January 2014

01/29/2014 18:00:24 ●

Released: Markdown for Keyboard Maestro (v 2.1.3)

Just a small update again. One new feature (speed!), and two fixes, provided by @fncll. (A big thank you!)

Download version 2.1.3

01/27/2014 19:00:29 ●

Stop Procrastinating Important Calls With Call Flows

I don’t where exactly to link back to for this. This is one of the results my Priorities approach has resolved into. The thing is once I knew what my priorities are, I quickly realized that to push these “bigger than me” things forward I had to do certain things I feel less comfortable about. I started procrastinating. Procrastination is like an energy that wants to push me back from the things I desire.

Some of the things I procrastinate are important calls. Whether it’s a bank, the tax office, my dentist1. Just thinking about these calls, I quickly imagine myself in the dentist chair - suffering in pain.

Part of the issue why I was avoiding phone calls is I didn’t know what to say. Obviously I know what I want from the person. I have a task here in OmniFocus that tells me why I’m calling, but how I actually communicate what I want was unclear. Because, as opposed to meetings, which I always prepare for with a mind map, I didn’t make the same effort for important calls. So I came up with Call Flows.

Call Flows

A Call Flow is really super simple. OmniGraffle has this nice Automatic Layout feature where rectangles connected with lines form a layout automatically. I used this for Call Flows.

A Call Flow template:

Write down what exact words you’re going to use. Then all you need to do is call the number. For me Call Flows have taken out the weight of calling, because now I not only know what I want, but how I’m actually going to get it.

Naturally I made a mind map as well.

  1. I actually don’t have any bank, tax, or teeth issues. ↩

01/24/2014 19:00:32 ●

A Conference Call in Real Life

via @AngelikaLattner

01/21/2014 19:00:21 ●

VLC for iOS Updated With Offline Download and Dropbox Streaming

VLC for iOS has just been updated with a pretty nifty feature. It can now stream from Dropbox and Google Drive. There’s also a new feature that makes a Plex Pass less desirable: offline download.

VLC for iOS can connect to all UPNP media servers. The integration in VLC is not super stelar, but it’s working. I had a couple of crashes, but was able to download media from my media server onto my phone. I never understood1 why Plex limits their users in such a way.

Download the update from the App Store. VLC also has received some nice UI changes.

  1. Obviously I do understand, but I don’t like what they do with Plex Pass. ↩

01/20/2014 19:00:16 ●

Web Automation

Sven inspired me to write this. He had a post recently named "iOS Automation Week". This is not about x-callback, but web automation instead. Some folks I have talked with were also explaining how they “automate the web”. I thought I could give you an insight what I do in this regard.

Honestly I don’t try to automate too much, because the more stuff I automate, the less I know about the stuff I automate. For instance I could automatically share all articles I star on Instapaper to Twitter, but I don’t want to do that. I feel like that’s automated spam. My followers don’t deserve automated spam. Instead I choose to share specific articles only. But I do automate some stuff. After all, that’s what we nerds do, right?

Articles and Other Consumable Media

I use Pocket and Instapaper as “reading queue”. My experiment with Safari’s Reading List didn’t yield good enough results. Pocket is my first place to put stuff. It’s where I put videos, articles, shared stuff from Twitter, etc.

Occasionally, about once a week, I go through the bookmarked stuff and decide what to do with it. When I find an interesting article, it goes on Instapaper. When I find something else of interest it usually stays in Pocket, or gets consumed right away.1 I’m meticulous about the stuff that I consume, because I put way more stuff on the queue than I can possibly consume. I’m a huge fan of deleting stuff. The thing is I don’t want to automate this part. My ex girlfriend used to say “no matter how much knowledge you have archived somewhere, it is worth nothing if you are not aware that you have it”. She’s right. No matter how much knowledge one archives on Evernote. It is worth zero if one has no idea that this particular knowledge is there and doesn’t know how to access it. That’s why so many people get caught up in tags, and referencing, and whatnot. People want to remember their stuff. Services like Evernote claim they make it easy to archive knowledge. It is for these reasons why I cherry-pick every single article. Stuff that is not good enough gets deleted. Why would I want to waste my precious life time with stuff that is just barely good enough?

