Mr. Minimalist

My dad took me flying today, and he let me fly the plane a little bit. He had me — attempt to at least — keep the plane at a set altitude and heading. He was constantly telling me: “Keep the plane level.” “Check your descent rate, you’re going down.” “Keep on your heading.” All the while I had to look at nearly every gauge in the cockpit also while keeping a look outside for traffic. It is near impossible to do all that. When I watched my dad fly the plane, he looks over and checks nearly every single gauge and uses nearly every single control at some point during the flight. Compare this with a car. When have you ever needed to know your RPMs? Or your oil temperature? There are lots of buttons and controls in cars that are seldom ever used. For instance, in my mom’s car there is a button for enabling a mode when towing large loads. When have we used this button? Never. In airplanes, everything has a purpose. Every button and gauge has to have some sort of function that will be used every single time someone flies it, otherwise it causes distraction and something more important can’t have that valuable space on the panel. Every control and instrument is carefully placed, and only anything that is extremely important is granted space on the relatively small control panel.

The same can be applied to every day things. If something doesn’t have a purpose, it can cause distraction. And while distractions in everyday life usually aren’t fatal — like ones made in an airplane are — but if something isn’t used regularly, how important is it? I’m very guilty of keeping things “just in case”, when in fact I never end up using them.

What you do and the things you keep need to be like an airplane, only keep and do what is necessary, anything else is a distraction.

Patrick Rhone writes about “Software Tailors”:

I believe there is a place for this [tailoring] is the world of technology. I think there is a need for a Software Tailor. For instance, you have a text editor that works well but could use just a few changes to make it work perfectly for you.

I think this is a really neat idea, but it would be near impossible for anyone to try to start up a “software tailor shop”. To meet the demands of any amount of customers would be nearly impossible. It’s one thing to listen to customer’s bug reports and feature requests on your own software, but making individual programs for individual customers based on their needs — especially for software that isn’t yours — would be a nearly impossible feat.

Instead of relying on a “software tailor” to do things like this for them, maybe people should just learn to change the software themselves, and try to find an open source program that meets their needs. For instance, Notational Velocity is a very popular piece of open source software. If people learn to change this software to their needs, they can become their own software tailors. I did this with a tea timer program I found. It was open source, and I tailored it perfectly to my needs.

I think that this is a great idea of Patrick’s, but it would be very hard to pull off realistically.

I found this completely amazing dictionary app for iOS. I had previously been using the Dictionary.com app, which was the only free app that did what I wanted. But now I’ve found this app that is simply entitled “Dictionary”. There isn’t a website for the app itself, but the website that is listed as the app’s “support website” is here. It is the simplest dictionary app that is physically possible, and it is awesome.

That’s a screenshot (click to embiggen) of the app. It is simply a text field and a list view. The text field is obviously where you input the word you want to define, and the list shows you suggestions based on what you’ve typed so far. When you click one of the items in the list, or press the “search” button on the keyboard, it brings up the iOS dictionary’s definition of that word. As well as being simple, it is tiny — in file size terms, that is. It’s only 0.1MB according to the App Store. When I first saw the file size, I thought it was some crazy black magic compression that allowed them to get it that tiny, then I found out that it was simply because it uses iOS’s dictionary, and doesn’t rely on its own database. This makes the app really fast, and it works offline.

I was looking for an app like this because sometimes I want to define a word that isn’t actually on the screen at the moment. And this app works wonderfully for that. It does one thing, and it does it really, really well.

Well, according to Lenovo’s CEO it is.

I returned home yesterday, so posting should return to normal! I’ve come up with some good writing ideas while I was gone, and I can’t wait to get going on them!