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Plan ahead and lie about it, if necessary

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Here’s the thing. George S Kaufman read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men when it was published in 1937 and immediately commissioned him to write a theatre version of it. Reportedly Kaufman said: “I don’t know if there’s a dollar in it, but it’s got to be prepared for the stage and Steinbeck’s the man to do it.”

Not only did he buy the rights and commission Steinbeck, he put the writer up at his ranch.

Fine. And especially fine since at some point around then Steinbeck announced: “I don’t go to the theatre much and I don’t know a darn thing about actors.”

But he may have been telling a pork. Like all writers do when necessary, like you need to do a bit more often. Don’t seem needy but do be ready.

For in correspondence with George Albee the year before, Steinbeck said: “It is a tricky little thing designed to teach me to write for the theatre.”

So he was planning a stage version long before he was commissioned. (Does that sound familiar to you at all?) You have to admire his chutzpah but you also have to admire his stage play, which in this 77th year is being revived all over the world – including a production at my favourite, the Birmingham Rep.

Where he may differ from a lot of us is that he didn’t go to see his play. It opened in New York City, it opened on Broadway and it opened to immediate rave reviews and big business, but he didn’t go. Reportedly, he believed that his script was perfect and that any actual production would necessarily be a let down.

Ah, we all think that about our writing.

Don’t seem needy but do be ready. And maybe a bit more modest, I don’t know.

Of Mice and Men is coming to the Birmingham Rep from 10 October to 1 November and you can buy his perfect – I do agree with him – playscript from Amazon here.

Advance word: productivity mentoring coming soon

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Partly for your information and partly for mine: let me tell you that The Blank Screen productivity workshops are shortly to become very personal. As in one to one. As in dealing specifically with what is holding you back in your writing.

All I can specifically reveal now is that the mentoring will be based around Skype calls and where possible also face to face meetings.

I’ll tell you much more, including pricing, when it’s finalised but I wanted to tell you now because I also want to ask you: would you find it useful to have one to one mentoring with me?

I really fancy it because I’m dying to know what you’re doing. If you think you might be interested, let me know in an email to wg@williamgallagher.com. You’re not signing up to anything, you’re not committing, it’d just help me to have an idea of your interest and perhaps ask you about the kinds of things I can help you with.

I’m also telling you this now because I’m just so excited about it. Workshops are fantastic, but the individual sessions I’ve done so far have been deeply interesting.

What to do when your computer slows down during a job

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Buy a Mac. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Whatever type of computer you have, there comes a moment when you need to quickly do this particular thing or other and it is taking ages. I don’t know what happens now with Windows, but with a Mac it’s when you get that spinning beach ball.

Given that I keep saying you shouldn’t multitask, am I really going to say you should stay looking at that beach ball instead of going off to do something else?

A little bit.

Partly because, yes, multitasking is that bad for you. The time it takes you to switch over to a different task, mentally, is equal to the time it takes you to switch back and both times are huge. Much worse than you imagine.

So I would stare at the beach ball for a fair while before I’d be better off doing something else.

But there is another reason. Very often, if our computer is slow saving a Word document, say, then we’ll nip over to Mail on it. And now that’s slow. So we just open that graphic that we need to tweak in Photoshop. And what do you know, dammit, now Photoshop is slow.

Whatever was causing the original slow down, we are compounding it by turning to different tasks on our computer. So if we’d just stood sitting there, we wouldn’t be distracted, we wouldn’t be slowing down our computer and we wouldn’t therefore be getting frustrated at how everything seems slow now.

I just don’t know how long to give that.

I do know that sometimes I should really restart the whole machine and that if I do, things will work better. Taking the time to restart is hard but it can be worth it, you can repay that time soon.

But in the meantime, here’s a shorter answer to the problem: try a little patience, it’s worth the effort.

Talk to the Mac: Dragon Dictate on sale (briefly)

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I haven’t used it in centuries but those who do tell me that Dragon Dictate is very, very good. Not only in the way I would’ve imagined – that you can, you know, dictate into it – but also in that you can control it by voice. Nip up a paragraph, skip to the end of a page, right a bit, left a bit, fire.

I’m still not going to get it because I really enjoy typing but if you’ve been thinking about it, go get Dragon Dictate now for half price. Cult of Mac has a deal running where it costs $99.99 instead of $200.

…and one sad

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After 30 years, the original US version of Macworld magazine is to go out of print. It will continue online and the UK version is unaffected, it will still publish a print edition, but Macworld US is gone.

I’ve never written for the US one but I did have a column for a spell in the UK edition. It feels like another me from another life but it was there. So strange to think of that now.

Back when I was in computer magazines for a living, there was always rivalry between Macworld and MacUser. What I didn’t understand until right now when I looked it up – or maybe I’d just forgotten, it is a long time ago – is that MacUser began as a UK title. The title was then licensed to a US company and later, when that firm got out of the magazine business, another firm took it on. But they had also taken on Macworld and they weren’t going to keep both running. So whatever was Macworld US and whatever was MacUser US merged operations together and became Macworld.

But I worked for that US company. Ziff Davis. Long gone from magazines, which in some ways now seems prescient, it had a big advantage that even as I worked in the London office, I could request a copy of US magazines. I would request the US MacUser.

Back then, it was such a good read that I’d request it and I’d keep it. I remember moving house and having to decide the fate of many years’ worth off MacUser issues.

I can scare remember the days of having to wait a month for news and there is no magazine now that I regularly read.

