Since I have to work in an office for my living (gee, where’s my fairy godmother to give me money-making ukulele talent instead?), I’m happy that one of the main tools I use is a Macintosh. It provides an interface that gets out of the way so I can get my writing and design work done without having to worry about the computer’s operating system.
We’ve been a Mac office since 1986 (I know, that’s before lots of you were even born!) and one of the side benefits of running a Mac for so many years is our long-standing tradition of attending the annual MacWorld Expo held each year in San Francisco.
While Mark and I started attending in 1988 (believe me, it was a much different expo back then), for the past decade or so, my dad and I have made MacWorld Expo an after-holiday date. Dad flies to Sacramento, I pick him up and we travel in my trusty 1987 Mazda 626 (36 mpg!) to San Francisco, where we take in the show and some great dining.
Son, Matt (who is an Apple service technician and sales manager at BitVision), joined up with us at our hotel near Fisherman’s Wharf and we rode the iconic F Train streetcars (photo above by Matt Dale), hopping off at the nearest stop to Moscone Center. These cars originally operated all over the US and even in Italy; today they’ll get you from Fisherman’s Wharf and all the way down Market toward Castro for a meager $1.50. It’s a bargain—and a delightful experience to boot!
Inside the hall were hundreds of vendors selling all things Macintosh. Yet there was not one ukulele-centric product in the whole Moscone Center—but my sore feet can assure you that I looked on both sides of every aisle!
If only I was an ocarina enthusiast instead of a fan of our favorite four-string instrument, I’d have hit the jackpot with Ocarina, a program by Smule that transforms your phone into, yes, an ocarina. You blow into the phone’s microphone at one end of the iPhone, finger the appropriate on-screen “holes” and the sounds of an ocarina come out. Really.
Folks wandered by the Smule booth, laughing and shaking their heads with smiles as the sounds of “Hey, Jude” played out from an iPhone. It’s an admittedly cool program, but it’s not an ukulele, so I kept walking.
At last year’s MacWorld Expo, I’d already met up with ukulele player and Mac enthusiast/writer Andy Ihnatko—so I thought I’d give him a break this year and not crash his book signing session at Wiley Publishing’s booth. Frankly, I think last year he was more than puzzled to find the first question thrown at him about ukuleles, not computers…and I didn’t feel a need to repeat the scene.
So I wandered.
By the second afternoon, I’d given up on finding ukulele-related items and satisfied myself with a search for the perfect case for my iPod Touch. Dad and I had perused both halls of the expo and we were doing our final pass through to make sure we had no more urges to decimate our Visa cards on software and geeky gadgets.
I was eying the Lynda.com software training booth guiltily (thinking I really should finally master Bezier curves in Illustrator with an online class…) when a voice shattered my thoughts of self-condemnation.
“Tonya! Are you Tonya?”
A smiling guy had crossed over from the other side of the aisle and was headed my way.
“Do I know you?” I asked (being eligible for AARP membership these days, I figure I can play the ‘I don’t remember’ card with impunity). Attired in an OmniGroup-labeled jacket, he didn’t look dangerous. So I kept smiling.
“I read your website,” he said, reaching out a hand to shake mine. “I play ukulele, too.”
Aha—finally a fellow combo Mac/uke enthusiast!
And that’s how I met David Messent—ukulele player from Seattle and OmniGroup’s official “Support Ninja” (honest, that’s what his business card attests to). That’s us, playing “air ukulele” above.
David shared that he started playing ukulele after his 2006 honeymoon in Maui; impressed by the music and dance they saw there, the newlyweds decided Allegra would take up hula and David, a violinist during his school years, would tackle ukulele.
“Allegra bought me an Oscar Schmidt that Christmas,” David explains. “I dove right in and immediately ‘felt whole’ again! By the way, still no hula dancing to be seen in our house.”
David goes for the good stuff in ukuleles; he currently has an ukulele rotation of a 1920s Martin Style O (soprano), an Earnest Instruments’ Palomino (concert) and a Ko’olau T-1 (tenor) he bought himself for Christmas a few weeks back. “I also have a couple less exciting ukes that live on my desk at work and get loaned out to friends,” he points out.
He plays jazz and pop standards, chord solos in the style of Lyle Ritz—but he’s expanding his repertoire lately with Mark Nelson’s fingerstyle book, enjoying the Hawaiian tunes “a lot.”
And he uses his Mac to “manage” his ukulele habit—and has the t-shirt to prove it (see image from back of shirt at left). So how does software help with ukuleles?
“OmniFocus is a personal productivity application that’s all about getting the stuff you need to do that’s floating around in your head out, and into a system that will let you ‘focus’ on what you should be doing at any moment in time,” says David. “It’s an implementation of David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’ philosophy [and book] and uses the concepts of Projects—groups of actions, usually to accomplish a specific goal—and Contexts—a person, location or tool needed to accomplish an action.
“The intersection of these two ideas clears away all the peripheral stuff that you shouldn’t be worrying about and makes you more productive.”
David uses OmniFocus on his desk-based Mac and it’s also available for the iPhone/iPod Touch to take along wherever you go.
“I’ve actually got a Project in OmniFocus called ‘music,’ and it’s got actions in it like, ‘Buy new Aquilas,’ ‘Print ‘Misty’ chart,’ ‘Ask Allegra for permission to attend Portland Uke Fest ’09,’ and so on,” David says. “The uke stuff lives in the same database as my work and home actions, but because it’s organized by project, I only see it when I want to. On the other hand, if I’m out running errands I can easily see everything in my ‘errands’ Context, regardless of which project it belongs to—so I don’t forget those Aquilas!”
Gee, just imagine the ukulele “to do’s” I could have on my OmniFocus list: Finally master an E chord; learn how to change strings; play scales in every key; buy a custom tenor”…
Now, if only the software actually did those things for me!
With lots of new possibilities on my mind to link my computer and my favorite hobby, I bid aloha to David. Hmmm…just imagine if I could organize my life enough with OmniFocus that I’d have more time to play the ukulele. Now that’d be a real benefit…
The next MacWorld Expo (without Apple as an exhibitor, but I’m still heading there!) is slated for January 4-8, 2010. Bring your ukulele and I’ll see you there!
P.S And yes, I am aware of the iPhone/iPod Touch software “Pocket Guitar” with the ukulele option (and it’s only 99 cents!). I’ve been having fun with that software since last fall, but they weren’t at MacWorld so I couldn’t “interview” them for this article. Maybe next year???