Where to watch today’s Apple event

Slightly longer answer: http://www.apple.com

Slightly longer and a little more useful answer: it used to be that Apple would post videos a few hours after the event but now they stream it live.

This has somewhat scuttled the many news sites and unofficial Apple ones which still post second-by-second typed updates live from the venue. Think of that as a really specific single-topic Twitter and, naturally, there’s at least a lot of the same updates going on the real Twitter too.

In the years of watching these things, I never did find one such source that I could recommend. Some typed faster than others, that was good, and some had websites that updated automatically instead of your having to hit Refresh all the time. But still, I would end up with two such text feeds rolling up the screen while I wondered what in the world it is that gets me so interested. I suppose there are people who study football results so maybe it’s that we all have a natural capacity for minutiae.

Or maybe it’s just men.

Anyway, fun is fun, so whyever this appeals, let it appeal at 6pm UK time on apple.com

This a bit specific, but if you have OmniFocus and Keyboard Maestro…

Posted by William Gallagher

…wait, let me tell you what those are. They are gorgeous. Now read on.

Okay. OmniFocus is my beloved To Do task manager and it comes up a lot on this site. If you’re not sure what it does, wait ten seconds and I’ll have a new mention of it. Keyboard Maestro is different: I have mentioned it but usually in passing or when it’s been on sale. It’s one of those tools that you set up and forget, so I rather set it up and forgot about it.

Keyboard Maestro lets you tap a couple of keys and set your Mac off doing all sorts of things. I have a key that opens OmniFocus. (Told you.) There’s a fault on my MacBook Pro where the Q and W keys don’t work and it looks like getting it fixed would be both expensive and time consuming. So I’ve told Keyboard Maestro to type a “w” when I press Command-1. And similar for capital W, q and Q.

I think there are more, but you come to believe that your Keyboard Maestro setup is just a normal part of your Mac. I’d need to go to another Mac and use it for a while before I could tell what Keyboard Maestro does by seeing what that Mac doesn’t.

But I have been the very smallest, slightest user of this software and that will change by about a pixel today as I’ve discovered a way to use it to solve an itch:

Using Keyboard Maestro, I was able to create a script that, when executed, creates and sends a custom-built email to my OmniFocus Mail Drop—and containing a direct link back to the original Mail message.

Specifically, here’s what the script does:

It executes a Keyboard Maestro script called “Get Message URL” which calculates the URL to the currently selected Mail message. (That script simply executes some AppleScript, which I’ve included below.)
Prompts me for a short text to be used as the todo title.
Sets a variety of Keyboard Maestro variables.
Creates an email message whose subject and body content are built from those variables—including the link to the original message—and then sends that email to my Mail Drop address.
Archives the original Mail message—since at that point, I’m done with it.

Using Keyboard Maestro to create todos in OmniFocus 2 that are linked to original messages in Mail – Matt Henderson, The Defacto Blog (23 May 2014)

Did you get that? The full feature has much more of an explanation plus diagrams – I should have more diagrams on this The Blank Screen, shouldn’t I? – and it’s also got the specific details you need to use this yourself.

Which is the specific detail I am this very minute taking in order to do this myself.

Nearly forgot: Keyboard Maestro for Mac costs £23.05 in the UK and is available here.

UPDATE: Done. Took me 17 minutes by the look of it. From a standing start, an “eh?” to running, working and using this.

Todoist Premium on special offer (briefly)

Posted by William Gallagher

As featured in this week’s email newsletter, you can currently get a free six months subscription to the premium version of Todoist.

The deal is via Appsumo, it’s here and it’s worth looking at – but before you buy, check out the free version. It may well be all you need in which case Premium is a waste of your money. It’s a nice waste, mind: you’d be supporting the firm that makes this To Do app you so like, but still.

When you follow that Appsumo link, scroll down. The front page looks like a big ad for Appsumo but it’s just the top: scroll down for a lot of detail about Todoist.

Taking the scorched Earth policy to your social media

Posted by William Gallagher

I belong to that exclusive Twitter club, not users who have been “verified” (curse their privileged names) but users who have hit the daily tweet limit, the social-media equivalent of getting cut off by the bartender. The few, the proud, the badly in need of help.

Reboot or Die Trying – David Roberts, Outside (2 September 2014)

That’s serious social media use. I had no idea that there even was a daily limit on Twitter. But after hitting it and generally just going far too far on all of these things, Roberts quit. Cold turkey, near enough, for a year.

He claims to have five things to tell you, five things that you can only know from having a year away from technology – or, presumably, reading about it.

I’d tell you some of the five but this is on Outside magazine. Outside. I barely know what the word means. Read the full feature and if it’s that crucial, let me know.

Update: the 1,179 news stories I won’t read

Posted by William Gallagher

Five days ago I wrote about The 319 News Stories I Won’t Read. If you’ve heard me wibble on above ten minutes then you might figure that these 319 are sports stories. No. I ignore sports but just as one amorphous blob of nothingness, I don’t understand it enough to determine individual news stories.

The 319 were the Apple news stories in my RSS newsreader. And right now there are 1,179 articles about Apple. That’s quite a lot of stories and I would like to tell you about them, except I still won’t read them.