The sharing process is similar. I have an inbox queue with about 10 articles. Do I see the number increase, I delete stuff. Articles that I read and want to share I automatically share using Buffer. Buffer is nice because it can share to Twitter, Facebook, and App.net. Most times I share to LinkedIn as well, though XING is the most prevalent business network in Germany. I tried sharing to XING using an RSS feed, but their RSS importer is just abysmal. When I share to Buffer I turn off link shortening. It feels a little bit more spammy to me to use buff.ly instead of the real URL. I want my followers to feel nice about themselves. If you follow me, you can be sure that what I share was shared with full consciousness that it represents what I stand for and that it’s of interest to people who follow me.

I also edit the URL’s to not include stuff like:

?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign

The reason I do this is manyfold. For one I want my followers to have a clean experience. Second I don’t want to skew some site’s analytics. Third I’m German (and a nerd) and we do stupid stuff like that.

Finding Knowledge

The question now is: am I against archiving old articles as reference? No, absolutely not. As written earlier, I left Evernote for good and am using a Dropbox folder to keep reference material now.

The thing is, I rarely put stuff in there. To be honest that’s not how I roll. When I sit in front of my PC and am like “how tall was I in inches again?”, I open a new tab in Safari and just type my size in the search box and hit return. I get the information immediately. I do this in 90% of the cases. It just never happens that I go “oh, I got this thing archived here”. Knowledge that I don’t know that I have, I don’t access. Acquiring knowledge through a quick research on the Internet is just so much faster.

The Nerdy Part

OK, now that you know why I don’t like to automate. Let’s talk about the stuff I do automate (in regards to the web).

Slogger

I use Brett’s Slogger, because, I think, it is a wonderfully nerdy, cobbled together, piece of software that misuses Day One’s original intention of being a personal diary, to an extent that I just have to use it. That’s it. I can’t resist. It’s got arms and hair, it’s a little bit stinky too. Just what I like. It archives my tweets, my Facebook posts, the articles I read on Instapaper, my RunKeeper activity, all in one place. I can still write diary entries by hand, or use Daily Diary. Slogger makes Day One become my personal logging. Day One represents what I am.

HootSuite

If you follow me on Twitter you know that I’m a huge fan of TweetDeck. HootSuite is even better. HootSuite allows to connect to so many places. It’s ridiculous. One nice thing is, it can import an RSS feed and post somewhere it can post to.

I want to have the posts I write here to be on all of MOSX’s social outlets. I have a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and a Google+ page. Tumblr can post to Twitter and Facebook natively, but not to Google+. HootSuite can post to Google+.

IFTTT

  1. Brainy Quote to Pushover: Sends me Brainy Quote’s Quote of the Day as Pushover notification. I enjoy reading quotes a lot. When I find a quote I particularly like, it eventually ends up in Day One.
  2. Archive Foursquare checkins to Google Calendar: Whenever I check in somewhere, the checkin gets archived in a Google calendar. I don’t overuse Foursquare, but I check in to certain places. My office and gym particularly. More important are the “unusual” places I visit that I want to archive somewhere. With a calendar I can go ahead and reconstruct what I did on a vacation.
  3. Archive new bookmarks as Markdown: This one checks for new bookmarks on Pinboard, and uses Heck Yes Markdown to process them to Markdown. The text file is then saved to Dropbox.

Zapier

  1. Job Hunt: I have a Twitter search set up on Zapier that outputs an RSS feed. I read the “job hunt” feeds in my desktop reader, Vienna. More on finding a job online.
  2. Github New Pull Request to Pushover Push Notification: Should be self-explanatory.
  3. Send To Dropbox: This one is built on the idea Federico’s Send Any Webpage From iOS To Your Mac, with a couple of minor differences. I was also using SendToDropbox for a long time, but realized they stopped working at some point.2 I was looking for an alternative and found Zapier to do a decent job. Basically this workflow allows me to send an email to a specific address at Zapier. All emails that get sent to this address get their content saved on Dropbox. The folder is monitored by Hazel, which scans the email for links which it then opens using the default web browser. This way I can easily send a “tab” to my Mac.

I hope you found some good stuff in this post.

