Deals

Kayak Pro airline travel app free for a week

Posted by

0

Well, it's been made Apple's App of the Week for iOS and it's been made free: I'm guessing it'll return to its incredibly expensive 69p in about seven days' time. But grab it now. Even if you're not travelling much by air now, grab it, see what it's like, delete it if you want to, and always be able to get it back for free. That's even after the price goes back up.

Kayak Pro for iOS on the App Store here

Kayak Pro just looks for flights from here to there. You get all the ones there are and you get 'um arranged by price. (There are other ways of sorting the data but, come on, it's price and specifically low-to-high that you look for.)

It also does hotels, car hire and it can do combinations of all these. So can many other apps but I have kept coming back to Kayak because it does the job and I like it. I can't think of a better reason to recommend that. Though if the company ever wants to sponsor me for anything, I'll work on it.

There’s more to negotiation than money

Posted by

0

If you’ve got a meeting with someone, they want to work with you. Or at least they want to want to work with you. Make the most of that meeting, get what you can and remember that the ideal is that you will be working with these people so let’s leave everyone happy. And at some point money is going to come into it but money is not all.

It’s a lot. Let’s not be daft.

But:

Have more items than they have. Let’s say you are negotiating a book advance. They offer a $10,000 advance and they can’t budge higher.

That’s fine. Now make your list of other things: how much social media marketing will they do, what bookstores will they get you into, who has control over book design, what percentage of foreign rights, of digital rights, you can get. Do royalties go up after a certain number of copies are sold, will they pay for better book placement in key stores, will they hire a publicist? And so on.

Before every negotiation. Make a list. Make the list as long as possible. If your list is bigger than theirs (size matters) then you can give up “the nickels for the dimes”.

This is not just about negotiation. This is to make sure that later you are not disappointed because there is something you forgot. Always prepare. Then you can have faith that because you prepared well, the outcome will also go well.

The Ultimate Cheat Sheet to Become a Great Negotiator – The Altucher Confidential

 

 

Scrivener on sale for 50% – but hurry

Posted by

1

I sound like an advert there. But hurry – stocks can’t last forever! Before I say “but you do have to be quick”, remember that Scrivener has gone on sale before. Usually only through bundles or other deals as it has today with MacUpdate, but it has gone on sale.

So presumably it will again and I loathe how the words “but hurry” work on our minds: a company sets a completely self-imposed deadline and it works. But every firm does that and this one has a great product which is briefly on sale. At time of writing you have one day and about 13 hours in which to buy Scrivener for 50% off.

 

scrivener-logo

 

Here’s what it is:

Scrivener is a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. While it gives you complete control of the formatting, its focus is on helping you get to the end of that awkward first draft.

Literature and Latte, makers of Scrivener

That’s a “yeah, but” kind of description: it does tell you something but it doesn’t convey much. It’s also a “yeah, and” kind of description because it doesn’t convey why you would want such a thing. So let me have a go, with one caveat.

I don’t have Scrivener.

I bought a copy for my wife Angela Gallagher and I tried it out with her. At first it felt like just another word processor but then its way of letting you throw thousands of things – text, articles, websites, images, anything – together into a project and sort it out was really impressive. I’m working on a book with someone and after lots of oddities in our email conversations where some chapters just wouldn’t arrive she’d have to resend them and it’d be out of order. Or often she rewrote some parts and sent me the new versions. I was really struggling to get a grip on what had been written and what was ready, what hadn’t and what wasn’t. Scrivener let me piece it all together in the right sequence and have an actual book at the end of it.

I’d have gone upstairs to my office iMac and bought my own copy there and then.

Except.

I am still working on this book. We are still working on it. Chapters go back and forth plus, the day I was doing this compiling of materials, I was doing it because I was going to stay with the writer and we needed to go over a lot of things.  You can’t collaborate in Scrivener. I had to take everything out and put it into Word so that we could work together and I could track changes. Actually, I put it into Word for her and Pages for me, but it couldn’t stay in Scrivener. Actually II, it was Scrivener that made it particularly easy to output the work to Word and Pages. Without it I’d be copying and pasting to this day. With it, the whole process felt relaxed and enjoyable.

So much so that I know I will buy Scrivener for my next project. But that’s not here yet.

All of which was by way of explaining to you why I feel I can enthuse about Scrivener as much as everybody else does, even though I haven’t got it. I was going to tell you all that and then go into why Scrivener is so good. But I think I’ve told you now.

So go take a look at the deal while the clock is running, okay? The regular price is £31.99 UK, $44.99 US so if you get in before the MacUpdate deal ends, you’ll have it for about £15.99 UK, $22.50 US. But you have to go now and you have to go via a deal on MacUpdate here.

Sales are productive, right? Take a look at Hukkster

Posted by

0

This is what should happen. You signup for Hukkster, add a little button it gives you for your web browser, and then tap that button any time you’re shopping online and see something you fancy. It should go into a little list that Hukkster monitors for you and come the day that your item goes on sale, you’re notified.

