Instead of working on stuff I often get distracted.  I can easily go off on “internet tangents” and lose time wading through endless cool shit that I find on the interwebs.  When I am working for a client this is a habit that is much more under control because I have a task list to complete and other people to report to and hence I get my work done.  However, when I am working on my OWN stuff, with just me to report to, then the distractions are WAY more damaging to my time.

The problem is I can’t find anything out there that fits my needs.  I have searched for hours and there is a remarkable lack of software that does what I want.  My ideal software tool would do the following:

• Run on Mac and PC (I use both)
• Maintains both whitelists and blacklists of websites
• Optional blocking of email
• Simple to activate
• Inconvenient to deactivate
• Programmable to activate at certains times of the day & week
• Runs at a system level – not just a browser plugin
• Low cost

Easy, right?  ;)

A note on blacklists vs whitelists: Some people may find blacklists suitable so they can hide a few sites in particular but allow freedom to the vastness of the internet.  My particular distraction IS the vastness of the the internet and I often get blissfully lost following link after link to random and (almost always) previously unknown websites.  For me a blacklist would simply be unmaintainable.  Also, some sites, like YouTube, contain very useful information that I need, such as tutorial videos, and blacklisting them would prevent me access to that slice of useful information I need. A whitelist on the other hand would be ideal.  I could whitelist certain YouTube channels that I need but block the rest of the site.

So far I have uncovered a few tools that are very close to what I need but fall down in a couple of vital areas.  It’s worth noting that I have been looking for Mac software only so far but I will need a similar tool for PC – once I find one!

1. System Wide Tools

The first tools are “system wide” and will affect all browsers and software that tries to connect to the internet.

Concentrate

Website: http://getconcentrating.com/

The best Mac software I’ve found so far, so I’m leading with it.  Concentrate is made by Rocket and is so close to what I want it hurts.

Pros

• Highly customisable via AppleScripts
• Can create custom “activities” that have different limitations (e.g. create a “design” activity that blocks the apps and websites you don’t need while designing)
• Quits/launches applications automatically
• Costs $29 which is about as high as “low cost” can get for me – which is good.

Cons

• No whitelists (yet…)
• Issues with blacklists – it blocks IP addresses which means multiple sites can be blocked unintentionally (known issue and is on their fix-list)
• No PC version
• Can’t schedule times of day to run automatically
• Can easily break out of a concentration activity by clicking “done”

The big thing they are missing is a whitelist but I believe they are planning on adding this in the very near future so I have high hopes.  Also the fact there is no ability to schedule times of the day/week when this will kick-in automatically is another minus.  Other than those points, Concentrate is a good piece of software made great by allowing customisable scripts to be added by the user which increases it’s usability enormously.

Bizarrely I stumbled across Concentrate in a “related links” section of the Self-Control tool (see below).  No amount of Googling for “productivity tools block internet” (and a hundred other keywords) ever brought Concentrate back as a search result.

Anti-Social

Website: http://anti-social.cc

This software is very close to what I want but fails in a couple of vital areas.

Pros

• Option to block email!
• Simple to activate and a pain to deactivate (require reboot!)
• Runs at system level (so blocks ALL browsers)
• Low cost ($15)

Cons

• No PC version
• Non-editable blacklist
• No whitelist option
• Unable to pre-program times/days to activate

It’s a great, simple tool that is easy to run and does exactly what it says on the tin.  Sadly, I need a couple of vital extra bits and so it’s not very useful for me.  The main downside being its non-editable blacklist of sites (which the author lists on the website).

I was put on to this tool from a blog post about “productivity software”.  In fact the blog actually linked to its much more brutal sibling software called Freedom which completely unlocks you from the internet!

Self-Control

Website: http://visitsteve.com/work/selfcontrol/

Self-Control has a more simple approach: block everything for a user-determined length of time!

Pros

• Cannot be stopped until the timer runs out!  Not even uninstalling or rebooting can stop it!
• Free!
• Open Source on Github!  Extend it and make it better (if you don’t get distracted by the interwebz along the way…)

Cons

• No PC version
• No editable whitelist (or blacklist) – cuts off the internet which is too brutal for me
• Can’t schedule times of day to activate

It’s a brutal app which unfortunately doesn’t offer enough control over what it blocks for it to be useful for me.  But it is free and Open Source so you can extend it if you feel the urge!

