News

Is this the most useless feature of the Apple Watch?

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Could be. First the feature, then why it’s useless:

[Jony Ive says] Just yesterday, somebody was saying, ‘Wow, do you know what I just did? I set the alarm in the morning, and it woke just me by tapping my wrist. It didn’t wake my wife or my baby,’” he recounted. “Isn’t that fantastic?”

“San Francisco Treasure” Jony Ive Talks Apple Watch at SFMOMA Gala – Nellie Bowles and Dawn Chmielewski, Re/code (1 November 2014)

It is fantastic and it would make my getting up hours before Angela that much easier. So far, so Apple.

But.

It’s beyond likely that the Apple Watch will need charging up every night. Maybe I’m jaded because I’ve had problems with the ordinary alarm on my iPhone, but I think this is going to be a feature that has to wait for better battery technology than currently exists.

Ive was talking at a San Francisco event; read Re/code’s full piece.

Weekend Read: When Crowdsourcing Turns on You

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At best you think crowdsourcing is a marvellous thing where people get together to achieve a common goal. At worst you think getting people to do that is cheaper than hiring them. But there is always the assumption that the people are good and the intention is pure. And sometimes, not so much.

We completed three documents in five days, at a breakneck speed that put us third among 9,000 competitors. We had just two documents to go. The secret to our success was our size and our system. My collaborator, computer scientist Manuel Cebrian, and I had created a platform that allowed thousands of individuals to work together on these scrambled documents. Plus, we rewarded assistance by enticing key players with a share of the $50,000 bounty, should we win.

However, my optimism faded suddenly on Day 5. My phone rang, and Cebrian shouted, “We are under attack!” I swung open my laptop and logged into the system, only to see thousands of man-hours of meticulous work disappear in seconds, as virtual paper scraps scattered before me in all directions. It was the first in a series of attacks sustained by our team, and marked the end of our winning streak.

How Crowdsourcing Turned On Me – Iyad Rahwen, Nautilus (23 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

The Verge on the best coming-soon Android features

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This means nothing to me. But if it’s your thing, knock yourself out while I deal with a sudden hankering to visit Vienna. Let me know if any of these features look like they’ll be handy for productivity, would you? Thanks.

Google’s approach for rolling out the latest version of Android, Lollipop, is a little different. There are the usual things we see every year — a new Nexus phone and a new Nexus tablet — but instead of a big event, the company is posting details in blog posts and on the main Android site. So if you’re tracking the rollout closely, you probably have a sense of what’s new and what’s cool in the OS. If you’re not, though, getting a sense of what Lollipop is actually like and what it actually does isn’t easy.

Luckily, we got a chance to sit down with some Google execs last week to get a walkthrough of the coolest features. We won’t know everything until we actually have a chance to use the final version, but there are some clever additions we saw last week. Here are some of our favorites.

12 of the best new features in Android Lollipop – Dieter Bohn, The Verge (28 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

Evernote adds unwanted Context feature

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That is, the new Context feature is unwanted. It isn’t that it does something useful with unwanted features.

I think it’s unwanted but you never know: I might find it useful, you might. But it puts links or information into your Evernote account that the company’s algorithms think you’ll want. If there is something in your notes that in any way lets Evernote reckon you burn to read a Wall Street Journal article, there it is.

This is a Premium user feature and is like a reverse of that other paid-for trick, the Google search look up. If I search Google for something and already have a relevant note, Evernote displays it for me. I use that, I like that, it’s very useful.

What I can’t conceive of is using Context to pull in WSJ articles. Any articles. From anywhere.

Maybe it’ll be something I come to like. Hopefully it’s something I can switch off. But right now I can’t tell either because the new Evernote update for iPhone brought me a different problem.

I suspect it’s re-indexing my Evernote notes or doing some heavy lifting. If it’s searching all my thousands of notes to find me relevant Wall Street Journal articles I’ll be pissed because whatever it’s doing, it’s stopping me using Evernote here on my iPhone 5.

In the last half hour it has got better: I can now get into a notebook I need and some buttons do respond. But I can’t then scroll down the notebook, I can’t get in to the notes.

Usually I like the automatic updates on iOS but I’d have more liked a warning this was happening and I’d even more have liked a warning and the option to postpone updating.

Please don’t picture me crossing my fingers that it’ll work before I get where I’m going today. No, don’t picture that. Instead, picture how useful Evernote is that being effectively locked out of it is causing me these problems and making me this ratty.

For sale – me

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Sort of. You’re reading the productivity website, there is the email newsletter, there are the books and there are the national workshops. But now there is you. And me. You can get individual coaching to help with your specific productivity roadblocks.

