Author: William Gallagher

Overwhelming technology and how to shrug about it

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A friend posted this on Facebook today:

Dropbox, We Transfer, #, twitter, UHDTV, Clouds, uploads, downloads, TECHNOLOGY OVERLOAD!!!!!!!! Not a bloomin clue.

I want to tell you what I told her, just in more detail and hopefully more usefully.

Here’s the thing. If I work this out on my fingers – hang on, you should always show your working out. Okay. Today I have used…

Drafts 4, Mail, Word, Pages, Evernote, OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, Awesome Clock, TextExpander, Calendar, Fantastical, MailChimp, Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, WordPress, Safari, iTunes, live-streaming radio, Podcasts, iCloud, OmniPresence, Dropbox and probably more.

That’s nice. But I only know that because you asked me. If you’d just said oi, what have you done today, I wouldn’t have thought to mention the tech, I’d have said:

It’s been a good day. I wrote about 3,000 words.

There was an interesting profile of Jonny Ive in Vogue the other day that touched on how we feel about technology:

In 1985, the year [Steve] Jobs was forced out of Apple, Jony Ive was in design school in England, struggling with computers, blaming himself. “Isn’t that curious?” he says now. “Because if you tasted some food that you didn’t think tasted right, you would assume that the food was wrong. But for some reason, it’s part of the human condition that if we struggle to use something, we assume that the problem resides with us.”

A Rare Look at Apple’s Design Genius Jony Ive — Robert Sullivan, Vogue (1 October 2014)

I’ve seen this. I’ve had people wail down the phone, convinced they had a virus because actually Word did something to their text. And I think you can see the same assumptions in my friend’s Facebook post there: “not a bloomin’ clue” is there synonymous with her feeling she should, wondering how people do and, if I can put thoughts into her head, maybe even resentment that she has to deal with all this stuff.

Look at my day. I didn’t get up thinking oooh, I’ll start with Drafts 4. I thought god, I’m late writing this piece and have to get it done before I can do that. If I did get up thinking, right, I’ll use Drafts 4, I don’t think I’d be a writer, I’d be someone who likes fiddling with technology.

Plenty do, plenty of people enjoy the intellectual challenge of getting Windows to work, and that’s cool but I think that’s a hobby. I think that’s the tech being someone’s aim and interest where I and I suggest my friend there are more interested in our work. It happens that I use a lot of tech to do mine and she would rather not.

I enjoy these tools and I can’t make my friend do that but I can tell her to shrug. If you’re not using twitter, so what? If you are using OmniFocus, cool. If you are using Windows, we can get you the help you so badly need.

You will never learn how to use anything by sitting there with a manual in your hand and a song in your heart. You will learn how to use everything when you have a need for it. You want to get a huge file to someone, you’ll see how to use Dropbox. You want to take minute and have a chat but you’re working alone, you’ll find Twitter. You want to waste your life and become aggravated to the point of coronary, you’ll buy a PC.

I believe this and I know it to be true: you learn from necessity and you learn a lot, you learn everything. I would now say I know Photoshop well but it’s from fifteen years of needing to use it to do the smallest, tiniest things. There was a tiny, trivial, even tedious little task at the Radio Times website that meant someone had to use Adobe InDesign: I did it because it meant once a week for two years I was using InDesign to find more and more.

InDesign is a big, daunting application but that weekly dose of it was far more useful than a lesson would’ve been. Enough so that I later got a freelance gig specifically because I knew how to use InDesign.

So don’t study, don’t look at this as opportunity to learn or a requirement to catch up, just do your job. Maybe you could keep an ear out for tech that helps you because I promise it transforms my work. But in principle, shrug. Alright?

Here it is: the novella-length review of OS X Yosemite

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You know whether you’re going to read this or not. Each time Apple releases a new operating system, John Siracusa reviews it at length. Specifically, at novella length. Typically he takes 40,000 words to say what Apple’s heavily illustrated web page does.

But Siracusa is not Apple and Siracusa is also serious. This time out, he practically leads with a complaint:

For the most part, a new look for an operating system doesn’t need to justify itself. It’s fashion. We all want something new every once in a while. It just needs to look good. But things start to get complicated when fashion butts heads with usability—then we want reasons.

OS X 10.10 Yosemite: The Ars Technica Review –John Siracusa, Ars Technica (16 October 2014)

Do read the full piece. As ever, it is very interesting and really well done. I would rather that it didn’t come on 25 pages as it feels like that’s done just to get 25 clicks out of you, but as an article and as a read, it is excellent.

How to fix problems updating 1Password (yet again)

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I enthuse about 1Password all the time and there genuinely isn’t a day and possibly not even a couple of hours that don’t see me using it. But allow me this one grumble because it’s infuriating: there simply is never a 1Password update that works the way it should.

Previously I’ve written about how I’ve lost passwords because of 1Password bugs: an update changed a setting and makers Agile Bits didn’t mention it until I complained. Previously I’ve not written about the teeth-pulling that went on using 1Password 4’s automatic updater from version 3 that was so automatic you couldn’t do it manually and yet you really wanted to because it wasn’t updating automatically. I didn’t write about that because we weren’t here: that was pre-The Blank Screen.

Now is that 1Password will prompt you for a free update to version 5 and it will give you a detailed software update screen that tells you what extra goodies you’re getting. But when it fails to update, you have to go hunting through the Agile Bits support page until you find a bit that says yeah, that can be a problem, you need to re-download the application before the updater can work.

Even then, even now, my Mac has just popped up a 1Password warning. I downloaded the application and was going to move it to my Applications folder to overwrite the old one but didn’t get a chance. It launched itself and gave me a warning that it was launching from my Downloads folder, did I surely not want to move it to Applications? Why yes, I did. It moved itself, which is nice, but it didn’t replace the old one.

So right now I have a fairly plaintive error message saying “Please make sure you have only one copy of 1Password on your Mac.”

Tomorrow I will love 1Password again. But today and every day that there is a big update, I’m close to wishing I please had no copies of 1Password on my Mac.

For when you still quietly fancy the Moto 360 round smartwatch

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It does look very nice.

But:

I’ve spent the last seven days with Motorola’s smartwatch strapped to my wrist, recharging it every night at around 10PM and re-equipping it immediately upon crawling out of bed. I’ve had it synced with my HTC One (M8) the entire time.

My experience over the past week has taught me a lot about the future of smartwatches, the importance of intuitive software on a tiny device, and all the ways Apple could make just about every other smartwatch — including my new Moto 360 — look like a joke

What a week with the Moto 360 taught me about the Apple Watch – Mike Wehner, TUAW (14 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

In today’s newsletter… October 10, 2014

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You could just go read it yourself right now. Right here in your browser, here.

And then it would be excellent of you to sign up to get the new issues emailed to you each week.

But let me say here and now that this week’s newsletter includes a serious piece of productivity advice, a very big new tool and a very small new tool, a cautionary tale and also a couple of pieces of entertaining daftness.

How can you not read it after that? Go on.

What I’ll be buying after yesterday’s Apple announcements

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Nothing. That’s no reflection on the new hardware, it is a semantic reflection on how the three things I will take away are all free software. Apple announced OS X Yosemite and I know this is good because I’ve been using it for months.

It’s one of those that, like OS X Mavericks before it and iOS 8 now, you can’t necessarily point to a feature that is overwhelming and an absolute must-have, but you try going back to the iOS 7 or the previous OS X.

Tell a lie. Continuity. I’ve experienced this feature already and it’s going to become normal. Start a message on my iPhone and finish it on my Mac without doing anything in between. Just pop the iPhone down on the desk, if I like, and carry on typing mid-sentence, mid-word on my Mac. Answering calls on the iPad when my iPhone is in another room. Definitely a killer feature.

So much so that if you have a Mac that will run OS X Yosemite, go get it. Available now and free on the Mac App Store.

An update to iOS 8 is also free but coming on Monday. The biggest new feature is Apple Pay and I don’t yet know how that will work here in the UK but for the States, it’s great.

Just to wrap up the three, there are actually two more three free things and Apple calls them all iWork. I honestly don’t know whether anyone else ever uses or remembers that term now as I think of the three parts of iWork as separate things. They’re Pages, the word processor, Numbers, the spreadsheet and Keynote, the presentation software. All very good, now all updated – twice. Once for OS X Yosemite, once for iOS 8.

In late 2012, I think it was the possibility of a Retina-screen iMac that made me look at replacing my ancient Mac Pro. They didn’t bring out a Retina one, not until yesterday, but I am so very happy with the 27in iMac I did buy that I’m not fussed. And I will remain unfussed until I see one in the flesh and covet its screen.

Down at the cheaper end of the Mac line, there is the newly revamped Mac mini. If I were in the market, I’d be looking seriously at that.

Still, who knew that Apple’s advertising line for yesterday’s event would be a gag? “It’s been way too long,” it said, and I don’t know what people expected but not that it was a reference to the iPhone 6 launch a few weeks ago.

Case study part 2: Melissa hits a brick wall

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Previously in part 1… Melissa Dale (not her real name) has never used any kind of To Do list before this week but now her work has ballooned and she’s writing lists “to tame” the job and stop being overwhelmed. She’s got her list and she’s cracking on with it. Now read on.

It’s yesterday afternoon, I’m working away here and this email lands:

From: Melissa.Dale@acme-psuedonym.com
Date: 15 October 2014 13:56:24 BST
To: wg@williamgallagher.com
Subject: RE: Case studies

Number one on my To Do list only just completed! 🙁

Notice the time. She started at 09:00 and this was just before 14:00. That’s getting on for five hours spent on the first of what is an enormous To Do list. I think that when this happens to you, you end up looking at me and saying nuts to all your advice, it clearly isn’t working.

It isn’t.

But on the one hand I think it still will in the end and on the other, I don’t see an alternative. Trying to do her new duties the way she did before is just not going to work. I can admire Melissa for having coped with her job for a long time without To Do lists but in a way that’s hurting her now: she’s not had to be prepared to handle so many new tasks at once. So she’s got these new tasks but she’s also got the task of handling the tasks. That doesn’t go on a list but this doesn’t make it any easier.

We have a slight complication in that Melissa can’t show me her To Do list: there’s too much on there that is confidential. So I’m trying to help her with the theory, it’s down to her to apply it. And that’s fine, that’s really how it ought to be, but Melissa’s in the trenches there and I think she’s going in with a list that isn’t helping her.

To Do lists are dangerous things. If you’re the type of person who just likes To Do list, that’s happy for you. Most of us like having done things and the list is the way to do that, so we like the list’s effect. We’re not OCD-organised list fans. Melissa is certainly not a list fan. But she’s been forced to use one because of the sheer volume of work and the thing with sheer volumes is that they tend to also come with sheer timescales. She has not got the time in her day to step away and concoct a perfect To Do list.

Ordinarily, I’d be glad about that: I want you spending time doing things, not twiddling with lists of things.

In this case, though, she dumped every single thing out of her head and onto the list – so far, so great – and has then immediately begun working through it. Exactly as it is, right in front of her.

I’ve advised her to take a few minutes to look at all of the tasks. Look for ones that belong together or have anything in common. Phone calls, for instance, she’s got plenty of those. Whatever task you’re doing, there is the task itself and there is the run up to and the lead away from: with a phone call it’s perhaps getting a desk or a space where you won’t be interrupted, it’s looking up the number and then after the call it’s noting down what has happened and what tasks have come out of it. If you do the next call tomorrow, it’s exactly the same thing. But if you do the next call right now, it isn’t.

You’ve found your quiet space, you’ve got all your phone numbers, make as many calls as you can in one sitting. Think about all the calls you can make. Every job is divided into many projects – Melissa now has responsibility for different areas of the UK so you might well create a North East list or a South West one – but ignore that division and make as many calls across as many projects as you can. You save a little time before each one by already being there, already being ready, and what’s more you have just attacked your To Do list in many different projects. You’ve pushed them all forward.

Melissa didn’t sound very convinced by this but she’s going to try it. And she’s going to look for the same thing in other areas: can you group all your emails together, for instance? If two tasks on two projects require you to be in the same place in the North East, can you arrange to do both on the same day?

