, yo)

tag.sh:

#!/bin/bash

cd /Users/username/Dropbox/Apps/Day\ One/Journal.dayone/entries

find . -type f -print0 |xargs -0 grep -L “<string>”$1″</string>”| xargs grep -li “”$1″” |xargs grep -l “<key>Tags</key>”|xargs -I file /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “add Tags:Key string “$1″” file

find . -type f -print0 |xargs -0 grep -L “<string>”$1″</string>”| xargs grep -li “”$1″” |xargs grep -L “<key>Tags</key>”|xargs -I file /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “add Tags array” file

Next, you’ll need another script called updatetags.sh, looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
cat /Users/andy/Dropbox/Apps/Day\ One/tags.txt|xargs -n 1 /Users/andy/tag.sh

The last bit will be a new LaunchAgent, so go to ~/Library/LaunchAgents and mock up a plist file by copying one from there, if you need an example, try this:

more ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.andymchugh.tag.plist
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN”
“http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”>
<plist version=”1.0″>
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>org.andymchugh.tag</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/Users/andy/updatetags.sh</string>
</array>
<key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
<dict>
<key>Minute</key>
<integer>00</integer>
<key>Hour</key>
<integer>06</integer>
</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

The name of the LaunchAgent has to be unique and the inside name (<string>org.andymchugh.tag</string>) should match the file name like you see here. Swap out the com bit for org, and forget the plist bit. This script will run every day at 6am. You can flavor it to your liking.

Then the final command to tie it all together:

launchctl load -w com.andymchugh.tag.plist

So now, when you write DayOne Journal entries you can mark up the tags.txt file that lives in your Dropbox. Value added, if you change this file anywhere, Dropbox will make sure it syncs up with all your other systems, so you can edit it and forget it pretty nicely as long as it’s not open-for-editing when your script fires off at 6am. That would be messy.

The first time you do it, you’ll notice your Dropbox churn for a long while and then all your other connected Dropboxes will churn as they sync up. Your iPhone and iPad will have huge downloads to do, but they’ll catch up well enough. As you create new DayOne Journal entries you can rest assured that your script will be doing keyword searching for you on your behalf and hooking up your tags to your DayOne Journal entries for you.

Just one more thing automated and out of the way. Hooray!

P.S. Backup your Journal, DIY. Be safe, be smart, learn how to use tar. man tar. Read it. Live it. tar is your delight and your savior. 🙂

EDIT: tags.sh needed a cd command first, otherwise it would just wander aimlessly. Sorry about that.

Slogger

Posted on July 12, 2013 by bluedepth

Slogger

Every once in a while I run across something I’ve seen before but ignored accidentally until I see it in great big headlines and neon and stop to pay attention to it and discover that it does something I really really want. This particular afternoon it was the product Slogger from Brett Terpstra. The software is a Ruby script, and Ruby is a delightful programming language that I’ve had the pleasure of dabbling in. Nowhere near the level of Brett and the people who help him, but here and there, little things.

The need came from a simple Google query, IFTTT and Day One. Looking for some way to bridge that divide between the automatic web service that I’ve fallen in love with, IFTTT and Day One, the journaling software that works quite well and renders DropBox a “Killer App”. Dropbox is the glue that keeps my Day One system together, on my laptop, my desktop, and all my mobile devices. When I found Slogger it was a definite Eureka moment, the answer all in one place. I downloaded the code as the author describes and tried to set it up.

Monumental fail. Pieces everywhere, error codes puking on the screen faster than I could read, pages and pages of interpreter and compiler errors, all surrounding one “Ruby Gem” module called hpricot. I knew why this was fail-town for me, it was because I had installed XCode CLI tools in order to get the mac_google_authenticator PAM module built. That CLI package rendered my system retarded when it came to processing gem requests. In the Ruby world there is a system established for distributing software written in Ruby, it’s called ‘gem’ and you run it much like apt-get in Ubuntu, it’s really quite straightforward and never has given me fits – until. Everything was complicated by the fact that I couldn’t really find where XCode was on my machine, all the likely targets to search didn’t have anything relevant and my find command returned pages of errors and I didn’t have the patience to pick through a thousand lines of “Permission Denied” to find the one spot where the file was hidden.

Didn’t need to complain, as I knew the solution. Download XCode for real. So off to Apple, download the monster and install it. That satisfied hpricot, and everything else installed quite nicely. I set Slogger up, pointed it at my Dropbox and configured the plugins that I wanted. The initial run crashed and burned but I figured out why, it was an errant space in the line that points to the Day One folder, a symbolic link fixed that and I was again off to the races. Of all the plugins that I configured these were successful:

BlogLogger
facebookifttt
goodreadslogger
lastfmlogger
pocketlogger
rsslogger

Then there were the plugins I tried to configure but couldn’t:

fitbit
flickrlogger
getgluelogger

The primary problem with the fitbit plugin was that fitgem, the Ruby assistant program that you have to install is a phantom. You install it, it’s successful, and then it’s gone. No trace of it exists. You try again, poof, nowhere. Plus for the plugin setup there are API codes, User codes, and oAuth codes. I get the reasoning behind all of them and getting most of them was not an issue. I felt a little awkward creating an “Application” for just myself, it seems kind of a waste of effort to ferret all these bits and peices into a semiformal request procedure, but doing it wasn’t hard or cost anything, so what the hell. The part where it all falls apart for fitbit is where you have to get the oAuth token, since fitgem never worked and it’s invocation from slogger should have opened a web browser and asked for my approval, all of that never happened. I tried to be sporting and do the heavy lifting myself but all I did was irritate the API for fitbit and I figured, what the hell, I got most of what I was after and moved the fitbit plugin into the “unused” folder and forgot all about it. Abandon ship, y’arrrr!

Flickr is a pain in the ass. It’s Yahoo and as such, it’s kind of an Internet leper. You need your Flickr number, there’s a site that makes that easy, except it doesn’t work. Flickr username? Feh, either the one in Flickr or your linked Yahoo ID is meaningless. I half figured it was in the URL anyways, but then I thought about it and I don’t really use Flickr all that much beyond a solitary IFTTT rule and that’s precarious as it is. The only attractive part of Flickr is they gave out 1TB of storage. Still lepers tho. So, abandon ship! Y’arrrrr!

GetGlue was the last great effort. Much like Klout, it’s a site that makes sense sort of, but the name is utterly silly. GetGlue. What the hell? Why? Glue has nothing to do with TV or Movies. The only connection I could think of was celluloid and horses-processed-into-glue sort of connection. They give away stickers, what a wonderful bit of pollution that is, and as a gimmick seems dumb. The plugin needs an RSS feed for the GetGlue Activity Stream. It appears as though the GetGlue folks have moved away from RSS and towards “widgets” which seems stupid as in this application RSS is the answer and widgets are worthless. Alas, Google searching for the RSS feed method was fruitless. I was half hoping for something like http://getglue.com/user/bluedepth/feed.rss, where I could just craft it up and be on my merry way. No. You have to “View Source” to find it, which is stupid because that is so full of CSS flotsam and jetsam as to be utterly incomprehensible. Again, my ardor for that particular service was fog on a hot day. I don’t need it. I don’t use it. Whatever! Abandon ship! y’arrrrr!

So I tried the slogger script, it failed, tore out fitbit goop and then it worked. Then I went into my Day One app and mopped up all the mess that testing had made. The only oddity I noticed was the BlogLogger completely missed out on the text on my WordPress site that was between pre tags. Meh. Not really a reason to kick the entire thing to the curb, just something to honestly stop using. HTML is a right bastard, almost all of the time. CSS is a filthy abomination, but we won’t go there.

I would say that tonight everything will work as it should for Slogger, but I have to race to work tonight to turn everything off because work is going to exit-stage-left when it comes to the Internet. They are turning the entire thing off, at least for a few hours. I can’t wait for tomorrow, there will be lulz.

So, to Mr. Terpstra, thank you for slogger. I’m sorry the plugins didn’t work, that fitgem was a phantom, but at least most of what I wanted worked. So we sound a victory cheer, sort of. Yaaay!

photo by: Silvia Viñuales

Byword 2.0

Posted on June 4, 2013 by bluedepth

Byword, one of my favorite apps for the Mac and for my iOS devices just upgraded to version 2.0. They have included publishing to blog platforms as a Premium feature and used the Mac App Store or iOS to distribute the added functionality for $4.99. So far I love this app and this was one of those features that I’ve been dying for, so I’m quite pleased. I can do all my writing using Byword and not have to worry about distractions or anything on the screen getting in the way of my writing. It’s all clear, clean, and simple.

The last post to my WordPress blog about Invention was written using Byword 2.0 and I’m quite impressed with it. I could suggest some other enhancements like enumerating the Category list and suggesting possible tags in WordPress posting, but I will take what I can get from the get-go. One thing that was a little dismaying, but not a show stopper was that the purchase of the Premium add-on only works for the App Store that matches the platform you are buying it for. The Premium add-on for Mac App Store is separate from the one for the iOS App Store. Their support was very clear and I pretty much assumed so even before I wrote to support, I just wanted to be sure. Frankly I could give or take the extra features on my iPad or my iPhone as Drafts works brilliantly there along with Poster app on those devices. Drafts hands off to Poster well enough without having to worry about buying Byword 2.0 Premium again for the iOS App Store. I bought the add-on for the Mac App Store because that’s where, when I blog on my Laptop or on my iMac, this will be the app that I’ll use to blog.

The only irking thing, and it’s not really anything really overwrought is the lack of pick lists and tag suggestions for WordPress, but I have faith that eventually they might take their software in that direction. Only time will tell, and developers. 🙂