Saturday, December 29, 2012

Goalscape - Friendly Goal Mapping You Love


Knowing what’s important to you is the first step to getting or keeping what you love. Successfully achieving important things requires prioritization, constant attention, and a multitude of baby steps.

How can you see the big picture, the small steps, and what’s most important at any time? You need a map or tool.

I have tried many tools. Yet, I have found none better than Goalscape.

Goalscape lets me:
  • Map out and identify the big important things
  • See how important each goal is with respect to the other
  • Get a clue as to where I am spending my time
  • Feed the explorer in me and enjoy the whole process of goal exploration

First impressions are important and Goalscape gave me a wonderful first impression. The application is professional and one can tell that user experience is paramount to its design. In other words, I liked it from the start!

After admiring how nice the user interface looked, I saw a detailed goal / subgoal “Get Started” screen which is designed to help one “Get started with Goalscape.” The amount of detail took me aback for about two seconds.

However, a nice tooltip popped up which shared with me that I could either explore this “Get Started” Goalscape screen or create a new Goalscape. So, I created one.

I created “Financial Security” as my main goal, and a couple sub-goals. Quickly, I  realized that “Financial Security” is not the only important thing in life. So, I created a new Goalscape with “Improve Well-Being” as my topmost goal.  From there I added those 3 subgoals most important to me now; “Health”, “Financial Security”, and a third one.


As opposed to some web-only solutions I have used, working with this application felt wonderful! I can use shortcut keys to my heart’s content such as Undo. As an explorer, one of my favorite features is Undo. So, I can boldly try things out and then Undo as I wish!

For fun, I right clicked and marked the “Financial Security” goal as complete by choosing “Complete progress” from the popup menu. It immediately shades in the subgoal and the parent goal (one higher up) is partially shaded as well to signify part of the goal is complete. This is a very satisfying and fun effect! I liked it so much that I showed my son who played with it too.

At this point, I need food. So, I close up Goalscape, save off the goal I was creating, and checkout how big the file. Size of the file matters for me since I want to save it on the cloud which has limited space. My Goalscape file is only needed 879 bytes. That’s less than 1 KB! No problem there.



After eating, I decided to get serious and fill out my subgoals with subgoals. Once I created goals within goals within goals, I saw the need for using the vertical gray stick at the top. It helps one visually collapse goals or expand them as needed.

While demo-ing the application to a family member, I was able to quickly understand, show, and adjust the “Importance” of a goal. The app has all I need.

Collapsed Goals And Colors
Subgoal Health

I was able to do all of these things without looking at the help documentation. Out of curiosity, I looked it over though. I start casually checking out the Help menu. It has a feature called Infopoints. If you click on one, you get helpful videos and instructions. Nice!

To top it all off, I can see they truly support their customers. They say, “We answer most queries straight away and always respond within 24 hours.” I rarely see such great support in anything I use.

To sum up, Goalscape is both user friendly and yet a power tool when you need it. The company is dedicated to their users. I sense this goal map product is part of a bigger mission of helping people help themselves. In other words, they have only good intentions.

I enjoyed using Goalscape, have made it part of my daily routine, and I invite you to do the same!

Monday, September 3, 2012

Method Callers in Xcode 4.4


I love that I can see the callers of a method in Xcode!

From the Find and Search Additions section of the New Features in Xcode 4.4 documentation, it says:

"...function is accessed from the Show Related Items menu, or by using the Assistant editor and selecting Callers or Callees in the jump bar pop-up menu..."




So how does one easily popup the Show Related Items menu? Press Control-1 aka ^1 and you will see "Callers(x)" where x = the number of methods calling the method.



There is also the comprehensive Xcode Keyboard Shortcuts and Gestures documentation which covers multi-touch gestures and other shortcuts.

Enjoy this feature while you explore your code!