News

The password is dead – ish

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There’s a new move to get rid of the password. I think I’d rather miss them but it is a bit 11th Century, isn’t it? Halt! Who goes there? Are you fr1n3d or f03?

We have already reduced them a lot with apps like 1Password – you just remember one password, it remembers all the rest securely and also creates very strong new ones when you want – and then there are tools like Touch ID on iPhones. I don’t have an iPhone with this but I’ve used them and it is nothing short of spookily handy to be able to pick a phone up and have it already know it’s you.

Still, back to the news. Passwords are under threat and it’s about time too:

Passwords are a pain. They’re incredibly important for the security of our data, and yet they’re hard to remember and keep track of. Plus, it seems like we constantly have to change them as the result of some new hack or security breach. But the password’s days may be numbered: the FIDO Alliance—a non-profit composed of heavyweights like Microsoft, Google, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, and more—has published its final specification for a system to kill the password, hopefully for good.
The specification is a bit technical, but what it boils down to is fewer passwords, hopefully. FIDO offers two options: a password-less login method, and a two-factor login method. In the former case, when you register with a new service, app, or site that uses FIDO’s technology, you choose how you want to authenticate that account (just as you would currently specify a username and password). But instead of a password, that method can be a PIN or a biometric factor—such as a fingerprint, a spoken passphrase, or facial recognition.

The Death Of The Password Starts Today (Maybe) – Dan Moran, Popular Science (10 December 2014)

Read the full piece. And while we wait for all this to happen, get yourself secure with 1Password. I’ve used 1Password 17 times this morning.

Email is great, now leave it alone

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There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence suggesting that email addiction leads to stress and unhappiness. Now, for the first time, researchers have tested this idea directly and found that, yep, there are probably positive psychological benefits to intentionally ignoring your email whenever possible. In a new study in Computers in Human Behavior, Kostadin Kushlev and Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia took a group of workers and, over the course of two weeks, assigned each to one of two conditions: One group was told to keep their email program closed, turn notifications off, and check their email only three times a day, and the other was told to leave notifications on and check their email as often as possible. After the first week, each group switched into the other condition, and each group was regularly surveyed about how often they were checking their email, how stressed they were, and how productive they felt.

To De-Stress, Check Your Email Less – Jesse Singal, Science of Us (December 4, 2014)

Read the full piece. Via New Republic.

Got it: an iPad app for transcribing interview recordings

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Excuse me while I do a spot of SEO: interview, interviewee, interviewing, interviewer, journalist, ipad, audio, sound, recording, transcribe, transcription.

There. Hopefully this means the next poor sod searching for this type of app can avoid spending the ENTIRE EVENING on the hunt. Here’s the thing. I have to be away from my office tomorrow but I have a very pressing job where I need to transcribe an interview I recorded some weeks ago. I hate transcribing with the same passion that EVERY SINGLE WRITER EVER does and I just wanted some help.

Specifically, I wanted an iPad version of Transcriptions, a freeware app for Mac that simply lets you play back audio while you type out what you hear. Missed a bit? Tap a keystroke and the audio scrubs back 5, 10, 15, 20 seconds. Nothing in all this land will make transcription fun but this helps. My great regret is that I didn’t discover it until I’d transcribed fully two thirds of the interviews I’d done for a Blake’s 7 book.

Now I just need that on iPad, please. You quickly start throwing your hopes out of the window when you can’t find something so I was reduced to thinking I’d have a notetaking app that just played back audio. A bit. Enough to save me having to skip back and forth between two apps.

It turns out that there are three types of application that get returned when you search for terms like “best ipad audio transcription” or “best iOS apps for journalists”. The first and most common search result is the transcription service. For various prices and with various different trial periods, you can record audio in the app and send it off to a human being somewhere to do your transcription job for you, for a fee.

Fine. Not what I want, but fine.

The second type of app does what I want but only to audio that you record with the app. Nice, fine, but useless to me with my existing recording.

How long has it taken you to read this far? Did you skim? Good for you. The answer is that the best option available is Notability for iPad. It costs £1.99 for iPad and iPhone together. It’s only £1.99 but it’s also a lesson to get good apps when they fall free, even if you don’t want them. I got Notability last May when Apple made it App of the Week. I downloaded it, tried it, saw why people liked it so but felt it wasn’t for me and I deleted it.

Now all these months on, I can just re-download it. And I did so after a couple of hours of trying everything else.