Special Mention: Think

Website: http://freeverse.com/mac/product/?id=7013

A quick special mention goes to Think by Freeverse.  A free, awesome little Mac application that dims your desktop to black (or a colour of your choosing) so that you have fewer distractions.

I must admit, having recently moved from Windows to OSX I was surprised to discover that one of the intended (?) differences between Macs and Windows is that you cannot easily maximise an application window to fullscreen.  I find it odd that you can’t in OSX and one benefit is that it allows you to focus on one application.  Think allows you to do this without breaking the OSX way of managing windows.

So, it’s not really the tool I am looking for but it certainly helps productivity, is simple to use, and it’s free!  Go and get it!

2. Browser Plugins

The next two tools are browser plugins and as such aren’t ideal because as a web developer I have most browsers installed on my computers and so I could easily circumvent a browser plugin by using a different browser!  The thought of managing a whitelist for several different plugins is somewhat frightening so I am including these for illustration purposes only – these plugins do a great job and if there was a system wide version of them then I’d buy it.

StayFocused for Chrome

Website: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/laankejkbhbdhmipfmgcngdelahlfoji

I use Google Chrome as my browser a lot – on both Mac and Windows – so a Chrome plugin like StayFocused by Transfusion Media is pretty useful and was my first step on the road to website control!

Pros

• Mac and PC
• Has a WHITELIST!
• “Nuclear” option to block sites (except those in the whitelist) for a user defined length of time
• Fully customizable schedule for auto-blocking
• Optional “Challenge” which allows you to break out of the blocking if you really need to BUT the challenges are tricky and will reset if you make one mistake!

Cons

• Chrome browser only so simply using Firefox side steps the blocks!
• Won’t stop non-browser based email

I love the Challenge idea where if you really want to stop blocking sites then you can turn it off but must first complete a random challenge like typing out a large paragraph of test without making a mistake.  If you mistype then the challenge resets and you must begin again.  Great idea!  Annoying enough that it will put you off any frivolous use of it but not so bad that if you really need to unblock things it’s perfectly doable.

LeechBlock for Firefox

Website: http://www.proginosko.com/leechblock.html

LeechBlock by James N. Anderson is a very similar tool to StayFocused but for Firefox users.

Pros

• Mac and PC
• Has a whitelist!
• “Lockdown” feature similar to “Nuclear” option for StayFocused – blocks all blacklisted sites
• User created “block sets” – groups of sites you want blocked/allowed which you can activate for a duration
• Highly customizable schedules for auto-blocking

Cons

• Firefox only so I can use Chrome to bypass
• Won’t stop non-browser based email
• A bit ugly (sorry!)

It’s a good plugin for all the same reasons StayFocused is good.

3. Conclusion

Well, I’m sure you can see from my (far from complete) list that Concentrate wins my vote.  At the time of writing I am trying to get in contact with the authors to find out how soon the whitelist feature will be released and to ask if they will be adding a time schedule too.

So what do you think?  Do you have any great tools that I have completely missed here?  I would love to know what they are as I am definitely on the look out for a tool that will do this – and I’m willing to pay!  Please comment if you do!

P.S. It’s amusing to point out that this exercise to find a distraction blocking tool is in fact a distraction itself as I should be working on my personal projects.  However, I do see this as the “final distraction” and so I think it’s worth it!

So today I went over some playlists from back in 2008 and found loads of tunes I never got round to buying.  It was like finding little gold nuggets!  And better yet – the tracks are cheaper now they aren’t new!

So it got me thinking about my process for finding music which I’d thought I’d share.  It’s probably very similar to a few music geeks out there.

One of the greatest pleasures in my life is finding new music.

I LOVE hearing something new that sounds amazing.  I mean, come on, who doesn’t?  Well, I’ll tell you who: students!  Not all of them admittedly, but most.  Whenever I’d go to any kind of student related party it was ALWAYS the same crap music.  Madonna, Michael Jackson, ABBA – for the love of GOD, too much ABBA!  Actually, to be fair, you just need to go to a pub or towny bar to see that most people are like this.  I just found it particularly prevalent while I was at university!