One last thing. One last thing that Melissa wasn’t just unconvinced of but actually gave me that jerk of the head that says yeah, right, sure, a likely story. When she goes through her whole list she will find that there are tasks in there that she doesn’t have to do.

I promised her and I promise you. It is always true. Dump everything out of your head and then work your list: you’ll have done some things already, you’ll be able to group others and there will be yet more that you simply do not have to do.

I’ll tell you how Melissa gets on.

Scrivener updated to play nice with OS X Yosemite

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Apple is expected to at least announce a definite shipping date for the new OS X Yosemite in a few hours and may even do that “available today” tricky the company loves doing. In anticipation of that, the writing platform – I struggle to find a phase for it as it’s much more than a word processor – has been updated to work with the new operating system. It’s also got a couple of twiddles and a temporary stop to your sharing Scrivener documents directly to Facebook and Twitter. Never knew it had that in it.

But then I am a particularly new and light user of Scrivener. Let Bryan Chaffin of The Mac Observer tell you more:

The binary code love of my life—Scrivener—was updated to version 2.6 Thursday morning. The update includes support for OS X 10.10 Yosemite, which Apple is expected to either release later on Thursday during a media event, or announce a release date.

Scrivener is the premier writing environment for the Mac, and it’s aimed at novelists, screenwriters, playwrights, and researchers. The release includes a ton of general bug fixes, as well as a couple of new features specific to Yosemite.

Literature and Latte also included a new import/export option relating to which version of Java gets used, removed Draft, Research, and Trash folder results from searches,and changed the way items dragged to the Binder are viewed.

Lastly, the company said that a 64-bit version of Scrivener was coming in the future. Until that time, Twitter and Facebook sharing services won’t be available in Scrivener in Yosemite.

Scrivener Updated to Support Yosemite – Bryan Chaffin, The Mac Observer (16 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

It sounds like a joke but addiction to Google Glass is real

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Maybe it’s more surprising that anyone has used it enough to get addicted yet. But The Guardian reports of a man who had been wearing one for his job and it’s caused problems:

Scientists have treated a man they believe to be the first patient with internet addiction disorder brought on by overuse of Google Glass.

The man had been using the technology for around 18 hours a day – removing it only to sleep and wash – and complained of feeling irritable and argumentative without the device. In the two months since he bought the device, he had also begun experiencing his dreams as if viewed through the device’s small grey window.

The existence of internet addiction disorder linked to conventional devices such as phones and PCs is hotly debated among psychiatrists. It was not included as a clinical diagnosis in the 2013 update to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official reference guide to the field, and many researchers maintain that its effects are merely symptoms of other psychological problems.

Google Glass user treated for internet addiction caused by the device – Azeen Ghorayshi, The Guardian (14 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

Three UK launches calls without a mobile cell signal

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That quirky underground restaurant. Sitting on the train. Or your friend’s basement flat where you can only get signal if you stick your arm out the window.

On mobile networks, unfortunately there are times when you just can’t seem to get a signal. So we created Three inTouch for our customers – a free app that lets you connect through Wi-Fi even if there’s no mobile signal. Just download and activate.

No signal? No problem with Three inTouch – email, Three (16 October 2014)

All Three users in the UK – wait, that sounds like the company is really unpopular, let me try again. All the doubtlessly millions of people in the UK who use the Three mobile phone company have today been emailed about Three inTouch. This is an iOS and Android app that lets you make phone calls and send texts even when your phone has no signal. At least, when it has no mobile phone signal. It does have to have wifi.

But if you’re in a spot and moreover are in a wifi spot, you will be able to launch the app and get on with calling or texting. Or sexting. I don’t judge. That Three email says it works anywhere in the UK and that the cost of the service is effectively free: a call or text will cost you just whatever it would cost you if you were doing it over a mobile phone signal like 3G or 4G.

Also, when you phone someone this way, it looks and sounds to them like you’re ringing from your normal phone. I’ve made wifi calls before but using Skype; it’s not been the best experience but generally speaking neither is Skype.

If you’re a Three customer, you’ve got or you will soon get the email with details. If you’re not or you’re in a hurry, check out the Three company’s page about it online and go get the free iOS app or free Android app.