Notability is not perfect. But I can import the audio from Dropbox, I can play it back and there is a 10-second rewind button. I would like a way to skip back 10 seconds from the keyboard as reaching up to tap that button does break the flow of my typing.

But tomorrow I will be sitting in coffee houses alternating between transcribing interviews for a book and writing a script. I could do without the hell that is transcription but otherwise that sounds like a pretty good day to me.

Droptask comes to Android

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It’s a To Do manager especially for visual thinkers – and as of today it is on Android as well as iOS and the web. Droptask does this:

DropTask is a powerful productivity tool enabling you to visualize your workload in a unique and engaging way. Simply drag and drop tasks for all your essential to-dos, and organize them within larger colorful circles to truly see the bigger picture. With powerful functionality delivered intuitively to the user, DropTask adds simplicity to even the most complex projects and provides effortless task management for teams and individuals alike.

Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 17.18.39

Take a look at the official site or go straight to the Google store for the new Android version.

Alternatively, wait for me to get my finger out and review the iOS version like I’ve been trying to do for two months. There is an irony in how I fail to do a review of a To Do app, but it’s not an irony that helps you much. But if you like Droptask on Android or the web, do take a lookout it on iPhone and iPad too.

That was November 2014

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It’s taking me longer and longer to do these, even though the fact that I tell you I’ll do them is a big driver to making me, well, do things. So thank you for that. Your work here is done and you needn’t read on nor nip back to That Was October 2014.

But committing to telling you this really helps me. Give it a go yourself, okay?

Writing approximately 60,310 words:
The Blank Screen Guide: Blogging book (approximately 15,000 words)
Writers’ Guild West Midlands email newsletter 821 words
4 x The Blank Screen email newsletter (6,776 words)
2x Ava and Soundscapes draft script (approx 6,000 words total)
97x The Blank Screen news articles (25,265 words)
4x Self Distract blog posts (6,415 words)
3x Radio Times reviews (approximately 300 words)

Events:
Seven Minute Stories – performed The Book Groups to 80 people
Lead Burton Young Writers’ group
Lead Rugby Young Writers’ group
Guest at Polesworth Young Writers’ group
The Blank Screen workshop for Room 204
The Writers’ Toolkit: produced one panel, spoke on a second, chaired a third
3x coaching and mentoring sessions
4x Ormiston Academy scriptwriting workshops
Speaking engagement at Fircroft College

Pitches and bookings:
Got Arts Council England funding for project
Workshop one-off proposal (pending)
Workshop series proposal (successful)
College workshop proposal (abandoned)
University talk commission
Scripts: The Lift and Mags pitched to director
Theatre series proposal (to meeting stage)
The Writers’ Bursary application

Commissioned:
(First time I’ve hired people)
2x workshop leaders
1x actor

Attended:
Royal Television Society committee meeting
Dangerous Corner at the Birmingham Rep
Soundscapes meeting
Next Generation Poets
Writers’ Guild Executive Council meeting
Roz Goddard coffee

Other:
Coached by Rivka Fine
Arranged Beiderbecke meeting work

My favourite iPhone and iPad app…

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…is really two separate apps in that you have to buy them separately. And in that one came out in this latest, great version late last year while the other was only a few weeks ago. But it’s already become so indispensable that I had to check the release date twice before I’d believe it was that recent.

The 2014 release was for the iPad. The 2013 one was for iPhone. There was also a 2014 one for the Mac. Are you getting it yet?

That’s OmniFocus 2 for iPad there. If I could pick only one app for the year, this would be it. If you can only afford to buy one version of OmniFocus, it’s the iPad one you should get. Both decisions are easy: it’s that good.

But for the overall best-app-ever experience, I do of course recommend you get all three editions. I used to say that this To Do manager was so good, was so important to my business and frankly my life now that I would cheerily, readily pay the cost price of all three over again. I don’t say that so much now – because I did do. The Omni Group brought out new editions of the Mac, iPhone and iPad OmniFocus and I bought the lot on the day they were released.

And I will again whenever they do OmniFocus 3.

Go take a look on the official site where you can also get the Mac version. Then head to the iOS App Store for the separate iPhone and iPad ones. Also to the Mac App

The 2nd best iPhone and iPad app of the year – as chosen by me

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I’ve been thinking about this all evening and especially since Apple announced its pick for the best apps of the year for iPad and iPhone. Apple went for Pixelmator on the iPad, which I like very much and regularly use in the production of this very site, and Elevate or Replay Video Editor (depending on whether you’re in the USA or UK) for the iPhone. And I’d not heard of that.

