Deals

Evernote Market reaches Europe

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The Evernote company has just announced it will now ship to addresses in Europe. What it will ship is a collection of bags and clothing that are fine but also some hardware that is rather good. In particular, there is this:

evernote-scansnap-e1380217395237

That’s an Evernote edition of a ScanSnap scanner of which the company says:

The ScanSnap Evernote Edition, a collaboration between Evernote and Fujitsu, is not only the first of its kind – it’s the best in its class. You can put nearly anything in it, push one button, and with lightning speed it scans, senses, and autofiles your photos, receipts, business cards, and documents into your designated Evernote notebooks. Before you can walk away for a cup of coffee, you’ll get a simple notification to let you know Evernote has done your filing for you.

Except, you pay a lot for the Evernote colour and logo. I mean, a lot. This model costs £475 through Evernote Market but is functionally equivalent to the ScanSnap iX500 which you can currently get from Amazon UK for £318. In the US, the Evernote edition is $495 and the iX500 equivalent is $424 from Amazon USA.

I started telling you this because I thought it was good that Evernote Market was expanding outside the USA but now I’m just going to stick to Amazon. Still, take a look at Evernote’s description of the scanner as it’s good – and the market has other products.

Book recommendation: The Blank Screen

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Earlier this week I sort-of recommended David Allen’s book (and accompanying cult) Getting Things Done. But amongst all the praise I had and have for it, I said this:

Getting Things Done (UK edition, US edition) is a self-help book by David Allen. The strange things first: it was written in 2001 and you will be amazed how long ago that seems. (Example: Allen talks a lot about how, for instance, you obviously can’t access the internet unless you’re in your office. It’s practically Victorian.) Also, it feels as if Allen is focusing on office workers and people who may do fantastic things but aren’t the kind of messy-minded creatives that writers are.

Getting Things Done – book (half) recommendation – William Gallagher, The Blank Screen (24 June 2014)

No question: my own productivity techniques owe a huge amount to Getting Things Done and in fact I credit David Allen extensively in my book. But The Blank Screen is written for us writers. I know normal people will get a lot from it too, but it’s written for us. So it’s about coping with the kinds of things we have to cope with – how to be productive when no editor ever bleedin’ phones us back productively – and it’s very much about making more of your computer. Jonathan Davidson of Writing West Midlands (a truly fine charity without whom The Blank Screen wouldn’t exist and which you should definitely be supporting, please) said this to me once:

Writers were the first to go digital.

He means it and he is damn right. We went digital back in the 1980s when we saw, we understood and by hell we coveted word processors. The rest of the world that is now so mad keen on digital, they’re just catching us up as best they can.

I’m just not sure they all come with our writer neuroses. That’s another big issue with us: we have to battle the curse of ourselves as well as the curse of other people when we’re trying to make our way as working writers. That’s something The Blank Screen is riddled with.

And the book also has one especially popular chapter on specifically how to cope when you either have too much work or you don’t have any at all. Those are both crippling for writers and we get them all the time. I suppose I should try to flog you that chapter, but I’ve seen how it helps people: I want it to help you too. So go on, since it’s you: download the free chapter, Bad Days, from The Blank Screen. If there’s someone you know it will help too, give them the link.

There comes a point when my free Bad Days chapter has solved that time when you are so fraught you have to hold your chest and breathe slowly, when you’ve passed it to other people and been thanked for how it’s done the same for them, and when you should really be buying the book.

The Blank Screen is on Kindle and iBooks plus – my favourite – it’s in paperback. Seriously, check out the free and complete Bad Days chapter but then:

The Blank Screen is on Amazon UK (Kindle and Paperback)
The Blank Screen is on Amazon USA (Kindle and Paperback)

And it’s a rather gorgeous iBook too.

One thing. I’m saying this to you today because I do want to celebrate a little milestone. You’re reading the 600th article on The Blank Screen website and I’m rather proud of how this spin-off from the book has become a productivity resource of its own. I do hope you keep reading and I hope that you enjoy it.

Two new AppyFriday deals today

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What do you mean, it isn’t Friday? By the time you’ve checked your calendar, these Mac software offers may be gone. They’re not earth-shattering and at full price they’re fine but if they’re of use to you, grabbing them while they’re free seems an idea.

The one I’ll get when we’re done is Duplicate Master: it runs across your Mac drives and goes ey-up, got five copies of the MIT lock picking guide. Do you want to delete four while I phone the police?

The other is a more specific productivity tool called Mindown. It’s for capturing notes and thoughts during the day, then organising them later.

Both of these are free but take a look at more details for Duplicate Master here and more for Mindown there.

Both of those links take you to pages on the AppyFridays site where, as you can see, they do deals all the live-long week.

