What is a Moleskine?

Moleskine is the heir of the legendary notebook, used by European artists and thinkers for the past two centuries.

This silent and discreet keeper of an extraordinary tradition, which has been missing for years, has been reproduced by the Italian company Modo & Modo since 1998. With it’s various different page styles in accompanies the creative professional and has become a symbol of contemporary nomadism.

Rather vague, ‘eh? But still quite effective at putting forward the heritage of a Moleskine notebook. A Moleskine is like Microsoft is to computers, but just to notebooks. They produce some of the highest quality products you will ever come across.

I have been using a Moleskine for just under a year now as my sole notebook. I think I first heard about it via a tweet and decided to check them out. So, I placed my order for a large Volant notebook with ruled lines. At first I was concerned about the price, unable to comprehend how a notebook of all things could have such an elevated price tag.

When I first opened it up I realised why people have become so dependent and excited about what I thought might only be a notebook. You get a very strong sense of the build quality, from the smaller details to just the care taken into the production of a Moleskine notebook. The paper is not thin and flimsy; but solid, closer to card. There are details in a Moleskine that you just don’t get most of the time from products of a similar price: for instance there is a pocket in the back of the book used for storing extras like lose paper. The edges of the notebook are curved, suggesting that the paper was not a load of A5 sheets collected together.

Plenty of people like to lay out the pages of their notebook in a certain fashion, having different areas of the paper for various tasks. I on the other hand like my Moleskine to be a simple stream of my consciousness (sounds very groovy doesn’t it?) onto paper. I started writing solely with pencil, always, always sharp, but after a little while realised that pen was superior – after all, you can see all the mistakes you’ve made when looking back. I’m now a big fan of Lamy fountain pens with blue ink, never black.

I am aware that a few people out there just don’t understand the concept of writing things down on paper. I think the issue is organisation:

On a computer you’re pretty much forced to save something in a location and if it doesn’t have one, create one. With a Moleskine, I can just write it down. You don’t need to think about a file name or location. You could spend that time thinking about actually what you want to write. After all, who likes making a Text Edit document just to write down a sentence or two? It doesn’t make sense to waste all that time.

Overall, I think the reason that I enjoy paper over computers for taking down notes and ideas is because with a notebook, you start at the beginning and finish at the end. You have this archive of your thoughts (I suppose in a similar way to a blog) and how they have changed. At the end of the day you can have a high quality book, that sits your shelf,hopefully outliving your computer, that you can look through with ease for years to come.

Any other Moleskine users out there? I’d be interested in hearing why you chose one.

There has been a lot of hype over the last week about EventBox, a new piece of software for the Mac which is designed to aggregate all of the social networks you use and also act as an RSS Reader – all within one application. So not wanting to be left out, I downloaded a copy of the free 15 (why not 30?) day trial for a spin, The verdict so far? I can’t say I’m that impressed.

First of all, I don’t really like writing about software that doesn’t work for me, after all I’m just one guy with one opinion. However, as EventBox is currently in beta I thought it would be best to give them some constructive feedback from some of my experiences with the application. So why not start with the good points – primarily the actual concept behind the application. I’m surprised that it took so long for an app like this to be created, it has all the right elements to make it a fantastic program.

I think that a lot of people have been looking for something to bring together all of the sites they visit of a regular basis. For me the key applications that this would replace are NetNewsWire and Twitterific. So as far as I’m concerned – they are the main competition for EventBox. Don’t be surprised if you hear me comparing them a lot – I think it’s quite fair to.

I’m not going to complain about the amount of social networks, because I’m sure more are coming but I want to talk about why this app hasn’t been earth shattering for me.

Information Overload

Every time I open EventBox up, things start flashing at me and numbers increase rapidly, I just can’t take seeing the number 500 in my dock. So most of the time I’d close EventBox and open up both NetNewsWire and Twitterific because lets face it, information is a lot simpler to digest in chunks. It’s a lot easier to move from doing one task to another; for me it’s Tweets first followed by RSS.

One idea I had was to have a ‘breakfast mode’ in which you can customise what section of EventBox gets your attention first. Let’s put this in context:

I open up EventBox at 6AM (and the apps notices this) and find the Twitter section of the app is all that is available to me. All the other sections are grayed out and there are no numbers alluding to how many feeds there are in the dock or sidebar. Once I’ve caught up on all my Tweets I can press this big button in the bottom of the window saying “Finished!”. From there I automatically get sent on to my RSS feeds, or Pownce, Flickr…. whatever you want.

It may seem unnecessary and infantile to a lot of people, but for people like myself who are easily distracted – this could be a godsend.

Layout

When I see my Flickr images within EventBox I can’t help think what a waste of space it is. A long bar with the image on the left and just space to the right of it across the window is a bad idea. Why not have a grid view, like iTunes, that when clicked on flips around, in a similar fashion to Dashboard Widgets, showing the information and meta-data for the picture?

I believe that there are a few changes that could be made to the layout in the RSS section of EventBox. I only have a 13.3″ of screen real estate. At the moment I’m only able to see about three feed items at once. I’m a big fan of how NNW gives you a list view of just the title and other details in one line – before you click on the post, I think that’s all you need. If the title grabs me I’ll read it. And yes, I have adjusted the preview sizes.

Twitter & Pownce

Both the Twitter and Pownce modules for EventBox were done very well, I enjoyed little touches such as it filling in people’s usernames in the post box if you click on a tweet. Though it may be a good idea to increase the differences in colours for @ and direct messages.

One way that I think EventBox could really set itself apart from other Twitter clients such as Twitterific, is by having filters for certain subjects. I suppose this could be done in a similar way to how Apple’s Mail works with rules. A good example for this would be all those times when you get someone tweeting: “New Blog Post…”. It would be great to have those not appear in the main feed – just a separate folder.

At The End Of The Day

Eventbox is one of those pieces of software that with a bit of time and a strong community behind it could really flourish. And I hope it does. But I just can’t say it works for me… yet. I hope that if anybody from EventBox is reading this; they post a rebuttal. I’d be interested in hearing more from them.

PS: Does anybody know why I keep accidently referring to this software as OpenBox?