Author: William Gallagher

How to use OmniFocus when you have to use Windows

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I was saying this just last Thursday: if OmniFocus ran on Windows and Android as well as Macs and iOS, I’d just wear an OmniFocus teeshirt and point at my chest when asked how to be more productive. But it doesn’t and, besides, I like talking. So instead I ask you what computer and phone you’re on and if it’s the right answer, I tell you about this gorgeous and transformative software. And if it isn’t, I go um.

Here’s a group that didn’t stop at um. This is Asian Efficiency:

A lot of OmniFocus Premium Posts customers and OmniFocus users have been emailing us with one of their biggest challenges: they love OmniFocus but are forced to use Windows at work. What to do?

Well…you actually have a lot of options. Some workarounds are limited while others can make your workflow seamless. It really depends on the IT restrictions at work (firewall, forbidden web services, policies, etc) and how flexible you are.

None of these solutions are close to ideal (the best solution is to use a Mac at work) but some come pretty close. Some fixes only allow you to send stuff to OmniFocus (which is good enough for some people) whereas others want to use OmniFocus as their preferred task manager.

Just pick and choose the option that works for you. With that said, here are seven options available to you.

How to Integrate OmniFocus When You Have to Use Windows at Work – Thanh Pham, Asian Efficiency (25 October 2014)

Read the full piece. I like very much that they’re upfront with how there is no magic option, I like how this isn’t written as if they’ve found the solution. It’s written baldly and starkly: there is no great answer, there is just this way of coping when you have to.

Do read that full piece and check out Asian Efficiency. The site has various options for OmniFocus users where you can buy some of their help.

Exhausted. My Inkspill writing retreat contribution now available online

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All afternoon I’ve been involved in Inkspill and I can relax now. But if you missed my sessions, if you’ve missed the whole Inkspill phenomenon, you can now get the lot online in one go. Hey, if you caught it and liked it all, you can go get it again. It’s just as good the second time.

Here’s what my afternoon looked like on Inkspill:

An Afternoon with William Gallagher – Guest Writer

15: 00 A Video From our Guest Writer William Gallagher

How to Get Rejected
16:00

Making Time to Write
16:30

Writing Doctor Who
17:00

What You get from Writing
17:30

Tomorrow is being run by writers Charlie Jordan and Heather Wastie and the whole Inkspill shebang is by poet Nina Lewis. Read about it all on the official Inkspill Writing Retreat site.

Did I mention that it’s free?

What customers? US store chain fights Apple Pay

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I’m not that interested in Apple Pay – a system by which you wave your iPhone at a cash register and have paid for your goods and services – because it isn’t in the UK yet. And also this is the latest of several so-called contactless payment systems and I’m just used to standing in queues behind people making rather a lot of contact as they bang their devices onto shops’ own devices. I mean bang. Loud enough to cover the swearing.

But Apple Pay went live recently in the States and it has two advantages. First, there are a lot of iPhones, this isn’t like trying to light a revolution with an Amazon Fire phone.

Second, it’s got Apple. And the company’s stated aim was to start with the idea of what makes this useful for customers rather than businesses. That sounds like bollocks: this is a gigantic company claiming to be on the side of the individual, the little person, yeah. Only, this is the firm that did the iTunes Store. Now, not everyone likes that but it was so easy to use for customers that it more-or-less, near-as-dammit killed off pirate stores for most people. There is still piracy and still people finding ways to get music that hurts artists and is a bag of spanners over the head to morality, but before iTunes, it was all you could do.

Come iTunes, come a lot of people paying a lot of money. And yes, Apple gets a massive cut. So you can easily, readily see why other firms are unhappy about this. But you can also see the result. Many film studios got together to make a rival to your buying films off the iTunes Store. It’s called Ultraviolet, which is just a meaningless name and it’d be great if that were the only problem.

The only real problem is that these firms aren’t even pretending to be in it for us. For a group with a completely legitimate reason to want to do without Apple, they don’t even seem to be able to get along with each other. This varies and in small ways improves, but it has been the case that to watch a film on Ultraviolet, you had to sign up to an Ultraviolet account. So far, so familiar and so identical to Apple and its iTunes Store. But remember that you go to this to buy a film, one film, and typically you get there because the shiny disc version you bought comes with a redemption code. Okay, so you expect to enter that code and you expect to sign up to the service but you don’t expect to have to sign up again. And, the first time I tried this some years ago, again. There were three separate signups in the process.

Translation: these firms won’t even share their sodding databases.

