The productivity tools series has now come to its end, thankfully. (Thankfully because I’m more interested in talking about current and future work.) I ended up featuring only twelve; there are a couple others I’ve stopped using, but if that ever changes, I’ll write about them.
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Arc intro
The last entry in the navel-gazing series talking about my personal productivity tools.
Arc is my private notes app. It’s a Python app running FastAPI. The name is short for Archive, as in an archive of notes. It’s my latest app, too — I wrote it around a month ago, as a replacement for Apple Notes (to try to get back to more of a Notational Velocity or Simplenote kind of thing). And just to be clear, this is distinct from the digital garden notes idea I talked about earlier.
Overview
Notes are just text files, stored in a directory with UUIDs for filenames. By default it opens to a blank note screen, but that’s boring, so instead you get to see what it looks like when editing a note (with the bar at the top indicating the text isn’t saved — I originally implemented autosave but soon realized that I prefer manual):
The search page lists the twenty most recently modified notes (dummy data):
The search results page uses Ag under the hood (since all the notes are just in a flat directory for now, it was super easy and took maybe ten minutes to implement):
How I use Arc
On my laptop, I have it open in Firefox as a pinned tab. On my phone, I have it saved to my dock as a PWA.
I’ve been using Arc daily, to keep track of things that I want to be able to refer to easily later on; normal notes usage, nothing too exciting here.
The future
Arc is still pretty new, so we’ll see where continued usage takes us. I’m happy with the plain text storage and with FastAPI, though. (Thus the plans to move over to those for the other tools.) It too is a small app, with around 500 lines of code. Maybe at some point I’ll switch from Ag to ripgrep, but that’s about the only change I can think of right now.
Lector intro
Yet another entry in the ignominious series talking about my personal productivity tools.
Lector is a reading app for macOS. It’s an Electron app for now. The name comes from the Latin (for someone who reads), with a homophonic hat tip to Hannibal. It came about from wanting a minimalist app that would let me read PDFs and scanned books in dark mode and keep track of my spot across multiple books.
Overview
A Lector book is just a directory full of images. (PDFs have to be split up into image files first, so I have a small script to do that.) When the app starts up, it looks at the book list directory to see what books are available. It also has a JSON file to track where I’m at on each book (which page and which part of the page), what size the window is, which book I last had open, etc.
The app itself looks like this, on an empty desktop to show how I usually use it:
No title bar, since I find that distracting. And the page images are scaled by default to fit the window width.
Hitting g / brings up a brief panel showing the books that are in the system, with alphabetized keys to get to them (so g a to go to the first, g b for the second, etc.). When I’m done reading a book, I delete its directory, so these mappings change fairly regularly.
j and f and double-clicking all go to the next page; k and d both go back to the previous page. J and K move up and down the page (in larger jumps), and the mouse can also be used to scroll. (I find that I mostly use the mouse for scrolling and f/d for page navigation, but every once in a while I’ll use the other keys.)
As you can see in the screenshot, it defaults to dark mode, with slightly lowered contrast for easier reading. i inverts the colors and s toggles the higher contrast view.
How I use Lector
I use it when I want to read a book I’ve scanned (usually with Scanbook). I haven’t used it as often lately, but I fully expect that to change soon. (It’s been very handy for reading textbooks.)
I’ve found that I prefer the window size shown in the screenshot, wide (so that the text is large enough) with just enough vertical room for a paragraph or so (since reading in smaller chunks is easier).
The future
I’d like to move off Electron at some point, probably to a native Swift app. Having it support PDFs directly (or splitting them up itself) would be nice, and having a way within the app to remove books would also be good.
Finally, I’d love to add EPUB support at some point. (I haven’t yet found a desktop EPUB reader I like. Marvin’s great on iOS, though.)
Links #4
- The Lycurgus Cup — ancient glass cup that changes color
- William Hale’s essay on the art of reading Latin — I first read this long ago when I started studying Latin, good advice
- Robin Rendle’s post in defense of fussy websites — some interesting thoughts
- Brian Callahan’s writeup on how argc and argv get passed in — more assembly goodness
- Rachel’s article on tripping over the potholes in too many libraries — and how it can be good to rely less on third-party libraries when programming (which I’m very much in favor of)
Saturn intro
Another entry in the frankly too long series talking about my personal productivity tools.
Saturn is my launcher app for my phone. It’s a small Go web app. The name comes from the Saturn V rocket launcher, and I wrote it as a replacement for Launch Center Pro (when it switched to a subscription model, because apparently I am allergic to those).
Overview
This is what it looks like:
The blue buttons are direct links to pages. There’s a very hard to see dark textbox at the bottom, and if I type something in there, the green buttons take that and execute a search somewhere else. Finally, the pink buttons open secondary panels, like this Notebooks panel:
On this panel, the lighter rectangle above the buttons is a search box that allows filtering through Vinci notebooks.
How I use Saturn
On my phone, I have it saved to my dock. It’s not set to be a PWA, because then the links would open in the in-app Safari; I prefer having them open in normal Safari.
I use Saturn pretty much every day. I mainly use it to set reminders, search Amazon, Goodreads, and eReaderIQ, and get to my journal and my daily review list.
