All the Right Icons
My favorite pastime for most of my adult life has been pretending to be an expert in areas where I have no legitimate claim to expertise. In a new city, I’ll stride past the famous landmarks without a glance—no time for tourist nonsense—and make directly for some restaurant I read about once, fully confident I know where it is, until someone asks me for directions and I realize I can’t identify a single street. This is a consistent character trait, not an occasional lapse.
With games: I’ll download something from Steam, immediately select whatever difficulty option sounds most humiliating—Inferno, Hardcore, Suicide Mission—and last approximately ten minutes before abandoning it in quiet frustration. There were no easy modes back in my day. Presumably.
The one domain where I’ve played the amateur longest, despite being paid to do the thing professionally, is my actual work. The tools, specifically. I made the switch from Windows to Mac sometime in the early 2000s and have been quietly failing to keep up with the ecosystem ever since. Around me, people working in Berlin’s media and startup world navigate interfaces I’ve never seen with the precision of concert pianists. "You still use the default mail app?" they ask. "You’ve never heard of Wunderlist?" And then someone asked if I’d heard of Sparrow—a mail client that Google had already acquired and killed—which felt like a fairly accurate summary of my currency.
Before this journal opened itself to the public, I sat down and did something about it. I consulted The Verge, Mashable, and Wired. I downloaded aggressively. I placed the resulting icons in my dock with the satisfaction of a collector arranging a display case and stared at them.
Then I actually used them. Spotify for music, courtesy of a few months of premium they’d given me. Airmail for email—looks immaculate, occasionally fails to send things. Twitter and Skype for communication. Feedly combined with Fluid for RSS feeds—and yes, I paid for a Feedly Pro account, because feeds are the unglamorous foundation of how this job actually works, and I’ve had too many other apps refuse to reopen after a single crash to trust the free tier with something load-bearing.
Coda for web work. Pages, Keynote, and Numbers—lighter and less presumptuous than any Office alternative I’ve tried. Things to stop me losing track of tasks I’ve already agreed to do. Evernote as a notebook. Pocket to park articles I intend to read and then mostly don’t. Chrome as my browser, security anxieties and all. And the Adobe Creative Cloud—overpriced and non-negotiable: Bridge for sorting photos, Photoshop for editing them, InDesign for layout work, Premiere Pro for the feature film I am perpetually about to start. Test subjects for the casting process have not survived so far, but I remain committed to the vision.
So here I sit. The dock full, the notifications multiplying, all the interfaces clean and professional-looking. A mail arrives and Airmail handles it. A deadline appears and Things flags it. A photo needs work and Photoshop is ready. Whether I’m hiding behind a wall of polished software or genuinely functioning more efficiently is a question I’ve decided not to examine too closely.
For anyone starting out: this is a reasonable foundation for publishing online, calibrated for someone who needs to appear competent while figuring out how the whole thing works. For anyone further along: the Pocket graveyard of unread articles is universal, and nothing will fix it. Some problems don’t have software solutions. Better to face them with a nice-looking dock.