Deals

Another iPad mind-mapping app on sale (briefly)

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Yesterday I told you of how iThoughts is on sale and also said:

It looks to me as if there are really two contenders in mindmaps for iPad. I have one – MindNode – and the other is iThoughts.

Mindmapping iOS software iThoughts on sale (briefly) – William Gallagher, The Blank Screen (5 September 2014)

Today another one goes on sale – and this one goes down to free. Dream-X isn’t as slick as the others: it’s variously spelt Dream-X and Dream X, for instance, and while it is very good at having tutorial videos built right into the software, they’re a bit fuzzy. You can only get the mind maps out of it via an image: you can’t export in a way that other applications can pick up.

Specifically, you can’t export in OPML which means you can’t take the image and have it be read by a To Do app or project manager.

But you may not want that at all, you may prefer keeping a map as a map. And Dream-X lets you explore the whole idea of mindmaps. If you’re musing about mindmaps or know what they are and just aren’t sure whether they’re for you, give Dream-X a go.

Mindmapping iOS software iThoughts on sale (briefly)

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It looks to me as if there are really two contenders in mindmaps for iPad. I have one – MindNode – and the other is iThoughts, which is now briefly on sale.

I’m more of a text guy than a visual thinker, though that varies and I’ve found directing is like writing in 3D, but I’ve found mind maps useful for starting projects. You have this mass of ideas and you don’t know how or whether they fit together. Actually, you’re having a hard time getting all this stuff down because there’s so much and oh, yes, if I do that, I could do this, and then there’s that. And the other.

Mind mapping software lets you – forgive me – just vomit up everything you can think of. And keep adding. Keep doing your doings. Then drag two things that seem like they should be together. Drag a third. Drag these bits over to somewhere else. Delete something. Add something else.

You reach the point where your initial mess becomes rather structured – and with both MindNode and this briefly-on-sale iThoughts you can then shove the map off to your To Do list.

I love that. The visual mess becomes the organised visual mess becomes the text list in my OmniFocus.

Take a look at iThoughts on sale on the App Store.

Eh? Get my book for £4,307.56 off

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Friend of the blog John Soanes sent me this on Amazon. It’s my first The Blank Screen book going for £4,319.19 secondhand.

Now, I’ve seen it go for around the £60 mark and I liked that. I don’t see that cash but I was terribly chuffed that it was going up.

But it’s still on sale brand new so before you gawp like I did at the £4,319.19 price tag, click here to get it for £4,307.56 less.

And now, drum roll…

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From today’s The Blank Screen workshop in Newcastle

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I do this Blank Screen productivity workshop a lot but I particularly enjoy doing it for the Federation of Entertainment Unions. They hire me occasionally to speak to members from their four associated unions: the Writers’ Guild, the Musician’s Guild, the National Union of Journalists and Equity.

It’s very special talking with these because all of us in the room are working full time in our creative fields. It’s especially exciting for me because actors and musicians have different needs to writers, journalists and authors so I work to find out what they need and how to help them.

I should say: to help them with this business I do of remaining the creative person we are, yet becoming a lot more productive. It’s not about knocking out work faster, it is about handling your time so well that you can do much more. That’s a subtle but an important difference.

But whatever group I talk to, there seems to be a collective mood. There’s so much in the workshop, especially the full-day version like today’s, that I spend some time at the end getting the attendees to recap. I think it helps them focus on what they’re going to take away but I know it helps me see what’s worked best.

Today what went down the best was a thing called Bad Days.

This is all about the worst times you get in our work, the time when are overwhelmed. That can be because you have too much to do, it can be exactly the opposite: you have nothing going on and have to pick which project to kickstart.

I actually have a solution. I’m proud of this and I’m proud of how the Bad Days chapter has been the most popular one in that first book. I’m fascinated by how I wrote that chapter right there during a really bad day. It was like I was writing live from the scene. The text is a little painful for me to read now: it’s clear and makes sense and does its job but I can feel the undertow.

But, hey, I’m a writer: nuts to my being uncomfortable, I’m simultaneously proud that there is an undertow.

I don’t want you to have bad days. But I do want you to have Bad Days, the chapter. Everyone I worked with today will get a copy of that via the FEU and I want you to have it too. It’s a single, blunt chapter from The Blank Screen and a PDF of it is all yours. Have it for free, use it, share it around if you think it will help people, and you’ll make me very happy.

Download it here.

I would be happier still if you fancied getting it in the book as I hope there is a huge amount of other advice in there that will help you. But the Bad Days PDF is the thing.

PC and Mac: You Need a Budget software on sale (briefly)

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Very briefly. Appsumo is offering a discount on this budgeting application, You Need a Budget, for Mac and PC which comes so highly recommended that I’ve just bought it.

Usually retailing for $60 (approximately £36), it is on sale via Appsumo for $30 (approximately £18) – but it’s only on sale for 72 hours. And I don’t know how many hours into that I heard about.

Go take a look now: you can guess what a budgeting application does but there’s a video showing why this is a good one.

New book: Filling the Blank Screen

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Thanks to your recommendations, the one hundred best articles from The Blank Screen news site have been extended, updated, revised, given a polish – and are now the new book, Filling the Blank Screen.

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I tell you, it is as if the book itself insisted on being written. There is going to be a series of Blank Screen books and I am deep into writing the first one at this very moment yet Filling the Blank Screen just demanded to be done. Maybe if I could work out a better way for you to find all the best articles on this site then the book would’ve shut up a bit. But I haven’t yet, so it went on and on at me about how it was time.