  1. Remember the two-minute rule? ↩

  2. They are back now. ↩

01/19/2014 19:00:38 ●

Blade Runner - The Aquarelle Edition

12,597 aquarelle paintings form a 35 minute paraphrase of Blade Runner.

This animation consists of 12 597 handmade aquarelle paintings, each painting is approximately 1,5*3cm in size. Together they form my 35 minute long paraphrase on the motion picture Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott.

by Anders Ramsell

01/18/2014 19:00:32 ●

Mark Kendall: Demo: A needle-free vaccine patch that’s safer and way cheaper

01/17/2014 22:27:00 ●

Do You Have Too Much Stuff?

People have told me that my article "New Year Resolutions, Being Strong, Letting Go" was the right writing, that came at the right time.

I hope I’m hitting a home run with this one too. It’s about stuff.

Minimal Living

This is not meant to be a writing on minimalism, but it is, in a way. I live a pretty minimal life. Minimalism for me doesn’t mean “don’t have anything”. We all have things, we all want things.

The goal of minimal living for me is not not to have things, but to have just enough things. To have enough food that I won’t die, but not more so I gain weight. To have the right food that is most nutritious, with the right amount of calories, at the right time. The same thing is true for stuff I own. I have one iPhone, not two. One is just enough.

Accumulating Stuff

The thing is we all consume stuff. We buy things, because we, at some point, thought that thing was going to improve our lives in a certain way, or make us happy. These things pile up over time. Clothes are a perfect example here.

One year we buy some pair of shoes. Somehow these shoes survive the season and they are still good enough for next year. So we keep them. Then another year passes by, now they start to look outworn, but we still keep them around, because they served us so well over the years.

Unwanted Stuff and Pain

With clothing it’s easy, because at a certain point we have a visual indication that we accumulated too much “stuff”. When the closet is getting too full, then it’s time to sort out old clothes.
With other stuff it’s not so easy. Just for a moment, I want you to find the nearest drawer, you know has all kinds of stuff in it. Open it. What does it have in it? All kinds of stuff. Empty the entire thing. I’m pretty sure you find one or two items in there where you’re going to wonder why you still have it.

Just seeing unwanted stuff creates a big enough energy in ourselves that we drop that thing in the next trash can. When you think about it. It’s an elevation of thoughts that finally makes you give in and throw it away. Ultimately unwanted stuff creates pain.

Let’s take this back to minimalism and thoughtfulness. Your brain is a powerful organ. It remembers a lot of stuff. Now imagine that all the unwanted things that you have around your house (or in your job life for that matter), but don’t consciously remember to have, your brain is aware of that they are still there. Imagine how good it must feel to relieve your brain off that stuff.

The Process

"The Process" is a very magical method that I came up with™. It’s called spring cleaning.

The way I go about cleaning “stuff” is basically ask myself if I really need it, what purpose an item is serving in my life, and what purpose it is going to serve. For example a couple of years I bought some hinges and screws and wood and whatnot to build a small recording cabin where I could record screencasts. Do you know what I just found in one of the drawers right next to my table? Said hinges and screws. Two years later that recording cabin still doesn’t exist. Now the question is. Now that I know that I once wanted to build a recording cabin, am I going to actually build it? Let’s just declare this project “unlikely”.
It was easy to throw the hinges away, but screws. Man. Screws are so useful. You can drill them inside of things and make stuff hang on them. That sounds pretty great. Let’s put them in the other drawer where I keep all the other screws. That drawer is full of screws, that can have things hang on them, already. I don’t need any more screws.

Minimalism is about being mindful about yourself and the future. In the future, if I have to screw something into something. How will that scenario unfold? I’m going to have the thing that needs to be screwed in front of me. I’m going to have my screwdriver ready. I’m going to open the drawer with all the screws in it, and if I don’t have the right screws, I’m just going to buy some. That’s contradicting I know. Bare with me for a second.

The thing is to be mindful that if you ever need screws, you’re going to get them, but right now there’s no need to have screws. A basic set of screws is healthy, but until you’re not a carpenter you probably don’t need to have all kinds of screws.1

This is how I think of “stuff” and getting to a minimal point where I can just be myself. Where I feel like “stuff” doesn’t control my life anymore. Where I have just barely enough to survive. Maybe I should write an article about having enough, now that I think of it.

