[Editor’s Note: This article contains offensive language, so please ignore this post if you’re not comfortable with that.]
I’m a pack-rat. I don’t want to be. If anything, I yearn for a clutter-free life. It just seems damn near impossible to attain. Think of all the crap we accumulate in the course of a normal work day. Stop at a convenience store to get a coffee and maybe a snack for mid-morning, and I’ve picked up a steel can, foil wrapper, and a receipt. Get to work and I’m given notes about my schedule changes and how the special-ed class has erected a life-sized paper mache statue of me in the art room. After lunch, I get another message from a school I visited along with a framed group photo and a handmade kite that I don’t think would even fly. And they want me to take it all home with me. And I can’t insult them. I’ve gotta take it home. And it can’t just go in the garbage. I’ve gotta hold on to it. Or else their efforts were for naught. What does this have to do with software? Well, the last thing I want when I open my Mac up is more clutter in my software.
So in order to be minimalist, I’ve took up reading Zen Habits and Lifehacker, but they’re mostly full of shit. Most of their articles are top five lists that seem to exist for nothing more than to drive traffic and hipster-Eastern wisdom that somebody picked up while browsing the New Age section at Barnes & Nobles. It’s a nice try but decorating your house in faux Japanese knick knacks and using Coca Cola to clean your toilet bowl isn’t going to solve your problem. You’ve got too much stuff. I’m guilty of it. So I’ll never fault you for it either, but retweeting Leo Babuta isn’t going to help you. Cause you’re just cluttering up everyone’s Twitter feeds. Now I’m sure I’m offending some white people out there who think they’re enlightened cause they had miso soup for dinner once or because they go to yoga, so for that I apologize. But much like when your father told you to wrap up your Johnson before you took that girl of questionable morals to prom, I’m just trying to be helpful.
But you’re not reading this just to hear me compare Microsoft Word and Omnifocus to herpes. I want to talk about minimalist software. It could be a pretty broad topic, so I’ll try to reign it in to the two types of apps that I think need it the most: text editors and task managers. I almost don’t want to consider Microsoft Word as a text editor. It’s a word processor. The two seem to be different animals. A word processor feels like a large machine. A text editor, on the other hand, feels like a small tool. Think of it as a whittling knife. What you do with text editors feels more like art, and less like work. If you’re just concerned about getting words down, and you’re not worried about formatting and printing wacky designs, a text editor is a far better solution. 99% of the writing I do is for Smoking Apples and my gaming site Pixelsnatch. Neither of those require anything more than for me to paste text into a browser form. I just need to get my words down as plain text. You want as little formatting as possible, since weird code can make your blog entry look like a car crash victim’s face. If you want a great text editor, I can’t think of anything better than Writeroom. If you need an all-inclusive writing tool, that isn’t a word processor of the Word vein, something like Literature and Latte’s Scrivener is a decent text editor wrapped up with a document management system.
What about task managers? Omnifocus feels like being on Tokyo subway during the morning commute. If I had tits, I’m sure one of Omnifocus’s menu bars would be squeezing them. I don’t want my task manager asking me what’s the start and end date for everything. I don’t want it to feel like it’s pressuring me into daily or weekly reviews. I found myself scheduling alerts into iCal to review my reviews. What most folks need is a database with next actions, some scheduled tasks, and maybe the shit you’re probably never gonna get to, but you enjoy tricking yourself that someday, maybe someday, you’ll take that trip to Japan and eat sushi off the tummy of a naked geisha. You nerds can dream, right? But there’s this other group of nerds. The kind that believes you can’t possibly use anything with any sort of bells or whistles. Just the idea of ‘digital calendars’ gives them the heebie jeebies. No, they prefer to do all their to-do lists in plain text. These guys live in TextMate. These are the nerds who hand code everything. I tell them I use Squarespace, and you’d think I was raping their mother they’re so offended. They don’t bother with creating task databases. They save their lists individually, and it’s not a tag unless it’s got an @ symbol in front of it. To these guys, if the UI didn’t come from a UNIX shell, you’re trying too hard.
I feel for these people, a little. I mean, in the rush to computerize the hell out of everything, we’ve forgotten how convenient paper is. You sit down at a desk with a piece of paper and a pencil, and the possibilities are endless. You can map out the future of the world. You can catalog the history of it. And you could also craft the most perfect to-do list. I spend a lot of my free time thinking about the things I need to do. If I’ve got a free minute at work, I find myself whipping out either a notebook or a Hipster PDA so I can schedule out the remainder of my day. Problem is, I have the same problem that everyone else does: I need to put my notes in an electronic format before it feels complete for me. All that time spent on handwritten notes and lists winds up being just a rough draft for the final draft that is Things on my iPhone. However, if there ever was a task manager that could get you back to paper it would be TaskPaper from Hog Bay Software. The Mac version of TaskPaper is not much more than a text editor, but the system that holds the text feels a lot like a blank piece of paper and a pencil. And it’s up to the user how they want to make use of it. When the iPhone version is finally available to the public (it’s currently in beta), you’ll be extremely surprised at how well it carries over the idea of pen & paper task management from the Mac client.
But worst of all offender are the communication apps. IMs, Skype, and Twitter. You all suck. The standard AIM, MSN, and Yahoo apps are fucking putrid. These guys haven’t learned a damn thing in the last ten years. They’re as ugly and gangly as they were when I was in middle school. I’d take ICQ over any of them. The shining light in the Mac world is Adium. It starts off pretty damn simple, and by installing a few add-ons, you can tear it down even more. Give yourself a HUD contact list and message style, and it’s like looking at an MS-DOS prompt. But Adium’s biggest success is that it looks minimalist without being short on features. You can manage all your different IM accounts, carry on multiple chats in one window using tabs, and you can script it to Hell and back. But the part of the UI you see is never crowded. And that should be the goal of every software dev: to create powerful software that never lets its user interface get in the way.
You may not agree with my theory that poor design will be the end of civilization as we know it, but it’s not out of the realm of possibilities. The further we progress as a species, the further we get away from organic design. When people made things from wood and stone with their own hands, they were simple creations. Natural designs that used natural materials. Everything we get now is cheap and plastic, and feels unnatural. But don’t take that as approval to use wood-grain in your UI.
