Author: William Gallagher

Pardon? Microsoft embracing Dropbox storage

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This removes another block to my using Microsoft Word for iPad. Up to now – and remember that isn’t very long, it’s not a huge time since Word and Office first came to iPad – you have had to use OneDrive for storage. That’s Microsoft’s equivalent of Dropbox and iCloud and it’s convenient if you’re an Office 365 subscriber. If you’re not, it isn’t. Not so much. Certainly not as handy as being able to save and open documents directly with Dropbox.

I’d have said Dropbox was an obvious route to go. But I’d also have said Microsoft would never do it. And the result was I never even thought about it enough to write it. So this was a surprise:

Microsoft and Dropbox are teaming up today to more closely integrate Dropbox into Office. The surprise partnership will benefit Dropbox users who use Office across desktop, mobile, and the web as Microsoft’s productivity suite will soon become the standard way to edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files stored on Dropbox storage. Office for iPad will benefit the most, with an update coming in the following weeks that will allow Dropbox users to link their account directly to the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint iPad apps.

Dropbox and Microsoft form surprise partnership for Office integration – Tom Warren, The Verge (4 November 2014)

This isn’t just that you can fiddle your way into sometimes using Dropbox, it is that you can seemingly even choose to skip OneDrive completely.

Now, if only Microsoft would sell a version without an annual subscription. Read the full piece.

That was October 2014…

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Previously… I write this list of what I’ve done in the month. I do it because I used to write a monthly report and had to do things in order to have anything to say. This helped me greatly. So I report to you. Here’s last month’s but here’s the a-little-better October 2014. Not as much writing as I’d have liked but I’m surprised how many events I ran.

Well, I say I ran them. Really everybody else did the work and I just got the best seat in the house, so.

Writing: approximately 58,049 words
Four guest blogs for Inkspill plus scripting and shooting an intro video with writing exercise (2,700 words)
Approximately 10,000 words on new book
Radio Times radio preview of the Free Thinking Festival (100 words)
Wrote poem “My Curse” (100 words or so)
Wrote 128 posts on The Blank Screen (40,610 words)
Wrote 5 posts on Self Distract (4,539)

Events
Produced and chaired Steven Knight event at the BBC Drama Village for the Writers’ Guild and the Royal Television Society
Produced and ran The Blank Screen all-day workshop in Birmingham for the Federation of Entertainment Unions
Attended the Royal Television Society Midlands Awards gala dinner as a drama judge
Ran Burton Young Writers’ group session
Ran a radio writing workshop for South & City College
Performed my short story, The Book Groups, to the Combrook Reading Group
Depped for Polly Wright leading a reader/writer group (second of two)
Met with BBC to discuss general projects plus liaising with RTS and Writers’ Guild
Attended countless events at Birmingham Literature Festival
Attended Ajax, directed by Polly Tisdall in Oxford
Appeared on Poetry Please by way of the Birmingham Literature Festival
Attended Write On Young Writers’ group meeting
Attended Solomon and Marion at the Birmingham Rep (for which I wrote programme notes)
Attended Of Mice and Men at the Birmingham Rep (for which I wrote programme notes)
Attended Cucumber Theater: Sorry to See You Go at the Birmingham Rep (for which I wrote a sentence of the notes)
Interviewed Jo Bell for book
Attended BBC launch of Children’s Chaplains

Pitches:
11 (3 successful)

Other:
Officially made Regional Representative of the Writers’ Guild in the West Midlands
Arts Council funding discussions and meetings
Submitted my first Arts Council England funding application
Created MailChimp account for Cucumber Theater Group and sent their first mailshot
Briefed Cucumber Theatre folk on using Mailchimp and handed over the keys
Was handed the keys to the Royal Television Society Midlands Centre’s social media: have tweeted news for them daily since
Was handed the keys to the Writers’ Guild West Midlands social media; have Facebooked news for them daily since
Devised a new business in a morning, publicised it in the afternoon and got first clients by the evening (The Blank Screen mentoring/coaching)
Worked with Room 204’s Rivka Fine
Graphics work for Cucumber Theatre
Moved The Blank Screen to using Drafts 4 for writing text and Pixelmator for image editing

Is Inbox Zero for Sociopaths?

