Are your tools working for you?

Apple has released the Public Beta of Mac OS X Yosemite, and  I’m getting a lot of questions about whether one should jump in. My advice is to wait. Most of the non-developer user features I find really great in Yosemite are in the integration with iOS, all of which requires iOS 8, which you don’t have (or you wouldn’t be asking me whether to try Yosemite! Ha ha!)

But whether you’re taking my advice or not, now is a good time to think about the Apps that you use and how you work. Anytime you are considering making a major upgrade it’s a good idea to check everything that’s essential to your work (and play) and ensure that it’s going to work right. It’s also a reasonable trigger for doing some thinking about what you use and maybe trying something new.

Yosemite and iOS 8 will give you plenty of opportunity to improve your workflow and try something new. There are a lot of new capabilities in both, especially in how Apps on both platforms can work together. It will be fun to see what creative developers come up with.

But first you need to know where you are. What are your most important tools? How do you spend your time on your computer? What works well and what doesn’t? It’s a fun exercise just to make a quick list, decide what’s essential and then ask yourself what works and what doesn’t.

In my short list: 1Password works great; Dropbox works well, but there are some privacy concerns so I might look at alternatives; my combination of Scrivener, Byword, Sublime Text 3, and Pages are excellent for writing projects and other text; TextExpander, Omnifocus, Fantastical, and BusyCal all work great for me. My tools for working with Audio are great; My Python and Objective-C/Swift development environments work great.

But I’m going to have to ruminate on this a bit. I’m sure there is some blind-spot — something that’s broken, but I’m just used to it. So I’ll jot a few things down over the coming days and weeks and then consider making a few changes.