Author: William Gallagher

And under the Surface

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I’m not sold. But the new Surface Pro 3 does address two of my criticisms of the range. Specifically, I’ve always found Surface tablets to be crazily heavy next to my iPad but Microsoft says this week’s new release is lighter.

Then I’ve had more of a jolt seeing the tiny screen. It’s not that small but it’s oddly shaped, it’s shaped like a long widescreen display which is good and is in fact better than the iPad’s, yet it makes any landscape work feel squashed. And you will spend most of your time in landscape because that’s how the Surface likes it. Fine, so do many people, including iPad owners. I’m not one of them, it just feels far more natural to hold and to use iPad in portrait that I resent any pressure to change.

But now the screen is bigger, so that may be fixed too.

It still runs Windows, though, and I don’t see that changing.

Take a look at Microsoft’s product page – and tell yourself to not keep spotting Apple-esque touches on the page – for the full skinny. Prices start at £639 UK, $799 US.

 

It’s about time

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If you possibly can, get some work in radio. What you learn – it doesn’t teach you this yet you inescapably accrue the knowledge and the experience and the feeling – will change how you approach time.

I recently spent time at a BBC radio station and all this came back to me. One of my uttermost favourite things in the world is how radio splits time in your head. Part of you is seeing the minutes of a show roar by so fast yet part of you is also crunched up in panic over how you will fill the next twenty seconds.

You cannot have dead air. I’m not sure if this is still the case but at one point if you were silent for long enough on a radio station, the transmitters switched off. And it takes a long time to get them back on.

Whatever the technical issues, though, you cannot have dead air. Think of all the times television tries to cover up a swearword by dipping the sound. Usually the bleep, sometimes they dip the sound to silent for a second. And when they do, the entire room notices and reacts.

The driving need to keep the show going and to fill the gaps that are coming up ahead of you like Gromit adding train tracks as he goes, it is beyond overwhelming, it is inside you. It is you. I’m sure it’s the same in television and actually it was in my first TV job that I learnt the average speaking rate is three words per second. (In those days video machines needed time to get up to speed so you’d make a mark on the script so many words, therefore so many seconds, before the vision mixer needed to cut to it.)

But I got it from radio so radio is special to me. And alongside that parallel track of slow and fast time, you also get the shape of time.

I do this now in workshops. I think of things like the top and bottom of the hour. I know this is a hard item – hard as in inflexible, it’s a certain length like a video package – and that I need a couple of soft items – live interviews or discussions that you can just end when you need.

What’s more, seeing time this way helps you with everything: you look for the thing you can do now rather than have dead air. You look for the shape of the hour and of the day. Time runs away from us, time catches up with us, but it is our chief resource and we benefit from using it more.

Seriously, it’s the small moves that work

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Seven weeks ago I decided I wanted to try creating an email newsletter for The Blank Screen. Six weeks ago, the first one went out to about ten people. Today the sixth went out to forty.

I’m not saying anything about the quality of the work – though that people are adding themselves to the newsletter is enormously gratifying – but I am saying that it was an idea that became a thing.

It’s now a normal thing. I knew this morning that my day would begin with writing a Self Distract blog as ever, then that I would do the newsletter. Then I’d be off writing an article for someone else and a script for someone else, but the newsletter is a regular, locked-in part of my week now.

There was a moment when I was first bringing The Blank Screen book to the web as this news site that I thought about an email newsletter. But I thought it would be a lot to take on atop everything else. Now it’s just here and it’s normal, it’s what I do.

It’s fun and it’s hard and to make it worthwhile anyone reading it takes planning and writing effort but I know I will do it every week. I suppose it takes discipline but it doesn’t seem that way now I’ve started and it’s running. It feels more like momentum.

I think creating new things is often like an engine: it takes a huge amount of energy to start – it literally takes an explosion – but then once it’s running, it keeps on going very easily.

I thought about this today just because I mentioned to someone that this morning’s newsletter was the sixth and I stopped mid-syllable. It can’t be six weeks, can it? Six editions? Already?

The thing I’m taking away from this is that you can do new things and you can enjoy them, you just have to start.

In this week’s newsletter (23 May 2014)

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The sixth weekly email newsletter from The Blank Screen was sent out this morning. How did it get to be six already? Here’s just a sample of what it includes:

  • The only true productive lesson you can get from sport
  • How to exploit your kids to get time away from your screens
  • The cure for “Shit Writing Syndrome”

Plus, of course, the release of the new OmniFocus 2 for Mac. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. I’ve bought it and in the newsletter show you why with videos from the Omni Group.

Read more in this week’s The Blank Screen email newsletter.

And sign up to get it emailed right to you every Friday.

Travel Bits

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As part of coping with email, The Blank Screen advocates having just an inbox, an archive and a Follow-Up mailbox. I do this. Except I also have a Travel Bits mailbox.

It’s called that because I set it up years ago in order to handle all the train and plane and coach tickets I have to use. Over time, it’s also become where I keep theatre tickets.

These days all significant travel, every journey that would warrant keeping details for, is kept in TripIt. (It’s When an App Fails that you Realise How Much you Like It – 14 May 2014.)

Yet I still move ticket emails to Travel Bits. That’s because some services like National Express seem to get a bit twitchy when you try anything but their own layout. Points to them for having e-tickets and allowing you to wave a phone at them, but it would be nice to just rattle off a serial number straight out of TripIt.

