Author: William Gallagher

Scrivener on sale for $20 (in UK too)

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It’s the word processor for writers that just about every reviewer loves. I liked it very much in my brief use of the trial version last year: I had a particularly complicated and messy project and Scrivener made it feel manageable. I chucked in all these chapters that had been emailed to me, I sorted through duplicates and rewrites, figured out the right order and could then just work on it as normal.

I’d have bought Scrivener right there and then but for how that project required me to go back to the writer with Word files and we needed to have tracked changes. You can’t do that in Scrivener, so far as I can tell, so I didn’t get it then.

But I did today.

It’s temporarily $20. That works out to just over £11 UK and since the regular, Mac App Store price in the UK is £31, I was convinced. Sold. Bought. Using it now.

There is one extra cost: by getting this price you are going through a deal with Cult of Mac and that will also get you on their mailing list. Quite a bit. Still, I’ve bought a couple of things through them now. In fact, I’ve bought Scrivener twice: I got it for my wife Angela Gallagher last year in some deal then.

So the deals do come around but if you fancy Scrivener, now is a very good time to buy. Check out this link and do so in the next few days or it will expire.

What unemployed people Google and what that tells us

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I’m not sure this is a wonderful indictment of human society but if the number of searches for pornography goes up, it can mean that the searchers are back in employment. Out of it, they were spending their time searching for jobs. Once they’ve got one, they’re searching for, well, anyway, indeed. (Have you hired someone recently? Don’t ask them.)

Google found that rising unemployment was not only linked to phrases such as “companies that are hiring.” It was also closely correlated to searches for new technology (“free apps”), entertainment (“guitar scales beginner”) and adult content (“jailbait teen”). The company said its data can improve the accuracy of standard estimates of economic data in a current month as much as 10 percent.

At the University of Michigan, [University of Michigan’s Matthew] Shapiro and his colleagues scoured more than 19 billion tweets over two years for references to unemployment, hunting for phrases such as “axed,” “pink slip” and “downsized.” They indexed the findings and compared them to the government’s weekly tally of people applying for unemployment benefits for the first time.

Their results are remarkably similar — and where they do diverge, the Twitter index may be more reliable. Computer malfunctions and the government shutdown last year distorted the official numbers, while the trends in Shapiro’s index held firm.

The Weird Google Searches of the Unemployed and What They Say about the Economy – Washington Post (30 May 2014)

Read more of what this analysis can find and remember that BBC newsrooms now regularly have rolling displays of what people are searching for. I’ve always assumed that was an edited list, I never saw anything untoward. But maybe the only people who read BBC News Online are unemployed.

Pet peeve rant here. Nothing to see. Move along, move along

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Look, I think there’s a spectrum of interest to do with Apple and things like the company’s WWDC. Most people are in the ‘never heard of it’ category, a great proportion are in the ‘and don’t care anyway’ set. If it does affect you or you are ever going to benefit from it or be even remotely interested, the smart money says you’ll look when you next buy a Mac or an iPhone. Or maybe you’ll just get these new features when they’re here and you’ll decide then if you’re interested.

That’s not only sensible, it is intelligent and only the teeniest bit dull.

Way over here in the not sensible, not necessarily all that intelligent but definitely bright and shiny category, you join me in watching the WWDC announcements and enjoy it.

But there is another set.

It’s the set of people who are quite interested. I have no criticism of this set. I have every criticism of the kind of technology journalism that tries to snare them. It’s the same kind of technology journalism that tries to snare us shiny interested people too. And it got me.

I read a headline today that ran: “Here’s one major new Yosemite and iOS 8 feature that got overlooked”. I am not even going to apologise for how that got me and I read it while waiting for the kettle to boil.

What I am going to do is boil in harmony because this major overlooked feature was Spotlight. This is broadly a search thing that Macs have had for ages and it is very good, it finds stuff including some answers to questions: I used it two minutes ago to add up some figures. Usually it’s how I find anything on my Mac. That script I wrote somewhere between 2005 and 2008, the one with a musical number in it, I wrote it in Final Draft, I think I emailed it to Bert that time, with just that kind of head-scratching detail, Spotlight will find the script pretty much instantly. Spotlight is Good.

And Spotlight is improved in the new OS X Yosemite. But the WWDC announcement included it. It fair belaboured it. First Apple told us what was new and showed some screenshots of it in action. Then it demonstrated these same features in action. (Just as an aside, the one thing I’d lose from an Apple announcement is the demo of what we’ve learnt about two seconds ago. Sometimes it’s good, I appreciate that it helps fix the details in one’s mind, but often enough I’m looking at my watch.)

We’re not done yet.

Having told us about it in detail and then demonstrated Spotlight in detail, Apple moved on to many, many other things – and kept using Spotlight throughout. They explicitly spoke of how it was built in to various other features.

There is only one way in which this can be regarded as Spotlight being ‘overlooked’ and that’s if the website running that stupid click-bait title was admitting that they forgot to cover it before.

You’ll notice there’s no link to the article. I’ve wasted enough of your time steaming away here, I’m not sending you their way.

