Author: William Gallagher

Wow-ish: Dropbox radically reduces prices

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I still use my free Dropbox account, I’ve just managed to nudge it up from 2Gb of space to 9Gb through a lot of work with offers and deals and referrals. It would be great to have more, it would mean that I could keep everything I do available to me everywhere I go. But the leap from free to paid has been rather big.

Now, not so much.

Dropbox says:

We don’t want you to worry about choosing the right plan or having enough space. So today, we’re simplifying Dropbox Pro to a single plan that stays at $9.99/month, but now comes with 1 TB (1,000 GB) of space.

Introducing More Powerful Dropbox Pro – ChenLi Wang, Dropbox blog (27 August 2014)

That’ll be $99/year. For UK users that’s £7.99/month or £79/year. It is a gigantic drop: previously you had to pay $99 for a year – sorry, you’re thinking that this doesn’t sound much or in any way different? But your money got you 100Gb: you’re now paying less for ten times more space.

But of course what Dropbox doesn’t say is that this is all because of competition from Google and Microsoft.

I don’t fancy Google Drive nor am I interested in Microsoft OneDrive because I’m already committed to Dropbox and like it a lot. I especially don’t want to get into a situation where some of my work is in Dropbox and some of it is in a rival system. That’d just do my head in.

So the fact that the price has dropped this much and the space has gone up this much is very tempting to me.

And yet I’m holding off.

I’m almost embarrassed to tell you why yet you need to know because you should hold off too.

It’s this. In a week or so, Apple will formally announce OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 – and these include iCloud Drive. Both Yosemite and iOS 8 will be free but iCloud Drive will be a Dropbox-like service. So yes, I am waiting to see whether I actually will split my work between Dropbox and another similar service. That’s why it’s embarrassing.

If iCloud Drive is very expensive I won’t do it, but it has the advantage – and this is why I’m even considering it – that it’s iCloud and so works really well with Macs and iOS.

Enough so that it is worth waiting to see what the price is. But after that, Dropbox is on my list.

Wow – TextExpander to radically improve in iOS 8

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Quick version: TextExpander will include a new system-wide keyboard that lets you trigger snippets and thereby expand text.

You’re looking at me like you want the slow version.

First, TextExpander is a utility that is fantastic on Macs and okay on iPhones and iPad. I’ve been working on the new book, Filling the Blank Screen – which is out as an ebook on Friday by the way, paperback next month – and so naturally I have typed that title a lot. I mean, a lot. But when I’m at my Mac, then whether I’m writing the back cover blurb, whether I’m completing a contract, whether I’m discussing the publication in emails, I can just type the letters xftb. Type that and the words “Filling the Blank Screen” are entered for me.

You can work out what the ftb means in xftb. The letters are up to you and the x is just a good habit to get into: few real words begin with x.

Now, I love typing and I love it so much that I ignored TextExpander for years. But it isn’t just for the odd short sentence: I have a bio snippet that after I type four letters, I get 300 words of biography text. A few times a month I’ll be asked for a bio so I type that snippet and then I edit the result to fit whatever is needed or whoever has asked me.

TextExpander also makes sure you are consistent: I don’t do this myself but there are many people who use it to automatically correct regular typing mistakes. So for instance, I keep mistyping “the” as “hte” (I wonder if that’s a cry of hate coming from my soul, as you do) which means I could set TextExpander to replace ‘hte’ with ‘the’ every time I type.

It’s also great for complex yet repetitive pieces of text: once a week I send a certain email to a certain person and I start it with a TextExpander keystroke. That does fill out the email with lots of detail but it also pauses to ask me for the new bits. I fill out a little form that appears and then TextExpander pops all the new bits into the pre-written email and I just hit send.

This is in all ways great.

When you’re on your Mac.

On the Mac, it works everywhere. On iOS it doesn’t. Apple doesn’t allow anything like this to run everywhere so the makers of TextExpander have to persuade app developers to play nice. Many, many do, but not all and not including Apple. So there’s no TextExpander support in Mail on my iPhone, for instance.

Now, Apple announced that iOS 8 will allow app makers to create keyboards. I did not give a damn. Not a monkey’s, not half a monkey’s, I heard Apple say it and it was out my other ear before they finished the sentence. I am fine with the regular keyboard on my iPhone and iPad, fine.