I’m sure that is what happens in reality too, if you’re in the US. Here in the UK it doesn’t seem to work but the company says there it works on “select international sites” outside America. Nothing seems to happen when I try it on Amazon UK, though.

Take a look at it if you tend to buy a lot of items online. I’m not entirely sure I remember when I used to buy things in shops, but.

Hukkster

Free today: face-detecting automatic camera app

Posted by

0

It’s called FaceSnap and it reminds me of films like Mission: Impossible 4 where whizzy glasses pop a green square around the face of everyone in sight and then run some spy algorithms to do some spy stuff. Snap just puts the green box around the face and takes a photo.

And takes a photo. And takes a photo. It’s probably handy while running through somewhere but there is also an element of how in the dear god can I switch this thing off now?

Especially if you have the sound up and this making faux camera shutter clicks every time.

I’m off to see if I can quieten it down. May I recommend that you go download it? It’s for iPhone and it is free today.

Free today – Lists To Do for iPhone

Posted by

0

I've not used it, not even heard of it before two minutes ago – but on being told of it, I wanted to make sure you knew too. This fairly basic-looking tasks app, Lists To Do, is free for today only.

It's usually 69p so it's not like that will destroy your bank balance, but To Do apps are so important that it's worth checking out a lot of them. And a lot of 69p can add up.

So do take a moment to check this one out here.

See specifically when you should buy air tickets

Posted by

0

hopperForget general advice about always buying on Tuesdays or always buying 6-8 weeks before you want to fly. Instead, use Hopper. Punch in the airport you want to go from and the one you want to go to. Then instantly see a really gorgeously detailed report that tells you exactly when to buy and when to go.

Exactly.

Hopper’s data is gathered via crowdsourcing so it is continually updating which means it is continually changing. So strictly speaking what you see is exactly the time to buy and the time to go as it appears now. But that is pretty good.

Go straight to trying it out for yourself at Hopper’s official site for this and also read the New York Times article that examines the service.

Microsoft lowering cost of Office for iPad – a bit

Posted by

0

Microsoft gives and Microsoft takes away. It’s interesting that this is in any way interesting: Microsoft Word for iPad, especially, is so much better than expected that it has become a genuine, serious contender. Enough so that if the pricing weren’t an issue, you’d have bought it and tried it already. Pricing is an issue, though, because you can’t buy Office for iPad at all, you can only rent it.

From launch to now, that meant paying $99 or so per year for an Office 365 subscription. Office 365 predates the new iPad offering so people and businesses who had already bought in to that programme for their home or work computers could just shrug, download Office for iPad and start working. While the price is a barrier to casual users, for serious regular users and devotees it was as close to a bargain as you could get. Office 365 effectively gave it to you for free: it cost you no extra to have a couple of iPads in your subscription.

That’s changed.

Now there is Office 365 Personal. There’s also Office 365 Home: Microsoft will never give up on making you study the feature list and regret your choice later.

Office 365 Home has UK pricing here and it’s £79.99 per year or £7.99 per month which gets you Microsoft Office on up to five PCs or Macs plus up to five iPads.

Office 365 Personal is £59.99/year or £5.99/month and for that much less you get much, much less. Only one PC or Mac (not even one of each) plus one tablet.

The two programmes also have storage but, hand on heart, I don’t understand the options. Whatever it’s all about, the principle is the same: the higher price gets you lots more.

But if you can live with the Personal constraints and you know you need Office for iPad, go take a look. Bring a calculator.

Having a Bad Day? Read this for free

Posted by

0

As part of the Birmingham Independent Book Fair this weekend, I gave away a free PDF of what's proved to be the most popular section of my book, The Blank Screen. It's called Bad Days and it is meant for those times when you are seriously under water: there is fast advice to get you out of it now and then there is a lot more to help you avoid the situation in the future.

I want you to have a copy too so please feel free: here is the entire and uncut Bad Days chapter from The Blank Screen.

I think it will help you. I hope you also like it and if you do, have a look at the complete book: The Blank Screen on Amazon UK and on Amazon US.

Readdle Printer Pro for iPhone free today

Posted by

0

Actually, it's free for 24 hours – but I can't tell when that period started so just go grab it now.

As ever with these things, don't bother thinking about it. Grab it while it's free, ignore it or even delete it – and when you need what it does, there it is. Or you can re-download it for free. And you get updates for free. But only if you bought it during this free period.

I just went to check the details and discovered that I've done this before. I knew I had with a lot of apps – a year or two ago there was a massive spate of travel apps going briefly free and I nabbed the lot, have since used a couple too – but I found I'd done it with Readdle Printer Pro for iPhone too.

No idea when that was. But I don't believe I've ever used it. So this isn't a review, isn't a recommendation for the app per se, it's a recommendation that you take advantage of this chance to get a popular app and try it out.