The Good Easy on OS X
by Giles Turnbull
07/25/2007
What Is the “Good Easy” and Why Should You Care?
Computers, as those of us whose professional lives revolve around them know all too well, do not necessarily make life easier. A lot of the time, they just add another level of complexity and another layer of demands on our time.
So, approaches have been developed that aim to make computers easier to get along with by simplifying what they do and how they do it.
Some years ago, Danny O’Brien (sometime stand-up comic, scriptwriter, Wired U.K. journalist, and, now, EFF’s International Outreach Coordinator) gave a presentation at O’Reilly’s 2004 Emerging Technology conference in San Diego, in which he spelled out the concept of “life hacks.”
He’d been fascinated by what other geeks did to keep themselves organized, so he set about contacting a large number of them and asking them outright: how do you do it?
The answers all boiled down to simplicity. The geeks used old tools, simple tools, which were reliable ways of working that rarely, if ever, went wrong. They kept to do lists in plain text files. They depended on copying and pasting to move data around. It was simple, and it worked.
So, Danny’s presentation sparked many ideas in a lot of other people’s heads, and the personal productivity boom now enjoyed by the likes of 43 Folders and Lifehacker was born.
Danny sums it all up this way:
A few years ago, I coined the term “life hacks,” which has gone on to become an entire industry of hints and tips that I am, by my congenital laziness, unable to use or benefit from. It is some sort of karmic punishment.
So far, so straightforward. But we haven’t gotten to the Good Easy yet.
Enter Mark Hurst. Mark’s “Good Experience” newsletter and blog have always been about making technology easier to use. He’s just published a book, Bit Literacy, which aims to teach ordinary people many of the simple tools and reliable working methods that Danny O’Brien found the geeks using back in 2004.
Hurst takes things further, in more detail, and aims his thoughts at a much wider audience. Computers are not “bit literate” machines out of the box, he says. It is up to users to bend, amend, and shape computers into something that will perform better and make them more productive people.
The “Good Easy” is a sub-set of the “bit literacy” concept. It represents the specific changes Hurst and his staff make to any new computer that arrives in their office. Until these changes are made, Hurst considers the computer unfit for use.
In short, the Good Easy is all about removing some things that are (in Hurst’s opinion) broken and adding third-party tools to make the working environment better.
I spoke to Hurst to find out exactly what the Good Easy is and why he considers it essential for all new staff at Creative Good.
The Good Easy Basics
In short, the Good Easy is about making every machine (and at Creative Good, they are all Macs) a more productive working environment. Productivity is improved when the tools and methods used are kept as simple as they can possibly be.
For example, file formats. Like a lot of geeks, Hurst keeps almost everything in plain text files. When saving a clipping from the Web, he prefers to copy and paste the text of the article into a new text file and save that, with appropriate metadata like URL, author, and data appended at the top.
Why do this and not just save as a web archive or import into an app like Yojimbo? Because, says Hurst, plain text is the simplest possible format for storing text data, and unlike web archive files, he can be confident of opening and reading a text file on almost any computing device for decades to come. Saving the URL itself in a bookmark or at an online service like del.icio.us is useful too, but URLs change, disappear, get switched behind paywalls, and so on. Hurst’s approach is just to keep the text.
To turn a factory-fresh Mac into what Hurst calls a Good Easy Mac, here’s what gets added:
LINK
Here’s a link to the book…
Bit Literacy
Mark Hurst
Best Price $13.87
or Buy New $15.40