Jesus, all I wanted to write was “Do some spring cleaning. It’s healthy!”. And now this is about minimalism and Feng Shui. Wat?

  1. Unless, of course, you’re just building your own house. That’s a completely different story. In that case you have a need for screws. ↩

01/16/2014 19:00:14 ●

Outread: Finally a Speed Reading App That Understands Speed Reading

Just yesterday I saw a new speed reading app popping in my news feed: Outread. I was intrigued, because I like to train my speed reading sometimes, but the apps that exist are either bad or old.

My previous favourite was QuickReader. QuickReader does a really great job for speed reading training. It lets a user customize not only speed, but also stops per line, which is important. If you want to learn how to read faster, you need to control your eyes better. To get control of the eyes, train how often they stop per line to take new words in.
The app is old and outdated though. It doesn’t integrate with Instapaper and its look needs a serious redesign.

Then some time last year Velocity was released. A really good looking speed reading app, but it only let’s you speed read by showing text on one specific spot on the screen. There’s no need to move the eye. So once a user who was trained with Velocity reads somewhere else, their reading slows down to their previous level, because their fixations haven’t been trained.

Enter Outread. Outread has a well designed interface, integrates with Instapaper, and it trains fixations. From a brief test I am very impressed by the app. I can set wpm (words per minute) as well as, what they call, a marker size. This marker is basically the measure for how many fixations per line the app will create.
Right now an iPad version is missing. I do most of my reading there. They have announced an iPad version though. According to a tweet, the app is going to be Universal.
Obviously the app is insanely expensive at $2.99, but I hope you still give the app a whirl.

01/14/2014 19:30:33 ●

Released: Markdown for Keyboard Maestro 2.1.2

I found some time to work on a new feature for Markdown for Keyboard Maestro. Nothing too fancy though. Also fixed a bug. I’m currently looking into improving the Remove Formatting macro.

01/13/2014 19:30:35 ●

Homescreens 2013-01-12

I haven’t posted my home screens since iOS 7 is out. The radical new design has brought some changes to my home screens. I also notices that I had quite a lot of apps installed, so I used my Find and Delete Unused Apps From Your iPhone to sift through all of them and find the keepers. Part of the reason why I removed some apps was also that many developers charge for updates and remove once-bought apps from the store. As much as I would like everyone to earn their money, some of the apps were just not worth it. That’s why I would like to dub iOS 7 “out with the new, in with the old”.

My iPhone Homescreen

My iPhone homescreen changed immensely compared to last time. I discovered that I had 160 apps installed. About 30 in my “Test” folder, where I keep apps that I want to take a second look at. Basically I decided that I don’t want to have so many apps on my phone and used my unused apps approach to fish out all apps that I want to keep. The basic rule was: Delete. If I really want it back, I will reinstall it again.

My iPad Homescreen

My iPad homescreen didn’t change as much, but there are a couple of noticeable changes.

01/10/2014 19:00:33 ●

Thinking a Fear All the Way Through

This post was originally written by a friend of mine, Jan Theofel. Some time ago I had a training session with him when he was still developing his coaching skills and needed a test subject. He taught me a therapeutic exercise. Recently I had an occasion where I wanted to use this exercise, but I couldn’t remember the question, which is an essential part of it, that he asked me anymore. So I asked him what that exercise is called. It turned out it’s something he came up with. Therefore I asked if he could share the exercise so that I can remember. He did. I want to share his approach on this blog, with my readers. He agreed that I translate his original posting, which you can find here. This is not a 100% translation though because some sentences didn’t make much sense in the English language. The original is German.

Thinking a Fear All the Way Through

What do you fear? I don’t mean fear of real dangers, like falling off a cliff. I mean fear of situations like beginning a chat with a person, doing your thing, or things like going on a stage. You can imagine a lot more of these things probably. That is all normal, so don’t be worried. Maybe you can go on a journey of discovery, one that will help you to overcome these fears?

It helps to do this exercise with a second person, a person that gives guidance and writes down your words. If you are truly honest with yourself you can do this alone as well. In that case be careful and question when you are taking too huge, and too surprising, steps.