Grab this now – PopClip is on sale until Sunday

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When you tap on a word or a line in iOS to select it, up pops a series of options right there. Copy, Paste, all that. PopClip gives you that on the Mac and I have regularly heard how great it is, I’ve just not got around to trying it. PopClip is on sale, I tried it, I can’t believe I haven’t become addicted to it before.

It is a very fast way to copy some text – it’s very much like the mini-toolbar in Word – but once you’re used to that, you can add more options. I’ve now had PopClip for around eighty seconds and I’ve already added options to send the selected text to Evernote or as a new task to OmniFocus.

So I can write ‘Add PopClip to your office iMac’, then select that text in quotes and send it to OmniFocus.

That looks like this:

Screen Shot 2014-06-06 at 20.46.14

Consider that a live example: I really wrote that, I really selected it, PopClip really gave me those options and I have really chosen that icon at the end. That text is now in OmniFocus waiting for the next time I’m back at my office Mac instead of here on my MacBook.

PopClip usually costs £2.99 UK or $4.99 US. I now know it is supremely worth it. But if you buy it on the Mac App Store between now and some time on this coming Sunday, you’ll get it for 69p UK or 99c US. It’s being done as part of a deal on the AppyFriday.com site but just go right to the App Store: go right now.

Produce your phone calls to make them easier and quicker

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18th Street Phone-1I’ve only got three phone calls I have to make today but I started at 11am and as I write this, it’s 11:13 and I am finished.

As you can expect and fair guarantee from any round of phone calls, they aren’t all finished and done with: right now I’m waiting for a call back from two people with more information and an email from the third. But the calls are all made and these issues are all underway and the response rate would be no different if I’d spent the day fretting over them.

And I do fret. Given that I’m a journalist and it is routine to phone people up, I find it really hard calling for myself. So I do several things to make it better. To make me do it, really.

There’s quite a bit about this in The Blank Screen book (UK edition, US edition) but since writing that I’ve been focusing on one particular piece of advice I learnt for it. I’ve made making calls be my thing, be the work I have to get better at. And I’ve done it by making days like this. All of which boil down to this:

Produce the calls.

You don’t go into any meeting and you don’t ever pitch without knowing who you’re talking to and what it’s about. So I take some time during the morning to build up a list in Evernote of who I am calling. I run my life through the To Do software OmniFocus and it’s very easy to use that to get a list of calls to make: I just tap or click on a button marked Phone and it shows me every call I have to make in every project, ever. But if I then start writing that out in Evernote, I can build up this:

Who I’m calling at what company

What their phone number is

The specific aim of the call and the most recent conversation or correspondence we’ve had about it

All obvious stuff but each line does something in particular. The first one, who I’m calling where, that acts as much as a heading as it does a To Do. Then the bit about their number is crucial – I know that sounds obvious, I know you’re thinking that without it I won’t have much luck calling them but it’s more than that. The point is having the number right there. See the name, ring the number, go. That’s the plan.

Then the specific aim is equally important to both sides. Usually there’s just one thing you can get done in a call so I pick that and we’re off. Knowing it, knowing it precisely and having written it down focuses me on it so that I am right on the topic and they get a quicker call out of me.  And similarly, how we last left something means I sound like I am on top of things, I am fully aware of what we’re doing and also that I’m moving this stuff on, I’m not hanging about, I’m not kidding. Without being rude or abrasive, you know I am working and this is business and as much as I may like nattering with you, today we’re doing this thing.

So I’ve spent the morning building up that Evernote note in between other jobs, then it comes to 11am and I start. See the first name, see the number, I’m dialling it before I can hesitate and it’s ringing while I’m fixing the rest of the information in my head. Ring, speak, done, next. See the second name, see the second number, I’m dialling.

I do also use Evernote to make notes about the calls and that’s not brilliant yet. What I find is that I will build up a lot of information under a call but then the next time I have to call them, that information is back in the previous day’s call list. I need to get more organised about copying the information out and into a single place per person or per project or per something. Not sure what yet.

But it’s surprising how much sheer data you can write up about a call. I record just whether I got them or voicemail, I make a note that I said I’d call back and perhaps when if I said a particular time. Also any numbers they need to tell me like fees or contracts or purchase orders. The list goes on and on.

One extra is that I also record the time of the call. I do that in Evernote but using a TextExpander snippet. As the phone rings and as I’m reading, I will type the words “Called at…” and then the TextExpander snippet ;ttime – a semi-colon and the word ‘ttime’ which pops in the current time. If it’s a long call or I’m routing through a hundred service desks who keep me waiting, I’ll log the time along the way because why not?

