Hardware
Wall Huggers we’re called and wall huggers we are. Mind you, before mobile phones I was always developing that second sense that tells you where you are most likely to find a mains socket. But for those times when you can’t plug in to an outlet, there is now this:
This interactive guide shows you how to make the most of your phone’s battery life. Just choose the make and model of your phone from the drop-down menu and learn how to stay juiced.
Read the full piece.
Just wow.
When first released in 1984, the Apple Macintosh shipped with a black-and-white 512 x 342 display. Fast forward 30 years to the release of the iMac with Retina 5K display, which ships with a 5,120 x 2,880 display with support for millions of colours. That’s an increase from 175,000 pixels to more than 14.7 million – an 8,400% increase. 80 of the original Macintosh displays fit within a single Retina 5K display1.
The stats are astounding, but to really put things in perspective, take a look at the image below, showing the original Macintosh display overlaid on a promotional image that Apple has been using to showcase the massive size of the new iMac’s display.
Here’s a small version of that image but go read the full piece for a better shot and also an explanation of how it works and why it’s only sort-of true. Read the full piece.
I’m spending today running a workshop for the Federation of Entertainment Unions: that means I’ll have people from the Writers’ Guild, the Musician’s Guild, NUJ and Equity. It’s a day-long workshop version of The Blank Screen and I’ve done it many times but it is always different.
I don’t mean because every person is their own special little snowflake and the day runs in different directions, though it does so I suppose they are. I mean it’s different because I change it.
Sometimes I’m just changing the presentation and the workshop plan because something new has come up and I might do that any time between these days. But there is also one thing that I don’t write and don’t change until the morning, until just before I leave.
It’s just this. I spend a lot of time in the workshop talking about To Do lists and how to make them something you use and that you enjoy using rather than something dreaded that you avoid. And I feel obligated to include my real To Do list. So I do, I add in a slide that (today) has this:
What I like very much is the simple thing that is doubtlessly complex yet I don’t have to care, I can just relish it. This. I added that To Do list image and I made various twiddles to the presentation on the 27in iMac in my office. I present from a MacBook Pro. And as I turned from the iMac to set up that MacBook Pro, my new presentation was already there. It was already on the MacBook and I didn’t do anything. Didn’t AirDrop it across, didn’t use a USB thumb, didn’t email it.
I wrote it on the iMac and it is on my MacBook as if I wrote it there.
And here’s another thing. I’m writing to you in Drafts 4 on my iPad and that image above of my To Do list comes from my iPhone. I didn’t send it over to my iPad, didn’t copy it, didn’t do anything. It’s just there where I need to use it.
As I say, this is doubtlessly complex stuff behind the scenes but to me, it’s just that everything I need is where I need it, when I need it. I think that is heady and gorgeous stuff.
Refresh is the app that seems a bit mystical when it presents you with a dossier (its phrase) about the person you are just walking up to meet. Mystical and maybe a wee bit creepy. But sometimes also so useful. Useful enough that I keep mentioning it to you even though it remains a US-only app.
And useful enough that yesterday’s Forbes roundup video of best productivity apps included it, though the presenters didn’t seem to glom onto the creepy mystical element so much. I’m just sensitive.
It’s also not quite useful enough to be as useful as you’d expect. I reviewed it months ago and forgot I had it until some many weeks later when it chimed up with one of these dossiers. But it does it for this person and not for that, it does it before this meeting and not that. And it hasn’t chimed a dossier at me in two months. Enough so that I forgot I still had it, until I got this email telling me about a new update:
There’s a new Refresh for you to try.
We updated the app you know and love to take advantage of new features in iOS 8. You can now install a Refresh widget in the Notification Center to see who you’re meeting each day, and insights display beautifully on any screen including iPhone 6 and iPad!
To install the new Refresh widget, update your app and then click “Edit” on the bottom of your Today screen. Click the green plus next to Refresh and you’re good to go!
