Tim Flight

Over the last month I’ve discovered my computer’s Applications folder is missing some key items. Filling the voids however, has been challenging. Through the web development process there are many different types of information spread across multiple places in my computer that I’d really love to have all in one place. Unfortunately because all of the information has different types of data despite being a related subject I have trouble keeping it all together. Let me take you through the flow.

A customer emails me and says “hey, I saw xyz website you built and I think it’s fabulous, my company needs a new website, are you available for hire?”. Well, of course I am! So we startup an email discussion. I create a new email folder in Mail to organize all of the client’s incoming messages. So far so good.

Next, we exchange contact information and agree to a phone conversation or physical meeting to discuss the details of the project. So I put the client’s contact information into my Address Book. Life is still good because Address Book and Mail work together well. Mail simply uses information contained in Address Book versus having its own.

So I meet with the client and start taking notes. Ideas start flying and I can’t type (or write) as fast as I can think so I usually scribble notes away in jEdit as fast as I can. At the end of the meeting I give them a rough verbal estimate and tell them I will create a more through estimate and send it to them in a couple of days. So now what to do with the jEdit document? Well, I create a folder in my Documents folder with the client’s business name and store it in there.

Now I start to work on the estimate. I begin by taking my notes and rewriting them into an outline/checklist form. Omni Outliner is perfect for this task and best of all it came free on my PowerBook. So a new document is created in OmniOutliner. I tend to be a pack-rat so I save the OmniOutliner document in the same client folder as the jEdit document was saved in. If anyone is counting I now have information about this project in four different applications, Mail, Address Book, jEdit, and OmniOutliner.

I’m ready to create the formal estimate and work description to send to the client. The estimate gets created in QuickBooks. Now I’m starting to get frustrated. QuickBooks uses its own address book so I need to copy the client information from Address Book into QuickBooks. Then if any of the client’s contact info changes hopefully I will remember to update the copy in QuickBooks. Once the address is added to my customer data in QuickBooks I then copy and paste much of the information from my OmniOutliner document into the invoice. Now that data is in two places as well! I save the estimate to a PDF file and email it to the client through Mail.

Finally, I get the “a-okay” on the project and start to develop. Website code goes into its own special directory so Apache can use it as a VirtualHost. I start to create images for the website in PhotoShop and Illustrator. Now eventually the special website directory will be synced with my Xserve using Panic’s Transmit program so I don’t want to store the original .psd files there because I don’t want to FTP those larger files back and forth eating up unnecessary disk space. So…. I store them in the client’s folder I have in my Documents folder. I setup the temporary URL on my Xserve using Apple’s Server Admin and Workgroup Manager applications and then store the password data in Keychain so I don’t forget the login information.

So I’ve created the website and sent the client the URL to take their first look and I start to prepare an invoice in QuickBooks. I start copying and pasting from OmniOutliner again marking some items as completed. The client sends me their first squawk list (sorry for the aviation term) and I again put this into OmniOutliner. Now I have my OmniOutliner document setup as a project management type document with priorities, stages of completion, due dates, etc. What would be really cool is if that information could be synced with iCal. Then of course I could sync that data with my smartphone (pda/cellphone hybrid) so I could have my to-do list and deadlines setup in my phone which I always have with me. There is an applescript copy data from OmniOutliner to iCal, but it doesn’t really “sync”. I can’t update something on my phone and then use iSync and have any changes wind up back in OmniOutliner.

So what’s the big deal about all this? Well I’ve now stored data in at least twelve different programs. The client comes to me and says “remember when I was talking about xyz feature?”. I need to look through Mail, jEdit, OmniOutliner, QuckBooks, and possibly iCal to find that information. Not to mention the fact that much of the information is duplicated across those applications.

So what’s the solution? Well years ago Apple debuted a program called OpenDoc which might have helped. Basically it allowed you to create one “document” and put all relevant materials into it from multiple applications. So I could have created a document and added in an address book entry, emails, notes, pictures, even webpages into that one document. That might have actually worked, however Apple abandoned the program years ago.

There are other programs out there that might integrate with some of my other apps better. I recently looked at a project management application that would integrate with address book and with iCal. But it was very buggy, expensive, and the company had terrible support reviews.

However I am looking forward to Apple’s next major OS release, Tiger and its Spotlight search feature. Take a look at it for yourself, but basically it will allow me to create smart-folders for my computer which will automatically group all of those items together with relevant client materials. It won’t necessarily eliminate redundant information, however it might cause less redundant information to build up as I might be able to “see” it duplicated somewhere else already.

I am fortunate to have a development (pre-release) copy of Tiger setup on a separate drive to play with and so far the Spotlight feature looks like it could be a winner. If anybody has any suggestions on how to streamline my operations I’d gladly accept them!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 30th, 2004 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Computer Technology. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.