Author: William Gallagher

Mindfulness or Don’t Multitask (part 99)

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From Canada’s HR Reporter:

The concept of mindfulness is to focus on living in the moment and avoiding distractions, particularly when one is involved in important tasks or activities. As well as tuning out potential distractions such as smart phones, e-mails and social media, mindfulness is about focusing on what you’re currently doing and giving it your full attention. In many ways, it’s also about living in the present and focusing on the here and now without thinking too much about the future.

How many times do we end up just going through the motions and not really paying attention to what we’re doing? I don’t know about others, but modern life is so hectic I often have five or six things on my mind at any one time. It’s so easy to lose focus by worrying about what’s coming next or some other important task that needs done.

The impact of ‘mindfulness’ on employers and employees – Brian Kreissl, HR Reporter (17 June 2014)

Kreissl argues primarily about how businesses would benefit from encouraging this type of step-back-a-sec and ponder about the moment thinking. But does also take a good potshot or two at how rubbish multitasking is.

Hat tip to reader Angela Gallagher.

Find a partner who looks like your ex

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What do you mean, that’s creepy?

I loathe the idea that any of us have a type, that there is certain physical type that we are attracted to. But I know it’s true. And dating firm Match.com is using this to help us. In partnership with the best-not-to-ask-why-it’s-called-this company Three Day Rule, the dating business is asking for photos that it will then use to pattern match.

Look, I’m just telling you, I’m not commenting on this. And I can’t seem to direct you to the US version of Match.com where this happening because my browser auto-routes to the UK one where I am and where my wife Angela is now going to wonder about my browsing history. Ah, I’ve searched for worse. I once looked for football news. It wasn’t for me, it was for a friend.

Before I give you Three Day Rule’s link and wish you well, let me point out that the service costs. It costs good. In the US it’s $5,000 which works out to around £2,937.89. But if that’s the cost of true love and a little creepiness over that whole type thing, there you go.

Match.com is here, though if you’re in the States you’d be better off typing it directly and skipping my local rerouting. And Three Day Rule is here.

Via On the Media

Amazon Fire Phone

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My considered opinion after Amazon finally unveiled its own smartphone is that I like the name.

Beyond that I do have a curiosity about exactly how easy this phone will make it for people to spend more money at Amazon. I am immune to this, I am above such trivialities as UNCONTROLLABLE BOOK BUYING ON IMPULSE, or at least I will be via this phone because I won’t get it.

I don’t know that I’ll buy the forthcoming iPhone 6 either – though as I’m now out of contract, I’ll certainly look at it – but there’s no way I’m chucking this for an Amazon Shopping Trollery. I mean, Amazon Fire.

But BBC News has done an interesting roundup of reactions across the web from people who know more than I do.

Watch Susan Kare talk about icon design

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Only this weekend, I wrote about the ⌘ symbol and that inevitably led to mentioning Susan Kare. And now she’s here on video, talking about the icons she designed for Apple and many more.

Susan Kare, Iconographer (EG8) from EG Conference on Vimeo.

Full disclosure. I swear I’m alert to Susan Kare in the news because I had a drama character I loved named Susan Hare. Complete coincidence, but.

I have no clue what to say. Star Wars: Scene Maker

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Disney has released a new iPad app that, wait, take this from the mouth of a horse:

MAKE STAR WARS YOUR OWN!

Become the master of your own Star Wars video universe! Create your own scenes, choose your favorite characters, control their actions and dialogue, record your masterpiece, and share your Star Wars story! The Force of your imagination is with you!

FEATURES:

· Create your own Star Wars universe and bring it to life with imaginative play and countless options.

· Select from 3D environments with 3D models of your favorite characters, weapons, and ships.

· Use dialogue straight from the Star Wars films, or record your voice and apply a Darth Vader, Rebel Pilot, or Storm Trooper filter to put your words into any character’s mouth!

· Switch between three cameras, each of which can track or follow the action, to record your scene from multiple angles!

· Chooose a musical score taken from the Star Wars films, write your own iconic Star Wars “Title Crawl” and end credits, and share your finished scene with your friends!

If you get the free app – it’s a big download but it’s free – you’ll hear all of this again but done in the style of a movie trailer. You’ll also get the Star Wars theme, which I do like, I have bought the soundtrack, repeated so often that you won’t like it, you will throw away that soundtrack.

I do just wonder what I would’ve thought of this when I was a kid and Star Wars first came out. I also wonder how much the in-app purchases would’ve cost then. Now they are £1.99 each for Death Star Attack and Cloud City Something or £2.49 for the pair.

Without those, you get the full game/scene experience, just with only a plot from Return of the Jedi. Do you remember when everybody knew that Return of the Jedi was the worst Star Wars film? We were so young.

Get the app here.

A tonne of news from Adobe

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Honestly, I’m not your guy for this: there has been so much news from Adobe about the latest release of their Creative Cloud that I’m still catching up. I read one news story cooing about wild additions to Photoshop – an application I love – or bits I don’t really understand for Illustrator – an application I generally fear to pieces – and that’s not the half of it. Or the quarter.