Here’s the skinny:

You’ve got so much to do that you can’t remember when you last did any writing. I will get you more time: I wrote the book on it. Then I ran the workshop. And the newsletter. Now you can get my individual productivity coaching: learn how to get started and keep going, how to handle distractions and deadlines. Plus, how to get more from your computer and your kettle. Barbara Machin says my book is “inspiring and liberating… genuinely grapples with making an extra hour (or two) in the day”. Join me for one-to-one coaching and I’ll get you going with three hour-long Skype or phone sessions.

If you’ve been to my day-long workshops you know how this works overall but I’ll get to find out much more about what you’re up to and help you that much more with your specific issues.

Price: £175
More details on my official mentoring site
And email me to book

Google: the search engine that looked at goats

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It’s not a metaphor. But it is a warning. Here’s the intriguing bit:

A few weeks ago, I discovered that Google knows the lifespan of a goat. Search for “how long does a goat live” and you’ll see it displayed in a special card above the search results. 15 to 18 years! It’s not an important fact, and I can’t imagine people ask it very often — but there it is. I couldn’t tell you where they got the answer (it’s surprisingly hard to nail down, as I’ll get into later) but I’m pretty sure it’s right. It’s the kind of accidental discovery that Google loves to serve up. I went looking for a fact, and there it was. You come away feeling as if the engine knows the answer to any question you could ask.

The official name for this feature is the Knowledge Graph, Google’s project for converting information on the web into easily managed cards. The sudden appearance of the goat data says a lot about the piecemeal way Google has been building it. How long had they known about goats? I made a few calls and Google got back with an answer: the card was added a year ago, as part of a broader animal expansion that also included a goat’s mass (45 to 300 kilograms) and height (40 to 58cm), with similar specs for other beasts. Unless you’d thought to Google “how long does a goat live”, you would never have known.

Why Google is learning about goats – Russell Brandom, The Verge (28 October 2014)

Read the full piece for the warning bit. Spoiler: what we think of is fact can be just a lot of good guesses.

Microsoft releases new Outlook for Mac, says Office coming

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I’m not very keen on Outlook but it is a gigantically popular app and it’s good to see it being updated:

Today we are announcing the new Outlook for the Mac, which delivers improved performance and reliability and a fresh look and feel that is unmistakably Microsoft Office. This release offers a more familiar and consistent experience between Outlook on the PC, Outlook on the web and Outlook Web App (OWA) for iPad, iPhone and Android devices.

The new Outlook for Mac includes:

Better performance and reliability as a result of a new threading model and database improvements.
A new modern user interface with improved scrolling and agility when switching between Ribbon tabs.

New Outlook for Mac available to Office 365 customers – Office Blogs

Read the full piece for more about Outlook and the future of Office on the Mac.

Band on the wrist

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Microsoft has release Band, a health, er, thing. There’s a Band app for iPhone, Android and Windows phones plus there is an actual band that you wear. It looks a lot like various smart watch-like bracelets I’ve seen people wearing, except this one just feels like Windows:

Tell the truth, you were expecting it to look like this:

Microsoft Health is a new service that helps you live healthier by providing actionable insights based on data gathered from the fitness devices and apps that you use every day. It’s designed to work for you, no matter what phone you have, device you wear, or services you use. Microsoft Health makes tracking personal fitness easier, more insightful, and more holistic.

Microsoft Band, the smart band powered by Microsoft Health – Microsoft Band official site (retrieved 30 October 2014)

Read the full piece and watch videos on the official site.

How to stop feeling overwhelmed

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Caught:

You might even be reading this in procrastination, facing that sliding mountain of work without the energy to scale it.

6 Steps to Stop Feeling So Overwhelmed – Samantha Cole, Fast Company (28 October 2014)

That quote from Cole comes at the end of her introduction to the piece and while that one sentence is what made me want to show you – and also admit she’s caught me out – I think the rest of her intro says it better than I would:

Becoming overwhelmed is a slow avalanche.

At first, agreeing to an extra project or starting a new class feels exciting. Sure, one more deadline is doable. Then you end up with three more meetings a week on your calendar. Before long, the moments that used to be reprieve become stressful, too–your friend’s in town and wants to catch up over drinks, but you’ve got that yoga class you already paid for, so you’ll have to leave work by 6 p.m. even though you haven’t started what’s due in the morning, and your emails aren’t going to reply to themselves. Work quality slips. Sleep, what’s that?

You might even be reading this in procrastination, facing that sliding mountain of work without the energy to scale it. Here’s your six-step climbing plan.

Go read her six steps, would you? I’m on her page, ahead of you. Or will be after I’ve made this tea.