An Overdue Update from The Practical Utopian

Herb Bowie
4 min readOct 11, 2022
rocket launching next to big head cutaway showing internal gears
Image Credit: iStock | wenjin chen

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted anything from The Practical Utopian, so I thought it might be time to give everyone an update on what I’ve been up to over the last couple of months.

Updates to Notenik

Although I enjoy writing opinion pieces, and appreciate all of you who read my stuff, there are times when I feel like it is time to actually work on a product that does something useful.

That’s when I start to turn out software code, instead of mere words.

Notenik is an open-source Mac app that I’ve been working on, in one form or another, for close to 20 years.

It is, first and foremost, a tool that I use for creating and organizing and publishing the content that I write for the web.

But I also make Notenik available to others, for free, from the Mac App Store.

And although it’s not hugely popular, it currently has 43 ratings in the App Store, with an average score of 4.9, and I’ve heard from at least a few people who find it useful; I release a new version of Notenik about every two weeks, each with a handful of significant updates.

(If you happen to own a Mac, and at least occasionally want to make notes about a topic of interest, and organize those notes, then you might want to give it a try.)

So that’s the first thing I’ve been up to. (And oh, BTW, version 10.5.0 has just been released.)

The Lexicon of Song

Over the years I’ve written a number of pieces that attempt to explain the workings of songs that I love. Some of those writings have appeared on Reason to Rock, and others on The Practical Utopian. But wherever they’ve appeared, Google often reminds me that these are among the most popular pieces I’ve published.

(For example, if you search for “All Along the Watchtower,” my piece appears pretty quickly once you get past the YouTube videos, the lyrics sites and the Wikipedia entry. And it’s appeared there consistently for the past twenty years or so.)

And I still feel a regular yearning — often indulged — to write about songs that I love, or that interest me in some way.

--

--