Behind every fear is a horror fantasy. The first goal of this exercise is simple: get to know that fear. The second step is then to decide what to do with it. To get to know a fear ask yourself continuously: “So what’s so bad about it? What bad thing could happen?” Repeat this question so long until you get the feeling you finally found the true horror fantasy. Trust me, you will recognize it when you found it.

An Example of a Fear

Let’s go through a concrete example. A couple of years ago I was sitting across a young woman who was preparing for a job interview. All I wanted, but couldn’t do, was to wish her great success. In short: I feared to talk to her. Let’s go through my horror fantasy. It may sound ridiculous at some point, but I get to that in a moment.

What’s so bad about it? What bad thing could happen?
She doesn’t like that I talked to her.
And then? What’s so bad about it? What bad thing could happen?
She doesn’t like me and tells everybody that I hit on her.
And then? […]
She tells all her friends and they tell everyone they know.
And then? […]
Eventually my friends, colleagues, and business partners will know. And they are going to think what a dick I am.
And then? […]
And then everyone I know won’t have anything to do with me anymore and avoid me.
And then? […]
I panic, because I won’t get any new jobs and I have no money anymore. This will get noticed by my current clients and they start to mistrust me as well.
And then? […]
I won’t get new jobs from them and I’m going to be poor.
And then? […]
Then I lose my flat and can’t keep my living standards. Nobody will have anything to do with me anymore then.
And then? […]
I will be alone. Without contacts I don’t get any sympathy and no money.
And then? […]
I die like a flower, that hasn’t been watered, and die.

This sounds crazy: I’d die because I talk to a young woman. No wonder I had so much fear. This is a life-threatening situation!

In fact all fears I learned to know always have an existential threat behind them. Other examples next to dying are insanity, complete loss of control, or absolute loneliness. These threats are indirect version(s) of dying. Loneliness for example traditionally meant exclusion of the horde, which also lead to death eventually. That is the reason why this fear can become so powerful.

What can I do when I thought a fear all the way through with this method?

Realize Your Insanity

It’s often enough to realize how insane a fear is, using this method, for a fear to weaken or go away completely. In my example I would obviously not die from talking to a young woman.

Finding and Resolving Dogmas

My teacher Christian Meyer also uses this method to find and resolve dogmas. When starting with a fear, often a dogma surfaces. In my example, on the last but two step, this could be something like: only when I have something to offer, will other people like me.
I prefer open alternative sentences like: “I approach people openly and take pot luck, and see if they like me or not, and I’ll accept all emotions this situation creates.“

Five Reasons Why You’re Not Going to Die

Thomas Klüh recommends in his book Mein Weg Zum Glück to find five reason why you’re not going to die. This is helpful as emergency medicine, when a fear surfaces that needs to go quickly. I would recommend to analyze the fear afterwards.

And Then? What Positive Things Could Happen?

Zellmi said in his Barcamp session that to every horror fantasy, he also imagines the dream fantasy, that can be just as crazy as the other. (In my example I could have gotten into a nice chat with the woman and maybe married and got children, or something along those lines.) Once you know the two extremes, it is easier to realize that the reality is somewhere in between.

Maybe you find further varieties of this method. In that case I’d like to know.

It would make really happy if this method helps to confront yourself with one or the other fear and helps to resolve it.

01/07/2014 19:30:26 ●

Find and Delete Unused Apps From Your iPhone

If you are an app geek, just as I am, you probably suffer from the same issue that I do: there are just too many apps on your phone. I was just about to update my “homescreens” post and realized I never shared my approach on how to find all apps that I can safely delete from my phone.

Obviously I’m doing this in MindNode.

My method is actually pretty simple:

Process all folders the same way.

You can download my original map here. I just copy/paste the one template node as often as I need to.

01/06/2014 19:30:17 ●

Does “Piling Up” Prohibit Your Productivity?

In recent projects I’m experiencing “piling up” a lot lately. As I wrote in "An official statement on the future of Mac OS X Screencasts", I’ve been holding off of making screencasts, because they require so much work and the task therefore became so daunting that I just couldn’t do any more screencasts.

