Of course, one day after my little treatise on workflow and the various to-do apps I have tried, Evernote launches a reminders feature. There doesn’t appear at first glance to be enough functionality to replace Wunderlist, although I will have to explore that, but it does seem as though it could potentially compete with Trillo as a potential candidate to manage story assignments with my writing team.
Now to play around with this and report back later…
How I’m Working
I’m putting some renewed effort into examining my workflows, particularly with respect to project management tools and ways to keep a “digital brain” in order to track the bajillion things I have on my list of things to do at any one time.
I initially started with Apple’s Reminders.app; it was easily available and uses iCloud to sync between my MacBook, phone and iPad. It has steadily improved since its first release, and the iOS6 version was pretty nice, but ultimately it was just a checklist. You made a list and added items that you could check off and move to a “done” list. The end. I wanted something a little more sophisticated.
My second attempt was to use Behance’s Action Method system — again, it used iCloud to offer seamless syncing between my various devices, but had significantly more features than Reminders. You can add color codes and make items orange, teal or gray; there’s a separate notes section where you can add long form written items that are organized by date (although the functionality for moving between notes from different days was pretty awful), and although I never got around to using this feature very much it had the option to delegate tasks to other Action Method users. I used Action Method for quite a while, until the pile of nagging little issues I was having with it (primarily, the iPad app was astonishingly crash, and the desktop app was written in Adobe Air, which meant more-frequent updates than I felt like messing with) reached the point where I wanted to seek an alternative.
After looking into a couple of different things I settled on Wunderlist, and right now I like it quite a bit. The app is just flat-out attractive; the devs are putting a lot of emphasis on look and feel, but in a way that supports usability of the app and isn’t just for show. It’s very Apple-like in that way. It really works for me; adding new items is amazingly fast, I have made excellent use of the ability to add task checklists to individual items on a list (for example, to build a checklist of distribution outlets for a news story’s to-do item), and there is a free-flow text area for adding long form notes to each to-do item. The one thing I miss from Action Method is the separate note-taking window for the long form notes, but in all honesty I should be putting those notes into Day One anyway, so they can be tagged and searched (I am dramatically under-utilizing the quite fantastic Day One, but that’s a post for another day).
Wunderlist is still pretty new, and the biggest issue I have with it is the lack of feature parity between the different existences of the service — the web app can do some things that the desktop app can’t do, which can do some things that the mobile apps can’t do. The developers seem to be working hard to keep the system updated, and this is still relatively new software, so for it to be as perfectly functional as it is right now is actually a solid achievement.
I discovered Trello today; our web team was using it for a demo they were giving us today. I haven’t spent a whole lot of time with it yet, honestly, but what I’ve seen at first glance is pretty nice. The app allows for simultaneous views of a number of lists, but its very clever feature is that those lists can be expanded into a separate view that includes dramatically more information. Trello quite properly calls this piece of information a *card*. On the front, a quick overview of the to-do item – name, number of items completed and total number of items on a sub to-do list, little tabs showing the item’s color codes, number of messages that have been added to that item’s activity log, etc. On the back, a full view of everything associated with that item – a to-do list, a view of team members who have been assigned to work on that particular item, a list of actions that can be taken and logged in the activity list, item-specific attachments, a list of the labels and associated color codes attached to that item, etc. At first glance what Trello has done is impressive.
I also used Basecamp this year to try and manage my student writers, but honestly it was only marginally effective. It could do the very basic things that I wanted to do, which was give the students a framework for checking in with me and giving a “this is what I did during my shift” report for me, and as a handoff to the student taking the next shift, and to give us some rudimentary discussion boards for us to share screenshots and talk about how to handle certain social media situations that came up during the course of the year. But it just didn’t seem to be that robust; I couldn’t even tell you offhand what I wanted to do with it but was unable to do (I suspect because I sensed its limitations early on and didn’t even try), but I was only marginally pleased with it.