Refresh now available as a Notification Center widget! – email from Bhavin Shah, Refresh (21 October 2014)
I am slightly confused by this: the Refresh app itself says you need to update to the new version and then delete the old. Cool. Happens all the time: a brand new app downloads and until you delete the old one, you’ve got two on your iPhone and it all ends in hilarious consequences. But this time, once I’d tapped its update button, there was no second copy. Can’t see where the old one is to delete. Actually would be hard-pressed to tell you for sure that what I have is the new version, except that it does have that bit in notification centre.
Which on my iPhone right now looks thisaway:
I like that it’s Yasmin I’m meeting because she’s an author who routinely fakes all her personal information on Facebook and Twitter and Linkedin so that description of her is nonsense.
If you’re in the US or, like I do, have a US iTunes account then you can get Refresh here and it’s free.
This looks like a slice of our past and you want it, you want to try this.
Remember what it felt like to press play and record at the same time? Back before streaming and downloading and blogs and YouTube, music meant CDs and Smash Hits and the NME and taping off the radio — and this delightfully retro Raspberry Pi creation recreates that physical connection with music for the 21st century.
Raspberry Pi is the low-cost computing system that allows you to build all kinds of bespoke gadgets from basic components, teaching novices how to code and limited only by your imagination. British developer and maker Matt Brailsford has used the DIY system to combine the technology of today — Raspberry Pi, Spotify, and NFC tags — with the retro tech of yesterday to build a media server that streams different playlists when different cassette tapes are inserted.
I don’t miss cassettes except that I guess that’s a lie, I see this and I do. Lots of memories, though a key one is of how the buttons would stay down when you press them:
Read the full piece.
The site 9 to 5 Mac has done a comparison video and – stop right there, did you just think that there might maybe perhaps be a teeny bit of Apple bias in a site called 9 to 5 Mac? And if not on that site then on this, given that thirty seconds reading The Blank Screen will tell you Apple is better for productivity? But no. The 9 to 5 video does a good job of stepping away from the platform bias that both sides of the iPhone vs Android camps have.
(Just as an aside, isn’t it interesting how there can be this schism? I can’t comprehend how you have the patience for Android or why you can enjoy the necessitated twiddly fiddling to get it to work and Android fans are equally unable to understand what it’s like having a phone that works. I’m at times quite passionate about my kettle but I couldn’t even tell you who its manufacturer was, let alone when the last time there was an upgrade to its firmware.)
So. The 9 to 5 Mac video is fair, balanced, and therefore not all that exciting. I think it’s a good watch if you’re in the market for a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 or you’re in the market for an iPhone 6 Plus: it shows you everything you need to know to make your choice, you just have to sit through the bits about the other phone.
I’ve a friend I like a lot who doesn’t have an iPhone. I know. But when she texts me, I can be knee deep in my Mac or on my iPad and I’ve got to get out my phone and send her a reply from there. I know, crazy.
As of now, in fact as of about midnight last night, that ends.
With iOS 8.1, when she texts me in her ordinary texting way, my iPhone will get it in its ordinary way but will automatically, unthinkingly, un-setting-up-ily pass that text on to my Mac and iPad. She’ll be there in amongst everyone else I exchange iMessages with.
And I’ll be able to reply to her from there.
So, yes, I’ll type at my Mac and it will pass the text over iMessage to my iPhone and my iPhone will text it out to her but you are reading the only time I will ever have to spend even this long thinking about it. It’ll just be what happens.
You can get iOS 8.1 on your iPhone and iPad now. Open Settings, General and tap on Software Update.
There’s a pile in here that I hadn’t heard of. I think the format of having two blokes stand there talking to each other is as irritating in this as it is on television – what, no, really, I am so surprised to learn of this app you’ve only mentioned in every rehearsal and while we were writing the script – but what they’ve got to say is useful.
