Project Hedgehog (http://projecthedgehog.com) was designed to address many of these complaints. The UI is almost completely keyboard-driven and fast, and stripped down to bare bones. It's a desktop app that runs on OS X and Windows. It has fast search dialog accessible with one keystroke.
Like OmniOutliner/Workflowy, though, it also is hierarchy-oriented, which I think is most natural for ordered tasks. It has a slight learning curve and the UI is very utilitarian, but it has drastically reduced the amount of stuff I have to keep in my head as I'm working.
"The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and then starting on that first one."
-- Mark Twain (according to wikiquote)
At the beginning, if the problem is vague, I open a text editor and start writing all of my thoughts about it. I try to keep the file as free-form as possible (I assume no one else will ever read it) and get down concerns about the problem, design decisions, observations, and anything else that comes to mind. I also write down exactly what the first step(s) will be. I think this technique works for a number of reasons, but especially because putting the project in front of my eyes on the computer screen -- even if it's just in the form of a quick brain-dump in a text editor -- gives me a massive motivation boost and a feeling of momentum.
Staying motivated after a concrete task list has precipitated is a different problem, which I also try to solve with record-keeping. I obsessively maintain a hierarchy of the tasks I plan to complete, and then check them off as I go. When I can become a machine that just walks the hierarchy and performs the tasks, I find that it sidesteps the emotional mechanism that otherwise makes me procrastinate. I used to store the hierarchy as a text file, but this year I've been writing a tool that provides a) native support for this type of data, and b) a keyboard-driven interface that doesn't make me switch away from the program where I'm actually working. In case anyone would like to try it out, it's at http://projecthedgehog.com (runs on mac and windows).
I tried to make the image buttons as simple as possible..they're just text surrounded by a drop shadow. I'm surprised to hear objections. Could you describe what you don't like about them in more detail?
Each dropbox url has a random code appended to the end, so spammers can't step step through all the drop boxes in order and pass in garbage. But otherwise nothing keeps spammers out. I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.
Thanks! That encouragement means a lot. Some of my other designs (http://mushpot.net/) weren't so well-received by HN..
It was just dumb luck (plus aesthetic help from my wife) that the box graphic came out as well as it did. I made it in OmniGraffle (mac drawing program), and I just kept playing around with the splines until I liked the shape. I'm just a programmer, so I tend to go with the simplest, bare-bones designs I can get away with.
Thanks for these suggestions. The design still isn't perfect, but I did get rid of the floats. I'm still thinking about what to do about the lost url problem. There should be a way to see all the drop boxes you created, but I also don't want users to have to create an account. Hmm.
Sorry to be a hater. I was gung ho OpenID for a while...simple for users, decentralized. But then I tried to get my wife and my mom to log into my site with it and they were baffled. "Login with Facebook" they can sort of get. And then I found that the openid consumer I wrote (I used some library, I don't remember which) didn't work with yahoo and a bunch of other providers, which really got my goat.
But when I said I was happy OpenID was gone, it was more because I think we're one step closer to whatever will be a better, widely-accepted, and more polished solution, not because of any particular disdain for openid. I'm fascinated that Facebook would join OpenID. http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/facebook-throws.html. Sounds like a fox in the henhouse to me.
Looks like you created an account just to leave this comment...ouch.
But seriously, thanks for the feedback. I was trying capture my feelings about FB before I lost them, and I'd be surprised if you were the only one who found the tone obnoxious.
Nice to see that I'm not alone in trying to build a better social news site as a side project. And by the way, when you say "we", we all know there's only one of you. And forget about scaling. Learned that long ago myself...
My side project is at http://mushpot.net, and I think the goals are similar to sqrt(2):
- multiple votes
- make it harder to game the system
- give more productive members more influence over the content
But instead of having users solve puzzles, on Mush Pot, the amount you get to vote depends on how many votes your submissions have received. And since I'm already started, here are some of the other ideas behind it:
- long posts, not just links (posts can have hyperlinks)
- there's no difference between top-level posts and comments..anything can appear on the front page
- make users provide a reason for downvoting (or pile onto a reason given by another user)
- tags, ability to weight your front page using tags
And it also lets you login with Facebook and post your submissions back to your Facebook feed.
Wow, I'm impressing myself with the length of this feature list, although I have been building the site for quite a while. Now, everyone, at the count of three...click...HERE!: http://mushpot.net
I just finished an FC implementation on a site I'm working on. The site still has local accounts, but users can now connect their local accounts to their facebook account Facebook or just login through Facebook (which actually creates a local account).
Beware: integrating with FC turned out to be a surprisingly large undertaking, although lots of that effort was spent a) trying to assemble an understanding from the FC docs about how the thing actually works and b) figuring out how to handle all of the weird cases (and the common cases, for that matter).
The FC developer docs are not all that coherent. The wiki seems to cover most of what you'd need to know, but lots of the information is on pages only linked to from obscure other pages, and there's not a good big-picture technical explanation. Even worse, much of the wiki is locked down so you can't fix it.
And there are a bunch of special cases to handle.. what if a user is logged into a facebook-linked local account on your site but is logged in as the wrong facebook user? Or what if they're logged into a facebook-connected local account and not logged into facebook? If you make a mistake, Facebook doesn't usually provide a helpful error message, and their javascript is all compressed, so it's a pain to try to use firebug.
If anybody's interested, my site's at http://mushpot.net. If anybody's got questions about the implementation, feel free to post them on mushpot and I'll try to respond.
You only get votes when another user votes on something you post. The original source of all votes is an administrator/editor with unlimited votes. If there were rampant hoarding, maybe some sort of stimulus package would be in order, like giving all users free votes, but I have no plans for that.
I appreciate the feedback. The body of each item is black, so I figure you're referring to the header text for each item ("by:", "submitted:", etc.) and the links. I've darkened them up a bit.
When I played Duck Duck Goose as a kid, we called the center of the circle the "mush pot"...that was where you had to sit if you got tagged. I'd consider changing the name, but trying to find good domain names that aren't being squatted on is such a pain.
Like OmniOutliner/Workflowy, though, it also is hierarchy-oriented, which I think is most natural for ordered tasks. It has a slight learning curve and the UI is very utilitarian, but it has drastically reduced the amount of stuff I have to keep in my head as I'm working.