While Trello may not (will probably not, in fact) replace Wunderlist as my personal project management tool, it’s got a pretty good chance to replace Basecamp. I just need to kick the tires on it a bit more and see what it can do. But its expanded features for teams – Trello’s “pro” version, essentially – is only $200 a year. It would be a pretty cheap experiment to run student assignments off of it next year.
I want to get to the point where I stop experimenting with things and settle in on a set of tools that help manage my often overwhelming workflow and get me to a place where I’m more productive. With my current trio of Evernote, Day One and Wunderlist, I feel like I’m pretty close to having what I need. The only remaining task is to seriously refine how the tools are used and for what purposes, solidify how they work together in my routine, and account for the few outliers that I’m still monkeying with (like iA Writer) – which I really, really like, but it seems like the work I’m doing there for story drafts could be moved to Day One).
What I’m Drawing
About a week and a half ago, I started this; it’s my attempt to copy a photo of Megan Fox that accompanied an interview with her in Esquire a few months back. I have mostly been working on it in 30-minute bursts over my lunch hour, which has been a fantastic way for me to recapture some creative energy that tends to get expended pretty quickly in the mornings at work.
I struggled with a couple of little things early on – her chin wasn’t right, I worked and reworked her cheekbone a few times until I got it where I wanted it (and then discovered that a little fix around her eye that I initially didn’t see was enough to cure a lot of other ills), and her right eye took me probably seven attempts to get properly placed and sized. But I worked through those, and right now, I’ve gotta tell you, I’m pretty happy with the way this is progressing. In terms of size, this is the biggest drawing I’ve attempted in 20 years, and if it keeps going the way it has started, it’ll be a keeper.
Flickr’s big update
In conjunction with its huge announcement that it had acquired Tumblr for just over a billion dollars, Yahoo! on Monday also re-launched a totally overhauled [Flickr. Flickr has been one of the sad sacks of the social media world for a long time; it’s the grand-daddy of photo sharing communities, but Yahoo allowed it to languish and mostly ignored it. Photo-sharing features were implemented poorly and quite slowly, and over time it simply faded into “who cares?” territory for all but the hardcore pro photographers who continued to hang out there — most people simply shifted the destination of their camera-phone photos to Facebook or Instagram or something similar.
But this new Yahoo under Marissa Meyer seems to be serious about becoming a competitor to Google in the web services arena. The new Flickr is amazing; the redesign is beautiful and offers some genuinely attractive ways to interact with your photos. They’ve also added the now-ubiquitous cover photo to your profile page, are allowing high-res avatars, etc. It’s nice to look at.
The biggest news, however, is that every single user of the site – every one of them – has, entirely for free, one terabyte of image storage. A terabyte. Compare that to the five free gigabytes you get from Google Drive or Dropbox or the seven from Amazon’s Cloud Drive. Granted Flickr is only for images and three-minute-or-less videos, but still — a terabyte of storage. For free.
I put that into some perspective on Facebook Monday night. I recounted a story about driving from Manhattan, Kan., to Circuit City in Topeka when I was in college so I could spend $225 on a 1.1-gigabyte hard drive for my Xeos-brand 486 running Windows 95. That was a huge hard drive at the time; I think you could get them in the four- to six-gigabyte range at retail for several times what I paid for my single gig. Yahoo gave a terabyte of storage away for free on Monday; had I wanted to acquire one terabyte of storage space on the day I bought that hard drive, it would have cost me $210,000. That’s an amazing window into how much – and how quickly – technology has changed in the last 15 years or so.
It’s incredible. Legitimately, amazingly incredible. And comparing the price of that 1.1-gigabyte hard drive to a free terabyte of storage makes me wonder what astonishing things I have today will seem equally ludicrous in terms of their price-to-performance ratio in another 15 years.
Helen: “Dad, what is a knapsack?”
Me: “Knapsack is another word for backpack.”
Helen. “Oh, I see. So, you have a knapsack. Only yours is called a Man Purse 2000.”
