I can't has cheezburger

Here’s the fun part in which we get into the meat of a paperless lifestyle.

You don’t have to use Evernote as your note & snippet repository. It’ll make this article less relevant, but there do exist some direct Evernote competitors. Springpad is a notable one. OneNote is great. Maybe Yojimbo is more your thing. DevonThink is quite respectable as well. Perhaps you prefer Circus Ponies NoteBook. Or, maybe you’re old school and you want to manage them all in files and folders manually.

I chose Evernote some time ago because it has a really good balance of all the things I need. It won’t let me scribble things super free form all over a note and record with a note and sync what I wrote to the recording (OneNote, Circus Ponies NoteBook do). It’s not really good at being a good example of a Mac app (Yojimbo is better at that). It doesn’t automatically parse my notes and present me relevant information for specific things inline (Springpad does).

But it does have a version available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux (unofficial), web, WebOS, Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry, iOS and Android (there doesn’t exist another note-taking solution compatible with this many platforms). Not only is Evernote available for each of these platforms, Evernote is written totally natively for each platform, so it fits very well into your phone’s OS or computer’s OS. If you’ve ever used an app that was originally written for another platform and lazily ported over to yours, you’ll appreciate that extra effort. If you add content that is an image, Evernote will make the text in it searchable, even handwritten content (I think it’s the only one in my list that does that). It allows you to easily clip content from the web and it offers this through native extensions for the three major browsers (Firefox, Safari and Chrome) I use. And it’s designed to be very flexible, and doesn’t require you to manage files in any way. It’s synced to a web based account automatically (Springpad does this, but that’s because it has no native OS X client). Evernote treats your notes in a very abstract manner, letting you organize your snippets of information into notebooks and tags (each note lives in a single notebook and can have zero or more tags), and each note can have a number of attributes that help you have context for when you wrote your note. Much of it is implicit. If you write a note on your smartphone, your location is automatically embedded into the note. The date and time you created and last modified the note is right in there. If you clipped a note from the web, Evernote automatically includes the source URL in the note’s metadata, making research super easy. In short, Evernote is designed to make a plethora of information available to you wherever you may happen to be, and they are focused on making it super easy to get that information into it. This is totally in line with what I expect out of a system for enabling me to be paperless.

To get started, get Evernote installed on all of your devices which support it, and log in with your Evernote account. Start off with a free account and upgrade to a paid account when you need it. On your computers, install the Evernote browser extension on all web browsers you use.

Now, when do you use it? Here are a few ideas:

With the exception of the restaurant menu idea, you’ll notice that none of these things are necessarily making your more paperless than you were before, unless perhaps you put things like this on a lot of post-it notes. This is part of the habit forming experience. You want to reach a point where entering things into a computer or other device is the way you put information away to remember. When that becomes second nature to you, you’re well on your way to being paperless, and that habit is going to push you to start doing things proactively to get the paper out of your life (which I will write about later).

Evernote’s got a fair number of ways you can catalog and manage your information. If you are itching to use that functionality, go for it, but don’t push yourself to do this in a way that puts you at risk for falling out of the habit of using Evernote. Start using tags and extended note attributes only when you really feel the need for them. Otherwise, you could be forcing yourself to take more time to make Evernote notes than it otherwise would have taken you. That’s no good.

Next up I’ll be discussing some stylistic choices you have to make when using Evernote, and some of the ways you can use Evernote to keep all your notes within close reach.

“Why don’t you just wipe your ass with your iPad? –Allison Mitchell

Once you have the tools you wish to use to adopt a paperless life, it becomes time to start using the tools. This is by far the most difficult part of the process, because it requires making real, meaningful changes to how you organize your stuff and how you deal with information as you get it. More importantly, you have to change your instincts when you find that you are in need of some piece of information.

When you first start putting stuff into a digital repository, it’s hard to get into the habit of continuing to do it because you haven’t yet benefitted from having the information stored like this (since there’s not yet much information in your digital repository). However, once you do encounter that situation where you need something and you realize “oh, I have it right here in Evernote, let me just grab it!” it’s at that point that you are on track to be in the habit.

Let’s start with the easiest habit to change: saving your files into Dropbox. It’s straightforward enough to do. First, move your existing documents into Dropbox. If you have a Documents (OS X, Windows Vista and up) or a My Documents (Windows XP) folder, make one in your Dropbox, move the contents of your old Documents folder into it, and then start saving your stuff in the new Documents folder instead. If you are using OS X or Vista or Windows 7, it’s a good idea to remove the sidebar shortcut to the old Documents folder and replace it with the new one.

If putting these documents into Dropbox puts strain on the free space you’re allocated, just buy more Dropbox space (or switch to an .edu account and refer lots of people). Don’t ever put yourself into a situation where you have to decide what’s worth keeping in Dropbox, because you’ll inevitably some day be in an airport needing a document you never thought you’d need again. 50 gigabytes of Dropbox space can be had for as little as $100 a year, and unless you’re a video editor or someone whose job involves incredibly large files, it goes a long way.