But now Smile Software, the makers of TextExpander, have announced that they will be one of the app companies providing a new keyboard.

And that keyboard will let you expand TextExpander snippets. Everywhere.

Everywhere.

This is huge and transforming because now you will always be able to use TextExpander. In anything. Anything.

I’m sold. Can’t wait for iOS 8 now. Go take a look at Smile Software’s announcement which includes a video demo.

Don’t touch anything twice

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Get it, see it, do it:

I will adopt the Touch it Once Principle more often, especially when I’m using my smartphone (which makes it oh-so-tempting to simply read emails but not deal with them). I am ok scanning for urgency, but I will only read an email once.

Top 10 Productivity Resolutions – Ann Gomez, Clear Concept Inc (7 January 2014)

That’s actually Gomez’s number ten in a top ten list of productivity tips and I like it already. Read the full piece for the other nine.

Try writing 300 words

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Yeah, yeah, it’s supposed to be a book. Or a play. Or a whatever, something that’s a rather long and daunting job. Just tell yourself that you’re going to write 300 words on it right now:

I use this trick to great effect because I know I can write 300 words, at the same time that I rarely ever just write 300 words. The technique gives me an imminently attainable goal that I have no excuse not to achieve and focuses on the actual starting rather than on the finishing.

The next time you’re either stuck or procrastinating on a writing project, give yourself a goal of writing 300 words on it. (Click to tweet – thanks!)

Procrastinating on a Writing Project? Use the 300-Words Trick – Charlie Gilkey, Productive Flourising (25 August 2014)

Do I want this? LG teases round smart watch

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Short answer, probably no.

LG is soon to unveil a smartwatch and it will be round. That is surprisingly alluring to me, except of course that we’ve seen squared-off watches and we’ve seen bricks around people’s wrists so maybe it’s not surprising.

But what this teaser doesn’t do – well, it doesn’t show you much of the watch at all really, but what else it doesn’t do is acknowledge you’re not going to buy one when you think Apple is about to release a smartwatch.

I’ve no idea if or when Apple will but all the signs point to it and those signs are enough to make me pause before dropping hundreds of pounds (or whatever LG charges) on something else. I do like Apple design so I expect any watch that company does to be deeply thought out and genuinely useful. Probably also expensive. But I’d rather spend a lot of cash on something good than a little less cash on something that isn’t.

But I’ll be looking to see what LG does with this.

Google Slides

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Sounds like a headline about something bad happening to the company. But where Microsoft has PowerPoint and Apple has Keynote, so Google now has Slides. It’s a presentation application and it came to the iOS App Store today:

Google Slides makes your ideas shine with a variety of presentation themes, thousands of fonts, embedded video, animations, and more. All for free.

With Google Slides, everyone can work together in the same presentation at the same time.

All your changes are automatically saved as you type. You can even use revision history to see old versions of the same presentation, sorted by date and who made the change.

Google Slides official site

Go take a look at the free app.

MacPowerUsers: How and whether to use a To Do app

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This is really more an iOS thing than a Mac one and there is a spot of Android-osity in it too, but this week’s edition of the MacPowerUsers podcast is all about whether you actually need a To Do app.

Spoiler: you probably do.

But not definitely.

Listen to David Sparks and Katie Floyd discuss the topic and if you don’t use a task manager app, you might feel good about it. If you do, you might learn something. And if you’re in between, if you’re looking to use an app but don’t know which of the myriad ones available, you’ll certainly learn a lot.

MacPowerUsers episode 210: Task Management

Video: using Apple’s Reminders app

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It’s not the most powerful To Do task manager around but it is free and it did introduce the whole idea of location reminders. Oh, how I love those: “Remind me to go to the supermarket when I leave here”. Wonderful.

But I use that feature via OmniFocus, which ties in to it, rather than in Reminders itself. So I’m not a big Reminders user but here’s someone who is:

Tutorial- Reminders App from cmarcotte on Vimeo.

Bank Holiday Weekend read: The New Yorker on the Hanx Writer

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If you have an iPad and you like typewriters, you heard of the Hanx Writer last week and are highly likely to have downloaded it.

Now read more about the origins of it on The New Yorker which muses fondly about the app, about co-creator Tom Hanks’s previous op-ed pieces about typewriters for the magazine, and more.

Put your feet up with a biscuit and a mug of tea here.