I went into the games area and did some wandering. The one thing that I thought was so great was the demo or trial feature available on most of the games. I've always had that problem with Xbox games. They're so damn expensive that it's hard to swallow a $50 purchase to just try one out. So after losing my Blockbuster card I just quit paying attention (yeah, that's a joke...I still have it...ok, that's a joke too). Reviews are great, but I like to try stuff out and I don't like to pay a large sum to try something out either. I end up just avoiding something I could potentially love.

I really wish the iOS App Store, and even more so, Mac App Store would figure out a way to easily allow for demos like my Xbox does. There's a lot to be said about a demo. Have you ever caught yourself staring at the $9.99 purchase button on the App Store entry of an application you think you'd love, but just aren't completely sure, trying to figure out if it would be worth it, bouncing back and forth between reviews, only to end up deciding it probably isn't worth it? Or is it? No, probably isn't. But what if it is? It could save you 30 seconds a day. Ok, probably not worth it.

Yeah, me neither.

Developers offer demos of their applications outside of the Mac App Store all the time. It's nearly standard practice. The Mac App Store seems like a perfect way to manage demos. It handles new installs and re-installs and updates just fine. Why not demos?

I do a lot of application reviewing and as the App Store takes a bigger hold it's getting more and more difficult to find demos of the applications I want to try out. No, "lite" version on the App Store don't count. That's cheating.

I was going to say I think I'd end up with a lot more applications, but the reality is that I'd probably have about the same amount, but they'd be ones that I actually used. I've purchased several apps over the years where I can say had there been a demo for me to try I wouldn't have purchased. So maybe bad developers wouldn't make as much money?

Well, this is going nowhere. I can't really find much of a point in here other than I think there should be demo capability built in the Mac App Store so this is essentially just a bitch session. Sorry. Thanks for listening though.

Oh, and if you know someone that works at Apple see what you can do. Also, an OS X bluetooth update would be nice too. That thing really pissed me off the other day too. Thanks.

A big reason I ended there was because the application does all sorts of behind the scenes data collection. So even if I didn't actually sit down and write every day the app would still compile some data. So I've been using Chronories for a little better than a month now. My results have been a bit mixed.

First off, my change in lifestyle has thrown me out of a regular routine and I'm still working on settling into a less structured day. It's pretty obvious that this has resulted into less personal writing as I haven't written in Chronories nearly as regularly as I was planning to (hopefully I can change that in the days ahead).

Today for the first time since I started using the app, I took a quick spin through the automatically generated reports. Even though I haven't written much there is still some pretty cool data in there. Even a just month of data was pretty interesting to look back on. I'm really looking forward to seeing what it looks like in six months or a year.

So, I guess it seems like my choice of app is doing what I hoped it would. I could neglect the whole idea of "journaling" and it would still grab some interesting data about my days that I could analyze later. That said, I am missing the benefits of writing each day so I do plan to do that more often going forward.

Chronories probably isn't for everyone, but it's working pretty damn well for me so far. Hopefully I'll be able to do a bit more manual entry into it in the coming months and I think that will add even more interestingness to the reports. We'll see. Maybe I'll post some examples of these reports down the road where I've got a few months of data to look at.

At this point it's safe to say the app is doing what it's supposed to, but I am not.

I was listening to a recent episode of the 5by5 podcast called Back to Work. In it this topic comes up briefly and Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin discuss specifically how John Gruber is essentially hated by some people and a primary reason is that they feel like he shuts them off to sharing their opinions. Gruber doesn't allow comments on his popular blog Daring Fireball. He writes about what he wants to and essentially never gets into any sort of online back and forth argument that so many people on the Web just love. This makes people mad. Some people.

The issue is that people feel like they are entitled to this sharing of opinion. This is certainly a new phenomenon that came along with blogging and Facebook and Twitter and all that good stuff. Think about the time before these technologies and ease of sharing. Someone wrote an opinion article and published it in a book or a magazine or a newspaper and that was it. The piece was maybe discussed amongst friends at the local pub.

A Web discussion is often a fantastic method to connect people with interesting viewpoints from all over the world and to have an intelligent, insightful, respectful discussion about a particular item. That is good and the way it works a lot of the time. The bad are those loud, sharp-toned commenters and opinion sharers who are essentially yelling into a conversation for real good reason other than to be assholes.

