All posts by rwhite

An Introduction to Dropbox

Computers, Workflow

AN INTRODUCTION TO DROPBOX

by Richard White

2012-06-11

Have you heard of Dropbox? Are you using it yet? If the answer to either of these questions is ‘no,’ then sit back and prepare to be freaked out. In ten minutes or so, Dropbox is going to change your entire world.

Dropbox is, at its simplest, an online directory (folder) where you can store files. It looks like a folder on your computer, but everything in that folder is also stored “in the cloud,” on Dropbox’s servers.

Why would you want to store your stuff on their servers instead of on your own computer? Two common use-cases will demonstrate.

  • You want to share files with another person.
    Have you ever tried to email a 50MB movie to someone, or wanted to send them a set of photos from your vacation? Email doesn’t let you do it because the file sizes are too small. But you can place those files in a Dropbox public folder, or created a Dropbox shared folder, and your friend can use Dropbox to access those files. Problem solved.
  • You want to share files with yourself on another device.
    I have a few files that I need to have access to from multiple machines. With Dropbox installed on my Mac, on my Windows machine, on my Ubuntu Linux machine, and even on my iPhone and iPad, I can work with those files without having to email them to myself or go through any of those other machinations. Any changes I make to the file on one machine are automatically synced nearly immediately to all devices.

The nitty-gritty details: Dropbox is free for the first 2GB of storage. If you want more than that you’ll have to pay, or have people sign-up for Dropbox using a link you provide in which case they’ll award you a little referral love by increasing that amount for each person bring in. You do have to download their software to install on your machine—this is not a browser-based program. You’ll need network access, obviously, if you want files to be synced between machines. You can access local copies of the files on most devices, although mobile devices (iPads and iPhones) don’t keep local copies (unless configured to).

Dropbox states that files are stored securely, and maybe you’re satisfied with that. The truly paranoid, or those with files of a particularly sensitive nature, will almost certainly encrypt their files or folders before uploading them.

One other caveat: if you share a directory with someone else and they decide to alter or delete a file in that folder, then it obviously gets altered/deleted from that Dropbox folder, which means that your copy—perhaps your only copy of that file—also gets altered/deleted. Thus, it may be in your interest to keep an archive copy of whatever files it is that you’re sharing with others—those business documents, those vacation photos, etc.

Celebrity Smackdown: iPad vs. Laptop

Apple, Computers, Hardware, Teaching

Celebrity Smackdown: iPad vs. Laptop

2012-05-29

by Richard White

It’s a simple question, really. You’re a forward-thinking guy or gal, and you’re thinking about updating the hardware at your school, or perhaps even getting into a 1-to-1 program, or a Bring Your Down Device agreement with your student body.

What do you do: go with iPads, or laptops?

Before we break this down, let me give you my qualifications, in case you were worried. I have a tendency to favor Apple-based solutions for many situations, both for the high-build quality of their hardware and the relative stability, reliability, and ease-of-use of their software. I have a MacBook Pro that I run OS X on, although I’ve also run Windows 7 on that machine as well. I have a PC desktop at home running Ubuntu, and a Lenovo netbook (x100e, no CD/DVD drive) that I run Windows 7 and Ubuntu on. My cellphone is an iPhone 4, and I waited in line for the original iPad, and purchased the “iPad 3” when it came out.

Another point of reference: I work at a school that officially supports both Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X machines. That same school currently uses classroom carts of machines–PCs, Macs, and iPads–to give students access to computers on an as-needed basis.

I’ve been accused of being an Apple fan-boy, and am somewhat guilty as charged. But what about this iPad vs. laptops showdown? If you only had one device to buy, which would it be?