My name is William, and I am a journalist. Hello, William.

Phone a friend. Randomly.

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I have not one single idea whether this is productive but it is fun.

You know that after you’ve produced something, you go back to all those people you needed beforehand and you thank them. Of course you do: without them, it wouldn’t have happened.

But I was scrolling down my iPhone’s Contacts list to one of them and right underneath her was an old friend and colleague I haven’t spoken to in a year or more.

So I rang her. Nothing to say, nothing to ask, just a call in the dark.

I hope she enjoyed it as much as I did because I had a blast. So much so that I have actually considered doing this more deliberately, phoning more people randomly. Except if you do it deliberately, it isn’t so random, is it?

Not sure about that now. But I had a lot of calls to make that day, plenty of them fun like the post-event ones, enough of them tedious like chasing this or that, and this random one-off in the middle. I tell you, it made my day.

Ideas come from here. Exactly here. And here.

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I’m not a fan. “Oh, JK Rowling’s neighbour had a boy who went to a school, that’s where she got Hogwarts from.” If you can actually trace an idea back to a specific source then either bully for you or where’s the lawsuit? I think it diminishes art to disassemble its parts and claim this bit came from here, that bit was stolen from there.

But since I’m not fussed about Star Wars, bring it on.

HeySiri – so much for jailbreaking

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It was the one feature I liked on Android – though, as ever, that meant it was on one Android phone somewhere – and it was then the one thing that might make me jailbreak my iPhone.

OkSiri… makes Siri listen all the time. No pressing a button and waiting a mo before speaking to Siri, it is listening all the time. And specifically it is listening for a phrase such as “OK, Siri” that it then recognises as its cue to work.
This I Might Jailbreak For – William Gallagher (1 June 2014)

Glad I didn’t bother now. Maybe the one WWDC announcement that most grabbed me was HeySiri. (I don’t like that name any more than I do OkSiri, but.) It is exactly what that OkSiri is, except it’s official, it will work.

WWDC: What I’ll use and what firms will copy

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This is going to be the norm for all computers soon but Macs soonest. You’re walking through your house writing a quick email on your iPhone and by the time you get to your desk, it’s becoming a long email. You’re wishing you hadn’t started it on the wee small screen there but you’re committed to it so you finish.

Not any more. From later this year when OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 are out, you’ll just put your iPhone down and carry on typing on your Mac. Exactly where you were. If it’s that long a bleedin’ email, you could then just pick up your iPad and head out of the house still writing it.

I can’t say I’ve ever wanted to between all three like that but I have regularly done that business with writing an email on my iPhone. I have very often had to leave for a meeting and therefore had to set things up on my iPad before I go. So the idea of just picking it up and going, I will do this. I will use this.

Apple calls it HandOff, as in handing off work to someone else or in this case some other machine. Samsung will probably call it OffHand and I rather like that better. But soon enough nobody will call it anything at all because this alchemy will be something normal that everybody uses everywhere.

I’ll also use this new business that if there’s no wifi for your iPad, it will connect to your phone and use that’s 3G or 4G connection. I do this now through tethering and it works fine, but it’s something else to remember to do. Something else to fiddle with instead of just working.

I am very big on not having to fiddle, not having to set up, not have to faff through a Wizard or something, but instead just getting on with the work I want to do.

That’s the big takeaway from this year’s WWDC for me. It’s really why I use and like Macs so that the annual announcement had more of this for both the Macs’ OS X and the iPhone/iPad’s iOS, I like that.

Speaking of iOS 8 and speaking of speaking, the only thing I wanted to see come some day was the ability to just talk to Siri on my iPhone instead of tapping a button first. Got it. The feature – it’s called HeySiri because that’s what you do, you say “Hey, Siri” and I’m not wild about that – will only work when the iPhone is plugged in but that’s fine. I add a lot of reminders to OmniFocus while I’m driving so that’s more than fine, that’s tremendous.

Speaking of more speaking of speaking, I’ve already tried an application that ostensibly let me make and receive phone calls through my Mac. It was rubbish. I regretted spending the money. But the odds are that with it part of OS X Yosemite, Apple will have made it work better. So I’m pre-sold on that one too.

I watched the WWDC video late last night and it was full of many little and large nuggets like this. Many, many times I’d nod thinking yep, I’m having that.

I did look at it from a very specific, biased view of simply what I was interested in and what I thought yep about. Possibly the best general roundup of all that was announced was done over on Wired. Do take a look, would you?

Especially as I did 5am-2am last night and swear to god I can’t remember who I am right now.

Jeff Goldblum and Steve Jobs on connecting to the internet

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Inspired by the video of today’s teenagers reacting to how the internet was in 1990 and also by how today is WWDC day where Apple announces something or other, let me show you two things.

One is the Apple way of getting online back in the olden days:

And then there’s this. This is the Apple announcement in 1999 when Steve Jobs demonstrated wifi. It’s now impossible to imagine there was a time we didn’t have this so, strangely, it’s also impossible to conceive how jolting this Jobs presentation was. As ever, wifi existed before, but as ever, you wouldn’t know it from how no other firm got us using it so completely.