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Watch this

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I did leave computers because they are ditchwater dull but just occasionally you get little moments of human interest. My absolute favourite was in the run up to the release of the iPad. There came a moment when for some reason everyone thought Apple would call this new device a slate. It’s a good name, it’s typically Apple in that it’s somehow better than the then usual term of tablet and sounds like they’d thought about it.

Maybe they did, I don’t know. But instantaneously, every computer company making anything even resembling a table began calling them slates. You’ve forgotten this because it stopped at about noon on April 3, 2010 when the iPad was unveiled. But for those brief weeks, it was funny watching companies like Microsoft dropping the word slate into any conversation they could.

Right now, things have ramped up a bit. Rather than dropping the word ‘watch’ into any chat they can, firms are releasing actual watches. Smart watches. Watches with smart bits in. But it’s still the same issue: Apple is now expected to unveil a watch very soon and rivals are trying to get there first. At this point, if it doesn’t reek of desperation it does at least pong a bit.

I’ve no idea if Apple will ever bring out a watch and I’ve no idea whether the latest rumour that it will be announced on 9 September is any more accurate than the myriad previous rumours.

But two days ago, LG released a teaser video saying that new watch was coming. Now the 9 September date is being whispered about more loudly, LG’s just scrapped the wait and gone straight to unveiling it.

LG-G-Watch-R-2

Shrug. Whether you like Apple or don’t, you know one fact already: while Apple would tell you the price and do its best to be able to say “Available today”, other computer firms don’t. The LG G Watch R – seriously, that’s its name – will be out in some places in the last quarter of the year and that’s when you’ll know the price too. There’s also not a bean about the other big question over smart watches: the battery life. Not true. There is a bean. The battery in the LG G Watch R will be a 410mAh one. I don’t know how to translate that to how long does it bloody last?

It’s a smartphone running Android Wear, which means you’ll need an Android phone to get any value out of it. And if I sound down on the whole thing, that would be because I am. The first mockups of what a round-faced smart watch would look like were just gorgeous and I wanted one on sight. Now I’m shrugging at the LG G Watch R – I just enjoy trying to type that name from memory and seeing how many corrections I have to make – and that makes me shrug a bit at the whole smart watch idea.

If Apple does bring one out, I will look at it. Apple gear has been very good for me and I will look at it. I don’t know if I want to buy one, but.

Why a routine stops you being routine

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How to sculpt an environment that optimizes creative flow and summons relevant knowledge from your long-term memory through the right retrieval cues.

Reflecting on the ritualization of creativity, Bukowski famously scoffed that “air and light and time and space have nothing to do with.” Samuel Johnson similarly contended that “a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.” And yet some of history’s most successful and prolific writers were women and men of religious daily routines and odd creative rituals. (Even Buk himself ended up sticking to a peculiar daily routine.)

Such strategies, it turns out, may be psychologically sound and cognitively fruitful.

The Psychology of Writing and the Cognitive Science of the Perfect Daily Routine – Maria Popova, Brain Pickings (25 August 2014)

Okay, I’m listening. Prove it.

And Popova does. Just please skip right on to her full piece as it is a simply absorbing piece that flies so quickly that it disguises just how much information is in there.

The creator and the audience: the irony of Star Wars

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Okay, it is occasionally argued that the reader or viewer knows more about a piece of work than its writer. Bollocks. I’ve been told by reviewers that my Doctor Who dramas are unquestionably, undoubtedly, certainly based on things I’ve never actually heard of.

But.

There is this thing with Star Wars. George Lucas keeps fiddling and he says that the original version was unfinished. He says that all his fiddling is making the movie into the film he always wanted it to be. I could be alright with that. There’s a song called Anchorage by Michelle Shocked that I adore and later on in her career she changed a couple of words. I found that very hard, somehow, but it’s her song and that’s it.

Except some of Lucas’s fiddling is juvenile.

He’ll take a scene and fill the background with CGI aliens that are distracting from the dramatic purpose of the moment and are sometimes just crap anyway.

Then he’ll go all Old Man’s Attitude on a scene. Originally, Han Solo is cornered by a baddie and kills him. Han is therefore a bit interesting, a bit less squeaky-clean than most of the characters, a little bit more than one-dimensional. And, most of all, his enemies are serious. Later we’re going to hear more about them and it’s more and more of a thing. But in the subsequent versions of the film, the baddie shoots first. He does so because Old Man’s Attitude says decent heroes don’t shoot until the baddie has. Lucas is fussed about the word decent whereas I am fussed about the word hero: because the baddie shoots first and we want Han to survive the film, the baddie must miss. From about a pixel away. Baddie is therefore ridiculously amateur and unthreatening.

That’s what you want: baddies who are unthreatening.