The future
I’m largely happy with it as-is. Maybe some more refactoring of the buttons (the Search button is largely obsolete now that I’ve moved all those buttons to the main screen, for example), and it could use a little design love to make things more consistent (search boxes, for example), but that’s it.
I’m currently dealing with tendinitis — or some other kind of RSI, not entirely sure what it is. It started up about a week ago and is mostly in my wrists and forearms, but it’s been occasionally flaring up in my hands as well.
At this point I suspect it’s stemming from a combination of the ergonomics of my work-from-home setup along with the iPhone 11 being too large and too heavy for me. Both exacerbate the pain. (As does almost any use of my hands or wrists. Such fun.)
I’m now wearing wrist guards while I work, which helps a little (though still not as much as I was hoping). I’m also trying to be more careful about my hand and wrist positions when I use the keyboard and trackpad.
For my phone, I tried a ring holder but didn’t like it, and I’m now trying a LoveHandle, which seems to help a little with the size of the phone (but not really at all with the weight). Main options here seem to be using my phone less often, setting it on surfaces to use it when possible (as opposed to holding it in my hand), and switching to a smaller phone at some point.
Anyway, I’m documenting this here not to elicit sympathy but as a forewarning that I may not be as productive over the next few weeks.
Storybook intro
Still another entry in the will-it-ever-end series talking about my personal productivity tools.
Storybook is my fiction writing app. It’s a Python app running Django. The name comes from, uh, books with stories in them.
Overview
First, the dashboard, which lists weekly writing stats and active stories at top and backburnered stories at bottom:
The writing view has a stats bar at top (showing how close I am to meeting my daily 1,000-word goal) and then the textbox for the actual writing:
The menu has some overall story stats and an outline (with somewhat vague and hopefully unspoilery scene titles), and some admin links:
Syntax
As you can see from the screenshots, it expects Markdown. I’ve put in a convention hack where h2 tags (##) delineate scenes. Also, scene titles that begin with “Chapter X” create chapter divisions. (Clarification: a story has a flat list of scenes. The chapter divisions are display-only.)
How I use Storybook
On my laptop, I have it open in Firefox as a pinned tab. On my phone, I have it saved to my homescreen as a PWA.
I mostly avoid using Storybook (cough) but somehow still manage to put in a thousand words a day, one word after another.
There’s a payload syntax so I can send writing from Gate or Quill to Storybook, but I never use it.
The future
Same old story: I’m planning to move it to FastAPI and start using plain text files for storage instead of a database.
At some point I want to refactor the outline UI and add search functionality.
Taking a cue from Robin Rendle and Jonnie Hallman, I’ve added a “Reply via email” mailto link at the bottom of my posts, both in my RSS and JSON feeds and on the web pages as well (the post detail pages, that is, not the post lists).
Bookshelf intro
Yet another entry in the forever-long series talking about my personal productivity tools.
Bookshelf is my reading tracking app. It’s a Python app running Django. The name comes from, uh, the thing that holds books.
Overview
Behold the books:
At the top there’s the stats panel, which shows how much I read the last six days with color coding for the genre tags (and yes, Wednesday and Friday I didn’t meet my 100-pages-per-day goal), my page total so far this month (932), how many books I’ve finished so far this month (2), and how much of my reading this month has come from each tag (I usually try to read around 50% nonfiction, but I usually fail).
And then there’s the book list itself. Title, progress bar with some extra data (including how long since I started the book), current page number (clicking this opens a panel where I can record the page I’m on along with a comment), and how long it’s been since my last entry.
Each book has a staleness limit (default is five days), where if I haven’t read the book at all in that period of time, it changes the color of the title to a glaring, awful red, and that’s sufficient motivation for me to get back to that book. (To be honest, lately I haven’t seen it come up much since I’ve been reading only a few books at a time, but in those crazy days when I was reading twenty to thirty books at a time, I saw it a lot.)
Also: the sixth book (in case you were wondering) is A Disciple’s Life, which is only visible on Sundays (I reserve it for Sunday reading).
And the mobile view, for the heck of it, and since it’s the one I use almost all of the time:
There’s also a stats page, since the statistics are surprisingly helpful in motivating me to make time for reading:
(Yes, as of a couple days ago I’ve read more this year so far than all of last year in total. This makes me inordinately proud even though it really doesn’t matter.)
And, lastly, the hopefully self-evident history page:
How I use Bookshelf
On my phone, I have it saved to my homescreen as a PWA, and that’s primarily where I use it, since I mainly read on my phone these days. On my laptop, I have it open in Firefox as a pinned tab.
I use Bookshelf every day to track my reading, both for individual books and for my daily/monthly reading goals. It’s handy, too, as a bookmark that toddlers can’t pull out.
The future
The desktop view needs some love, particularly that stats page. (I added those genre tags to it a month or two ago and realize now that I never actually looked at the desktop version. Whoops.)
Also (this should be no surprise by now), I’m planning to switch it to FastAPI along with plain text files for storage, for the same reasons I gave in those other posts.
Links #3
- Alice Bartlett’s weaknotes — really loving these
- Marijn Haverbeke’s Lezer writeup — fascinating writeup on how he built CodeMirror’s parser (for syntax highlighting, autocompletion, etc.)
- Wheelhouse — fascinating newsletter on making physical things
- 3D printing on a diffraction grating sheet — cool technique
- 3D plots out of paper — math made physical