  iPad laptop/netbook
Time to wake from sleep ~ 1 second 3-10 seconds
Battery life ~ 10 hours 1 – 4 hours
Availability of applications Many, most modified to run on the iPad. Available only through iTunes. Many, with availability of certain titles dependent on operating system
Interface usability Touch interface, not suitable for extended typing. External keyboards available. Keyboard and trackpad, with usability dependent on keyboard size, manufacturer.
File management No access to file system. Apps may have some ability to share files, but third-party solutions (Dropbox, Air Sharing, etc.) necessary to move files around. Organizing and moving files done with operating system.
Cost Base model: $499 Varies depending on manufacturer, model. (Lenovo G570, 15.6″ screen, i5 processor, 8G RAM, 750G HDD, Windows 7 Home Premium = $569 sale price)
Security Applications heavily policed by Apple, Inc and sandboxed. No user access to filesystem. OS X relatively safe, Windows typically requires running anti-virus software.
Strengths Near instantaneous wake from sleep and outstanding battery life. Listening to music, surfing the Internet, reading PDFs, are all dead easy straight out of the box. Does everything, conforms to current paradigm of computing. Easily customizable. Runs Flash and Java applications.
Weaknesses No “real” keyboard. Programs limited in availability (Microsoft Office suite not currently available) or function (Photoshop Touch doesn’t have full feature set). Doesn’t allow access to file system. Can’t display Flash files or run Java applications. Relatively limited battery life. Use requires knowing how to navigate the operating system, manage files.

Does that clear things up? At my school, for some teachers the iPads have literally transformed the way they conduct their classes, with students reading course handouts on them, writing papers on them, uploading them to the instructor via Dropbox, and the instructor annotating their work and returning it to them via email.

For other teachers, the iPad is a non-starter. The Physics classes are unable to run Java-based animations, and the programming class is unable to launch a Terminal or write Python programs.

My recommendation for teachers is that use cases be examined very carefully. For all the talk of a “post-PC world” with “cloud-based storage,” we’re not there yet. As an educator who, in addition to teaching subject-area content is also helping students master the technological tools that they’ll use in college and in business, I strongly feel that there’s so much more to technology than pointing and tapping. Students who are unable to right-click, or “Save As…”, or create a new folder for organizing their files, haven’t been well served.

iPads satisfy some needs for some teachers, it’s clear, and may be part of the educational technology equation for some schools. For an institution with limited resources, however, money will be better spent on laptops. And for schools considering a “one device to one child” program, committing to the iPad–the device du jour–is, in my opinion, short-sighted.

Cleaning Up Your Desk(top)

Workflow

CLEANING UP YOUR DESK(TOP)

2012-05-17

by Richard White

I’m a physics teacher, so I totally get that whole entropy thing.

You know. The Second Law of Thermodynamics?

No?

The general idea is that the universe is getting increasingly disorganized, always. An chicken egg, which starts out pretty organized (shell on the outside, yolk and albumen and stuff on the inside) gets broken, and can never get put back together again. A teenager’s bedroom gets cleaned at some point, and in a shockingly short period of time turns into complete and utter disarray.

Yes, that Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The desktop on your computer, which is currently showing dozens of little files on it if you’re like everyone else, is in some disarray, and needs some cleaning. You should organize those files, and tuck them into some little folders somewhere in your Documents folder. It won’t take long, and you’ll thank me for it later.

“Why?” you ask—”I’ve survived just fine up to this point, and besides, I know where everything is.”

Well, that may be. And I don’t ordinarily like to preach that whole “my way or the highway” thing, but… look, you wouldn’t invite me over to your house until you had a chance to straighten things up a bit, right? Because living in squalor is nobody’s idea of “pretty.” The grubby state of your house tends to reflect a certain carelessness on your part, and perhaps even a health risk, depending on how long it’s been since you washed those dishes. It may even be hard to find things, and you end up wandering about a bit, looking for where you put the keys, or that can of soda, or that bill that needed to be paid.

In that same way, the desktop on your computer—and yes, I’m preaching now—reflects your approach to managing your digital life. You need to clean up your desktop once in awhile. Get those files that you’ve saved there organized into a folder or three, or tuck them away into the appropriate folder in your Documents. If you’ve got 5-10 folders sitting there on the desktop right now and you’re sort of using them, that’s alright. Don’t freak out about it. But if you haven’t looked at that document in a week or three, put it away some place, because on your desktop, it’s just cluttering things up.

“What do you care?” you ask. Good. I don’t! I don’t care about your desktop as long as I don’t have to help you fix your computer. But if I need to sit down and figure out what’s going on with your broken machine, I don’t want to look at your messy house. I’ll probably need to clear some space there, too, so I can download some system updates, install new software, etc. I’ll probably also be trying to clean your disk up a bit, and that’s harder for me to do if you have boatloads of random crap lying around on your hard drive.

Most importantly, though, (cue disapproving Dad tone of voice here)… If you won’t do it for me, do it for yourself. Developing an organized approach to managing and storing the files on your computer will make it much easier for you to find things when you need them. It’ll improve the efficiency of your workflow.

It’ll make you a better person.

Go clean your room Desktop.

Udacity

Distance-learning, Education reform, MOOC, Teaching

Late night provisions for Computer Science homework session at Udacity

UDACITY

by Richard White

2012-04-03

Today I finished the first online course that I’ve ever taken, thanks to my professor David Evans and Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun… and the experience has changed my life.

If you haven’t heard about Udacity you might consider a) going to udacity.com to wander about the website, or b) reading the excellent writeup in Wired magazine. But the upshot of it all is this: education is never going to be the same.

MIT’s OpenCourseWare offerings were a fine way to get the online education experience started—who can argue with access to top-notch professors at a world-class university? And Sal Khan’s Khan Academy offers increased granularity in bite-sized chunks at the secondary school level.

What makes Udacity so amazing, though, is the platform that they’ve developed to deliver and manage true online learning. Thrun identified nine components that he considered essential for education at the university level:

  • admissions
  • lectures
  • peer interaction
  • professor interaction
  • problem-solving
  • assignments
  • exams
  • deadlines
  • certification

While Udacity hasn’t completely solved every one of these problems yet, it is well on its way. I greatly enjoyed taking the inaugural CS101 Intro to Computer Science course, a seven-week curriculum that used the context of “building a search engine” as a vehicle for presenting core computer science concepts.

I’ll admit right now that I was well-acquainted with the subject matter—I teach an Intro to Computer Science course myself—but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t find most of the assignments entertaining, and some of them quite challenging.

If you haven’t had a chance to try out an online course yet, I strongly encourage you to do so. Both Udacity and Coursera have plenty of fine offerings in a wide variety of fields.

It’ll change the way you look at education.

Email Etiquette @ Work

Staff Development, Uncategorized, Workflow

Email Etiquette @ Work

2012-03-28

by Richard White

You know, every few months it seems I read another article about “the death of email.” It’s being replaced by chatting (online). It’s being replaced by texting (on phones). It’s being replaced by always-on social networking sites, mostly Facebook, or maybe Twitter.

It’s true that email doesn’t have the same luster that it once had, but it’s still the backbone of Internet-based communication, if only because all those fancy networking sites, still rely on email to validate your membership.

In the workplace, though, email is still king, despite the fact that it gets horribly misused by so many.

All that’s about to change, though.

Here are four simple things you can do to make email better for you and those you love (your coworkers). This won’t fix everything, but it’s a damn good start.

  1. Please don’t give me a paper copy of that letter, or that document, or that report. I don’t need a paper version, or if I do, I’ll print one. What I really need is an an electronic copy of the file. Email it to me. Thanks.
  2. When you attach that file to the email… don’t forget to attach it. If you DO forget to attach it, just send a quick follow-up email with the same Subject as before, and and the body with the document attached. That way I’ll be easily able to find the follow-up email.
  3. For work emails, use clear, succinct subject lines that inform the recipient of the contents. Subject lines like “Great news!” or “We need to talk” are useless. Instead, use “Update in History Curriculum” or “Meet with you on Thursday?”
  4. Reply at the top of an email, not at the bottom. Don’t force readers to scroll all the way to the bottom of an email to find what you wrote. Your message is important, and should be placed at the top of the reply where it can be quickly and easily found. (If you find this preference abhorrent, I’d urge you to consider the fact that Google’s GMail and Apple’s Mail.app implement top-replying by default, and don’t even offer an option for bottom-replies.)

What other possibilities are there for improving email in the workplace? Love it or hate it, managing your email and your emailing habits is a part of modern life.

Embrace the email!

