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We should write trailers

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The film trailer is a work of art. Sometimes. Maybe often. Not really always. For every trailer that is genuinely better than the movie it’s trailing, there are clunkers. I don’t want to suggest that we should write trailer moments into our scripts but I wish we could edit the footage.

I think about this a lot because I do video editing and it feels to me like writing. It’s very much the final edit and the bits of my brain that I use at Final Cut Pro X are the same ones I use when writing.

Which is partly why I just find trailers so fascinating. And this comes up today because of Star Wars. I’m not a big fan but I remember the shivery anticipation when the trailer started for The Phantom Menace. How did that work out again? It’s also interesting because originally that trailer went out online on some crappy PC-based postage stamp thing and it was Apple’s QuickTime engineers who lobbied to do it properly. When they did and it worked out so well, that was really the start for high quality trailers.

Well. That’s high as in the video quality. Have a look at this collection of the trailers for all the Star Wars movies, including the new one. I’m surprised to say I think The Phantom Menace looks the best. I’m appalled to say how ferociously bad most of these are.

Watch the lot on The Verge

More Black Friday software details

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So this is the year that Black Friday hit the UK. It’s a thing now. But here’s a benefit of the whole shebang: more cheap software. MacLife has a bigger list than I’d seen before and it includes many I’d recommend:

Well, the big Black Friday sale day is upon us. If you’ve been out this morning beating back hordes for physical bargains on flat screen TVs and whatnot, this will come as a welcome respite. Cheap prices and no lines, no shortages, no riots. And if you skip the whole retailer madness on principal or for other reasons, you can still grab some sweet deals right here still.

Price Drop Black Friday Edition: The Weekend’s Best App Deals, November 28 | Mac|Life

Read the full piece.

In this week’s newsletter… November 28, 2014

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What to do when you get things wrong. Say so. Right away. Such as me, for instance, I got a big thing wrong and I admit it right at the top of this week’s newsletter.

Sorry? A man getting something wrong – and admitting it? Songs will be sung of this day.

Also, a couple of Black Friday deals that shouldn’t really happen in the UK but do plus a terribly absorbing video summarising Steve Jobs’ advice about business. Recorded the day after he died, it’s a speech by Guy Kawasaki who abandoned whatever regular talk he was supposed to give and instead talked about Jobs. It’s very Apple-centric as you’d imagine but each word is useful for us whatever our work is.

Plus, it has a comparatively off-the-cuff feel about it so rather than a studied presentation, it feels like a chat.

All that in the newsletter which you can read here and then sign up to get your own copy each week.

There are two types of scanners in this world

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Those that work and those that don’t. Wait. No, I’m thinking of printers. Let me try again. There are two types of scanners in this world: Fujitsu ScanSnap and Doxie.

Apparently others are available and that’s nice but you want one of these. If you can afford it, go the Fujitsu route. I won’t say those are more expensive because I believe the price is only part of that calculation: an item that cost a lot of money but you use is not expensive. Not compared to an item that’s cheap but you never use it.

But Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners cost more than many and enough so that I don’t have one. It is on my budget list for a particular project, though.

Instead, I have a Doxie. Cheaper, lighter, slower, but so handy. And now the Doxie company has brought out something new:

We’re extremely excited to announce two brand-new Doxie Go models this week – Doxie Go Plus and Doxie Go Wi-Fi.

First, about the new Doxie: building on our best-selling flagship portable scanner, Doxie Go, both new models deliver 3x the battery life, higher quality images, one minute setup, the ability to charge and scan at the same time via wall power, and the latest apps.

What we’re most excited about is Doxie Go Wi-Fi. On top of the aforementioned features Doxie Go Wi-Fi also has built-in Wi-Fi for syncing to Mac, PC, iPhone, & iPad (no third-party SD cards or helper apps needed), a native Doxie iOS app for iPhone and iPad, an open developer API (available next quarter), and 4x the memory capacity with Smart Memory™ (store up to 1,800 documents before needing to sync).

Hi: Your Doxie Go Wi-Fi upgrade voucher – email from Paul Scandairato, Doxie (25 November 2014)

Nicely, this came in an email because so did a voucher to let me upgrade to the new Doxie for a pretty considerable discount. Whether you have a Doxie already and so qualify for this or you don’t and you’re just looking for a good speaker, take a gander at the Doxie site.

Be told when anything happens online

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If you visit a lot of websites all the time, stop and ask me about RSS instead. You’ll have plenty of chances as I rarely shut up about it. But as well as this tool for making websites send you their new articles, there are ways to get all sorts of information without schlepping off to site after site. One new way involves IFTTT and a tool called TrackIf:

TrackIf helps you track the web and alerts you if anything you want changes online, helping you be the first to know when anything happens online. Track price drops on any product at nearly any shopping site. Something you want out of stock? No problem, TrackIf can alert you if it’s available again.

Connect TrackIf to anything – IFTTT

Read the full piece. It’ll either bore you or awaken a brilliant interest in automating te web for you. A brilliant interest that becomes all consuming, but there you go.

E-cigarettes can be bad for the health – of your computer

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It’s fair to say that the first person to stick leaves in their mouth and set fire to it wasn’t really thinking ahead. But who could’ve foreseen this? It is reportedly possible that your e-cigarette is just waiting for you to plug it into your PC or Mac so that it can do some damage. Deliberate, malicious, profitable damage:

Many e-cigarettes can be charged over USB, either with a special cable, or by plugging the cigarette itself directly into a USB port. That might be a USB port plugged into a wall socket or the port on a computer – but, if so, that means that a cheap e-cigarette from an untrustworthy supplier gains physical access to a device.