I’ve yet to find a good spot for theatre or any event tickets, though. Any ideas? I use EventBrite for some things, Passbook for others, but my trust Travel Bits mailbox for everything.

If you know a kind of TripIt for events, please do tip me off.

Creativity isn’t a separate deal

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Education gets so focused on exams that it becomes siloed into specifically what gets examined and when. There is less learning for the sake of learning and there is an inherent assumption that subjects are different to each other. There is then an assumption the creativity is something that gets labelled as a subject to be handled on its own.

So many of our gut thoughts about creativity are not true. You can be creative in math and science. Creativity can be integrated into the classroom experience. Creativity is not simply another word for “arts and crafts.”

The Dangers of Creativity Advocates – The Creativity Post

The Creativity Post’s full article is about how championing creativity is a good and great thing yet it can damage us too.

Don’t plan a career, concentrate on now

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You can’t figure out the future. Even young people who have a plan (be a doctor, lawyer, research scientist, singer) don’t really know what will happen. If they have any certainty at all, they’re a bit deluded. Life doesn’t go according to plan, and while a few people might do exactly what they set out to do, you never know if you’re one of those. Other things come along to change you, to change your opportunities, to change the world. The jobs of working at Google, Amazon or Twitter, for example, didn’t exist when I was a teen-ager. Neither did the job of Zen Habits blogger.

So if you can’t figure out the future, what do you do? Don’t focus on the future. Focus on what you can do right now that will be good no matter what the future brings. Make stuff. Build stuff. Learn skills. Go on adventures. Make friends. These things will help in any future.

Leo Babauta – Zen Habits

Via 99U

The best To Do apps for your phone

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I’ve said this from the start of The Blank Screen:

If you have a phone that can run a To Do app, get a To Do app

and

If you haven’t got a phone that can run a To Do app, get a phone that can

The reason is that you need your list with you everywhere and Post-It notes can’t cut it. It’s possible to lose them, it’s impossible not to end up with dozens of the wretched things.

Whereas a phone is part of you and moreover, any task you enter on that phone should then be everywhere. It depends on the app and the phone but, for instance, I’ll dictate a To Do task into my iPhone while I drive and know – know – that it is immediately on my office Mac and immediately on my iPad.

What I’ve been adding in lately is a list of specific recommendations. I can’t recommend phones, I know nothing about Android and if I said an iPhone 5something then you know the iPhone 6 would come out immediately.

But software, I can recommend.

Google any one of the following to find every possible detail plus oodles of reviews – plus in most cases, YouTube videos showing them in action.

For iPhone users

OmniFocus
Reminders (Apple’s own, you’ve already got this)
Appigo Todo
Clear
Wunderlist

For Android users

Any.do
Wunderlist
Todoist

Windows Phone

Sorry, I truly have no clue here and it is not for want of trying. You’ll be astonished how many Windows Phone articles there are about productivity apps which explicitly say they feature To Do software but then don’t. If you know a great Windows Phone To Do task manager, would you tip me off, please? I’m on wg@williamgallagher.com

Breaking – OmniFocus 2 for Mac releasing today

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More details as soon as it’s out – give me five seconds to go buy it myself then I’ll get right back to you – but the new OmniFocus 2 for Mac is being released today. It’ll be on the Mac App Store but get it from the maker instead, the Omni Group at www.omnigroup.com.

It’s coming out at 9am PDT which I reckon is about 5pm BST but I wouldn’t count on my maths even when I’m not excited.

That sounds strange, even to my ears: the idea of being excited about software. Yet the only real surprise to me is that I am this thrilled when I’ve already been using the beta version for months.

But I’ve used that beta on the Mac for those months, I used the previous version 1 on the Mac for a year or more, and there hasn’t been a day – sometimes not even an hour – that I haven’t used OmniFocus for iPhone or iPad in about two years.

I’m particularly glad about today’s launch because I’m running a full-day workshop of The Blank Screen today for the Federation of Entertainment Unions – the Writers’ Guild, NUJ, Equity and Musicians’ Guild – and this will come up. OmniFocus always comes up, the company couldn’t get more adverts from me if they paid, but I have been hesitating in every single The Blank Screen workshop. That’s partly because OmniFocus only runs on Apple gear; if it were on PCs and Android too, I’d be trying to distribute copies.

But the other reason has been that the Mac version was hugely powerful yet very hard to use. You don’t often hear that said about Mac software, but it was. So I used to be torn over recommending it, especially as it’s expensive.

Now I can tell you from experience that the new OmniFocus 2 for Mac is much easier. There’s still a lot to it but it makes sense and it works how you will expect.

There’s just one more thing. It used to be that the iPad version of OmniFocus was the best of three but now the Mac one is coming out and we’ve had a revamped iPhone one for a few months. Today I’d say the Mac version is the best.

But the company confirms a revamped iPad one is coming so the dance begins again.

Not just one inspirational video but five and a bit

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I never used to pay much attention to inspirational videos: I just assumed they all ended with phone numbers for you to buy something or to hand over money for nothing anyway. YouTube is changing that but I am still resistant – except when it comes to commencement lectures. Brainpickings.org has collected five such videos and an extra similar one in a set that is particularly strong.

The featured speakers are Ellen Degeneres, Aaron Sorkin, David Foster Wallace, President Obama, Conan O’Brien and (the extra one) Ray Bradbury.

It’s hard to pick but I think my favourite is Ellen Degeneres’ which goes thisaway:

But watch the lot over on Brainpickings.