My Go Bag

Hardware, Workflow


My Go Bag
2011-12-13
by Richard White

A “Go Bag” is that bag you keep by the door, and grab on the way out in case of emergency, disaster, etc. Spies might keep weapons and a passport for a new identity in their Go Bag, a pregnant woman might keep a change of clothes and a flashlight in her Go Bag… you get the idea. Some urban “warriors” (commuters, really), looking to pump up their street cred, have adopted the Go Bag term for their own use, and use it to refer to any daypack or shoulder bag that contains essential items for a day in the wild: in the car, on the bus, at work.

So what’s in your Go Bag? What do you find essential for your day in the classroom, as a teacher, as a technologist?

People tend to fall into two camps in this matter: some adopt a “everything but the kitchen sink” attitude with an eye towards hauling around everything from multiple power supplies, screwdriver sets, and water purification tablets—because you never know when you might need to purify some water, right?—and others go for the fast-and-light approach, carrying a minimum of gear and hoping that any unplanned for emergencies will be resolved by relying on the kindness of strangers.

Me, I tend to go fast-and-light.

I think it started when I was preparing to move to France for an extended period of time. I would only be carrying a single bag for the trip, so space was at a premium, and I made some difficult decisions about what to carry. Since then, I’ve embraced carrying a minimum of gear in my travels, including my commute to and from work.

So without further ado, here’s my list, with comments. Trust me, this is going to take long.

  1. Daypack
    My personal favorite right now is a Mountain Tools Stealth pack, 21.3 Liters worth of black ballistic cloth badness. It’s a simple, one-compartment, zip-open number, and so slim it’ll make you wonder how you’re going to fit all your stuff into it. Surprise answer: you can’t. You’ll have to pare down your essentials a bit, eh?
  2. Wallet bag
    I have a very thin wallet—just driver’s license, credit card, ATM card, and health care info—but even so I don’t ordinarily carry it in my jeans. I keep the wallet in a zippered pouch that also holds a ballpoint pen, and contacts solution. The pouch just keeps these other items from rattling around too much in the pack.
  3. Sunglasses
  4. Laptop
    Of course. The 15″ MacBook Pro that I use for just about everything slips into a snug Waterfield Designs Laptop Sleeve Case (sfbags.com), which itself slips nicely into the pack.
  5. Cellphone
    It’s often in my pocket, but sometimes it’ll be in here.
  6. Keys
    Clipped to a carabiner attached to the top of the pack.
  7. Papers
    The day’s paperwork is nicely contained and protected by a thin plastic folder.

That’s it.

Seriously.

What more do you need?

Okay, okay, the bag’s not full yet, and maybe the weather’s looking a little shaky for the next couple of days. You can add:

  1. Umbrella
    … and/or a light sweater or jacket
  2. Power brick
    for laptop
  3. USB cable
    to charge the phone with the laptop.
  4. PowerBar?
  5. Swiss army knife?
  6. Bottle of water?

Yeah, sure you can bring all those things. Just don’t start getting carried away, right? Fast-and-light is the way to go.

“What do you have in your backpack?”
– Ryan Bingham in “Up in the Air”

The End is Nigh

Apple, Computers, DIY, Hardware

The End is Nigh

2011-12-01

by Richard White

“The End is Nigh!” For your optical drive, that is.

CDs and DVDs are still here for the moment, but not for long. Depending on how much you love your archives and content, it may be time to start thinking about a migration process that will allow you to convert your CDs and DVDs to a hard drive.

It’s an easy, if tedious, process. I did it with my documents and data last year: buy a couple of 1-terabyte external hard drives, plug one of them into your computer, plug in the nearly endless succession of CDs and DVDs that you’ve been burning data on all these years, and click-drag over to the terabyte archive.

Once you’ve spent a day or two doing that, plug in both terabyte drives and click-drag all the contents from one drive to the other, which will act as a backup of the archive.

At that point you’ll have at least three copies of your data: the original CD or DVD (which you might want to tuck away, should something catastrophic happen to both hard drives), and two copies of your data on the Archive and Backup external drives.

There are fancier ways to do this that you may already have built. rsync works magic in a shell script, and you can spend hours and days developing a system there that you can use to manage it all.

In the absence of anything fancy, though, at least get your data off those optical drives. In another three years or so, many computers—and certainly the most popular ones, including iPads and Macbook Airs—won’t have an optical drive, and you’ll have easy way to access that data. Let’s face it, the data storage on CDs and DVDs is time-sensitive anyway. Like that old slide film that your father shot just thirty years ago, that medium decays with age. If you think that Apple is wrong about that, you don’t have to look too far back to find another decision they made regarding media that was very controversial at the time. The 1998 iMac G3 came without a floppy disk slot in anticipation of what would happen throughout the industry in the years to come. By 2003, Dell was no longer including floppy disk drives as standard on their machines, and by 2007, only 2% of computers sold included floppy drives.

So, yeah. I’m not saying you need to run out right now and take care of this. But you might want to put it on your ToDo.txt list. I mean, come on. When’s the last time you bought a music CD?

Yup. That’s what I thought.

Do yourself a favor and get a couple of 1-terabyte archive drives. You’ll be glad you did.

It’s All About the Process

Teaching

It’s All About the Process

2011-11-29

by Richard White


Back in the day, “Project-Based Learning” was one small but powerful attempt at reforming some of what was wrong with some of our K-12 educational thinking. The general idea was that larger term projects—hopefully projects with some relevance in the Real World—were a better context for student learning, as opposed to a series of smaller and often disconnected-seeming homework assignments or worksheets.

We also had “Authentic Assessment,” in which the tasks students were asked to perform and be assessed on were “either replicas of or analogous to the kinds of problems faced by adult citizens and consumers or professionals in the field.” (Wiggins, G. P. 1993. Assessing student performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.) The typical product of an authentic assessment-based assignment would be a product that students could market at the school or community level, or a presentation to a gathering of community leaders regarding some local issue.

I’m actually a big fan of both movements, but I think it’s important to keep in mind that for our students, now more than ever, the end product is less relevant than the process by which one arrives there.

It’s a concept that bears repeating. For K-12 instruction, process is everything. The final product is less important.

Here’s why.

You’ve no doubt heard how quickly things are changing in our Western Hemisphere, technology-driven, North American world. One of the devices that I use most frequently during the course of the day, my iPhone, didn’t even exist five years ago. The web browser I use, Google’s Chrome, is one of Google’s famously beta releases that was released for the Mac less than two years ago. If your students are using technology in any way as part of their work in your class—and they absolutely should be!—then you need to be teaching them knowing that the technology is going to change.

This philosophy extends even to non-technology situations. In the AP Physics course I teach, it’s common knowledge that I don’t care much about the right answers. Hell, I’ve given them all the right answers by making the solutions available to them. What I’m interested in is the answer to this question: “Do you know how to ‘think’ physics?” Have you acquired the processing skills that will allow you to analyze a situation, develop a problem-solving approach, and execute that approach in order to arrive at an answer?

In the computer programming class I teach, when I given them an assignment to code a database-driven Address Book program, I don’t have any great need for one of those programs—there are dozens of commercially-available ones, most of them better written than something that my students will be able to come up with. But it’s the process of thinking about User Interaction, efficient coding, validating input, sanitizing input, designing and interacting with a database, that they will go on to use at some point in the future. In the meantime, the Address Book project is simply a context that allows them to explore those topics.

Do I want an Address Book program? No. Do I want them to know how to write an Address Book program? Absolutely.

It occasionally happens that a student of mine—typically a very bright and perceptive student, what teachers sometimes refer to as a “quick study”—will complain about the fact that I’ve docked them points for missing homework assignments, even though they’ve scored exceedingly well on the exam for that topic. “Come on, Mr. White. I obviously know this stuff!” This typically happens during the first semester when the topics of study—Newton’s Laws, conservation of energy—are ideas that are already familiar to them, or at least somewhat intuitive.

Second semester it’s a different story, when concepts like “charge density” and “magnetic flux” aren’t quite so easy to grasp. Students who have developed a system for working through the material are able to apply that system to the new material, while the “bright” student, for the first time finding that the material isn’t coming as easily as he’d thought it might, flounders about and wonders what went wrong.

It’s in our students interest to learn processes, ways of thinking, and ways of learning. Facts are important, of course—it’s a serious impediment to one’s study of chemistry if can’t immediately recall that the sulfate ion is SO42-—but it’s also important to know how to evaluate an oxidation-reduction reaction. That’s a process that can be used to analyze a whole series of different reactions.

Most of the teachers I know do this almost as a matter of instinct now, but it never hurts to go back and reflect on what we’re doing, especially for assignments that we’ve developed and been giving to students for years. In our Conceptual Physics class this year, we’ve eliminated the discussion on photo-sharing on Flickr—students do their own photo-sharing on Facebook and other sites all the time now, and don’t need formal instruction in that area any more—in favor of expanding our instruction on using Excel to process and analyze the data from their experiments.

Is Excel important? Somewhat. Is knowing how to create and manipulate a spreadsheet? Absolutely!

The Process. It’s everything.

Pick Your Poison: Working with Words on the Computer

Computers, Google, Microsoft, Workflow

PICK YOUR POISON: Working with Words on the Computer

2011-09-23

by Richard White

When it comes time to sit down and compose a text-based document, what’s your weapon of choice? Microsoft Word? Google Docs? Window’s Notepad or OS X’s TextEdit? emacs? vim?

Most people have a favorite tool that they use to write with, and in a recent Thinking Stick blog post, Jeff Utecht gives 10 Reasons to Trash [Microsoft’s] Word for Google Docs.” He brings up some excellent points, which are explained in further detail in the post:

  1. No more corrupt files
    A Word file that works on a student’s computer may not work on someone else’s.
  2. No more corrupt USB Keys [“thumb drives”]
    USB flash drives can become lost or corrupted.
  3. .doc .docx who cares!
    Something of a repeat of #1.
  4. Work Collaboratively
    Students can share Google Docs with each other.
  5. Share and Share a Like (sic)
    Something of a repeat of #4.
  6. Export to PDF or Word no problem
    Google Docs can be exported to these formats.
  7. Make it Public
    Google Docs can be published as a webpage for viewing by anyone.
  8. Work from any computer with Internet access
    Google Docs can be easily viewed/edited by you even if you don’t have access to your own computer.
  9. Work on the Go
    Google’s Chrome browser offers some limited ability to work on your Google Docs offline.
  10. Because it’s the future
    “We’re headed into a fully web-based world.”

Jeff does a good job pointing out some of the strengths of Google Docs, especially for high school students which is who this post is targeted towards. And it’s true that Microsoft’s Word is not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s a large, relatively expensive program with an awful interface and a boatload of features that go unused by most users.

But Word is also the de facto industry standard for creating word processed documents. Period. Anyone who is interested in sharing word processing files pretty much has to have Word in their arsenal, and I think that reasoning extends to high school students, or at least those who are able to have access to that software.

Google Docs has plenty to recommend it, and Jeff hits on some of its strengths. Its a great way of developing a shared document with someone, with the ability for two users to work simultaneously on the same file. Documents are auto-saved, and being able to access one’s work from any machine connected to the Internet can be awfully handy. In addition, Docs is free. I use Google Docs on a regular basis for some of my projects, particularly on those in which I am collaborating with someone else.

The bad news is that Google Docs isn’t quite ready for prime time for anything more than the simplest document. The challenges faced (as of 9/24/2011) by this web application fall into two categories:

  1. No offline editing of documents–you MUST have an Internet connection if you wish to work on your Google Doc.
  2. Incomplete feature set (depending on your needs), including
    1. Single style of bullets
    2. Fewer than 20 fonts available.
    3. the equation editor is a good start, but can’t express equations like

    4. etc. (there are others)

Google Docs is excellent at what it does, primarily allowing users to maintain documents “in the cloud” and sharing them with other people. But to suggest that it has become a viable alternative to the many-featured Word is jumping the gun, I think, unless you simply don’t need the features that Word provides.

And if that’s the case, Google Docs will serve you well… or perhaps you can get away with using an even simpler and more robust document creation tool: the humble text editor.

We’ve touched upon this in the past so we don’t need to belabor the point here, but a text editor allows one to write unformatted, ‘plain text’ documents without worrying about nonsense like bullets, margins, bold or italic fonts, etc. (I’m using a text editor to write this post, actually.) At some point in the future, if that plain text needs to be formatted, it’s easy to do so: copy-paste the plain text into your Word or Google Docs document, select (highlight) the text you want to format, and apply formatting from Word or Google Docs as required. Easy.

Working with a plain text file has some of the same advantages that Jeff mentions in his list above.

  1. No more corrupt files
    A text file is a text file. All computers can read them.
  2. No more corrupt USB Keys [“thumb drives”]
    That’s true if you keep your plain text files on a server, which is perfectly possible. (I’m using DropBox and the excellent PlainText app to allow me to work on my plaintext files from multiple locations.)
  3. .doc .docx who cares!
    These extensions indicate Word files. Most people use “.txt” to indicate a plain text file.
  4. Export to Google Docs or Word no problem
    Via copy-paste, plain text files can be dropped in to other documents easily.
  5. Work from any computer with Internet access
    Plain text files stored on a server can be accessed in this way.
  6. Work on the Go
    A local copy of your plain text file can easily be synched with the server later on.

In addition to these benefits, you may discover others:

  1. Plaintext improves your writing
    By allowing you to focus on the words themselves rather than what the words will look like, writing in plaintext improves your writing. Don’t get stuck on the style of your heading, or whether you should italicize a word or not. Just WRITE. You can worry about making it pretty later on!
  2. Start writing faster
    You don’t need to wait 3 minutes for Word to load up or to log on to Google Docs. Open your text editor and start writing.
  3. Smaller file sizes
    Text files are orders of magnitude smaller than the bloated files created by Word—text files don’t have to contain all that formatting information, right?
  4. Improve your Geek Credibility
    The lowly text editor is not the sexiest product out there—after all, Notepad (Windows) and TextEdit (OS X) are provided for free with the operating system. But they’re one of the most powerful tools in the geek’s toolbox. Just ask coder Gina Trapani, Google Director of Research Peter Norvig, author Neal Stephenson, and LifeHacker Kevin Purdy.

Upgrading to Lion

Apple, Hardware

Upgrading to Lion

by Richard White

2011-08-13

Are you working on an Apple machine that’s running Snow Leopard? That’s OS X version 10.6—click on the Apple in the upper left corner of the screen and select “About this Mac…” to see what version of the operating system you’re currently using. If you’re currently using OS X 10.6, you have the option of upgrading to OS X 10.7, code named “Lion.”

How you go about upgrading to Lion is relatively easy to do. From you Dock or the Applications folder, launch the “App Store.app” and do a search for “OS X Lion.” Downloading the app will cost you thiry bucks—a bargain for updating this particular operating system—and following the crystal clear instructions will take a couple of hours, depending on how fast your download connection is.

Should you upgrade your system? Yes, of course… at some point. You’ll absolutely want to upgrade to the most current version of your operating system at some point, for lots of different reasons. A new OS is typically safer, more secure, faster, and in some cases required to run recent software. For most people, though, I’d recommend that you update your machine later rather than sooner.

There are three reasons why you don’t necessarily want to jump into early-adopter “update now” mode.

1. If you’re running a “production machine” which has software installed on it that won’t be able to run under Lion, you obviously shouldn’t upgrade. A silly example: I have a friend who still uses the AppleWorks word processing program that Apple stopped distributing over ten years ago. AppleWorks won’t run under Lion, so my friend is going to need to convert AppleWorks files to a different format before upgrading, or resign himself to working with an obsolete program for the rest of his life.

2. If you’re running a machine that can’t upgrade to Lion. In addition to running Snow Leopard, you need a computer that has these minimum hardware requirements. If your machine doesn’t meet those requirements, you can just chill with your old machine running Snow Leopard until you’re ready to buy some new hardware.

3. It’s often a good idea to just wait a bit until the “first release” kinks get worked out. Each new verson of an operating system—10.7.0 in this case—is typically a first draft, and despite efforts to test the system under a lot of different conditions, there is always the potential for unexpected surprises, and the release of Lion is no exception. If you’re not willing to put up with some of the inconveniences that occasionally accompany early adoption, you should probably wait for another month or two until 10.7.1 is released. That will potentially give you a much more stable experience.

There. Have I convinced you not to upgrade? Good for you. You can stop reading.

Still here? Okay, if you insist on going through with the upgrade process, here are some tips for you.