I don't blame Gruber for not allowing comments on his blog. He'd get slammed with these types of "opinions" because of the nature of his writing. He is successful and opinionated and that no doubt rubs some people the wrong way. When the option to share is turned off, certain people are enraged at this perceived lack of respect. The reality is that he has every right to close it off.

For the sake of everyone, if you're going to comment on post anywhere on the Web try to add some value to the conversation. There's no need to be an ass and it pisses me off when your stupid comments show up when I'm Google-searching for fedoras.

With my new lifestyle I decided to try out an actual journaling application. There are many options in the field and the three I zeroed in on were MacJournal, Day One, and Chronories. 

MacJournal is very well regarded and after some research seemed to be a little more robust than I really needed. Day One and Chronories were the two finalists in my mind. Those were appealing for very different reasons. Day One is a barebones, impeccably designed journaling application that also has accompanying iPhone and iPad apps. Chronories is what you might call a new-age journaling application. It utilizes technology to accumulate data as well as allowing actual journal writing.

These are two areas that appeal to me. I love minimal, focused applications like Day One and I'm also really interested in the self-analysis Chronories would allow. After more deliberation than was healthy, I decided on Chronories. In the end I thought it would be most interesting to track some data about myself as a I embark on a career change and a big lifestyle change. 

I'm only a couple days into using Chronories, but here's a basic rundown of it's capabilities. Each day's entry is contstructed from a combination of automatically compiled data along with a little manual intervention. After a bit of configuration and adjustment, Chronories can record things like the music you've been listening to in iTunes, the people you've emailed and chatted with, the temperature where you're at, your mood, the applications you've been using and several other other things. Some of these items can be manually added to and tweaked to record exact what you're looking for. Along with all of this there is also a space for an actual written journal entry.

Some standard report type views are set up so that after you've accumulated some data you can look back not only from an entry by entry point of view (calendar view), but also from many other angles. You could correlate your mood to the temperature for example. That sounds pretty cool to me and the process to completing an entry seems quite easy considering the amout of info that is recorded.

Regardless of what application or method you use a journal is only useful if you actually use it. We'll see how Chronories goes, but the combination of automatic and manual entry should make the process easier. More on this as my journaling continues on this year. 

I think I've narrowed it down to the nature of a status update. The early days of Twitter and Facebook and the whole "what are you doing?" type of question these applications were asking encouraging you to share has always been odd to me. I never totally got on board with that and to be quite honest I've thought it somewhat presumptuous for people to think that I actually care that they just ate a great tuna sandwich (or whatever). In that same mindset I always feel strange posting anything like that because I don't want to spam all of my "friends" with some largely pointless statement.

I know that there are a lot of people that find those little snippets great. They allow others a small peak into your life. The point where I see relevance or usefulness here is when dealing with close friends and family. There are situations where it's cool to have that small window into a loved one's life and vice versa. I'm moving to a new city very soon and I know that my folks would (or at least my mom) enjoy that type of information.

For me, controlling those that I share with and that share with me is probably the most important aspect. I typically only follow people on Twitter that I think add some value to me life. This doesn't have to be anything profound and a lot of people are certainly hit and miss, but this could be anything from a link to a good article or a joke or a beautiful photo. These are all at different points on the value scale, but I do see some value in sharing those types of things and I'll unfollow anyone who I think turns up on the low end of the scale too often. Facebook has added more and more features that allow me to better manage the noise. To be frank, I have a lot of "friends" that are long lost acquaintances at best. Granted, every once in a great while I may need to send a message to one of these people, but I really don't want that window into their lives. It bothers me more often that not actually.

I find more focused applications like Path kind of interesting because these restrictions are built in from the start. It's designed to be a more closed sharing community. This has more appeal to me and I think to those interested in what I'm doing as well. I'm more apt to share things I may see as pointless, but my mom may find useful in that type of environment.

Oddly enough, I'll probably end up sharing this post on Twitter and I suppose that's an indicator that I feel like it does contribute some (although probably pretty minimal) value to the community. This is a wandering, experimental exploration for me still and I may venture one direction or another on the value scale as I go along. I certainly don't think I'm right or wrong, I'm merely trying to figure out how the noise that are status updates fit into my world.