Then the last thing I do after all the calls is I make a note of them in a separate Calls Made list in Evernote. This has no function at all except to make me want to make more calls. It’s showing me that I’ve made 162 phone calls so far this year and, hand on heart, I wish I hadn’t looked because I thought it would be more impressive than that. Just 162 in five months? I promise to do better.

Starting now. I’ll just add today’s 3 to the list and I’m on 165. That’s a bit better.

Scrivener on sale for $20 (in UK too)

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It’s the word processor for writers that just about every reviewer loves. I liked it very much in my brief use of the trial version last year: I had a particularly complicated and messy project and Scrivener made it feel manageable. I chucked in all these chapters that had been emailed to me, I sorted through duplicates and rewrites, figured out the right order and could then just work on it as normal.

I’d have bought Scrivener right there and then but for how that project required me to go back to the writer with Word files and we needed to have tracked changes. You can’t do that in Scrivener, so far as I can tell, so I didn’t get it then.

But I did today.

It’s temporarily $20. That works out to just over £11 UK and since the regular, Mac App Store price in the UK is £31, I was convinced. Sold. Bought. Using it now.

There is one extra cost: by getting this price you are going through a deal with Cult of Mac and that will also get you on their mailing list. Quite a bit. Still, I’ve bought a couple of things through them now. In fact, I’ve bought Scrivener twice: I got it for my wife Angela Gallagher last year in some deal then.

So the deals do come around but if you fancy Scrivener, now is a very good time to buy. Check out this link and do so in the next few days or it will expire.

Breaking – OmniFocus 2 for Mac releasing today

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More details as soon as it’s out – give me five seconds to go buy it myself then I’ll get right back to you – but the new OmniFocus 2 for Mac is being released today. It’ll be on the Mac App Store but get it from the maker instead, the Omni Group at www.omnigroup.com.

It’s coming out at 9am PDT which I reckon is about 5pm BST but I wouldn’t count on my maths even when I’m not excited.

That sounds strange, even to my ears: the idea of being excited about software. Yet the only real surprise to me is that I am this thrilled when I’ve already been using the beta version for months.

But I’ve used that beta on the Mac for those months, I used the previous version 1 on the Mac for a year or more, and there hasn’t been a day – sometimes not even an hour – that I haven’t used OmniFocus for iPhone or iPad in about two years.

I’m particularly glad about today’s launch because I’m running a full-day workshop of The Blank Screen today for the Federation of Entertainment Unions – the Writers’ Guild, NUJ, Equity and Musicians’ Guild – and this will come up. OmniFocus always comes up, the company couldn’t get more adverts from me if they paid, but I have been hesitating in every single The Blank Screen workshop. That’s partly because OmniFocus only runs on Apple gear; if it were on PCs and Android too, I’d be trying to distribute copies.

But the other reason has been that the Mac version was hugely powerful yet very hard to use. You don’t often hear that said about Mac software, but it was. So I used to be torn over recommending it, especially as it’s expensive.

Now I can tell you from experience that the new OmniFocus 2 for Mac is much easier. There’s still a lot to it but it makes sense and it works how you will expect.

There’s just one more thing. It used to be that the iPad version of OmniFocus was the best of three but now the Mac one is coming out and we’ve had a revamped iPhone one for a few months. Today I’d say the Mac version is the best.

But the company confirms a revamped iPad one is coming so the dance begins again.

Urgent – Calendars 5 free today only

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Just learnt this and am rushing to tell you because time is ticking: the app Calendars 5 is free for the rest of today only.

I don’t know much about it except that when I was researching calendars for myself, it came up in features and reviews a lot.

I chose Fantastical instead but I’ve grabbed this and will check it out properly at my leisure. Go do the same, would you?

Download Calendars 5 now – but check the price is still free before you tap that button. It’s worth paying for,  I can see that already, but free is nice.

Grab Word Lens right now – it’s suddenly free

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It's the app that looked like a joke: point your iPhone camera at a sign written in French and on the screen, you see it in English. It's the universal translator of Star Trek or the Time Lord Gift of Doctor Who except that it is real. Like many, I downloaded the free app just to see if it were true and it was. But you get only a kind of demo limited unless you buy packs such as English to Russian. I can't remember how much those cost but it was enough that I put it off until I was going to a country. I never once remembered to do that.

Except.

Now we don't have to: the whole thing, in-app language packs and all, is free.

It's free because the development company has just been bought by Google. The mark has turned everything free and I am downloading it all right now.

I'm sure it won't remain free for long. I'm not sure whether it will continue as a separate app, though: you can well imagine that Google is intending to incorporate this technology into its other offerings. Fine. Good, even. But the current Word Lens app may not survive so grab it while you can.

Word Lens on the iOS a App Store