It’s been a big day today. But for all that, I’ve only really achieved three things, but two of them are whoppers so that’s OK:

1. I have achieved, after many hours of sorting, Inbox Zero once again (or near enough – Mac Mail won’t remove the Notes from my inbox and they’re things I need to keep on my iPod Touch, but apart from that it’s empty). Feels soooooo good! Only problem now is that I need to try to achieve the same thing in Evernote, which isn’t so hard but more than a little annoying.
2. I have ditched NetNewsWire as my RSS feed reader because the interface was messy and it was stopping me from actually reading stuff. I tested out Reeder, which I’ve heard good things about, and while the overall concept was nice, the lack of text contrast was killing my eyes, so I ditched that one. Nice Mac-like interface though. If they fix the contrast issue or introduce user-definable colours, I could well give it another go. Anyway, I’ve ended up with an open-source reader which I’d never heard of, Vienna, which has the rather nice attributes of being skinnable with CSS themes (so no contrast problems), a nice clean interface, and integrated with Evernote so I can send articles I want to read later straight into EN without needing to launch them in a browser first. Quite pleased with it so far. I do, however, think that I need to review the feeds I’m following and do a bit of culling – there’s a lot there I don’t necessarily want to read all the time and perhaps there’s a better approach for these than RSS. Also, as I’m working on businessy stuff, I suspect my focus will change to a certain extent. Wonder if there’s a way to archive a group of feeds so they don’t show up as readable but can be resuscitated at a moment’s notice – that would be very cool for people like me who go through phases of what they want to read.
3. I have spent a fairly large chunk of time uploading stuff to SoundCloud. So far I have 3 pieces up there. I’d like to add one more before I launch, just to give a bit of an overview. Not entirely sure what to choose though. It’s been a good experience so far though – I like that they limit you by duration not by filesize, so I can upload a big fat file which they then compress for me and all that costs me is the time to upload it, it doesn’t reduce the amount of music I can put online. Easy interface to use and mostly good options to fill in. I like that you can include a ‘Buy’ link – might use that when the scores are online. The only thing that’s a little annoying is that you have to choose just one Genre option, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to search by Genre – it seems like you can type anything at all into the Genre box, so the chances of small variants between similar terms (classical vs classicalmusic vs classical music, for example) are extremely high. i’m guessing that’s not much of a drama for most pop genres but for the classically-derived new music world it becomes a barrier to finding new content because everyone thinks of their music with different terminology – new music, contemporary classical, nonpop, art music, serious music – it’s a long list. plus all the typographical variants that can happen – it makes it hard to hunt down music that might be of interest. But time will tell – looking forward to seeing what the response is!