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No.

The campaign by productivity experts to convince us that all successful people have achieved Inbox Zero is directly at odds with our very human desire and need to stay in touch and sustain our relationships. We need to ask ourselves if the guilt we feel for not having a totally empty inbox is worse than the guilt we feel for treating heartfelt communiqués from those we love as just another task we have to complete.

Which is all to say that you should maybe feel a little horrible for not responding to those long emails. Keep them around until you have time to really respond to them—even if takes months. Jot a brief note to the sender letting them know it might be a while, but you will respond.

Is Inbox Zero for Sociopaths? -Melissa Kirsch, Cafe

Read the full piece.

But, seriously, what? I like – no, I love – long emails, I just don’t see that equals my having to keep them in my inbox. Takes all sorts.

Do something else at 2pm

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Writer JD Arbuckle has a longish piece about studying your habits and rhythms in order to improve your productvity. It’s interesting but this is the bit that grabs me:

Move into a completely different task between 2PM – 3PM. Most people suffer from a mid-afternoon crash during this time. The worst thing you can do during this hour is try to grind through the crash. Instead, head to a local restaurant and meet a friend. Switch into workout clothes and run the lake. Go run errands and pick up groceries. After this break, you will return to finish the rest of your work completely re-energized and focused (If you haven’t already finished everything between 9-2)

5 Strategies for Maintaining Peak Performance Levels – JD Arbuckle, Conquer Today (12 June 2014)

Read the full piece.

How books shape writers in unexpected ways

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Quick: who is this?

just finished “Moby-Dick,” which scared me off for a long time due to the hype of its difficulty. I found it to be a beautiful boy’s adventure story and not that difficult to read. Warning: You will learn more about whales than you have ever wished to know. On the other hand, I never wanted it to end. Also, “Love in the Time of Cholera,” by Gabriel García Márquez. It simply touched on so many aspects of human love.

Who is your favorite novelist of all time, and your favorite novelist writing today?

I like the Russians, the Chekhov short stories, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. I never read any of them until the past four years, and found them to be thoroughly psychologically modern. Personal favorites: “The Brothers Karamazov” and, of course, “Anna Karenina.”

Bruce Springsteen: By the Book – (no author listed), New York Times (2 November 2014)

Bugger. The link there gives it away. That’s Bruce Springsteen listing and discussing the books that shaped and stay with him. I just think it’s interesting how the books you remember are the ones that define you. Read the full piece. And also take a look at Brain Pickings, which spotted this, and would now be on my all-time website reading list.

The praise sandwich is baloney

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You might know this under a different term so let me explain what I mean by praise sandwich. It’s when you have criticism to give a writer and you think it’s going to be pretty bad so you begin with something nice and you end with something encouraging.

The idea is that the little writer believes the praise and is thereby cushioned enough to accept your true criticism. That the poor little writer will learn from you, that you can give them the benefit of your knowledge and do so in such a way that they don’t realise how harsh you’ve really had to be.

Give me strength.

You’re already detecting a certain antagonism from me about this idea so let me nip in quickly with this: no, it hasn’t just happened to me. It’s certainly happened over the years and I think I’ve even been taught to use it too. But I read a piece recently by someone who was advocating it and perhaps because it was couched in a lot of talk about being professional, it narked me.

Because if you actually are a pro, you can smell the praise sandwich from the first bite.

Don’t waste my time with it, don’t insult me with it. If you think you need to give me a praise sandwich, we shouldn’t be working together. We should not be in the same writing group. Good writing groups are so hard to find that I never have. I’ve long since given up trying, though I did have a go with one a few months ago. It wasn’t the right group for me: there was some professional work going on there but not much and at most the writers fed each other praise on toast.