That’s a group that gets along, that’s a group that is going to stay together. And that’s not a group that is going to agree on anything technical like the ability to get the films to work.

Seriously. You start this process, you begin thinking you’re doing something wrong, you eventually twig how stupid it is yet you’re invested now, you’ve spent a lot of time logging on and it becomes like a crossword puzzle where sheer determination to finish gets you to the end. The first time I did this, I got there, I got it working, and I couldn’t watch my film. Physically could not get it to play.

The second time, I couldn’t even find my film.

All that effort for one movie and when I got to it, it was hidden. As a customer, what I want when I go to buy a specific movie is to see all other films but that one first.

This was the Veronica Mars movie and if you’re not feeling the rant yet, let me give you three facts. The day I heard Veronica Mars would be distributed on Ultraviolet, I knew I’d buy it off iTunes instead. I backed Veronica Mars on Kickstarter so I got a free copy of the film on Ultraviolet and I still bought it off iTunes. Spent money again because I could not get Ultraviolet to work.

And here’s fact number three: Warner Bros, distributors of Veronica Mars, sent me a refund for my iTunes purchase.

So they spent all that effort, all that money, setting up an online store and because it fails to work, they end up spending more money to pay customers for the inconvenience.

Here’s the thing.

We’re going to get it again.

With Apple Pay.

There are companies in the States do not want to work with Apple and, as ever, that makes total sense. But it already looks likely that they’re going to cock it up because they already have. If you were in the States and had an Apple Pay iPhone, you’ve been able to pay for your shopping at CVS, a pharmacy chain. You’ve been able to not because CVS decided to support Apple Pay but because it long ago decided to support Google’s fairly failed rival, Google Wallet.

Both systems use technology called Near Field Communications (NFC): the phone and the cash register have to be near to each other. CVS has the equipment and now they have two phone systems that will work with it, but it looks like this phone-based payment thing is taking off, it looks like customers are taking to it.

So CVS appears to have shut it down for them.

It now appears that fellow major pharmacy chain CVS is… shutting down the NFC functionality of its payment terminals entirely, a move presumably intended to thwart Apple Pay. Google Wallet services are obviously also being affected by the move.

Multiple reports on Twitter and the MacRumors forums have indicated that CVS has sent an email to its stores indicating that NFC support is to be turned off. It is still relatively early in the day in the U.S., but we are now starting to see reports of NFC indeed being turned off at CVS stores.

The reason behind Rite Aid’s and CVS’s moves to disable unofficial Apple Pay support in their stores is presumably related to their participation in Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), a retailer group developing its own mobile payments system known as CurrentC. A claimed internal Rite Aid message shared with SlashGear supports this notion, instructing cashiers to explain to customers that Apple Pay is not supported but that MCX’s solution will be available next year.

CVS Stores Reportedly Disabling NFC to Shut Down Apple Pay and Google Wallet – Eric Slivka, MacRumours (25 October 2014)

They haven’t even got their alternative working.

I like Apple and at least in part because they make things that work. I’d rather a world where there were many companies doing things that work, I’m strange like that, but for God’s sake, choosing to stop your customers paying you money is a bit thick.

Starting now – Inkspill online writing retreat

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Welcome to INKSPILL 2014, here is the programme of what’s coming up over the weekend. Remember you can follow in real time (GMT) or just dip in at your leisure.

If you are currently working on a writing project or preparing for NaNoWriMo, then gather your notes and start by giving yourself some time to write.

INKSPILL 2014 – Programme of Events | awritersfountain

I’m one of the contributors to this and my bits are on this afternoon. But read the whole programme and get writing, okay?

Oh, I’m having this: an interactive guide to saving phone battery life

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Wall Huggers we’re called and wall huggers we are. Mind you, before mobile phones I was always developing that second sense that tells you where you are most likely to find a mains socket. But for those times when you can’t plug in to an outlet, there is now this:

This interactive guide shows you how to make the most of your phone’s ​battery life. Just choose the make and model of your phone from the drop-down menu and learn how to stay juiced.

How To Save Your Smartphone’s Battery Life – (no author listed, it must be Don’t List Writers Day), Digg (24 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

Okay, I’ll bite: the organisational habits of highly successful people

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I’m intrigued, cautiously intrigued. (I type that and my heads it in a Bond, James Bond voice. Let’s find out whether highly successful people do this.)

Setting goals, both short and long-term, is one of the simplest ways that highly successful people maintain focus and direction in whatever they do. Take the example of Oprah Winfrey, whose success has been defined by setting multiple goals.
In addition to setting their sights high, highly successful people incorporate deadlines and due dates into the structure of their goals. This ensures their short term goals are met regularly, and long term goals are worked towards steadily and methodically.