It’s not fair to say this to you yet because I’m only tried it exactly once and exactly one minute ago. But it didn’t entirely work and I can’t see why, so I want to explore it. And also, frankly, tease you.
This is the feature and this is the bit that is working: I can now make phone calls from my Mac. It uses my iPhone but that’s the thing, it uses it, I don’t. Scroll through my Contacts list and click or right click on any phone number anywhere – in an email, on a website, in an OmniFocus task – and I can dial it from there. It may ring using my phone but you don’t care and I don’t notice: the sound comes out of my Mac’s speakers and my voice is sent via the Mac’s microphone.
I found the call quality to be a bit crackly and the person I called – okay, it was my mother – had trouble hearing me but it did work and it was useful.
Except.
I realise now that I will use this for all my calls when I’m in my office because it’s just so handy but I did originally want to use it for recording interviews. And that’s the bit I can’t get to work yet. I use Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack Pro a lot and it’s the obvious choice for this kind of thing but it isn’t working for me yet. I tried grabbing the audio from FaceTime, the application that the Mac uses to do these calls and got exactly nothing recorded. I tried switching to have Audio Hijack Pro grab my system audio – so every little bleep and whistle my Mac makes – and that did work except it audibly dropped the volume on the call so that now I was having trouble hearing my mother.
I wonder what we’ve both just agreed to.
So let’s consider the interview-recording to be a work in progress but, blimey, calling from your Mac. As with so many things, this is the way it should always have been – and so this is the way it will be. If you’re on a PC then thank you for reading this far but you’re going to get this Mac feature as soon as Microsoft finishes its cycle. That would be stage 1) deriding Apple, stage 2) claiming you could always do that anyway with a PC, stage 3) announcing it as a new feature and hoping you don’t notice Apple’s already done it, stage 4) eventually shipping the new feature and stage 5) eventually shipping a version that works.
Microsoft is launching a smart watch that will help with your fitness, according to Forbes. Maybe it’s just the cheesy photo but I want to look at Microsoft and give them a friendly tilt of my head, a warm moment’s crinkling of my nose. Microsoft is a gigantic, astonishingly gigantic corporation yet it acts like a little kid, “we can do that, we can do it too, in fact we did it first, yeah, no comebacks, to infinity”.
Apple tends to roll up late to a category of product and then just totally change how everybody ever makes that stuff again. (Look at mobile phones before the iPhone and then look at mobile phones after it. It’s equal parts impressive, laughable and a bit depressing how you can spot a massive seachange and pin it down to the single hour when Steve Jobs unveiled that iPhone.)
Whereas Microsoft, not so much. I didn’t know that Microsoft would bring out a smart watch but I should’ve bet. I did read the top of the Forbes article and know this much for certain, for absolute certain: whether it was a leaked report or a formal Microsoft press release, it would still end with information that the company isn’t saying when it will be released or what it will cost. And to think I wasn’t impressed that Apple said “early 2015” for its watch. At least they gave a starting price.
Here’s Forbes, doing its thing:
Microsoft MSFT +2.08% is gearing up to launch a wearable device within the next few weeks, Forbes has learned. The gadget is a smart watch that will passively track a wearer’s heart rate and work across different mobile platforms. It will also boast a battery life of more than two days of regular use, sources close to the project say.
That could put it ahead of Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smart watch and Moto 360 which both need to be charged around once a day. The wearable will hit stores soon after launch in a bid to capture the lucrative holiday season, a timeline Apple AAPL +1.46% was reportedly targeting before it delayed its own Watch to early 2015.
Forbes first reported in May that Microsoft was working on a smart watch that drew on optical engineering expertise from its Kinect division, and which would sync with iPhones, Android devices and Windows Phones. It is unclear what Microsoft will name the device, or what it will cost at retail
Microsoft Plans To Launch A Wearable Device Within Weeks – Parmy Olson, Forbes (10 October 2014)
Read the full piece.