How often do you find yourself in front of your two computers, forgetting which mouse belongs to which, transferring files via FTP or USB flash drive, moaning in agony as you save the contents of your clipboard on one computer to a file in order to transfer it to the other? Exactly: all the time!

Well, no more!

Thanks to the magic of Synergy, I’ve been safely controlling two computers with a single keyboard and mouse for the past six years. After three years without active development, a group of developers have taken it upon themselves to create a successor fork, Synergy+, where they have been patching bugs and adding new features since 2009.

So far, Synergy+ has improved upon the original by adding a new GUI, as well as HTML and image support to the clipboard. The latter is not yet supported on Mac OS X, but that’s on its way–they promise.

How is Synergy+ different from a KVM or A/B switch? Simple: it’s all software. Just install Synergy+ on all your computers, make sure they’re connected over the network, and away you go.

I use Synergy+ on a daily basis. My primary computer, a 15″ MacBook Pro, drives a 24″ monitor. To its left is a 22″ monitor, rotated vertically, and connected to my Windows XP box. To switch between computers, I just move my mouse pointer to the edge of the screen and onto the monitor next to it. Synergy transfers my keyboard and mouse inputs instantly to the other computer.

While I’ve kept my PC around solely to test site designs on Internet Explorer, I’ve recently discovered a new benefit to using Synergy. Rather than run a scattering of applications on each machine, I’ve divided up my tasks, using my Mac for development, running Photoshop, Firefox and TextMate, and relegating everything else–IRC, instant messaging, Twitter, downloads, and streaming–to my XP box. By limiting which computer handles which tasks, I can maintain shared control over two discrete workspaces: one where I only do work, and another where I’m only dealing with distractions. It’s worked out quite well, both for my productivity, as well as my CPU load.

If you find yourself needing some extra desktop space or more RAM, maybe you’re asking yourself the wrong question. What do you really want to be able to do? If the answer is “run more stuff in more space”, Synergy can be a great way to get some extra use out of that old computer you have sitting in your closet.

Download Synergy+.

Today, I’m going to complain about what’s wrong with it.

Now, to be fair, I’m quite pleased with the whole Notational Velocity package. Simplenote’s team are quick to respond to problems on Twitter, and quickly tackle bugs as they crop up. Notational Velocity is a well-developed app that can only get better since it’s been open-sourced.

So what’s missing from Notational Velocity if I like it so much? Actually, not much! I can only actually think of three real issues, and two simply aren’t that big a deal. Unfortunately, the third has proven to be surprisingly disruptive to my workflow.

1. Markdown Formatting
Notational Velocity supports bold, italicized and underlined rich text. Simplenote, on the other hand, does not. I’d love it if Notational Velocity had an option to save rich text formatting when exporting to plaintext–at least for bold and italicized text, that is. Markdown doesn’t care for underlines.

This would let me preserve rich text formatting round-trip from a file created in Notational Velocity, edited via Simplenote’s website or on my iPhone as plaintext, and displayed again in Notational Velocity, bold and italicized text intact. It looks like I’m not the only one who thinks this is a good idea, so I’m hopeful we’ll see this at some point in the future.

2. Multiple Windows
I get the philosophy behind Notational Velocity’s two-pane, no-buttons design. I do. I also get that, as such, it’s unlikely I’ll see this last feature without forking the codebase and adding it myself, which goes directly against my philosophy for using Notational Velocity and Simplenote: because it’s straightforward.

That said, I’ve occasionally found myself wishing that I could have two (or more) Notational Velocity windows. Why? Easy: sometimes I need to refer to a daily “to do” list while also referring to a second notecard, and sometimes I need to cut and paste between a couple different notecards, particularly when I’m breaking one up into smaller subcategories.

3. The Icon
Yes, seriously. Hear me out!

A rocket-powered filing cabinet. I can’t think of anything more appropriate to illustrate what Notational Velocity does.

Notational Velocity’s new “filing cabinet/rocket ship” icon is a huge improvement over the terrible, terrible “NV” icon it had for years. It’s clever, well-designed, and the metaphor, a rocket-powered filing cabinet, is both appropriate to what Notational Velocity does, as well as being a play on Notational Velocity’s name. It’s great. I wish I’d thought of it.

I can’t use it.

I tried. I really did! Even after four months of using the new Notational Velocity, my brain simply can’t get around the idea of a note-taking application’s icon not looking like a notepad or book. I’m not setting out to criticize Colin Cody’s ingenious rocket ship icon; indeed, I’m astonished that I can’t seem to get my head around the thing.

Human-computer interface expert Jef Raskin wrote about this issue in his 2000 book, The Humane Interface. He later summed up many of these points in an email to Tom Gilb:

Definition: A gesture is an action that you finish without conscious thought once you have started it. Example: For a beginning typist, typing the letter “t” is a gesture. For a more experienced typist, typing the word “the” is a gesture.