Go take a quick peek at Adobe’s main site for Photoshop to just see a simple video about one feature. It’s the feature that lets you take a photograph and then later change your mind about the perspective. Just move that building around for me, would you?

The firm has a comprehensive if a bit dull press release here.

And the best summary intro I’ve caught so far is this from Macstories.

Eating the dog food

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So I’m after telling you to work more, that you can work more. That you can create more time to write. I may rarely have been so annoying in my life. But, just because this has been an unusual day, I want to show you that I do this too.

You’re reading the fifth posting today on The Blank Screen and all five were written on buses or while waiting for buses. I can do this in part because I am in Birmingham which has a good transport system. (Didn’t stop me getting lost and late, but.)

And I can do it because I have my iPhone with me.

One of today’s stories, Coffee With(out) Me was borne of my own experience and an idea I had for a particular friend who has that problem. Once I knew I wanted you to have this solution too, it was a matter of writing it up.

I could’ve written in the WordPress iPhone app and without exception every one of the stories ended up there for posting. But I just more enjoy writing in the app Drafts. So I did. Drafts is comfortable and somehow relaxing so I write in that, then maybe tap a button.

If I tap a button, it is to squirt the text to somewhere specific like OmniFocus. But I just as often copy and paste the lot over into WordPress.

Once it gets there, I may edit but I really just set the tags and search keywords for when I might want to find a story again. Otherwise, it’s just copy and paste into WordPress, then, wallop, published.

Once published, the stories here get automatically promoted in various places but if I really like a piece, I’ll go promote it with love too.

That writing step, that publishing and that promotion are the same for every piece. The rest of today’s went through exactly that going from me to you. But they also had steps and apps before then

I read a lot of news on RSS through the app Reeder 2. I search around a lot as I think of areas of interest and that’s all done through Safari. Any time I find or I think of something that might be useful, it goes into Evernote. I have a notebook (actually a shared entire account) that I can email in to. That applies as much to the odd stray thought that I email in via Drafts as it does to whole websites in Safari or forwarding actual emails I receive.

I use Safari again when getting a link to a previous story of mine. I use Apple’s iTunes Link Maker website to get me links for apps that work internationally. One irritation is that Apple only shows you the price of an app before you buy it. If I buy a pile to test before recommending one to you, I can’t see its price. So I use the website Appshopper.com which tracks these things.

And – full, whispered disclosure – I use Amazon Associates for links to books or DVDs. If you buy those or take a look and then buy something else, some pennies come my way. I reckon it’s better that I get them than Amazon does, but.

To get iTunes or Associates links like that, you have to log in to your account on those services and I do that repeatedly via 1Password.

So that’s, what? At today’s prices, I’m using:

Drafts: £2.49, $3.99
Evernote: free to try up to a generous limit
1Password (£12.99, $17.99 universal version)
WordPress for iOS: free
Reeder 2: (£2.99, $4.99)
Safari: free and preinstalled on iOS

As ever with these things, if you were to set out doing it today perhaps you wouldn’t rush to buy three apps and use them alongside three others. Put like that, it does sound like overkill.

But these things grow. And then when you are on buses all day, you’re glad they did. Except for finding all the links, that’s five-biscuit job.

I should also say that my iPhone battery would’ve died from all this I’d it weren’t that I have a gorgeous Mophie Juice Pack recharger plugged into it right now. I bought mine at the Apple Store in Grand Central station but I reckon you can get a cheaper deal here in the UK or there in the States.

Windows sees big 1Password update

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If you think that headline is contorted, it is. It was just about the best I could think of without making ‘1Password’ be the first word. I can’t begin a sentence with a number like that. Usually I will spell out the number or I will recast the whole sentence to avoid it.

There was no spelling out this time: 1Password is the name of the product I’m recommending.

Well, I’ve often – even regularly – recommended 1Password on iOS and Macs. I’ve recommended it on Android at least once. But I confess I haven’t paid any attention to the Windows version. That’s because I just assumed that if it weren’t identical to the Mac one then it was because it had some extra features I’d see on the Mac someday.

But it turns out that Mac came first. Because today, Agile Bits announced 1Password 4 for Windows.

Sorry, Windows users, I just thought you had all this already. But you do now:

After months of beta testing, a small lake’s worth of coffee, and a possibly illegal number of pizzas, 1Password 4 for Windows is here.

This is a huge release for us, as it brings many of our latest features to Windows and a cleaner, more intuitive interface. Windows users can enjoy Favorites, Multiple Vaults, Wi-Fi Sync, and Security Audit, as well as our new, free 1Password Watchtower service that warns you when a Login’s site has been compromised and helps you decide when it’s safe to update your passwords.

All together, this release includes 374 new features, improvements, and fixes spread over 85 betas. You can comb through the full beta release notes, learn more in our documentation, or check out our feature overview down below the gallery.

1Password 4 for Windows is here – David Chartier, Agile Bits blog (17 June 2014)

That gallery and more is in the original piece over on the 1Password makers’ blog.