The new issue is out (subscribe!). I've just received my in-print copy, and tonight and tomorrow, en route to Colorado, I look forward to reading the 99% of the issue's contents I had heard about in the office but have not yet seen. Through the eons I've made a point of reading as much of the magazine as possible not in galley proofs nor in intermediate versions but the way civilians would, when it arrives all nicely bound and illustrated. More reaction anon.

The 1% I have seen is my article on that evergreen topic, information overload. The reporting for this one was fun, in that it involved talking with people whose ideas, software, writings, or any combination thereof have guided my thoughts about technology's limits and evolution.

They were: Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus and creator of (among other things) the brilliant early program Lotus Agenda; Phil Libin, founder and CEO of Evernote; Esther Dyson, a friend since our teenage years and an authority on all things digital; David Allen, famous for the "Getting Things Done" approach to life and a friend since I met him in Texas ten years ago; and Mark Bernstein, chief scientist of Eastgate Systems and designer of Tinderbox, an elegant and powerful Mac-based system I've used for info-management since making the Mac switch six years ago. (For a decade before that, I relied—and still love—the Windows program Zoot, by Tom Davis of Zoot Software.) Among other distinctions, Allen and Bernstein are former guest-bloggers here.

You can see their predictions in the article. The point of this post is to mention its existence, and to cover a few update points:

1) I allude in the article to my version of the Holy Grail, "speaker-independent voice recognition." Here's the real-world example: I spent yesterday doing "American Futures" interviews in Winters, California, and this morning doing tech interviews in San Francisco. As a result, I have hours and hours of audio recordings, which eventually I need to sit and transcribe.

Someday, I will be able to feed those recordings into an automatic transcriber, and get nice typed-out versions on the other end. No system now extant comes close to working well enough to handle that challenge. Not Dragon's software, which does fine when you train it to your own voice, not the Google or Apple voice-recognition that can parse limited words and phrases. A timeline with the article says that this might work within 10 years. Many people have written in to say, No, it will happen sooner! I think they're wrong but hope they're right.

2) A version of the Holy Grail is a system that will automatically collect info from business cards and render it into usable, searchable text form. Phil Libin's Evernote has produced a hardware/software combo that is not perfect, but that unlike the voice systems has become just good enough at the task to be worthwhile from my point of view.

You bring cards into the system either by taking smartphone pictures of them, then sending the image to the Evernote cloud for processing; or by scanning them on an expensive-but-excellent desktop scanner that made by Fujitsu and sold with the Evernote brand. The software for recognition in both scenarios is steadily improving. I swallowed very hard, and tried to distract my wife, before shelling out the $400+ for the new Fujitsu-Evernote scanner. But by the time I'd run the zillionth business card through it I thought it was worthwhile. It also handles receipts and any other sort of scan.

3) Mark Bernstein's Eastgate has put out an entirely reworked new release of Tinderbox, known as Tinderbox Six. I paid to be part of the "Backstage Beta" testing and development process for this new release and consider it a big step forward in power and sophistication. More details on what is new at the Eastgate site and this user forum. Also, reviews by Steve Zeoli at Welcome to Sherwood. (Zeoli also mentions another lithe little Mac program I like, FoldingText. As he points out, it recalls memories of the fabulous, lamented DOS program GrandView.)

Tinderbox is expensive, though much less so than the scanner. Even more so than with the scanner, I consider it money well spent. Right now Tinderbox is bundled with several other (also excellent) "artisanal" Mac programs. You can read about them here. The two others from this group that I use every day are DevonThink Pro and the nonpareil writing program Scrivener. Here are the logos of the five programs on sale:

Of course, your money for an Atlantic subscription is also well spent, and it's a bargain!

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Because this comes up from time to time, let me say for the record: I always buy and pay normal list price for any software or hardware I like enough to use, including all of them mentioned here.

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