Rule 1. An interface should be habituating.

If the interface can be operated habitually then, after you have used it for a while, its use becomes automatic and you can release all your attention to the task you are trying to achieve.

Consequently, when an interface can’t be operated habitually, we run into problems. Since I started using Notational Velocity, I’ve experienced this exact issue on a daily basis: I’m reading a blog post. It’s interesting. Full of good ideas. I think, “Hey, this is related to that thing I’m working on right now! Why don’t I copy the URL and make a quick one-sentence note about the way the information therein can be tied into the project? Sweet!”

I select the URL, hit Command-C to copy it, Command-Tab to switch applications–and pause. Wait! Where’s my note…thing? My eyes dart around, as my brain’s needle abruptly skips across the surface of its record. ¹

Suddenly, I’m forced to switch from purposefully performing a task–one that requires me to immediately jot down my current train of thought–to consciously trying to remember and recognize which icon I’m looking for. It’s really disorienting, and I’ve found it to be the one consistent hiccup in my Notational Velocity/Simplenote workflow.

Worse, because Mac OS X’s application switcher lists active applications in the order in which they were last used, I can’t even train myself to click a specific area of the screen, as I would, say, if their icons were instead ordered alphabetically. (Yes, I’ve tried Witch to switch between windows rather than applications. I like the idea, but it’s just not what I’m looking for.)

Incidentally, this quirk of OS X’s interface goes against another of Raskin’s points:

“Rule 1b. To make an interface habituating, it must be monotonous.

Commentary. “Monotony” here is a technical term meaning that you do not have to choose among multiple gestures to achieve a particular sub-task. Crudely, there should be only one way to achieve a single-gesture subtask.”

Here, Raskin’s criticizing the practice of giving the user more than one way to do a task, (To copy the URL of the aforementioned blog post, we can choose between the keyboard command, the Edit menu, right-click menu, etc.) but application switching in OS X is even more annoying. Depending on how many apps I have open, Notational Velocity can be anywhere in a horizontal list of a dozen other programs.

So I changed the icon.

Now that’s an icon you write things in!

Instead, I’m using DeviantArt contributor ^pica-ae’s beautiful Red Moleskine icons.

She’s also created a number of similar icons in more traditional Moleskine colours, but I find I prefer the red one. It stands out against the other applications I use, and as a bonus, feels easier to associate with Notational Velocity’s functionality than the black icons. I’ve used the red icon for about a week now, and it’s worked out well. Is that strictly because it’s an inherently more appropriate icon? Not at all. Perhaps it’s simply easier to find because I’m subconsciously recognizing the effort that went into thinking about the problem and finding what I felt to be a more suitable icon.

This is by no means a perfect solution. I’m frustrated that I couldn’t ever get used to using the rocket-cabinet icon, just because it IS so apt and clever.²

Another option might have been to simply train myself not to use Command-Tab to switch to Notational Velocity. It’s in the same position on my Dock. I tend to keep the open Notational Velocity window to the left side of my desktop, where it does tend to peek out from behind other apps. Couldn’t I have just learned to click the open window rather than looking for the icon? Couldn’t I have used Exposé?

Sure, there were plenty of options available, but changing the way I switch apps might actually have been an even greater change for me to deal with. Consider this: I’ve switched applications the same way on Mac OS X since 2002. I’ve used applications with pads-of-paper for icons to jot down notes since Windows 3.1. Perhaps four months with Notational Velocity and its new icon was simply not long enough for me to learn a new mode of behavior.

My experience here has demonstrated something I think we should all take to heart when designing interfaces: a change to established practices can be really, really hard for users to accept, even if they agree the change makes complete sense.

1. Tch, your MOM has synesthesia.
2. And purpose-designed! Sorry, Colin Cody!

Since Apple added their super-convenient Time Machine app to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, I’d been meaning to get around to using it. A year later, I bought a simple external USB drive, a Western Digital MyPassport. Easy. Tiny. USB-powered.²

So I finally made it to the counter to pay for the thing. No, I hadn’t shopped there before. Would I like to sign up for the Best Buy blah blah card thing? I sure would! And I proceeded to do so. Take that, people behind me in line.

“Oh, my email address? Certainly. It’s ‘catherine’…”

*tap tap tap*

“at”

*tap tap tap*

“catherine–”

*DELETE DELETE DELETE*

“Uh…no. I mean, yes, my name is Catherine. You spelled that correctly. My email address is Catherine at CatherineWinters.com.”

*tap tap tap*

“Catherine with a ‘C’.”

And so on and so forth. So that was pretty fun.

Protip: Once Best Buy security agrees not to call the police if you promise never to set foot in the store again, you can partition your external drive as half Time Machine and half storage, formatting it for convenience’s sake as NTFS, not MacOSX-native HFS+. The NTFS 3G driver for OSX allows you to both read and write NTFS-formatted drives, and you’ll still be able to connect to Windows PCs should need arise.