Saturday night, I took Melissa to see Oblivion. The trailers looked interesting, I had heard good things about it, and read some decent reviews online from non-mainstream movie critics (Filmdrunk gave it a B+, for instance). So when we got a date night, I suggested we go check it out.
Not a good movie. There were a few scenes that were likable, and the drones in the film that Tom Cruise’s character is on Earth to repair are pretty cool (Tom Cruise has a pretty cool helicopter-like vehicle, too). But overall the movie is not good at all. Rather than explain why, I am just going to repeat the list of questions that I asked myself after it was over in my attempt to figure it out. The more questions I asked, the worse the movie became.
In no particular order…
I really could go on all night. The more I work on this list the more I think to add to it
The shootout in the library sure was cool though…
I originally wrote this Saturday night, lost my draft in some weird software mishap, then rewrote it yesterday and forgot to post it. So, two days late, my Saturday was pretty good. Just pretend “today” means “Saturday” when you read this. Or something.
–
Today was a pretty good day – family things together, time with each kid, the works. Today was a pretty good day.
We started by making our way to the third annual indoor garage sale at Sanford Center; Helen loves going to this thing, and I’m a fan of garage sales, so this event is always fun. It’s like a treasure hunt; and there are enough booths there that it’s hard to imagine not finding at least one thing to come home with. We didn’t get much this year, but what we did get was fun.
• A Series 1 Hex from Skylanders. This kid had a bunch of Skylanders in a basket for a dollar, all Series 1 – Helen had them all, but we bought Hex for a buck because she’s cool.
• A Lego Creator mini-plane kit for 50 cents. We already had this kit, but for 50 cents it couldn’t be passed up simply as an addition to the parts pile. Another table had a BARC Speeder for eight bucks; the girls got this kit for me for Christmas a few years back, so I passed on it. I kinda wish I would have offered them five dollars for it, again just to throw the parts into the collection.
• A KRE-O Sentinel Prime) for three bucks. This was a $40 set when it was available at retail, and we only had to raid one part out of our Legos to finish the robot mode. This was a steal. I suspect the parts we are missing are due to Helen opening the box in the car and not because the set was incomplete; it looked like the kid who owned it originally got about halfway through the first build of the alt-mode firetruck and quit on it. The stickers weren’t even all applied yet.
• Helen found a few Pokemon books and was really excited about those.
• I passed on a vintage MPC/Ertl model kit of the Hoth Rebel Base from The Empire Strikes Back. I had the Battle of Hoth companion set to this when I was a kid and remember it being pretty great. I didn’t want to pay the $25 sticker price for it, and wasn’t really in any sort of mood to negotiate a lower price (mostly because I don’t have any idea what I would’ve thought was acceptable – I’d have bought it without hesitation if it would’ve been priced at $10, but the odds of talking the table-holder down that low seemed slim). They go for about $50 on eBay, so maybe I should’ve just picked it up.
• Millie found, and was completely enamored by, a Hoberman sphere, so we picked that up for a dollar. She spent most of the afternoon starting with the sphere fully extended and saying “big,” then collapsing it a bit and saying “medium,” then fully collapsing it and saying “small” before giggling herself into a lather and repeating the process.
• Mel found a Fendi scarf and some books.
Bemidji High School fundraiser dinner prep
After the garage sale, we went and spent about 90 minutes helping get food ready for Bemidji High School’s fundraiser fish fry that will be held tomorrow night. We were on carrot duty; we probably peeled 12-15 pounds of carrots, and for awhile Mel was on chopping duty. Good stuff. Helen was an awesome helper, and Millie even helped for a bit too – although she ultimately probably stole more carrots than she peeled.
After that, Helen went swimming with a friend and Mel wanted to clean the house, so I took Millie to McDonald’s to play. After that we went to Home Depot and picked up some tool organizers for the Legos in the basement and she wanted to go look at books at Target, so we did that too. In total we were out for maybe two and a half hours.