A report on social news site Reddit suggests that at least one “vaper” has suffered the downside of trusting their cigarette manufacturer. “One particular executive had a malware infection on his computer from which the source could not be determined,” the user writes. “After all traditional means of infection were covered, IT started looking into other possibilities.

“The made in China e-cigarette had malware hardcoded into the charger, and when plugged into a computer’s USB port the malware phoned home and infected the system.”

Health warning: Now e-cigarettes can give you malware | Technology | The Guardian

If this were chocolate, I’d be talking about having some perspective and how this is surely a tiny proportion of all e-chocolate systems. But since it’s just smoking, what the hell? Go crazy, panic, stop smoking, it’s fine. Read the full piece.

Metaphors are like, um, er

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Metaphors can help by tapping what learning theorists call prior knowledge to make a connection between what people already understand through experience and what they have yet to discover. We do this naturally in conversation — for instance, “The news hit her like a freight train.” By comparing the situation to something people already know or can at least imagine, we convey its intensity and urgency. But when explaining our ideas in presentations, we’re sometimes reluctant to use verbal or visual metaphors to relate to audiences. I’ve heard people say that metaphors are “off topic,” or worse, “cheap.” Though using a cheesy one can elicit groans, more often than not, metaphors offer a shortcut to understanding.

Finding the Right Metaphor for Your Presentation

Read the full piece. Its specifically about searching for the right metaphor in a presentation but so long as you don’t lurch into cliché, it’s surely going to be valid until the cows come home.

Very important: Things for iOS is briefly free

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Stop reading this and go get both the iPad and the separate iPhone version of Things on the App Store.

Are you back? Things is important because it’s a very good To Do manager and I don’t believe it’s ever gone free before. I could be wrong, but To Do apps fall into four tiers that they generally stay in. There’s your free ones, your low-price, your higher price and your OmniFocus.

To my mind OmniFocus is the best by far and what it does for me is worth an awful lot more than its asking price. I used to say that I relied on OmniFocus so much that if I had to pay the money again, I would. I don’t say that any more – because I did pay the money again. New versions came out and I bought them faster than you can read this sentence.

But.

Before I found OmniFocus, I very strongly considered Things.

In its favour, it has a great name. I’ve got Things to do. Sold. I am a sucker for a good name and this is a good name. Then it seemed to me that it was more powerful than anything else I’d tried up to then and at the time I was moving to needing something with much, much more oomph. I had so much more to do at that point and actually it’s only got worse.

Also, Things looks great. Today I’d say OmniFocus looks very good and even if it didn’t, the look wouldn’t be enough to make me switch. Right now, this minute, nothing is enough to make me switch. But you spend a hell of a lot of time in your To Do app so the look – both in terms of its aesthetics and in how it works for, what you press and what you tap – that’s important. You can’t quantify it but you also can’t deny it.

In the end, I think I tried the Mac version and it just didn’t take. Not for me. I wish I could tell you why, I wish I could point to something. I can with the iPad version that I’ve just downloaded and played with: there doesn’t appear to be a way to set a start date for a task. A deadline, sure, but not a start date. I regularly now have work that is scheduled months out and while I need to plan for them, it’s unproductive of me to plan now, to plan the day before, or to have a reminder every day in between. So I tell OmniFocus that my planning task should first show up on my list about a week or a fortnight before the due date. Can’t see a way to do that with Things.

Sometimes this stuff can be a bit buried under preferences and suchforth so I could be wrong.

And I told you I just downloaded this to play with. I did that to get you the screenshot above and to see what Things looks like now, a few years down the road. Why not? It’s free.

Until 28 November.

Because the reason for this rare free-dom is that Apple has chosen Things as its app of the week. Come next week, something else will go free.

So go grab Things right now. Remember that the iPhone and iPad ones are separate, they’re not universal. So grab them both right now. Even if you haven’t the time to play with them, grab now and you can use them tomorrow, next week, next year, whenever you have a minute or a need.

Oh. My. God. We’re running out of chocolate

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Mark your calendar: January 1, 2020.

As this future year unfolds, the gap between how much cocoa the world wants to consume and how much it can produce will swell to 1 million metric tons, according to Mars Inc. and Barry Callebaut AG (BARN), the world’s largest chocolate maker. By 2030, the predicted shortfall will grow to 2 million tons. And so on.

Because of disease, drought, rapacious new markets and the displacement of cacao by more-productive crops such as corn and rubber, demand is expected to outstrip supply by an additional 1 million tons every decade for the foreseeable future. Here, now, as you read these words, the world is running out of chocolate.

Chocolate: Can Science Save the World’s Most Endangered Treat? – Mark Schatzker, Bloomberg (14 November 2014)

Read the full piece. And pray.

How to switch off Evernote’s Contexts feature

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I was going to call this How and Why to do it, but you don’t need the why. Context is a new feature in Evernote that completely unhelpfully recommends Wall Street Journal articles that are not in any way related to your note.

Okay, that’s not how Evernote would describe it. But, hey, I’m in an Evernote note where I keep my invoice details and popping up in my way is a notification that “UK Police Drop Begg Charges” and that the WSJ wrote about this on 1 October 2014. I’m sure the case is riveting, but I don’t know who Begg is and he (there’s a photo too, it’s a he, whoever he is) doesn’t get a mention in my list of invoice numbers.

But on the Mac and I presume PC versions of Evernote, go to Evernote/Preferences, find Context, uptick Show Context.

Done.

So far I’ve not been so interrupted by Context on my iPhone or iPad so it’ll be interesting to see if the preference carries over to it.