If you do this, however, you have to be really careful about ejecting the stupid thing properly. If any files get damaged, you’ll lose write access to the NTFS partition and the resulting error message will in no way be helpful. If you suddenly find that you can’t write to an NTFS-formatted disk, plug the thing into a Windows PC and run chkdsk on it to fix the errors.

Congratulations, I just saved you three hours of Googling.

Next Time: In Case of Fire.

1. Yeah, you know that time that your computer died and you lost everything and you said, “next time, I’m going to do regular backups” and then you didn’t? I’m marginally smarter than you.
2. Unfortunately, my 5-year-old Dell 24″ monitor has a crappy, crappy USB hub that causes my MacBook Pro to kernel panic whenever Time Machine starts–Windows users: that’s the OSX version of a bluescreen. There’s an app for that. So I lose a USB port; no hub for you, WD My Passport! This is actually a good reason to use Firewire, come to think of it.

October, 2000
I come out to a few select friends and family. My parents immediately fight over which one of them is most accepting of it. It later turns out the answer is “neither”.

September 11, 2001
The American Century comes to a close. The subsequent decade sees Western civilization dig its heels in, ineptly seeking security and short-term gains at all costs. I watch CNN for 6 months straight.

October 23, 2001
Apple releases the iPod. I fail to see what the big deal is. Investors disagree significantly on this point.

December 20, 2002
“Second Life? What’s that?” I ask as I click the link. “What a stupid name!”

February 1, 2003
I move to Vancouver on an ill-advised whim. The next three years are…interesting. To this day, I still wake up thinking cockroaches are eating dead skin off my face.

January 14, 2006
Some dude cuts most of my face off and totally goes to town on my skull with power tools. Fortunately, he was a doctor. I can breathe through my nose now.

August, 2006
As a part-time contract LSL developer, I am paid in US dollars. Currency fluctuations force me to give up LSL development in favour of working a minimum wage retail job. I like it a lot better.

November 18, 2006
I manage to get published for the first time. It is not exactly my finest work.

December 20, 2006
I’ve just been told about this new CMS that’s supposed to be pretty good. “Drupal? More like Poo–pal!” I exclaim to a circle of blank, embarrassed faces. Nice.

April 21, 2007
A lab test indicates I may have cancer. Subsequent tests indicate I have stress. I consider remedying both by having alcoholism.

July 22, 2008
My Palm Treo dies. I buy an iPhone. Unfortunately, everyone I know can be divided into two camps: People who already have iPhones and people who don’t care that I am now the coolest person ever.

August 15, 2008
I learn my knee pain is likely to be the result of osteoarthritis. At such an early age, the implication is that I will not be able to walk in 10 years.

September 1, 2008
I am told I do not have osteoarthritis after all. As such, I am likely to continue walking for some time. “Your knees look great,” the doctor says, peering at the x-ray. “Say, how much exercise do you get?”

January 1-Dec 31, 2009
I endure a great deal of bullshit. My friends are kept appraised of the situation–to their dismay.

And that’s what I did during the aughts. How about you?

Yeah, there’s more, actually.

First, the good parts, the ones that were enough to make me give up Firefox:

• It’s fast. Really, really fast.
• Pages you visit get indexed in OSX’s Spotlight. It’s like Google Desktop for Firefox, only not totally ridiculous.
• While Safari doesn’t include support for Firefox-style extensions, there are a bunch of cheesy hacks billed as plugins that look very similar to the end-user. Apple has indicated they’re going to stop support for these though. Hopefully, by the time they do, Safari 5 will have incorporated some of the functionality of the ones I like.

  I’m using Glims, Safari AdBlock and Inquisitor. Inquisitor is fairly rad, actually. It changes how your search results work and adds support for all your favourite search engines, searching them all in parallel if that’s your thing. (It’s not mine.)

Now, the parts I hate:

• Selecting text and right-clicking gives you the usual “Search in Google” option. It apparently can’t be changed to open in a new tab by default. So for me, a user who searches lots of strings and opens them in new tabs, I’m forced to Cmd-T new tabs open, copying-and-pasting the text into the search box.
• I’m not used to having to type a search before I tell Inquisitor where to search. In Firefox, it’s the other way around: you click the dropdown, select “Wikipedia” and then type what you want to find.

Still, these were not huge complaints. If you’re on Firefox on OSX, I’d give Safari 4 a try. Want to sync bookmarks between the two? (And office computers, your iPhone, blogroll, etc?) Get Xmarks.

Mind you, I still have no plans to use anything but Firefox for development purposes. For making sites, Firebug is where it’s at. When casually browsing, however, I just don’t need to be using half my CPU and RAM to display websites.