Later in the evening, Helen and I worked on the Lego Chamber of Secrets from 2002, from the huge pile of Legos my parents found at the garage sale in Kansas a few years back and brought up for us. Making really good progress, but running into missing-part issues; I’m making a list and am hopeful that most of what we are missing can be acquired from Lego’s Pick a Brick site. We’re missing one of the tower walls, and those aren’t on Pick a Brick and are pretty expensive when they show up on eBay. I’ll keep looking…
I like the track lights I installed in here quite a bit, but they’re seriously useless for providing lighting to work, and the six-dollar desk lamp I bought from Target to provide a close-up way to fill in the shadows I was getting from the overhead lights was barely functional.
I want to try this setup out this weekend sometime; I’m so, so, so far behind on my postcard project, and it would be really fun in May between the end of the semester and the start of summer school / getting Megan up here to get caught up on that and churn a bunch of these out for my friends. They’ve been waiting long enough…
What I’m Listening To
I started a Daft Punk station on Pandora this morning on my phone, and I’m not gonna lie it’s pretty great. I’ve never listened to much electronic music at all (really, my only experience with it has been Daft Punk’s work on the TRON: Legacy soundtrack and the tremendously great Deadmau5 concert on Netflix), but it’s proving to be excellent background music while I’m trying to get some stuff done in my office today.
What I’m Shopping For
Just for fun, I have been pricing out a wide variety of laptops at Apple’s online store — five different laptops ranging from a 13-inch Air to a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, ranging in price from $1,400 to $2,280. I’d really like to have an Air just for the insane portability (but I wonder if most of what I could do with an Air I could also do with an iPad and a quality keyboard case), but the 13-inch MacBook Pro is pretty compelling at only $1,400. I would totally love to have a tricked-out 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, though — 16 gigs of RAM, etc. Big difference between the compelling 13-inch Pro and the $2,280 I’d drop on the 15-inch Retina Pro I specced out… Ah, well. It’s only window shopping at this point!
Toys can be an important merchandising tie-in for summer’s blockbuster Hollywood movies, and this summer’s G.I. Joe: Retaliation is no different. As it is based on characters which appear in Hasbro’s G.I. Joe toy line, which made its debut in its current format in 1982, toys are a focal point of the merchandising for this film.
The movie features 11 main characters — seven heroes on the G.I. Joe team and four members of their adversaries in the evil terrorist organization known as Cobra. Each of those 11 characters are represented in action figure form in the merchandising for this summer’s film. However, given that the history of G.I. Joe now dates back more than 30 years, those interested in pursuing toys of these characters might also be interested in digging into the deep and often varied stories of these characters as they have appeared in toy form throughout the decades.
Some of the characters in Retaliation have been mainstays of the G.I. Joe universe for the entire life of the property, and collecting each of their appearance in toy form will require chasing down more than five dozen different toys. Others have been rather infrequently immortalized in plastic, with as few as three different toys made of the character.
In total, pursuing every toy made of the 11 primary characters in G.I. Joe: Retaliation would lead to a collection of more than 320 action figures. Here’s a breakdown of the number of times each of the film’s 11 primary characters have shown up as toys in the last three-plus decades.
Cobra Commander
Cobra Commander is supreme leader of the terrorist organization which contains the villains in Retaliation. Hidden behind a helmet for the majority of the film, Cobra Commander is played by Luke Bracey. The Commander was one of three villains released in the very first series of G.I. Joe figures in 1982. Since then, he has appeared in action figure form 51 different times, including three times in the line of toys to support the film. However, none of the three film-line toys represents how the character appeared on screen.
Duke
Duke is the field commander of the G.I. Joe team, played (briefly) in the film by Channing Tatum. Duke first appeared in the second series of G.I. Joe figures in 1983, and has since appeared as 48 different action figures. He has one figure in the toy line to support Retaliation, but it does not represent how he appeared on screen.
Firefly
Firefly is Cobra’s saboteur and demolitions specialist, and the character was played by
Ray Stevenson in Retaliation. Firefly has been represented as an action figure 26 times since the character first appeared in the third series of G.I. Joe figures in 1984, including three times in the line of toys to support the film.