I’ve been involved with a free time project too. A friend and I have been working on videos, before we began though, we had to make a plan of what the first video is going to be about. So we wrote down ideas and thought about the content. We made a todo list and talked and imagined and played with ideas; so long that after three hours we still had 0 minutes of video recorded. We made the thing so big in our heads that beginning the first video was such a huge task that we just couldn’t do it.
Think about this, the first thing of something is always going to be rubbish, isn’t it? Every time you start something new, the first time you do it, it is always going to be not as good as if you do it for the 20th time. This is what’s called “mastery”. Before you get good at pottery, a person has to make many many pots and mugs before.

For the same reason I’ve not been accepting what I really wanted to do with zCasting. About three months ago I had an epiphany what would be really cool for zCasting to be about, and my first thought was: “No, I can’t do that. What would other people say about me?” That thought alone made my idea become so little that I told myself “that’s a nice idea, but I can’t have that”. And so I didn’t.
I spent the entire last year just looking at myself. What am I? What do I stand for? What is important to me? What are my core values?

One of my values is “equality”. I like people to get treated equal. I realized that was a value when a developer friend lamented on Twitter how stupid App Store reviews are and posted that comment with his complaint. That is so totally uncool that I had to tell him he can’t do that and we got into an argument. Days later I thought about it again and was wondering why I did that. Why do I get upset by such a situation, so much so that I can’t control myself, and rather than keeping a peaceful relationship, I risk having that relationship potentially become broken and bicker at people? The reason is simple, I just don’t think that’s the right thing to do. I was wondering if that is one of my values? How often did I do this in the past? If I want to have people get treated equal, how would such a world look like? I realized that a world where people are equal (men, women, and races, of course) is something I look forward to; it’s something that I want.

I have collected my “values” in a mind map. So I knew that equality was something that I wanted. I knew that the business idea I had for zCasting had to do with equality. And for just a brief moment in my life I was weighing how much I wanted equality in the world against my fear of getting told “you can’t do that”. This is what “piling up” essentially leads to. In your head you make things so big that the fear becomes so big that you just can’t start.

Next time ask yourself if “fear” is the reason why you hold off doing a certain thing. Consider if you can let fear decide what you do in your life. Can you let fear take over your world? If you can’t, just go for it. I’m doing this “fear can’t take over my world”-thing for about 6 months now. From that small experience I can tell you that all that happened in the last months have been amazing. The problem is that once you make decisions that way, you have to be a grown up-enough person to accept the consequences your decisions result in. So in my case if I get someone saying “you can’t do that”, I need to have a riposte for that person. I want to write about conquering fear in a future article.

01/03/2014 19:30:13 ●

Get Every Redirect of a Short URL

Apparently I never published this here. Some time ago I wanted to see where a short URL takes me. I needed this for Twitter because when you copy a link, even though it says the original URL, Twitter’s own shortner t.co is copied.

The solution is actually quite simple:

curl -sIL http://t.co/9acY1bnnFg | grep ^[lL]ocation

This short command will show every redirect this URL takes:

location: http://tmblr.co/ZFavEy139CkNk
Location: http://www.tumblr.com/ZFavEy139CkNk
Location: http://mosx.tumblr.com/post/72095032814/an-official-statement-on-the-future-of-mac-os-x#_=_

01/03/2014 17:33:14 ●

An official statement on the future of Mac OS X Screencasts

I have come to a conclusion. This took me some time and it is really hard for me to type this. I wrote about letting go off things recently, and this is the result of this.

The new year has just started out and we are filled with new energy for the things that are ahead of us. Doing new things means that there needs to be room for them.

I am currently working on zCasting 3000. It is the job that I love to do. zCasting would never have been possible without Mac OS X Screencasts. I love doing screencasts, I love explaining things, I love teaching things, and I love to get taught. Three months ago I finally figured out where I want to take zCasting 3000. It took me the entire year to figure this out, it took me another two months to decide that’s really what I wanted, with all the negative thoughts that piled up in my head. Some weeks ago I decided to go for it.