And to be doubly fair a lot the songs they play were great. Were great.  They’ve had their time. Move along people, move along.  Let them get old before dusting them off and listening to them again.  Don’t play them EVERY week (or day – some workplaces I’ve worked at play the same song every DAY – ARRGGGHHH!!!)

I love new music.  Now I am a huge dance music fan and I will be the first to admit there’s as much crap, recycled rubbish in this genre as in any other but there’s also LOADS of great new music every day.  I want to find that edge and surf it.  However, I am lazy and music is not my job!  I am busy building websites all day so I try to keep up by following those people (DJs) at the edge!

Mining for Choons

I subscribe to a whole bunch of weekly podcasts by some of my favourite artists.  They showcase the latest and greatest tunes and allows me to work while listening to new music with the minimum of effort!  Before each podcast begins I find the playlist for it and copy it to a Google Notebook I have set up.  Then I listen to the show and if any of the tracks stands out I find it in the playlist and highlight it either red or yellow depending on how HOT a track it is!

At the end of the week (or immediately if I just have to have the track!) I go through the playlists and search for the tracks I have coloured.  I usually use Beatport and I have always found it has the widest range.  I also try Playittonight and Trackitdown. Then once I’ve bought it I go back to the playlist and mark it as green.

• Red: HOT TRACK! Buy as soon as it’s available!
• Yellow: Good track, well worth owning.
• Green: I own it now!

I also have my favourite artists and labels saved on Beatport and each week I will go through all their new releases, often about 100 new tracks.  Sometimes, if I am feeling really curious, I will go through Beatport’s entire “New Releases” lists for each of my favourite genres.  I’m a big fan of:

• Progressive House/Trance
• Electro House
• Trance
• Chillout

There’s often loads of cross-over in genres so it’s hard not checking all of them!  So I often find great tracks that have been filed under techno, dubstep, tech house, electronica, deep house.  In fact, I’m pretty much a fan of “anything good” but it can’t be too hard or fast or “bleepy”.

Other Sources

I’m also a big fan of Soundcloud.com and I have my own Soundcloud account where I upload my mixes – you should check them out!

What’s great about Soundcloud is that I can find other people’s music via friends and groups.  It’s another great resource for tracks and mixes which I may never have heard otherwise.  I can’t recommend it highly enough!

What about you?

How do you consume your music?  How do you find those gems?  How do you keep up-to-date with your favourite kind of music?  I’d be very interested to know so feel free to tell me in the comments!

I recently discovered FlairBuilder, which looks like a great new tool to not only wireframe my work but also prototype it.  I have a new project I want to get stuck in to so this couldn’t have come at a better time for me.  During my development process I will be giving it a go to see how it shapes up and then I will write up a review about the pros and cons.  I use and currently enjoy Balsamiq’s Mockups app so it’ll be nice to try something new.

Stay tuned…

A site I have been helping develop over the last couple of months has just launched. It’s a Nokia sponsored site to raise awareness for “Earth Hour“.  Earth Hour is a special hour set aside each year for people to save energy and try and give the planet a breather.  If everyone in the world did it then the planet would get an hour “off” in each timezone adding up to a day!

Mobile phone chargers are one of the many household things that when plugged in they burn electricity even when they are not being used.  Electronic goods with “standby” options are also a big waste of energy.  So Nokia, who are releasing their new low power phone chargers, wanted to raise Earth Hour’s profile by creating a website.

So I present to you “Planet Unplug“!  A simple, fun little site where you can join others in pledging to do something energy efficient during Earth Hour by adding a little plug socket character to our wall!

Please spread the word anyway you can by emailing, blogging or “tweeting” about it.  We have created a few little widgets that can be added to blogs (http://www.planetunplug.com/main/blogtools) to help get the word out too!  Here’s what the first two looks like:

We will be adding a few more features over the next week or two so come back and check them out!

Now go ahead and have an explore!  And don’t forget to add your pledge!