Flint
Flint is a warrant officer on the G.I. Joe team, played in the film by DJ Cotrona. The character first appeared in the fourth series of G.I. Joe toys in 1985, and since then he has appeared as an action figure 20 times. He has two toys in the series supporting the Retaliation film.
General Joseph Colton
Joe Colton is the original G.I. Joe, the man from whom the team of heroes takes its name. However, he did not appear in toy form until the 13th series of G.I. Joe figures in 1994. The character is played by Bruce Willis in the film, and in total he has been represented in toy form only three times. He has one figure in the toy series supporting the film.
**Jinx**
Jinx is a ninja affiliated with the G.I. Joe team, and the character first appeared in 1987. Played in the film by Elodie Young, the character has appeared in toy form six times under three different names — Jinx, Agent Jinx and Kim Arashikage.
Lady Jaye
Lady Jaye first appeared as a character in 1985 and is one of only a handful of female members of the G.I. Joe team. The character has been represented in toy form nine times, and was played in the film by Adrianne Palicki.
Roadblock
Roadblock appeared for the first time in 1983 as part of the third series of G.I. Joe toys. The main character in the Retaliation film, Roadblock was played by Duane “The Rock” Johnson. There have been 23 different versions of the Roadblock character over the years, with three in the toy line supporting the film as of this writing.
Snake Eyes
Snake Eyes is one of the 12 original G.I. Joe figures released in 1982, and has appeared in more incarnations than any other character in this property. The ninja commando, who cannot speak, was played in the film by Ray Park. Since making his first appearance, there have been 66 different Snake Eyes action figures released — including a total of six in the toy line supporting the Retaliation film.
Storm Shadow
Storm Shadow is Cobra’s ninja assassin; the character made his debut in the third series of G.I. Joe toys in 1984. Played in the film by Byun-hun Lee, Storm Shadow has appeared in toy form a total of 47 times, including three times in the toy line supporting the film.
Zartan
Zartan is a master of disguise and was played by Jonathan Pryce in the film. Zartan first appeared in the third series of G.I. Joe figures in 1984, and has appeared as an action figure a total of 21 times. He has one figure in the toy line supporting the Retaliation film, but the figure does not represent how the character appeared on screen.
Interested in learning more about the hundreds of characters and thousands of action figures that make up the G.I. Joe toy line? Visit YoJoe.com, the most complete fan-maintained encyclopedia of G.I. Joe collectables on the Internet and start your own collection today.
Exploring new things
Significant updates were released today for a pair of iPad apps that I have a varying degree of familiarity with – Flipboard and Springpad.
Flipboard I used for a bit when it first came out, and I liked it but preferred a more traditional text-based view of my RSS feeds that I could sort by subject. Flipboard is beautiful, and it works really well, I think, for following things like Twitter and Facebook, but it breaks down and was far less effective for things like Google Reader (which I still haven’t identified an alternative for, with Google’s announcement that it’s being unmercifully killed). So it was a fun social media browsing toy for awhile, but I never did much with it.
Springpad was introduced to me as an Evernote alternative, but it never stuck. I think part of it was that I just have too much information already in Evernote and there wasn’t a “holy crap I have to have that” feature in Springpad to get me to switch. The new version that launched today has some features I don’t recall from the first time I checked it out – mostly in the templates it offers for specific post types like checklists and contact management – so it might be worth revisiting this. I still think I’d be hard-pressed to switch away from Evernote though.
The updates to both Flipboard and Springpad today added the functionality to add what both are calling “magazines” of (UPDATE: actually, only Flipboard is calling this a “magazine”; Springpad is calling them “Embeddable Notebooks.” Thanks to Springpad VP Brian Carr for pointing this out to me!) user-created content, but both approach the idea from different directions. As we search for ways to launch a digital version of our magazine that work with our office, any time a service like this mentions “magazine” my interest is immediately piqued. Ultimately, while the new functionality in both apps is significant, neither really match my definition of a magazine (although Springpad is closer than Flipboard).