I did too: I ended up talking encouragingly to a writer who will never get her book published. I could tell her why, I had told her why, she just wasn’t ever going to listen. For a simple reason too: she’s not a pro. She’s a reader, not a writer. Usually criticism is just one’s opinion but in this case it was as practical and pragmatic and certain as if she’d told me she was entering a poetry contest and the piece she was submitting was 170,000-word doctoral thesis about trout.

Tell me what good I did her. Tell me what good the praise sandwich I got back was. This was a group that prided itself on being so tough that it could scald the skin off your arms but to me it was kindergarten. It was nap time at kindergarten.

Please, I’m asking you, give me some credit for being a pro and do not use the praise sandwich on me.

US bans Google Glass from cinemas

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Google Glass and other wearable devices are now officially off-limits in the cinema.

On Wednesday, the MPAA and the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) announced an update to their joint policy to prevent film theft in theaters, prohibiting recording by users equipped with Google Glass or other wearables in theaters.

The update “was made to fully integrate wearable tech into the rules following a joint meeting of NATO and MPAA theatrical anti-piracy teams,” the lobbying orgs said. The announcement was made at ShowEast 2014, NATO’s annual industry confab in Hollywood, Fla.

Movie Industry Officially Bans Google Glass, Other Wearable Devices – Todd Spangler, Variety (29 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

Details matter

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Apple pays more attention to the details then anyone else. Sometimes the details they pay attention to are so small, you don’t notice them at all for a long time… but once you see what they’ve done, you can never unsee it, or accept anything less.

Here’s a great example from OS X Yosemite. Compare the two images above. The top is from OS X Yosemite, the bottom from Windows 7. Notice anything? One of these images has much better typography than the other. But can you tell why?

Apple has tweaked the typography in OS X Yosemite so that link underlines skup over the descenders. What’a descender? It’s the little dangling parts on letters, like the tail of the lowercase ‘p’, ‘g’ or ‘y’.

Once you see this small typography tweak Apple made in OS X Yosemite, you can’t unsee it – John Brownlee, Cult of Mac (27 October)

I love this stuff. It’s like the way you can tell when a writer cares or has just knocked a piece out for the cash. Previously I’ve thought this about things like the way Microsoft can’t be bothered to translate all of Windows’ dialogue boxes: you can be working a PC in France and after a few French warnings, there’s an important one in English. I think details matter anyway, always, forever, but when you’re making something that literally millions and millions of people will use and see for eight hours or more every day, details are special.

Read the full piece.

Weekend read: this is the first-ever advert on the internet

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Here it is:

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And now the only answer is no, not deliberately. At least we think we don’t click on banner ads but enough people do that the world keeps moving and has done so for twenty years now. For this is the twentieth anniversary of the web banner ad and if you’re not in the mood to celebrate, read anyway because The Internet History Podcast has a remarkably interesting story.

It begins:

Of course, it’s not *technically* the first banner ad. There was no “one” first banner ad. Instead, there were around 12-14 banners, which all went live 20 years ago today, on October 27th, 1994. That was when the website HotWired.com first launched on the internet.

What follows is the story of the world’s first banner ad (or ads). This topic may not seem like something to celebrate, but think about this:

Basically, the majority of the web and the Internet are subsidized by ads.

The net as we know it today would not exist without ads. There would be no Google search. No Gmail. No Facebook. No Twitter. No Reddit. Nor any website that you can use basically for free…

Without advertising, that is.

Sure, there are huge sections of the Internet that function on a different revenue model (Amazon, eBay, iTunes and other things come to mind) but the vast majority of the online world we love is underpinned by an economic infrastructure of advertising.

This is the story of how that infrastructure was fist built, by the people who conceived and designed the very first banners.

On The 20th Anniversary, An Oral History of the Web’s First Banner Ads – Brian McCulloch, Internet History Podcast (27 October 2014)

Read the full piece where you can also listen to the podcast version.