Jonas Downey writes:

Today, a basic HTML/CSS site seems almost passé. But why? Is it because our new tools are so significantly better, or because we’ve gone overboard complicating simple things?

More and more when creating a new site, I skip WordPress and choose Pelican. I bet skipping Pelican would be the best choice more often than I think.

OmniFocus 2 for Mac will be here in two days:

Just a little over 48 hours until we ship OmniFocus 2.0 for Mac: http://t.co/AqGGZkzPyv

For as long as I have know that it was coming, I just assumed that OmniGroup would get my $80 on day one.¹

I am not so sure anymore.

I originally switched to OmniFocus from Things, back in 2011. Things had limitations, OmniFocus fixed those limitations, and all was right with the world. For a while.

The last few months have been different. The complexity of OmniFocus has been wearing on me, particularly the new iPhone version. It's too hard to enter a task. There are too many fields. The date pickers are still terrible. There is still no easy way to handle templates on iOS.

Task name. Notes. Project name. Context. Start date. Due date.

It's too much.

Sure, I could pick and choose what I use, but it's this complexity that gives OmniFocus it's power.

For about a month, I have been slowly getting into TaskPaper. I haven't ported all my tasks over - just a subset of work tasks. Sometimes it works great, and the simplicity makes it a breeze to use. Other times, the limitations have me missing OmniFocus.

Simple takes time

I'll need to put together a whole new set of tools to get tasks into TaskPaper easily. I'll need new Drafts and Launch Center Pro actions, along with some way to add tasks by mail. It's all possible, but it also takes time.

There's also the question of scale. I have doubts that TaskPaper will scale well with a large number of projects and tasks. That's why I am starting out small. OmniFocus, for all it's complexity, does a great job of only showing me tasks that can be done now.

I am not saying that I'm done with OmniFocus. I am not saying that I won't buy OmniFocus 2 for Mac.² I am just saying that it's no longer automatic.

This isn't good.

The bad news is that the renewal rate was not high enough for us to have sufficient budget for full-time employees. After carefully considering a few different options, we are making the difficult decision to no longer employ any salaried employees, including founders.

The lights are staying on, but nobody will be home.

Just in case you're the one person on the Internet who hasn't read this:

Not a single living person knows how everything in your five-year-old MacBook actually works. Why do we tell you to turn it off and on again? Because we don't have the slightest clue what's wrong with it, and it's really easy to induce coma in computers and have their built-in team of automatic doctors try to figure it out for us.

Perfect.

It's official - Mike D'Antoni is no longer the Lakers head coach. He resigned, apparently since the team wouldn't commit to the year after next. OK.

Look, D'Antoni isn't my favorite coach. He has a very specific style of basketball that he likes his teams to play. Run, run, run, pick and roll, and worry about defense tomorrow. That's fine, except it hasn't fit the Lakers team the last two years. D'Antoni simply wasn't the right coach, and it's best for him AND the Lakers that he moved on.

That said.

The failure of this past season is in no way D'Antoni's fault. There were far too many injuries for any coach to handle. Not even Phil Jackson could have turned this year's Lakers into a playoff team.

So long, Mike, and good luck in your next gig.

Sid O'Neill on complaining:

At the root of this is a bizarro on-the-fly scale of validity. The fallacious idea that there’s something wrong with complaining about something that isn’t the MAXIMUM WORST THING EVER. How dare you complain about your day when there are people dying somewhere in the world?

I've been meaning to write this article for a long time. Thanks to Sid, and procrastination, now I don't have to.

Justin Williams on focus and vision:

As I look at my iPhone I can name the person in charge of the vision for most of the apps on my home screen. Here’s a hint: most aren’t from large corporations that include the marketing folks and bean counters as part of the development process. They are from small development shops run by just a few people who have an idea of what their product should be and how it can impact the world.

Launch Center Pro, Drafts, Pythonista, Reeder, Instapaper¹, etc. All apps created by one person, and all superb. There are certainly apps that do more, but none that are better.

Kevin Ding on Kobe:

Kobe was examined today by Lakers doctor and ruled out for the rest of the season by the team.

Hardly unexpected, and the right move. His knee just wasn't healing very quickly. What's the point of rushing back? So he can risk re-injury and still not make the playoffs?

This way, Kobe has the entire summer to rehab and heal. Then he can (hopefully) be back full strength in 2014-2015.

Greg Pierce put together a hacky way to use x-callback-url in Safari, despite Safari's lack of support.

Not sure whether to call this a tip or a hack. Either way, this post demonstrates a way to mimic Google Chrome on iOS’s x-callback-url support in Mobile Safari through the use of some javascript and an intermediate static html page.

Always security conscious, Greg notes that you are welcome to duplicate the HTML file and host it on your own server. That way, no one besides the NSA can see what you're doing.

Brendan Tobolaski, on his reluctant decision to stick with OmniFocus:

I like a system that allows me to organize tasks by project but, also can make a list of available tasks regardless of the project that they are in. I don’t feel like there is a system that combines both of those and so I must stick with OmniFocus.

Between the OmniFocus 2 stability issues and design / functionality regression, the extremely dated Mac app, and just general complexity, I have seriously considered switching. I came to the same conclusion as Brendan — there just isn't a better solution available today.

Gabe and Phillip have done a great job exploring TaskPaper and plain text based systems. Maybe they'll convince me one day, but for now, OmniFocus is a habit that I just can't quit.