I think my pick beats all of them. And so does my second-place pick. Okay, I couldn’t get it down to just naming one app, I have to tell you about two, but they are both gorgeous things of beauty that are transformative in my work. The first-place winner, for me, in a mo, but now, an extremely close second place spot goes to… Drafts 4 for iPhone and iPad. Easy. It’s an apparently simple note app where you just fire it up with a tap, write anything you fancy and forget it – or send it off as email. Or a text. Or an OmniFocus task. Or an Evernote note. Or all of the above. And more.

The speed of opening and getting going with your writing is a big deal. It makes Drafts 4 far faster at entering Evernote notes than Evernote itself is. Far. I’ve reached for Drafts 4 in the middle of the night when I’ve had a dreamy idea and I’ve come back to it the next day to send on to email, Evernote – or the trash. Depending.

Drafts 4 also transformed how The Blank Screen site is written. When I’m just pointing you at an interesting article someone else has written, I can go to that, highlight a choice quote and tap a button. Drafts 4 takes in that quote, turns it into an inset block quote, appends the citation including correct link back to the main article and writes me a basic paragraph referring people to that original. One tap instead of back-and-forth to the site several times. I love it for that alone.

But please imagine you’ve just written a bit of an old note. Written it and then tapped one button. This is what you see on iPhone:

drafts

There are ten options right there for what to do with your text and I only created two of them. But I could create two, it is possible to create your own. So the top one appends a note to a journal I keep in Evernote and the second one posts the Drafts text straight to this website. Write, tap, publish, gone.

It’s so good I could’ve made this my favourite app of the year and probably should have done because it came out in this version in 2014 whereas my real best-app-ever pick is one whose iPhone version was last released late 2013. Still, it’s best-app-ever and its iPad one was September this year. Come on. That’s up next.

 

The iPhone App(s) of the Year – as chosen by Apple

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Spot the difference:

best-iphone-apps

On the left, Apple’s iPhone App of the Year – Elevate. On the right, Apple’s iPhone App of the Year – Replay Video Editor. The difference is that I took the screen grab on the left on my iPhone while logged in to my USA iTunes account and the other while back on my UK one.

Interestingly, both Elevate and Refresh are available in the two stores. I just don’t know anything about them because I’d not even heard of either until twenty minutes ago. This is another thing that makes me wonder if they are really the best app(s) but then that is being a bit parochial of me. Maybe I’m just looking for my favourite apps of the year and these aren’t them.

If you fancy the brain training utility Elevate – seriously, I don’t know anything about how it elevates your brain, you’re on your own there – or Replay then you’ve just read over the links.

The iPad App of the year – as chosen by Apple

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IMG_0849.PNG

Pixelmater, an image editor, and Monument Valley. That’s actually the app of the year and the game of the year. But notice what they have in common? Both have buttons mark Open. That means I already have both of them on my iPad.

Appropriately, it was Pixelmater I used to crop that screenshot. So I do definitely agree that it’s a good choice – and I adored Monument Valley despite being far less of a gamer than you.

I’m just not sure it’s the best. I’ll have a ponder about that – and a check through my purchased items list – but in the meantime, go take a look at Pixelmater or Monument Valley plus the rest of the top recommended apps for iPad.

Know when you need help

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When the Wright brothers made their historic first flight in 1903, lots of other inventors were trying to fling their own shoddy little planes into the air. And in 1977, when Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs unveiled the Apple II, there were a zillion other nerds working on building a personal computer.

But Woz beat them to it, and Jobs knew how to sell it.

The Apple II was the product that turned Apple into Apple. It was the iPhone of its era, the product that redefined every machine like it that came afterward.

Its real magic was Wozniak’s minimalism. He integrated many technologies and components that no one else had put together in the same device, and he did it with as few parts as possible. It was, as Wozniak wrote in his autobiography, “the first low-cost computer which, out of the box, you didn’t have to be a geek to use.”

But as genius as Wozniak was, the Apple II almost didn’t make it out of his brain and into a product that the rest of the world could use.

Apple’s first employee: The remarkable odyssey of Bill Fernandez – Feature – TechRepublic

Read the full piece.