Author: William Gallagher

More good stuff from iOS 8

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It’s the update that keeps on giving little gorgeous details. This is a favourite of the less-obvious ones: iOS 8 gives you a bit of a nudge about what’s using your phone’s location-aware feature. Often you need that, more often you don’t.

It’s funny how many apps want to use your current location, it’s as if the developers fancied trying it out because it was new. The result is that every app seems to ask you to allow it to keep tabs on your location and over time you say yes enough that it becomes a long list.

Which eats into your battery power because they all keep yelling “are we there yet?” at the phone.

Now iOS 8 will nudge you. Just occasionally and just the odd app at a time. But when it happens, you get this. (And I said yes to this one.)

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Facebook sure loves your iPhone’s battery

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Previously… the Facebook app was shown to be a bugger for sapping your iPhone battery for no damn good reason. It’s still doing it. Ever since learning that about the app, I’ve had a habit of killing it each time I come out.

To be fair, I also kill it because I’ve had people believe I was online when I wasn’t. They got quite ratty.

So that was two good reasons to force-quit the Facebook app and I did, I do, I will. I’ll just avoid using it much more now.

Because of iOS 8’s great new feature that tells you what’s eating your battery time. Look at this. And tell me I really used Facebook five times more than I did OmniFocus yesterday.

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What a productivity app developer does when not productive

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Take a read of this on Reddit. Those very words – actually, that very word
Reddit – should tell that it won’t be an easy read. Not because of anything actually harsh or hard in the piece, but because it’s on Reddit. Looks very ugly but it’s worth it for pieces like this:

Lately, I’ve been stressed out and find myself caught in a bad, unproductive cycle: I’m tired so I can’t work. But I’m stressed out so I can’t sleep. I wake up tired, only to realize I’m going to waste another day. This has been going on for some x weeks — maybe more.

This isn’t normal for me: I write productivity apps, and I (like to think) I really know my stuff. If you ask me about a common problem about productivity, I probably know how to solve it because I’ve probably suffered from it in the past.

I’m writing this down because I need to follow my own advice. Maybe you need to hear it too. If you don’t need this now, that’s fine. We go through phases in life. I probably didn’t need to hear this 6 months ago.

If you’re stressed out and got caught in a unproductive cycle, here’s something that might help. (self.productivity) – Reddit (20 September 2014)

Read the short but full piece on Reddit.

Yeah, yeah, anyone can be creative

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Wall Street Journal, noted bastion of the arts and rumoured to be the inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, has done one of those How to Be Creative articles. It’s called How to Be Creative:

The image of the ‘creative type’ is a myth. Jonah Lehrer on why anyone can innovate—and why a hot shower, a cold beer or a trip to your colleague’s desk might be the key to your next big idea.

How to Be Creative – Jonah Lehrer, Wall Street Journal (12 March 2012)

Another tug of the forelock, this time for 99U. Anybody can be creative, but they’re not. Says I. Lehrer, not so much:

…creativity is not magic, and there’s no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It’s a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it. New research is shedding light on what allows people to develop world-changing products and to solve the toughest problems. A surprisingly concrete set of lessons has emerged about what creativity is.

The full feature goes on to list exactly what you have to do in order to be creative. Please follow the instructions and let me know when your symphony is read.

I’m minded of Community, the comedy. In one episode, there’s a mobile phone app that you use to rate everyone else. Rather than stars or ticks, these ratings are called meowmeowbeenz. And Abed, an Aspergers’ character says at one point:

Meowmeowbeenz takes everything subjective and unspoken about human interaction and reduces it to explicit, objective numbers. I’ve never felt more alive.

Go read the full piece and let me know if you rate it two or more meowmeowbeenz.

Nobody knows how to make a can of Coke either

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The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all. Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead — the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space. Coca-Cola did not teach the world to sing, no matter what its commercials suggest, yet every can of Coke contains humanity’s choir.

What Coke Contains – Kevin Ashton, Medium (27 February 2013)

I would recommend the full piece to you regardless because it is a very interesting read. But I think there is a thought here that applies to us as writers.

Nobody knows how to make drama. The number of individuals who know how to make a TV series is zero. We all have to work together and it uses all of everything we know.