Planet Unplug: http://www.planetunplug.com

I’ve been a user of Beatport for years now and have watched them grow to the biggest online music store dedicated to electronic music.

There is definitely a love-hate relationship with them for many people. We love Beatport for having such a wide choice of music. We love them for getting early exclusives. But we also hate them for being a bit “too big for their boots” and, most importantly, not really listening to their users.

We waited a looong time for this new version of Beatport. Far longer than it should have taken and even when they launched in January this year they were missing a few things fans thought would be shoe-ins.

Something I have been calling for since Beatport announced it was making version 4.0 over a year ago is a public API. Why oh why haven’t Beatport sorted this out yet?

Websites that offer open APIs get all the usual benefits of open source development: a huge, creative workforce for very little money! Simply look at the enormous success of Facebook’s API, which continues to grow and go in new directions, and also Twitter with it’s simple but very useful API.  These APIs have helped these sites grow enormously by effectively outsourcing work to anyone from hobbyist programmers and professional developers.

I would love to have access to a Beatport API for many reasons.  One of the best reasons for me would be so I can access my account’s favourite artists and labels so I can display them here on my blog.  Or have a list of the latest tracks released by my favourite artists in a simple list so I can see if it’s worth going to Beatport today.

Probably the main reason I’d like an API is because I don’t think Beatport are serving my needs very well, which is fair enough if I am in a small minority, but then why not let fans like me mold and shape the Beatport service to suit my needs?  It can still be Beatport branded and it will still have me going through their payment gateway so it will always benefit them.  Also, creative people will be able to add huge value to the Beatport service.  A Beatport API should be a no-brainer!

Does anyone agree with me about this?  What other things would be cool to create using a Beatport API?  Add you comments below!

Best idea evar:

The Shit Box

http://www.thebrowncorporation.com/

Impressive!

Having only just blogged about Beatport’s new website being thoroughly overdue I came across an email from Beatport deep in a pile of unread stuff which announces that the new site is being launched on January 21st 2009! Hurrah!

Screengrab of Beatport's new interface

The teaser site has a “senses” theme (hearing, touching, tasting, seeing and smelling) and seems to hint that the new Beatport site will be the dogs knackers.  They say they’ve been listening to their customers and are promising lots of cool new features.  I hope so, although I’m not sure quite how I am going to “smell” my music…

As I write only the hearing part of the 5 “senses” is active.  It explains that the preview player has finally been overhauled to make it easier to browse music.  The video “tutorial” is a bit disappointing and sometimes mind-numbingly dull (“click the up arrow to go up…. and click the down arrow to go down…” – no shit Sherlock).

It looks like they haven’t gone for the “needledrop” style player that DJDownload has which is a crying shame because that is one of the best things about DJDownload and to be able to have a full track preview is incredibly useful.  However, Beatport in their infinite wisdom have stuck with a 2 minute sample.  Their “enhanced music player” (*cough*) does its usual scrubbing (jump the playhead about) and has been given a volume control (much needed) and a playlist (much needed).  Which basically means it’s now inline with how DJDownload’s preview player worked 2 years ago.  Hmmm… Beatport seem to have made the most important part of the site not so much “enhanced” but incredibly average!

So a rather disappointing look at the preview player to start with.  Hopefully the other senses will prove more impressive.

So checkout http://www.thenewbeatport.com for a teaser “trailer” and a sneak preview of the upcoming features of the new site.

Beatport's new player

Beatport's new playlist queue

I was shown a nice charting/graphing tool done in flash.  It’s called “XML/SWF Charts” and is free to use with some limitations.  A single license is still cheap at only $49.

Examples of what you can do with XML/SWF Charts

Pretty cool if you like that sort of thing!

Check it out: http://www.maani.us/xml_charts/index.php

Lunchtimes for me often revolve around finding a nice food market near where I work, grabbing a burrito or tub of thai food and going back to my desk to catch up on my RSS feeds via Google Reader.

One of the fun sites I subscribe to is http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com and today I got a pleasant surprise when a photo of mine appeared in a post!

My photo is the second one down (“no reading please”).  I took it one morning on the way to work in June and submitted it to the site straight away.  I guess it’s taken them this long to find some other similar photos to make it worthy of a post!