Having your files Dropboxed gives you some peace of mind. For one thing, for each computer you have Dropbox installed on (if you’re doing it right that is all of them), you have a redundant local backup of all of your files that automatically propagates instantly. You can walk from one computer to another (like a BOSS) and pick up on documents right where you left off. Did a catastrophic storm happen, destroying one of your computers and leaving you without an internet connection? Fear not, the files are right there for you to use on your other machine.

What’s that? You accidentally deleted a file and now it’s deleted on all your computers because Dropbox propagates changes like that? No problem. Go to Dropbox’s web app, log in, and browse to your folder and click “Show Deleted Files.” Bam.

But what if you didn’t delete a file, but instead you drunkenly made some egregious modifications to one of your files? Not to worry. Dropbox has you covered there as well.

At a friend’s house and you didn’t bring a computer with you but you need a document? Again, no problem. Just log into the Dropbox web app and you can see all your files and download the one you want to work with it. You don’t have to worry about installing some software on your friend’s computer.

It gets cooler, though. Dropbox’s mobile app gives you handy access to all of your files. Sitting on a beach and your friend wants that PDF of the eBook you have a (perfectly legal) copy of? It’s surprisingly easy to email your friend a link to the file. And in situations where access to an important file is even more critical, you’ll appreciate having that safety net that much more.

Again, Dropbox isn’t exactly an integral part of a paperless life since those documents were already not on paper, but it’s a habit worth getting into.

I always find it so adorable when I’m talking to someone about Apple’s strategy around the App Store model and they smirkingly explain that Apple’s push toward getting developers to use their app store to sell stuff is all part of a grand scheme to get 30% of their revenue.

If you are truly convinced that this is Apple’s ultimate goal and that they have spent decades building the most successful electronic hardware company in the world because the real money is in leeching money off of the developers that came into existence to develop software for your hardware, there’s little I can probably do for you. However, if you’re the kind of person who might be convinced when shown some cold hard facts, well, let’s maybe take a look at a couple.

First, let’s maybe look at how much money Apple reported earning last quarter:
(this is from Apple’s PR site for 1Q 2012 earnings)
$46.33bn total revenue with $13bn quarterly net profit

That’s a lot of fucking revenue, isn’t it?

On the other hand, let’s look at how much Apple’s been paying out to developers making apps. This article notes that as of Jan 2011 Apple had paid out $2bn to developers to date. That’s a pretty astounding jump given that it took till June 2010 for Apple to pay out the first billion and just seven months after that to double that total payout. I can’t locate more recent figures, but I seem to recall the $3bn mark getting reached last summer. Let’s be safe and just say that $5bn total has been paid out to date to developers (that’s me being really safe).

Okay, so if $5bn is the 70% developers kept, that means that Apple to date has pocketed $2.14bn off these hard working developers’ backs from the summer of 2008 (when the App Store debuted) and today. And again, this is assuming that $5 billion has been paid out and I am overestimating that a tad.

$2.14 billion sure isn’t chump change, but let’s go back to some of those first figures. Remember that $13 billion Apple made? In profit? In one QUARTER alone?

I’m sure Apple really appreciates the $2.14bn in revenue it made from the third party apps, but it probably doesn’t do much more than pay the bills for those data centers that developers’ apps are hosted on. Perhaps it also covers the cost of the reviewers and also perhaps some of the people who, you know, wrote the APIs and frameworks that these apps couldn’t exist without.

And as Apple sells more devices that App Store revenue’s just going to grow over time, no doubt, but so will the costs associating with the app store upkeep. And in the meantime, you know what will grow a hell of a lot more? Apple’s revenues from selling literally tons of iPhones, iPads, iPods and Macs.

Apple’s pushing developers on the Mac to get their apps in the App Store because that’s a super straightforward, Mac-like way to install software on your computer and it’s the best experience for the user. People (including myself) are (rightly) concerned about the limits of what Apple lets into the App Store and are (rightfully) concerned about Apple one day deciding that going App Store-only’s best for them.

But if you think Apple is going to do that because they want to stop developers from making money without Apple getting a 30% cut you’re delusional.

Meant to post this awhile back but I’ve been letting it simmer

A post by Mark Vaske re: the Times’s article:

The NYT’s article was released at an opportunistic time journalistically speaking after a record quarter and something that is probably historically significant. It reported years old events and figures.

Would it have been more journalistically responsible of them to not do their research of Apple’s history with its suppliers?

And should NYT have waited for Apple to have a down quarter before they publish this? Would that have made you less concerned about them being opportunistic? Every quarter is Apple’s best quarter.

What baffles me is that the most recent Foxconn news had been about an Xbox manufacturing portion of the plant saying it was going to commit mass suicide, but that has gotten relatively little press at the current time, but some press all the same. This seems very familiar to the explosion last May that got covered but it didn’t get the scrutiny that the current piece is getting.