I’m serious but you’re looking at me like I’m trying to contort a metaphor. I’m not saying you’re right, but go on, go read the full feature instead. And as you go along, take a guess how many cans of Coke are made every day.

Tug of the cap to The Loop for covering this.

Ideas have their time

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I’m working toward various BBC Radio proposals – you get to submit them via producers in what’s called the offers round at certain times of the year – and I’ve done this a lot. The proposals. A lot. I mean, a lot. Quite often an idea will go very far through the process before it becomes clear it isn’t going to fly.

That’s not for any bad reason, it would often enough be that the BBC released notes on what they specifically didn’t want this time around and an idea or two of mine might be exactly one of those. Even then, the usual reason BBC Radio doesn’t want a certain type of idea is that they’ve just done too many of them. But like anything else you do a lot of, you keep doing a lot of them because they work. So sooner or later, they’ll be asking for exactly that type again.

But.

Usually when it’s been suggested that I bump an idea back to next time, whenever next time is, I’ve mentally regarded that as a rejection. I’m not being pessimistic or self-immolating about it, I think it’s factual. Because ideas go stale.

You have a finite time in which the idea is viable and exciting to you. After that, you’re at least struggling to get back the passion or you’re not even struggling, you’re just pretending.

Plus, I think that even the producer who says – and means – to bring it back next time will often not use it then for much the same reason. They’ve got their plate full of new ideas, one from last time will just seem stale.

There are exceptions. I’m involved in one right now. We’ll see how it goes but I’m into it with a passion.

But. Presume that this isn’t going to happen to you, so that you can the better enjoy it when it does. If you have an idea you want to write, write it while you still want to.

Or to put it another way, get on with it.

Data loss in 1Password: check your database is syncing

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Yesterday I found that 1Password had lost a login and passcode I needed. It’s been confirmed by Agile Bits and the short solution is that you need to recheck that it is syncing the way you told it to, using the service you chose.

I’d chosen Dropbox and at some point there was an upgrade to 1Password which switched that off without notice. From that point on, my iPhone wasn’t syncing to anywhere. Once that happens, it’s only a question of time. And when the 1Password for iOS 8 upgrade was crashing for me on open, I deleted the app and redownloaded it.

Maybe if I could’ve got far enough into 1Password without a crash, I might have thought to check the syncing options. But you set it once, it’s unfathomable that an upgrade would change a key setting and not notify you.

Nonetheless, that’s what happened. And since my syncing was switched off, every password I added on my iPhone was lost when I deleted the app.

This is what I deduced but here’s Agile Bits’ confirmation:

Yes, there was a version of 1Password 4 that disabled Dropbox sync for some customers and we did not have a system in place to notify customers if/when this happened. Sorry for that!

I am assuming that if you do have 1Password installed somewhere else you didn’t notice the lack of Dropbox syncing, correct? This is entirely feasible if there aren’t that many items being updated and the items being updated are only being used on the device the update was made on.

Yes, when you uninstalled 1Password for iOS the local database was deleted then. All 1Password data would have been deleted then. Again, I am sorry for this having happened.

Agile Bits support email – 20 September 2014

I’ve said before that 1Password is superbly, even astonishingly great in every single way bar upgrades. The company really falls over on upgrades: the move to iOS 8 causing so many crashes is minor compared to the alchemy one had to go through moving from 1Password 3 to 4.

But this is the first time it has ever lost passwords for me.

And I say passwords, plural, because the odds are that this is the case. There is simply no way for me to know how many other passwords I’ve lost or what they are.

I understand that there is bugger-all Agile Bits can do now but they’re wrong that there was nothing they could’ve done. They could’ve triggered a prompt for all users to check whether they had the fault, they could’ve even just publicised the fact that it had happened.

They could also have deleted their boilerplate last line in the email which reads:

Have a great weekend and please let us know if we can be of further assistance.

A lie can go viral before the truth can get the sniffles

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Earlier today it was reported that a guy who bought the first iPhone 6 in Australia dropped and smashed it. Specifically, the story was that it dropped as he opened up the box for a reporter. Sure enough, this is the video showing it happening:

But that was the reporter recapping what happened in a previous segment. Here’s the previous segment and – spoiler – this one doesn’t cut off. And in this one the iPhone appears to be fine.