Flipboard’s implementation essentially creates a completely custom RSS feed. I created a magazine called “College Hockey” where I dropped a couple of stories from College Hockey News, and I could easily add any other information off the web that I found and wanted to add. Flipboard users could find and subscribe to this magazine and then get anything I added to the feed pushed to their board. I could add self-generated content to Flipboard’s magazines by creating a blog post somewhere and then manually adding that page to the feed. There currently isn’t an automated way to have my magazine auto-detect new content and add it to the feed, though; every post must be added manually. For what basically amounts to a custom RSS feed, that’s somewhat of a drag. Flipboard’s implementation is, for all intents and purposes, its version of Storify – and Storify is already pretty good and has traction.
Springpad’s implementation is essentially a shared notebook on the service. Evernote’s had shared notebooks for awhile. Like Flipboard you can add pretty much any sort of content you wish to a notebook – sharing a link or whatever content you want to put in a Springpad note – and there are templates for adding specific content like movies, music, recipes, products, checklists, events, to-do lists, contacts, etc. So you can create content and bundle it up and share it as a “magazine,” but it seems like somewhat of an odd implementation as it forces you into one of two options for storage – either using the magazine to gather content that is stored in Springpad (which is a free service without a paid upgrade option like Evernote, meaning your content is at the mercy of the survival of the parent company) or linked from elsewhere online, making it the same implementation as Flipboard’s magazines.
As I said earlier, neither of these things really fits my idea of a “magazine,” although Springpad probably comes the closest.
To say I’ve been distracted and a bit over-extended lately would be putting things mildly. Here’s a rundown of my activities over the last couple of months (since Christmas really).
Social Media Strategist Certification
I joked about this on Facebook last night; I’ve started working on an online training course to prepare to take the National Institute of Social Media‘s exam to become a certified social media strategist. The course just started on Monday so I don’t remotely have a good handle on it yet, but so far it’s incredibly basic and actually isn’t all that different from the grad school courses I’ve taken online for my degree program at Winona State. I’m hoping that things pick up considerably as the course progresses.
New comic day
Roy’s had a big pile of Marvel’s Essential Horror volume 2 today; they were running a cool deal where they were giving it away for free with the purchase of a trade collection out of this pile that they had assembled on the counter, or for five bucks on its own. So I paid the five bucks and picked it up along with this week’s small three-book haul. That’s going to be a fun addition to the reading list.
One of the things I picked up today was last week’s release of the first issue of IDW’s second reset of its G.I. Joe franchise; after the second “season” of books completely fell apart after the Cobra Command storyline wrapped up, I didn’t have much hope for it. But it was actually pretty good. I’m interested to see where new writer Fred Van Lente takes the series.
Work
Work’s been crazy, to put it simply. We have so many things going on right now, and we seem to absorb more significant projects at an astonishingly rapid rate. But somehow we’ve managed to successfully juggle everything so far, and good work is getting done. The next two months until we get to commencement are going to be a sprint; the whole year has been a sprint really. Getting a breather this summer is going to be welcome.
What I’m Reading
I’m looking over the list of the dozen or so rules changes passed at last week’s NCAA Convention in Texas, and some of them are interesting.
Two of them directly impact athletic media relations, a subject near and dear to my heart:
In the past, the restriction on sending printed recruiting materials to recruits in many instances precluded those materials from being produced altogether. Whether this trend will reverse itself given the advances in the quality of material being made available online; this will be interesting to watch.
The 13-7 change means it’s open season for coverage of recruits once they’ve signed NLIs; this will lead to some interesting (and potentially time-consuming) new activities for media relations offices to promote student athletes before they have even arrived on campus.
There are a few other bylaws pertaining to travel and a student-athlete’s expenses that at first blush seem to lend themselves to some interesting interpretations and, perhaps, some creative ways for schools to fund travel. It’s going to be interesting to see how all of this plays out once the rules take effect in August.
Recent Comments