One of the biggest challenges with tools for making things, even specific to making web things, is there are so many tools to choose from. Nearly every tool has a learning curve to overcome before being able to use it efficiently. With proficiency, comes the ability to pursue more efficient use of tools, and find limitations, papercuts, or outright bugs in the tools. If it’s an open source tool or you know its creator you can file or submit a bug report or feature request accordingly, which might result in an improved tool, eventually, or not. You have to decide whether any such tool is good enough, with tolerable faults, or if they’re bad enough to consider switching tools, or so bad that you are compelled to make your own.

This post is my entry for the 2024 July IndieWeb Carnival theme of tools, hosted by James G., and also syndicated to IndieNews.

Criteria

I have many criteria for how I choose the tools I use, but nearly all of them come down to maximizing trust, efficiency, and focus, while minimizing frustration, overhead, and distraction. Some of these are baseline criteria for whether I will use a tool or not, and some are comparative criteria which help me decide which tool I choose from several options.

Trustworthy tools should be:

• Predictable — it should be clear what the tool will do
• Dependable — the tool should “just work” as close to 100% of the time as possible
• Acting as you direct it — the tool should do exactly what you direct it to do, and not what other parties, such as its creator or service provider, direct it to do
• Forgiving — if you make a mistake, you should be able to undo or otherwise correct your mistake
• Robust enough to keep working even when not used for a while

Efficient tools should:

• Be quick and easy to start using
• Be responsive, with as low a latency as possible, ideally zero perceptible latency
• Reduce the work necessary to complete a task, or complete multiple tasks with same amount of work otherwise
• Reduce the time necessary to complete a task, or complete multiple tasks in the same amount of time otherwise
• Be quick and easy to shut down, or otherwise put away
• Use little or no energy when not in use

Focused and focusing tools should

• Provide clear features for accomplishing your goals
• Encourage or reinforce focusing on your tasks and goals
• Never interrupt you when you are using the tool to accomplish a task

Bad tools can have many sources of frustration, and nearly all of these involve inversions of the desirable qualities noted above. Frustrating tools are less predictable, work only some of the time, randomly do things because some other party directed them to (like auto-upgrade), ask you to confirm before doing actions because they have no capability to undo, or stop working for no particular reason.

Inefficient tools take too long to be “ready” to use, are unresponsive of otherwise have a delay when you provide input before they respond, cause you more work to complete a task, or make you take more time than simpler older tools would, require waiting for them to shut down, or use energy even when you are not doing anything with them.

Unfocused tools have many (nearly) useless features that have nothing to do with your goals, encourage or distract you with actions irrelevant to your tasks or goals, or interrupt you when you are working on a task.

Baseline Writing Tools

Examples of tools that satisfy all the above:

• Pencil (with eraser) and paper
• A typewriter (ideally with a whiteout band) and paper

That’s it, those are the baseline. When considering an alternative tool for similar tasks, such as writing, see if it measures up to those.

Tools I Like Using

For myself, I prefer to use:

• BBEdit for writing, which requires near zero maintenance for years of reliable use, for both prose (and markup) for my posts, and code for my personal website
• MediaWiki based wikis for collaborative text authoring like on:
  • indieweb.org
  • wiki.mozilla.org
  • www.w3.org/wiki/
  • and of course Wikipedia

Tools I Tolerate Using

I do also use the iOS and MacOS “Notes” app notes to sometimes write parts of posts, and sync text notes across devices, both of which have unfortunately become just frustrating enough to be barely tolerable to use.

iOS Notes (as of iOS 17.5) are buggy when you scroll them and try to add to or edit the middle of notes. MacOS Notes have a very annoying feature where it tries to autocomplete names of people in your contacts when you type even just the first letter of their name or an @-sign, when you rarely if ever want that. MacOS Notes also forces anything that starts with a # (hash or pound) sign into a weird auto-linked hashtag that is nearly useless and breaks text selection.

There are no options or preferences to turn off or disable these annoying supposedly “helpful” automatic features.

There’s definitely an opportunity for a simple, reliable, easy to sync across devices, plain text notes application to replace iOS and MacOS notes, that doesn’t require signing up to some third-party service that will inevitably shut down or sell your information to advertisers or companies training their LLMs or leak your information due to poor security practices.

Similarly I also frequently use Gmail and Google Docs in my day-to-day work, and I’ve grown relatively used to their lagginess, limitations, and weird user interface quirks. I use them as necessary for work and collaboration and otherwise do my best to minimize time spent in them.

Better Tools

I have focused primarily on writing tools, however I have made many distinct choices for personal web development tools as well, from writing mostly directly in HTML and CSS, to bits in PHP and JavaScript, rather than frameworks that demand regular updates that I cannot trust to not break my code. I myself try to build tools that aspire to the criteria listed above.

At a high level, new tools should provide at least one of three things:

1. Higher efficiency and/or quality: tools should help you do what you already could do, but faster, better, cheaper, and more precisely
2. Democratization: tools should help more people do what only a few could do before
3. Novelty: tools should help you do new things that were either impossible before or not even imagined

Mostly I prefer to focus on the first of those, as there are plenty of “obvious” improvements to be made beyond existing tools, and such improvements have much more predictable effects. While democratization of tools is nearly always a good thing, I can think of a small handful of examples that demonstrate that sometimes it is not. That’s worth a separate post.

Lastly, tools that help accomplish novel tasks that were previously impossible or not even imagined perhaps have the greatest risks and uncertainty, and thus I am ok with postponing exploring them for now.

I wrote a few general thoughts on what tools and innovations to pursue and considerations thereof in my prior post: Responsible Inventing.

Referencing Articles

Articles also written about this topic that reference this article.

1. 2024-08-01 Tom Morris: A world run by tools