The Designer Geek

It sounds like an easy request, doesn’t it? And when you’re the only game in town, you have that responsibility to the people who use your product. Especially if you’re dealing with data that’s essential to their business. Like, oh, I dunno, invoicing and billing data.

About a year ago we ditched a creaky old custom FileMaker time tracking & invoicing system for iBiz Server. (We had a few false starts with web-based solutions, but they simply didn’t offer everything we needed.)

We went for it because it’s the only solution for networked time tracking that also has invoicing built-in. As a bonus, it integrates well with iBank. Spiffy! And for a small office, the price is very, very reasonable. (Well under $500 for seat licenses for everyone, and it’ll run just fine on an old Quicksilver G4 sitting in the back room.)

Now 99% of the time, iBiz is a great product. I can whip through a month’s worth of invoices in about half an hour, and there’s several different ways of keeping track of your time with timers and whatnot. And, like all good geek programs, it’s AppleScriptable, bless its heart.

The other 1% of the time? It loses data.

Like, for instance, all the invoices, estimates, and payments associated with a client. Or it’ll duplicate a client, and the jobs associated with it will disappear. Or once after a restart, all the unsubmitted Quick Timer events were gone. How much time had I spent on those projects? Don’t know. And I don’t know because I was relying on the software to keep track of it for me. Last time I checked, that’s the job of software.

Now, like any good geek,  I’ve got it running nightly backups of all its data. But that doesn’t bring back the 8-10 hours of data it collected between the backup and when something went wrong.

So if any seriously-skilled Cocoa programmer (or group thereof) want to write a kick-ass time tracking & invoicing application, talk to me. For a marginal cut (20%) I’ll help you develop a program that will totally kick ass.

And not just because it won’t lose data.

-geek out

I am a perpetual multitasker. A dozen plus applications, 3 Spaces, and keyboard shortcuts out the wazoo. I never, ever, sit and watch a progress bar. If something is going to take longer than 5 seconds — like making a 24-page PDF — bet your ass I’m switching to a different space and doing something else. That can be reading a web page, answering an email, or installing a new application to try out. For all intents and purposes, I’m operating at near 100%. But some people just don’t understand. They’ll happily sit there watching a progress bar. They’ll curse how “slow” their machine is. All while not realizing they can be doing something else at the same time. So it is that I sit at my machine, churn through personal and work tasks, flip rapidly between Spaces and apps and windows, and when a Unitasker walks by, I get the “what the hell are you doing?” look because, invariably, I just switched a space. Or an app. Or a window. Or a tab. Hell, this blog entry wasn’t written in one sitting. It kinda went like this:

1. In QuarkXPress, start a Collect for Output
2. Switch to MacJournal, start a blog entry
3. See the Collect for Output is finished, go to the Finder to Zip the folder
4. Switch back to MacJournal, write a little more
5. See the Zip function is complete, trigger Quicksilver to launch Cyberduck, and start upload.
6. Switch back to MacJournal, write a little more
7. Growl pops up a notification that a friend IM’ed me. It’s a quick question, so I pop over to iChat and answer him
8. Switch back to MacJournal, write a little more
9. Look at Cyberduck upload window (in the background), note upload speed has stabilized, note estimated time to complete the upload
10. Switch from MacJournal to Mail. Email client & vendor, letting them know when the files will be finished uploading
11. Switch back to MacJournal, write a little more
12. Growl notifies me that the Cyberduck upload is complete, switch to Finder to copy the Zip file to our local fileserver, then delete the Zip file from my Desktop. While I’m there, clean up a few straggler files that have accumulated there.

This is about 5 minutes worth of my day. My screen is switching between Spaces and apps, Growl notifications are popping up, I’m triggering Quicksilver every 5 minutes, and command-tabbing my way through apps…. so my screen is rarely static on any one app for any length of time. But what am I gonna do… sit here with a machine that has 80% idle processor cycles and watch Cyberduck’s upload progress bar until it finishes a 125MB upload?

Not likely.

Don’t get me wrong, there are times when I’m completely focused in one app, on one window. When churning through a design, writing a script, or editing 50 images for a catalog layout, I’ll be in 1 app for a long stretch. But at least 50% of my time is spent flipping. And when I flip a lot, the Unitaskers look at me like I’m goofing off. So my options are:

A) Continue to multitask and get the quizzical looks, or

B) Be less productive

Frankly, I don’t like either option.

–geek out