1. Do a full backup of your system.
If you don’t use Time Machine, or SuperDuper!, or Carbon Copy Cloner, then you’ve got bigger problems than installing a new operating system. Do a full backup, and come back when you’re done.

2. Set aside a couple of hours for the download/installation process.
There shouldn’t be any problems—the installation process has been extremely well tested—so just follow the instructions and you should be up and running again in a couple of hours.

3. Bask in the wonders of the new system.
You may have heard about some of these. Full-screen mode for interruption-free work. Automatic document and window saves. Automatic version control. New user interfaces and styling for Apple-branded apps like Mail.app and iCal.app. New support for multiple workspaces (“Mission Control”). Apple’s attention to detail in the user experience, as always, shines in this new release.

4. Configure your new system.
Lion works a little differently from Snow Leopard, obviously. Other changes, in addition to those listed above: Two-finger swipes on a trackpad work the opposite of how they used to. Lion tries to auto-correct practically everything one types, it seems. There are some new apps in the Dock, including LaunchPad and FaceTime. If you have any experience with an iPhone or an iPad, some of the changes in Lion are designed to bring your experience on the computer closer to what you do on a touch screen.

Of course, not everyone always appreciates the changes brought about by a new operating system. From tweaks to the user interface to new controls and key combinations, you may find that some behaviors that you really like have changed under Lion. Fortunately, many of those changes can be reconfigured to match your needs.

Here are some of the modifications I made to my own machine after upgrading to Lion, along with a brief description of why I made those changes.

  • Remove LaunchPad, App Store, and FaceTime from the Dock
    I tend to use the Dock only for apps that I very frequently use, and these are just cluttering it up.
  • Select Apple Menu > System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars: Always (instead of Automatically based on input device)
    In an attempt to clean up the screen, Apple removed scrollbars from Windows, apparently not realizing how important scrollbars are for identifying whether or not a window contains additional information, and how much information there is.
  • Select Apple Menu > System Preferences > Trackpad > Scroll & Zoom: uncheck “Scroll direction: natural”
    The default setting on Apple machines now is for a trackpad to mimic the behavior of a touchpad, and this doesn’t work for me. On my iPhone, while I’m perfectly comfortable swiping a document UP to look further down that document, that’s because that’s how I would actually interact with a real piece of paper under my finger. For Macs and PCs, for the last 25 years, that’s not how mouses and trackpads have worked, and I continue to use PCs with trackpads that don’t follow Apple’s new convention. They knew this was going to be controversial when they introduced it, and that’s why they wisely provided the option to change this behavior via that checkbox. I’ve unchecked it!
  • In Mail, select Mail > Preferences > Viewing: check “Use Classic Layout
    Some people are really happy about Apple’s new 3-vertical-pane layout. I prefer the old one, thank you.

    If you ARE going to use the 3-vertical panes, consider changing this preference: Mail > Preferences > Viewing: List Preview: “1 Line”. This will allow you to see more of your messages at one time.

  • Select Apple > System Preferences > Language & Text > Text: uncheck “Correct Spelling automatically”
    Damn you, Autocorrect! I love spell-checking when writing a formal document or pounding with my big thumbs on the iPhone’s tiny screen-based keyboard. In most other circumstances, my computer trying to second-guess me is just annoying, and actually gets in the way of what I’m trying to do. Try leaving Autocorrect on for a day or 3 and see what you prefer.
  • In Terminal, type chflags nohidden ~/Library
    Apple has chosen to hide the user’s Library folder to keep the average Joe from digging around in there and messing it up. It’s true that most people shouldn’t be dinking around in there, but I do from time to time, and it’s nice to be able to navigate to that folder directly.
  • Select Apple > System Preferences > Time Machine > Uncheck “Lock documents 2 weeks after last edit”< br />
    In another move designed to protect users from themselves, Apple think that if you haven’t worked on a document in a couple of weeks, you probably don’t really need to edit it any more, at least not without typing in your password to verify that you really do want to edit that document. I work on old files all the time, and don’t need Apple holding my hand during that process.
  • In Terminal, type defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool YES
    This turns off annoying Mail-related animations. To change it back: defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool NO
  • In Terminal, type defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO
    This turns off a subtle but potentially annoying zooming window effect that affects how new windows appear on the screen.