DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Unable to withstand the allure of Rogue Amoeba’s MacSanta promotion (a 20% holiday discount on dozens of great OS X applications), I took some time this morning to test-drive an app that promises to help Get Me Organized.

(This is no small feat. A year and a half ago I purged my desktop. I loved the spartan appeal of it, the austerity of blank space. For about a month. Then the convenience of fast access buried my good intentions under 87 icons, a couple of which were folders containing yet more disorganized items that resisted proper filing. Like I said then, my clutter is recursive.)

The organizational app that had caught my eye is EagleFiler. It puts a 3-panel browser interface onto any folder of documents, providing a common navigational and viewing mechanism for disparate document types. It provides grouping, tagging and searching features as well, allowing the user to impose additional layers of organization and accessibility not normally afforded by the filesystem.

I have a folder of 8 years’ worth of work documents that are not as accessible as they could be… and the idea of storing them all under one UI, with tagging, definitely appeals. Currently I need at least four apps to view these documents: Preview (images and PDFs), OmniOutliner (I’ve used an outliner for all my note-taking, list-making, and project planning, dating back to Dave Winer’s re-release of More 3.1 in 1999), OpenOffice (Word and Excel docs), and BBEdit (text docs). EagleFiler could replace them all, and the Finder too.

Except that it doesn’t. At least, not yet. It thinks my OmniOutliner documents are folders. It can’t display the outlines, nor can it display OpenOffice spreadsheets (.ods), nor Excel spreadsheets (.xls), nor the contents of compressed tar (.tar.gz) archives.

I have no doubt most of these file formats will be supported by EagleFiler in the future, but at the moment, the app can’t display the 20% of documents I use the most. So for now it’s not a good fit.

Reeling from this letdown, I started shopping for a new task timer. I’ve been using BK Task Timer, which bothers me for three reasons:

1. It seems to have a terrible memory leak; e.g. I recently noticed it sucking up 150+ MB of RAM.
2. It’s slow; bringing the app to the front takes over a second, and starting the timer takes 2 more. On a dual 2GHz G5. WTF?
3. The “no frills” interface is hard to love. There’s so much Mac software that looks cool. This does not. And I have to look at it a couple times a day.

Unfortunately, everybody who makes task timers ends up writing invoicing applications too. So the timer apps get bloated with client data and expense records and a bunch of features perfectly suited to freelance developers and designers who juggle a dozen clients at once — in fact those are the guys writing all these bloated timer apps. I just want to put time into a couple buckets so I don’t inadvertently work 12 hours a day (one of the risks of telecommuting).

I scanned a half-dozen timer apps, downloaded the two that seemed least likely to suck, and within moments eliminated both. Sigh.