Behind the thousand articles and the quarter of a million words on this site there are hundreds of conversations with people online and at the now many Blank Screen workshops. New writers at literary festivals, very experienced ones at Writers’ Guild events, I love that this stuff helps them – and I love even more that every one of them has something useful for me to steal. I mean, use. I mean, um.

Anyway.

I want you to have Filling the Blank Screen and I’d like to suggest that you read it a chapter a day. That way you can tell people it took you one hundred days to read and I either sound like I write a lot or that I’m very heavy going. I’ll take that. Bit of quality, innit? Bit of heft.

The paperback version is scheduled to be published on 12 September and doubtlessly I’ll tell you all about that then. But today the ebook version is out and it’s at a special price of £2.99 on Amazon UK. It’s also at a special price of $4.99 on Amazon US.

One thing, though. If the next 11 months gets us another 1,000 articles and another 250,000 words, you’d hope that there will be enough material in there for a third Blank Screen boo. But what would I call it? Refilling the Blank Screen?

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.

Mac: Pomodoro app goes free (briefly?)

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If you’re on a Mac, take a look at Pomodoro One which has just gone free.

I’m writing to you from my iPad so I can’t get it and try the thing out for you but it comes reasonably recommended and I think you’ll like the Pomodoro technique. It’s just where you work for, say, 25 minutes and then have a break for, say 5 minutes, before you start all over again.

Pomodoro One reportedly looks just like a good stopwatch – and in some stylish way suits the new OS X Yosemite – so that tells you bugger-all aren’t bad things.

Want: Noke – a bluetooth padlock

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Yes, I was suspicious and/or cynical at first. Fuz Designs has launched a Kickstarted campaign to create Noke, a padlock that requires no key.

You’ve got a lot of questions already but I can predict some of them:

1. Eh?
Lock your bike or whatever you want by snapping the Noke padlock to it as you would any other padlock. Then to unlock it, just press on the Noke – if you have your smartphone with you.

The Noke looks Bluetoothily for a phone that it recognises and if yours is there in range, the padlock opens. You don’t even have to take your phone out of your pocket or purse.

2. Battery
Yeah, that was my first thought: what happens when the battery dies on the Noke. You are screwed. Except that you get a warning on your smartphone Noke app long before that happens and there is also a little secret way around it that you set up in advance.

There’s only one more thing I would say: Fuz Designs made the Everdock, which I backed on Kickstarter before and now use every day. I backed it twice over, buying two of the things. So I both like and trust the firm.

Now, watch their video. I can’t embed it so you need to visit their Kickstarter page – but that does also have a lot more detail. A lot. Check out the Noke Kickstarter page by Fuz Designs.

Did I say this already? Buy 1Password right now

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I definitely urged this in the latest edition of The Blank Screen email newsletter – do sign up for your free copy – and if I’ve met you on the street in the last few days I’ve undoubtedly pressed you on the issue. But I don’t think I’ve said it here and I must.

Buy 1Password for iOS now.

As in now. Please rush.

Well, you can take a little bit of time because it’s on sale and will be for at least a short while: it’s not one of those instant on, instant off sales. And as ever with things I recommend on sale, it is more than worth its full price so if you miss the discount, shrug it off.

So you know, the sale price goes thisaway: 1Password for iPhone is briefly £6.99 UK or $9.99 US (instead of £9.99 UK or $17.99 US). Check the maker’s website, though, because there are many options if you’re using more than one device: 1Password official site.

It’s a password manager – creates great passwords for you and then, this is the key part, both remembers them all and pops them into websites for you – and it’s also especially good at holding all your credit card details and, again, popping them into websites when you say Go. It’s also very cross-platform: I use it daily on Mac, iPhone and iPad but there is also a PC, Windows and Android version. They all play nicely, too, so if you’re a PC user with an iPhone or a Mac user with an Android phone, you’re fine. Possibly schizophrenic, but fine.

If you are on a PC or Android, my reason to urge you to buy 1Password is solely that it is so very good. Indispensable. I went from wondering why anyone would want such a thing to having it on my iPhone’s front screen and using it literally every day. Literally literally: there’s a thing I have to do every single day and I do it through 1Password because it’s so much quicker.

But.

If you’re on an iOS device, there is an extra delightful urgency to all this. Buy 1Password for iPhone or iPad on sale today and you will get the next version for free. The next version will be a significant upgrade but it won’t cost existing users anything and you will be an existing user.

I am an existing user, I am a now very long-standing existing user, and I’m excited by this – I don’t use the word lightly, I actually am excited – because of what’s coming in the next version.

The next 1Password will be the first or at most among the very first apps to use Apple’s new Extensions feature that lets one app use another. I told you that I do this thing every day: it’s using a website that I have to log in to and on my iPhone, I have to remember to go to it via 1Password in order to have the password app pop my details in. If I’ve just gone there via Safari, I either nip back and forth to 1Password, copying out my secure details and pasting them in to Safari – or I quit it all and start the job again in 1Password.

From the next version and Apple’s iOS 8, I will be able to just call up 1Password right from within Safari and have it do my doings for me. If I have the new 1Password, iOS 8 and a newer iPhone than I currently have, I’ll be able to tap my thumb in order to get it to enter secure details for me.

I’d say that if I were you, I’d buy 1Password now. But if I really were you, you’d already have it.