Deals

Grab this now: Localscope for iPhone is free, briefly

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It’s an app for finding places and services near you: I just used it to find the nearest supermarket in general and the other day to find a coffee shop in particular.

Stop reading, go getting. It’s free now, I don’t know when it will go back to it’s regular price. If you’re reading this late, go get it anyway. It’s worth it.

Well.

I alternate between Localscope and Where To? – whose name I have to fight to get right because its icon has the word Exit so prominently that I call it that.

Both do the same thing, both must surely use the same sources. But in general, I’ve found Where To? is more accurate yet Localscope is good and looks great. Where To? just looks to old.

But I’ve just been talking while you downloaded Localscope. Now you’ve got it, try it out.

Shazam updated with Rdio playback

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20140715-183707-67027567.jpgSeriously, you get something on your mind and then it is everywhere. I’ve been thinking a lot about streaming music lately and today Shazam updated to include some of that.

Shazam is the app by which you can hold your iPhone up toward a speaker playing music and it will tell you what that music is. You can probably find this app in the music section but I think it’s properly filed and catalogued under Alchemy.

What’s new today is that once you’ve heard some music and Shazam has told you what it is, it can now play you the whole thing via the Rdio streaming service. That is the specifically new thing in this latest update and it does require you to have an Rdio account.

But to try it out for you and also because I’d been meaning to try Rdio for myself anyway, I got such an account and then I checked Shazam.

It’s true. I went through all the previous songs I’d had Shazam identify in the bars and clubs of my exotic lifestyle and there was an Rdio button. But there was also a Spotify one. That’ll be because I have a free Spotify account.

So on the one hand, I caught the news about Rdio yet had missed the one about Spotify whenever that was added. And on the other hand, I went off trying Rdio all day. It has one advantage over Spotify: it lets you use all the premium features for 14 days so I was able to get it to play me entire albums in sequence. That’s as compared to Spotify’s free version only allowing shuffled songs and to iTunes Radio’s way of not necessarily playing you the album at all.

Travel advice: The Man in Seat 61

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Flashback. Only to last night, I don’t flashback very far. A man I’m working with mentions how much better organised train travel is across mainland Europe compared to the UK. I find that a bit hard to believe because – flashback now to last year – I lost half a day just trying to book a series of trains across France.

He told me about a train travel website that would’ve done the job for me in seconds. Less than seconds. Moments. And it would’ve saved me the worry over whether I’d accounted for different time zones at different ends of the journey. And it would’ve probably meant I’d have had longer than six minutes to get across what turned out to be a very big station.

It might also have meant I didn’t get a few hours in Paris on the way there and back again, so that wouldn’t have been good.

But from now on, I’m using The Man in Seat 61. The man is Mark Smith and his site explains why it’s called what it’s called.

Macworld’s pick of the best free iPhone apps

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Some of these are free up to a point and then is worth your paying cash. But it is worth that. Macworld’s David Price has picked out a good set that I think is free of the biases one usually sees: it isn’t packed out with games, it isn’t a selection of deliberately obscure or geeky apps that are fun to fiddle with. Instead, it’s 42 apps that if you’re not already using, you could well find become deeply important to you.

Case in point: of this 42, I use 16 regularly, 5 of them many times today and overall I’ve tried out 28.

Have a look at the lot, would you?

Ritot – the world’s first projection watch

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This is another Indiegogo crowdfunding product but it’s done, it’s passed its threshold and will be produced. Ritot is a projection watch, reportedly the first such thing, but it’s easier to show you. Have a watch, so to speak:

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For some reason it reminds me of my very first digital watch where you had to hold down a button to see some red LED readout. The watch band for this is rather nicer than those but still, I’m not sold.

Plenty of other people are, though, so if this is your bag, go pledge on Indiegogo to get it early or cheaper or with some rewards.

Update: Uiee portable power charger

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Previously… Uiee is a small and cute and colourful battery charger for iPhone and other devices that’s currently well worth your attention on IndieGoGo. I told you upfront that I want one myself, but these chargers don’t last forever and I wondered about how long this would stay useful. My own current battery charger has radically reduced its ability to top up my iPhone, for instance.