Drupal
Extension

Firebug

I definitely agree with MacBlogz’ assessment: “Safari 4: Three Steps Forward, One Step Back

http://www.macblogz.com/2009/02/24/safari-4-three-steps-forward-one-step-back/

Fortunately, I’m feeling my blogging powers coming back and I reconfigured my desk here at Workspace.

I brought along my trackball and clicky Apple keyboard^[1] for use when my fingers became just too sleepy, so I’m good to go there. I’ve boosted my laptop up on some ASP programming books, because, well… insert elitist statement here, baby.

Dairy Queen wasn’t the only organization to have brought us goodies, either. The BC SPCA dropped off a bunch of water bottles and a border collie to entertain us, and the BC Cancer Foundation has a bunch of chips waiting for us on the table. Cool!

[1] In my gym bag, hanging off the housing for my rear brake handle on my drop bars. Nah, I don’t need panniers here.

One short diagnosis of tennis and golfer’s elbow later, (“Catherine, you use the mouse a lot, don’t you?”) my doctor ordered me to find a less damaging pointing device. Since then, I’ve mostly relied on my laptop’s trackpad.

That’s all well and good while using my laptop, but for desktops, I needed a better solution. It’s really just Cirque that still makes USB trackpads, and those aren’t super either.

The Apple iTunes store provides a dozen or so “trackpad” apps, most of which use VNC to function as an input device alone. These let you use your wifi network to get your iPhone going as a trackpad. Surprisingly, this works fairly well, but it really does take gadget overkill to a whole new level.

So that leaves trackballs. Which is good, because I like them! ^[1]

So beautiful. So majestic.

Consequently, for the past 18 months, I’ve been using a Kensington Expert Mouse 7.0, the latest version of the classic ADB trackball. Kensington trackballs are so good, in fact, that sometimes I print out trackball-advocacy literature and go door-to-door, inviting people to hear the good news.

The latest version of the Kensington Expert Mouse boasts the same four buttons in a butterfly layout, as well as a one-dimensional “scroll ring” around the ball. The ring’s movement could be a little smoother, but it moves easily and is difficult to nudge by mistake.

So yes, I strongly recommend the Kensington Expert Mouse to anyone, if only because I rely on other people’s continued interest in trackballs to ensure companies keep producing them. Aside from that, trackballs are generally fairly good, egonomically speaking, and also make it more difficult for mouse-only friends to use your computer, providing you with ample opportunity to look smug. If you’re into that sort of thing, I mean.

For my keyboard, I’ve been alternating between my MacBook Pro and a 2005-series white/clear Apple keyboard. I own a Microsoft Natural Pro ergonomic keyboard, but I never liked the “mushy” feeling of the keys. The last-generation Apple keyboard’s keys aren’t buckling-spring. so it’s no Model M, but they definitely have sufficient give and are nicely clicky — within the limits of dome-switch keyboards.

Aside from feel, many Microsoft keyboards have a bit of an issue that’s always bugged me: they tend not to detect the left shift key being depressed when character entry keys have already been hit. This makes my hastily-typed smiley emoticons look terrible: ;0

I am pleased to say that Apple’s keyboards have never exhibited this problem.

Trackballs: A part of our heritage.

[1] Little-known Canadian trivia: the Royal Canadian Navy developed the first trackball back in the 1950s.

However, astute Canadians will note that this photo from Wikipedia shows the DATAR trackball assembly using flat-head screws, rather than superior, patriotic Robertson screws. For shame!

Recently, it seems like everyone I know is either sick, or involved in some massive family/social life drama, or having stuff stolen. I lost one half of a pair of earrings, Eric lost his camera equipment and Rob from Social Signal had his MacBook stolen.

Rob, of course, had the courage to at least put on a brave entertaining face for the rest of us, but man… that had to hurt. After a quick “back up your data, seriously” conversation, I did just that. Badly. But I’m going to grab another drive this week, so… you know, please don’t steal it before then, guys.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about ways of LoJacking my MacBook Pro to produce some kind of entertaining photoblog of snapshots of whoever stole it, complete with a record of access points detected, cross-referenced to WiFiMug. (or better yet, some obsessive wardriver’s map!)

Experience tells me that stolen laptops are rarely recovered, and that photos of computer thieves are frequently faked. Still, it’s something I’m setting up just in case.

Say it with me: “awwwww!”

Want your own? I ordered this spiffy, custom-made sleeve from Saltygal on Etsy.com. She makes super-cool stuff, and for very affordable prices. I’m going to order more. At random. It’ll be good.

(I’d also like to note that while the above photo was posed, it was not actually staged. I really was –and continue to be– that excited.)

It’s still in beta, and the only way to grab a copy is to bug Jim, but I’m using it and it works great. He’s still working on adding support for Shift-Home/Shift-End text selection, but it’s already made editing text fields in web pages so much easier. Thanks, Jim!