I miss that experience. And as sad as I was when I learnt that my old mag, PC Direct, had closed down, tonight I am just that little bit sadder because MacUser as was, Macworld as it became, was just a damn good read for a long time.

One silly paper-based Apple story…

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I’ve been leaning toward the larger phone because I’m really curious about how a bigger screen would change my relationship to my iPhone. I really like my iPad and if I had some of those features in my pocket at all times, I may really like that. I’m so curious that I’ve made a mock-up with this template from Ars Technica. I printed the page, folded it around the 6 Plus size, and taped a stack of index cards to the back to give it the approximate thickness of the actual phone. I’ve carried it so far in my fancy work pants and my jeans. It fits fine in my pocket.

6 or 6 Plus? – David Sparks, MacSparky (10 September 2014)

Here’s the Ars Technica link if you really, really want to do this daft thing. I saw that they’d done it, I just didn’t think anyone would use it.

Sparks, who I might mock for this bit otherwise think is an interesting guy, explains more in his full piece and mentions the ribbing he’s had today.

Apple’s other product: the presentation itself

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Apple does this stuff well. I’ve stolen from their playbook: I make the simplest, shortest, briefest slides I can.

Others have gone a lot further. Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi’s CEO dresses like Steve Jobs, presents products that look remarkably like Apple’s, and recently did Jobs’s famous “One more thing” in a presentation.

I would hope he got laughed at. I would hope that I get away with my short slides. But we both have reason to steal from Apple: they do this stuff so well.

Quartz (qz.com) looked at the last many years of Apple event presentations and analysed them rather a lot. So much so that it’s a bit of a shame they didn’t wait until after yesterday’s which would’ve seriously affected the findings.

Still:

One of Apple’s most successful products—which rarely gets recognized as such—is made not of aluminum and glass, but of words and pictures. The Apple keynote is the tool the company uses a few times a year to unveil its other products to millions of people. To understand their hidden structure, Quartz reviewed more than a dozen Apple keynotes, logging and analyzing key elements. Here’s what we found.

The Apple Keynotes podcast on the iTunes Store lists 27 events since Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone on Jan. 9, 2007. (A few are missing.)
They are an average 88 minutes long, with a similar look and feel—a minimalist slide presentation with live demos from Apple executives and industry leaders, punctuated by videos explaining Apple’s design and manufacturing processes. These videos—a genre in themselves—have been frequently parodied.

The Hidden Structure of the Apple Keynote – Dan Frommer, Quartz (8 September 2014)

Read the full piece for more minute by minute details, including who is the funniest Apple presenter ever. It isn’t Steve Jobs.

How and probably why Apple’s streaming event failed so badly

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My interest is in how a bad presentation – the video stream was so very poor though the actual talk was good – can affect the audience’s experience. I’m interested because I present and I’ve had things go wrong. Just never on this scale.

The short answer is that it wasn’t how many people tried to watch it at the same time. It was the fancy page that Apple put it on.

Unlike the last live stream Apple did, this time around Apple decided to add some JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) code to the apple.com page which added an interactive element on the bottom showing tweets about the event. As a result, this was causing the page to make refresh calls every few milliseconds. By Apple making the decision to add the JSON code, it made the apple.com website un-cachable. By contrast, Apple usually has Akamai caching the page for their live events but this time around there would have been no way for Akamai to have done that, which causes a huge impact on the performance when it comes to loading the page and the stream. And since Apple embeds their video directly in the web page, any performance problems in the page also impacts the video. Akamai didn’t return my call asking for more details, but looking at the code shows there was no way Akamai could have cached it. This is also one of the reasons why when I tried to load the Apple live event page on my iPad, it would make Safari quit. That’s a problem with the code on the page, not with the video.

Inside Apple’s Live Event Stream Failure, And Why It Happened: It Wasn’t A Capacity Issue – Dan Rayburn, Streaming Media Blog (9 September 2014)

No more callers, we have a winner: Apple Watch

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That’s it, I’m done. I’m buying an Apple Watch.

Previously, I’ve ignored the whole smart watch fad, I’ve been tempted by the announcement of Motorola’s Moto 360, I’ve got bored and lost all interest, I’ve been re-tempted by the eventual launch of that same Moto 360.

It got to the stage where yesterday I would recommend the Moto 360 being worth your having a look. And I had decided yeah, maybe, that is good and someday that will be a really great thing. But I didn’t know whether I would actually want one.

That’s over now. No chance I will ever buy or even bother to look at the Moto 360.

But I will have an Apple Watch on my wrist next year. Yes, it looks good but what sold me is the depth of thinking they’ve done on this: the myriad tiny details that make this watch something genuinely useful that you will genuinely use.

Go take a look at the mass of detail now available on the Apple site.

If Microsoft’s video had gone so badly I’d be mocking them

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Apple’s event today wasn’t really overshadowed by its technical problems, but it felt like it was. I could tell you that the video feed started and stopped, began again, dropped out to colour bars, ran catchup like a Benny Hill sequence and when it would come back would also be accompanied by a Japanese translation soundtrack.

I could tell you all that and it would be true but it doesn’t convey the frustration. I truly do not know why I carried on watching. Actually, I gave up many times, but still I was drawn back. And eventually it did work – but the live feed ran so many minutes behind reality that I had to hide my iPhone to ignore texts that were coming through from people who happened to have a better feed.

But the texts, they did come. Because of the Apple Watch.

By the time that was announced on my screen, the feed was fixed and the frustrations were fading. But I have to wonder: is the reason I’m not fussed about the new iPhones just that they were announced when the feed was down?

Video and systems and launches and infrastructure are crucial – and Apple got it wrong today.