I may never read them. You can be sure that a gigantic majority are to do with the launch of the iPhone 6 and whatever else Apple may or may not release tomorrow. I’ve been staying away from the firehose of news because most of it is wrong, much of it is clickbait emptiness as well as wrong, and you end up being convinced that Apple will announce the discovery of alien life.

After tomorrow’s event, there will be many more stories and I might read some of those. But these 1,179 are dead to me.

All of which is a long way of saying that a lot gets written about Apple, that a lot gets read about Apple by me and that is KILLINGLY DIFFICULT to ignore 1,179 articles.

Apple is streaming its event live on apple.com from 6pm UK time tomorrow, Tuesday. I’ve skipped the articles but I’ll be watching the event. If you enjoy these as much as I do, please write in and explain what I get out of them.

Stop me. This is a bad new habit

Posted by William Gallagher

I’m a bit swamped. And today I set an alarm to prod me into a particular task at a particular time.

That’s not a time in my To Do list: I don’t find the timed reminders in OmniFocus all that useful because I just don’t find them. I’ll pick up my phone and discover a reminder notification is there. If it made a sound, I didn’t catch it.

This could be a problem with my iPhone: I have difficulties with the alarm sometimes going off and sometimes not. It will always display the alarm notification, the one with stop or snooze buttons, but it might not make any noise. I would be considering my hearing if it weren’t that sometimes it does work.

For a year or more now, I’ve been setting two alarms: one for 04:59 and one for 05:01 because one or either or both will sound and I’ll take that.

I suppose I’m just using the same workaround to solve my tasks problem but I really don’t like it. I set three alarms today for three certain things that had to certainly be done. When it came down to it, I postponed one of them. And I snoozed all three several times.

This is just a senseless waste of my concentration and I’ve got to stop it.

If something works, fine. If it doesn’t, why keep doing it? I need to take a step out, I think, and re-examine my OmniFocus To Do lists.

Hang on, I’ll just set an alarm for that.

Why we have the 40-hour week – and why we should keep it

Posted by William Gallagher

I’m all for working long hours and I remain convinced that I am contributing to the work/life balance argument by not having a life. But:

In the early 1900s, Ford Motor ran dozens of tests to discover the optimum work hours for worker productivity. They discovered that the “sweet spot” is 40 hours a week–and that, while adding another 20 hours provides a minor increase in productivity, that increase only lasts for three to four weeks, and then turns negative.

Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week – Geoffrey James, Inc (24 April 2012)

That’s the crux of it, really, but read the full piece for a little more of the history of the 40-hour figure and how it’s applying to office workers as well as Ford’s factory ones.

Fork. This cutlery will help you eat healthier

Posted by William Gallagher

As I raise the fork to my mouth to deliver another Brussel sprout, it starts to violently vibrate, and I almost drop it on the table. The hostess eyes me suspiciously.

The devil fork is called the HAPIfork, but I immediately slip into calling it the “food-shaming fork,” and the name sticks. The moniker isn’t really fair — the fork doesn’t actually take into account what type of food you’re eating. Instead, it measures how quickly you eat, and zaps you with a Pavlovian vibration if you don’t take enough time between bites. It’s supposed to train you to eat slower, which studies have shown can help you feel fuller sooner, thus leading to weight loss. (This effect generally takes about 20 minutes.)

I Ate With a Food-Shaming Fork for a Week – Jessica Roy, NY Mag (1 September 2014)

It’s a very big fork, like a sonic screwdriver with prongs on the end. So there’s also the embarrassment factor of being seen with this, let alone with it, well, um, vibrating like that.

Read Roy’s full feature for how the week went and how the weak survive.

Refresh app: just when you get used to it feeling creepy…

Posted by William Gallagher

It’s still not out in the UK so you’ll just have to trust me here, but there is this iPhone app called Refresh which parses your calendar and prompts you with conversation starters for people you’re about to meet.

Refresh is very clever and it seems supernatural how it combs sources like LinkedIn to present its information. But as well as the fact that I will never use its suggested conversation openers – I prefer “Hello” to “Say, weren’t you on holiday in Marakesh from 16 July to 18 August?” – there are oddities. And these oddities keep reminding you of how Refresh is sitting on the very line between useful and creepy.

It’s meant to prompt you before a meeting and it does so, but not always. I forgot that I still had it after reviewing the app. Until one day, two months later, it pinged with details of the woman I was meeting to discuss a writing project. I showed her what it said and she revealed that it was all wrong: she had purposely lied on LinkedIn and Facebook in order to defeat this kind of thing.

But then I had a meeting right after that and Refresh didn’t do anything. But then I had a third meeting and it pinged.

A few weeks later, I was going to an event I’d produced and it pinged with what it called a dossier about a particular someone else who was going. That was freaky-plus because my calendar just had the event name and there was nothing I could see that named her – and didn’t name half a dozen other people that Refresh was ignoring.

But still, you know, even though I could just delete it and walk away, I am drawn back to it. There is something so smart about what it does that I’m fascinated at the algorithm. Plus, it gave me the name of someone’s partner and I’d forgotten it. So thank you, Refresh.

Except, last night I got something new. Have a look, see what you think. Is this what I was really doing last night?