Unfortunately this means I can’t continue to work on Mac OS X Screencasts. This has been a long time coming. Over the past year I rarely published any screencasts, because they just take so much time to produce. One video takes me about 4 days to produce from start to finish. The revenue is 01. You can imagine that I can’t continue afford living like that.
In the past year I’ve tried cutting down production time. I made a screencast on the new Keyboard Maestro Debugger. But I was just not happy with it.

Let me tell you about the other things that were going on in the back so that you see that things weren’t standing still behind the scenes.

At the beginning of 2013 I wanted to work on an Alfred tutorial. I prepared for it, and when I was actually going to record, I was told I can’t start. Obviously I was trying to clarify things beforehand, before I booked people, but for some reason the communication wasn’t clear enough. I didn’t take on new projects so that I can fully concentrate on this project for two months. You can imagine how unfortunate it was to hear that all the money and time I invested were going out the window.
I didn’t know what else to do other than working on a reboot of Mac OS X Screencasts. I wanted to start afresh. I wanted a new look and feel for it. The old days where the website was mainly black were soon to be gone; so I thought. We started working on the site and were almost finished in March. Almost means that some technical difficulties prevented us from continuing the work. These weren’t resolved until June or July or so. Part of the reason I couldn’t concentrate was a split up with my 4-year girlfriend. I had to move out of our flat and find a new one quickly. You can imagine what a seamless transition this was. I had no time and energy at hand to push Mac OS X Screencasts forward.
Finally when things settled in I was able to get the content moved.

At the beginning of last year I decided that my big goal of 2013 should be to make zCasting 3000 a real company. This was sitting in my head for the entire year. Because of this I was unable to focus on MOSX and lead the reboot. It was just not important enough. The new thing was so much bigger and more interesting.

The name should change. I wanted something new. Something that doesn’t have the word “Mac”, or “i” in it. MOSX seemed appropriate because I was using this shortening already. You can look at the new design here: drupal.macosxscreencasts.com (This is also where you will find the Debugger tutorial. Watch it and you will understand that I’m not happy with it.)
Drupal should be at the core of MOSX. Drupal as CMS has the power to make the site fully multi-lingual (plus some other niceties). Something I could never pull off using WordPress. Most icons used should be fully Retina ready, also preparing for Retina screencasts.

I recorded some footage too. On my disk is an almost-finished recording of a Keyboard Maestro tutorial. In this two hour tutorial I go through everything I know about this app. Its last chapter is labelled “Markdown for Keyboard Maestro”. That’s right. In this chapter I was going to rebuild all Markdown macros from scratch so that you know exactly how they work and are able to make better macros for yourself. In the end it’s not about me, I am doing this because I want people to build better things. That’s what kept me going.

I was so focused on other stuff though that I wasn’t able to lead these projects to the end. This has destroyed MOSX so much for me that I almost don’t want to look at the site anymore.

What does all of this mean?

The website will not be shut down.
The website will continue to run.
You will be able to purchase the Hazel tutorial, and you will receive full support for anything related to this video.
At the moment I can’t say if or ever new videos will come out. I would say it’s unlikely.
I won’t respond to any mails regarding Mac OS X Screencasts-de and Mac OS X Screencasts-com.
I will continue to write my blog on Tumblr. More on this below.

The blog

My blog is something that I still enjoy writing for. You have seen the amount of articles plummet. In the recent months I have been focusing more on insightful and valuable content. From what I’ve heard, my readers quite enjoy to read these. So I would like to continue writing them.
This is the icing on the cake, if you will. When I started this blog, I focused heavily on apps, technology, and ads. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy technology, but I’m just not the student, that I used to be when I started Mac OS X Screencasts, anymore. My life has changed so dramatically over the last ten years and I think this directly reflects into my writing.

Now that Mac OS X Screencasts doesn’t need to generate revenue anymore, I am free to write whatever I want here. So I will do just that. I hope you find this an agreeable arrangement.

Final words

I sincerely wish that you understand my decision and how hard it was to make. I don’t want to let MOSX die, but it is more important to move on. Now that zCasting has a foundation, a credo, and an idea for a place for people to work at, it is time to build walls and roof.

  1. Actually it’s not 0, it’s “a little coming in from ads”, and that doesn’t pay my bills at all. (About €50 every three months) ↩