You can’t expect a brand new product to have years of usage data but I asked the makers and they told me:

Uiee is built with top range circuit board components, Uiee is expected to hold its charging capacity for at least 5 years as we will be using Samsung battery supplies giving a substantial life.

I also asked about the name:

With regards to the name Uiee, when starting the company, the owners wanted to start something that would take away the fear that most people seem to have when it comes to technology. Uiee came about while searching for a word that felt simple, friendly and warm to say. Uiee is more like a companion than a product.

Do go check out the IndieGoGo page for Uiee.

Day One journal app goes free (briefly)

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Even if you can’t get around to looking at using it yet, grab this now: the acclaimed Day One diary app has just been made free for iOS.

I bought it a couple of years ago and it changed things. I recorded more diary details than I ever normally do and I enjoyed it.

I made a calculated decision to move away from it, though, because I use Evernote so much. I thought it would be the same, that I would journal just as much. Technically speaking, I was right. There’s no real difference between tapping out a diary entry in Day One than there is a note in my Journal notebook in Evernote.

Except that there is a massive difference. For the months I used Day One, I bet I wrote an entry every day. In the year since I stopped, maybe I’ve made two notes.

I should go back to Day One and if you haven’t already, you should go get into it now.

Free mindmapping software for Mac (but hurry)

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The new mindmapping application for Mac OS X, Quick Node, is temporarily free on the Mac App Store here.

I haven’t used it, I just learnt of the price drop from £13.99 UK and $19.99 US and wanted to tell you.

But I do use mindmapping now and I do sometimes find it very useful. I had a project I was late starting recently and I used Mind Node on my iPad to let me whack down every thought I could muster about it. Then I could see that okay, those two ideas could go together, if I find another one for here than that’ll sound better, and then I just wrote up what was in front of me. It worked too.

So visual thinking can be good but it isn’t for everybody and I find it isn’t for everything I do. So the chance to try it out for free has got to be a boon.

Note, though, that Quick Node doesn’t support OPML: you can’t very easily create a mindmap and then export it to something like an outlining app or a To Do manager. You can save in Quick Node’s own format plus TIFF image or PDF but effectively this makes it a personal-use-only tool. I only use Mind Node personally, I have yet to share any of the maps with anyone else, but I do regularly export to OPML so that my To Do manager, OmniFocus, can import it.

Quick Node – Easy Mind Maps and Diagrams for OS X is free today (July 3, 2014). If it’s gone off sale by the time you look for it, the price will probably be that aforementioned £13.99 UK and $19.99 US but in its short life the app’s price has bounced around a lot so it may yet be more.

Bugger. Got to buy this.

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I bought an iBook called Paperless by David Sparks some time last year – wait, this is iBooks, this is the 21st Century, I can tell you in a flash… I bought it on 10 January 2013. It’s a very good read, it changed how I do a lot of things in my work, all’s good.

Then the same fella released a book about Email and I thought nah, I know from email. Then caught some of his MacPowerUsers podcast about the topic and thought, well, okay, possibly I don’t know quite as much as I thought. So on 15 November 2013 I bought the MacSparky Field Guide to Email

But that’s it. No more. What can this fella cover that I’d need?

Cue this morning and this announcement:

I’m pleased to announce the newest MacSparky Field Guide, Presentations. Most presentations are terrible. That, however, does not need to be the case for your presentations. This book explains how to create your own exceptional presentation. This Presentations Field Guide explains how to plan a presentation that will connect with your audience, the technical wizardry to create a stunning presentation, and walks you through presentation day to make sure it goes off without a hitch.

New MacSparky Field Guide: Presentations – David Sparks, MacSparky (30 June 2014)

I do a lot of presentations now. I have no choice. I’ve got to buy this. I would’ve bought it immediately and now be telling you what I think of it, but it’s not out yet. You can pre-order it for £5.99 UK or $9.99 US and it will ship on 21 July 2014. While we wait, here’s a short video trailer for it: