The Shape of Everything
A website mostly about Mac stuff, written by August "Gus" Mueller
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March 30, 2009
(This post is from my old, old, super old site. My views have changed over the years, hopefully my writing has improved, and there is now more than a handful of folks reading my site. Enjoy.)
Notebooks

I learned a long time ago that the two best debugging tools I own are a nice piece of paper, and a good pencil. What I never really learned all those years ago, was to keep track of those wonderful pieces of paper*. Especially the ones where I worked out tricky problems involving trigonometry.

See, I'm pretty bad at trigonometry. Luckily for me, and indirectly yourself, my wife Kirstin is pretty good at trig.

So a little while back as I was bugging Kirstin about some math (which I knew I had already bugged her about a couple of years previously, but couldn't find my notes on) I decided to get a little bit more organized. And I've now got two pretty thick sketch books, pictured above, with mostly empty pages in them but rapidly filling up. And I thought I'd just pass this tip on to you.

Of course I still use VoodooPad for notes, and I still draw some things out using Acorn + a Wacom tablet (with grids turned on so it looks like graph paper). But I just can't get the feel of it right, even with what I consider the perfect pencil brush, with the perfect color. Maybe some day if Wacom comes out with a tablet which has some sort of texture feedback on it, I'll be 100% happy with a digital solution.

Until then, paper and a blue col-erase pencil are my best friends.

P.S. - the above image was made using AcornNewImageWithCurvedDropShadow.jstalk.
  • For some reason, I have all my notes from my previous job all together and right where I'll never need them. I'm not sure why I managed to keep track of these.