Okay, so you’re upset that the incident which did get press coverage when it happened no longer deserves coverage now that it’s been awhile since it happened and people have since then discovered that the explosion was more than just a freak accident, but the result of carelessness symptomatic of the supplier’s pressure from Apple to churn out more iPads at rock bottom prices?

Those who are experiencing cognitive dissonance over old news that did not experience it at the time of when it was actually news have on blinders and must be spoon fed their opinions.

Or they’re just rational human beings who aren’t prone to being partisan and are able to change their stance on an issue given new facts (the facts, in this case, being that the explosion was completely preventable and it wasn’t prevented because Apple negotiates so hard that no supplier can afford to be up to snuff).

If you don’t like how something is produced, and you cannot stand for it, then don’t buy those products.

A good company doesn’t need a boycott or the threat of a boycott to change its mind. Like a rational human, a good company will change its course given new information and input from customers. As opaque as Apple might seem compared to most companies we encounter, Apple is quite receptive to its customers’ input.  This pressure has an impact.

Remember back when Steve Jobs was convinced that the iPhone didn’t need native apps? If not for the iOS SDK we wouldn’t be having a conversation about Apple’s massive supply chain because they surely would have faded into obscurity.

I don’t think we should necessarily look at these events and turn a blind eye and not try to constantly do better, but I don’t think that is the case anyway.

Yet here you are writing a blog post expressing your rage that NYT has the nerve to try to tell the world that Apple could stand to treat its suppliers better and ought to try harder to make workers’ conditions better.

Another thing that bothers me is that the Times’ piece quoted an ex-Foxconn Executive who was suing the company. Where do you think his bias and favor lie…?

That’s not bias. The fact that this exec left the company he’s now suing for some wrongdoing doesn’t make the article biased. If the ex-exec now worked for a competing company that would benefit from Foxconn’s reputation being damaged, that’s bias. But if this exec was indeed wronged and is in the process of litigation, he’s not biased, he just has an opinion on the matter.

I’ll be the first to admit I find it annoying that journalists piggyback off of Apple’s popularity to try to get their articles more traffic. I am on record complaining about Greenpeace using Apple as a scapegoat for poor environmental practices despite Apple being a leader in this arena in many ways (Apple has since risen in Greenpeace’s rankings). This is a piece of investigative journalism that looks at a series of events that have happened over the years regarding Apple. Apple publishes possibly the most thorough supplier responsibility progress reports I have seen in the industry, but the interviews with those close to the matter revealed in this article paint a wholly different picture, and that disparity angers me and it should anger customers as well. Yes, there is going to be an inherent leaning against Apple given that the interviews are from those who left Apple.  After all, there’s some reason they left Apple.  It isn’t the responsibility of NYT to spell out the biases; a smart reader should be able to see this and understand it.

Is the NYT article trying to take advantage of Apple’s success by publishing it at this time to try to get more views? That’s a pretty serious accusation to make (and Mark did make it). This is a pretty well thought out article, not some piece of linkbait. It clearly was put together over some weeks and many interviews. Sure, it was published shortly after Apple reported record earnings, but nobody was surprised at Apple’s earnings. Apple was a hugely profitable and valuable company the day before the earnings call and are just as successful after. Apple is a highly talked about company no matter what day it is, and has been even more popular since iPhone was announced in 2007. There’s little to be gained from timing the article around the shareholder earnings report. Finally, the timing of the article more logically happens to come shortly after a much more relevant release by Apple, and that is the publishing of their supplier responsibility progress report.

NYT also offered another perspective on the matter in an earlier article as well.

As an aside, I think it’s also important to note that although work conditions in these Chinese factories are poor by American standards and absolutely should be improved, the situation now is an improvement for people over their lives before. Working at a Foxconn facility nets workers far better wages than living on the countryside. Foxconn workers are earning better salaries than their competitors’ counterparts, and while any workplace fatality is unfortunate, the fatality rates are low in factories and suicide rates are statistically low (although when your workers are committing suicide it’s not good PR to point at your favorable suicide rates even if you are mathematically correct).

I know that conditions in China will improve gradually, but I’m bothered by this notion that people think that because Apple has done a lot to make conditions relatively better that customers are somehow in the wrong to tell Apple that they could try harder. I’m upset by blog posts like this one that accept factory work as something that necessarily has to be sucky and that nothing can possibly change it.  Factory work may not be the most fun thing ever, but you’re kidding yourself as a morally sound human being if you think it’s okay to be fine with not improving it. And of all the companies who can improve it, Apple is perhaps better positioned than any other company in the world to effect change, because they are so incredibly profitable.  If we can’t expect the most valuable company in the world to pay factory workers better for fewer working hours, then we’re definitely going to struggle to expect the factories in businesses that are a lot more competitive to step up as well.