The Journl Blog – Inspiring Better Organisation – no author listed (what is it with not listing writers?) (24 October 2012)

Read the full piece with lots of quotes from the aforementioned highly successful people. I’ll leave you to see what they quoted from me.

The case for ditching Microsoft Office if you have a Mac

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Well, I think this is part of the case. It’s a fine enough argument but maybe it’s not stating anything new: Apple’s Pages, Numbers and especially Keynote are in many ways better than Microsoft Word, Excel and especially PowerPoint. For better, I don’t just mean free or that they are installed when you buy a new Mac, I mean actually better.

That’s an easy claim to make when one’s work is not stretching the limits of what word processing, spreadsheets or presentations are doing. Except Keynote vs PowerPoint. That’s a separate argument, less because Keynote is as good as it is and more because PowerPoint isn’t.

But it’s this kind of more-complex, depends-on-your-needs argument that maybe this article from Apple Gazette lacks. But for an otherwise good laying out of the situation, take a look:

For years, Microsoft Office has been the gold standard for productivity software for business. If you took an inventory of the applications on most computers used in the corporate environment, chances are you’d find some version of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel installed on the majority of hard drives. MS Office has gotten so ubiquitous in fact, that it is installed on more than 85% of business workstations worldwide, making it as dominant in the productivity software space as Window is amongst operating systems. Fortunately, Apple has created a viable alternative to Office in the form of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, collectively known as iWork. These apps provide most of the same functionality as Microsoft’s software, but with the simplicity and ease of use that we expect from an Apple product. Here’s iWork is the better software solution for Mac users.

Why Apple’s Productivity Apps Should Replace Microsoft Office for Mac Users – (no byline), Apple Gazette (24 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

OmniFocus tips from The Sweet Setup

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This is good.

We picked OmniFocus as our favorite GTD app earlier this week, and we wanted to share some our favorite and most-used tips on this powerful suite of apps. Several of us here at The Sweet Setup have been using Omnifocus for the past 4-5 years, so we’ve seen it come a long way since then.

Below you’ll find a few tips and resources to help you get the most out of the app.

Mail Drop
The OmniFocus Mail Drop feature launched back in late 2013. It allows you to send emails into your OmniFocus inbox from any email client.

I used this quite a bit while I was traveling on vacation recently. As work emails came in that needed follow up, I simply forwarded them to my special OmniFocus email address. When I opened OmniFocus, all of those items were in my inbox ready to be processed.

Some of our favorite OmniFocus tips – Bradley Chambers, The Sweet Setup (23 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

Google revamping Gmail

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I know this is just me, but Gmail is confusing. And sometimes even announcements about Gmail confuse me. Such as this one. I read Google’s news about a new email solution called Inbox and it felt like I was swimming in a little ocean of very gorgeously photographed images but not an awful lot of information. I did get that Inbox by Google wants you to include your To Do list in your email and that’s just a bag of spanners waiting to fall on you.

But a lot of smarter people who do like Gmail have been reading that same information and understanding it. Here’s one:

Today, Google unveiled a new email solution called Inbox, which looks like a marriage between Gmail and Google Now. Currently available by invitation only, this new app takes bits from your email like purchase invoices and bank statements and groups them together for fast access. Like Google Now, Inbox adapts to the way you operate, highlighting key pieces of emails like flight plans, photos, documents and upcoming event information.

Google’s new Inbox app is a marriage between Gmail and Google Now (update) | 9to5Mac (22 October 2014)

Read the full piece and let me know what it means.

Thirty years of new resolutions

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Just wow.

When first released in 1984, the Apple Macintosh shipped with a black-and-white 512 x 342 display. Fast forward 30 years to the release of the iMac with Retina 5K display, which ships with a 5,120 x 2,880 display with support for millions of colours. That’s an increase from 175,000 pixels to more than 14.7 million – an 8,400% increase. 80 of the original Macintosh displays fit within a single Retina 5K display1.

The stats are astounding, but to really put things in perspective, take a look at the image below, showing the original Macintosh display overlaid on a promotional image that Apple has been using to showcase the massive size of the new iMac’s display.

The Difference 30 Years Makes: iMac with Retina 5K display vs. the Original Apple Macintosh – Kent Akgungor, Things of Interest (22 October 2014)


Here’s a small version of that image but go read the full piece for a better shot and also an explanation of how it works and why it’s only sort-of true. Read the full piece.