All this comes up now, though, because of a news story in The Atlantic that features someone called Harmy who has spent years recreating the original version of Star Wars from the various versions. You literally cannot buy the original film now but over the years there were Laserdisc and VHS versions and the like that are being scraped and utilised to rebuild the movie as it was. Fine.

I appreciate the craft and the determination. I wouldn’t if Lucas’s changes weren’t so often truly, deeply poor but they are so I do. What really interests me though, is that The Atlantic has also got this quote:

People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behavior, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society…

Today, engineers with their computers can add color to black-and-white movies, change the soundtrack, speed up the pace, and add or subtract material to the philosophical tastes of the copyright holder. Tomorrow, more advanced technology will be able to replace actors with “fresher faces,” or alter dialogue and change the movement of the actor’s lips to match. It will soon be possible to create a new “original” negative with whatever changes or alterations the copyright holder of the moment desires. The copyright holders, so far, have not been completely diligent in preserving the original negatives of films they control. In order to reconstruct old negatives, many archivists have had to go to Eastern bloc countries where American films have been better preserved.

That’s George Lucas making a speech to the US Congress in 1988. The Atlantic points out that this was to do with the then hot-topic of bastards colourising black and white classics. The Atlantic says:

Some argue that here Lucas was railing against outsiders being able to alter a directors work, not against directors being able to update their own pieces. Which raises the question of who truly owns something like Star Wars—a huge cultural phenomenon—once it is unleashed. Lucas addresses that in his speech too. “American works of art belong to the American public; they are part of our cultural history,” he said.

I think the word you’re looking for is ‘busted’.

Read the full piece in The Atlantic and learn more about what drives this Harmy.

Intentionally awkward office furniture for writers

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With shelves that are a little out of reach and a chair that requires balancing, the idea is introduce a “bearable discomfort” to make life a little less smooth–and a little more healthy.

This Deliberately Inconvenient Furniture Forces You To Be Active And Not Just Lie On The Couch – Adele Peters, Fast Company (26 August 2014)

Right. I’m thinking that I might be able to solve that “shelves that are a little out of reach” design by pulling the bloody things closer. But:

French designer Benoît Malta, by contrast, is creating products that are purposely a little less convenient, so people are forced to get up more often. And even if they stay seated, they’re forced to sit in an active way.

“Domestic activities are less and less physical,” says Malta. “I decided to work on different typical daily situations like turning on a light or reading email on a computer, and I tried to design objects that modify our habits and try to engage the body differently in everyday life.”

Read Peters’ full piece for photographs of example designs including a chair that you have to balance on rather that flop over. I don’t expect to flip over it either.

Wow-ish: Dropbox radically reduces prices

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I still use my free Dropbox account, I’ve just managed to nudge it up from 2Gb of space to 9Gb through a lot of work with offers and deals and referrals. It would be great to have more, it would mean that I could keep everything I do available to me everywhere I go. But the leap from free to paid has been rather big.

Now, not so much.

Dropbox says:

We don’t want you to worry about choosing the right plan or having enough space. So today, we’re simplifying Dropbox Pro to a single plan that stays at $9.99/month, but now comes with 1 TB (1,000 GB) of space.

Introducing More Powerful Dropbox Pro – ChenLi Wang, Dropbox blog (27 August 2014)

That’ll be $99/year. For UK users that’s £7.99/month or £79/year. It is a gigantic drop: previously you had to pay $99 for a year – sorry, you’re thinking that this doesn’t sound much or in any way different? But your money got you 100Gb: you’re now paying less for ten times more space.

But of course what Dropbox doesn’t say is that this is all because of competition from Google and Microsoft.

I don’t fancy Google Drive nor am I interested in Microsoft OneDrive because I’m already committed to Dropbox and like it a lot. I especially don’t want to get into a situation where some of my work is in Dropbox and some of it is in a rival system. That’d just do my head in.

So the fact that the price has dropped this much and the space has gone up this much is very tempting to me.

And yet I’m holding off.

I’m almost embarrassed to tell you why yet you need to know because you should hold off too.

It’s this. In a week or so, Apple will formally announce OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 – and these include iCloud Drive. Both Yosemite and iOS 8 will be free but iCloud Drive will be a Dropbox-like service. So yes, I am waiting to see whether I actually will split my work between Dropbox and another similar service. That’s why it’s embarrassing.

If iCloud Drive is very expensive I won’t do it, but it has the advantage – and this is why I’m even considering it – that it’s iCloud and so works really well with Macs and iOS.

Enough so that it is worth waiting to see what the price is. But after that, Dropbox is on my list.

Wow – TextExpander to radically improve in iOS 8

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Quick version: TextExpander will include a new system-wide keyboard that lets you trigger snippets and thereby expand text.

You’re looking at me like you want the slow version.

First, TextExpander is a utility that is fantastic on Macs and okay on iPhones and iPad. I’ve been working on the new book, Filling the Blank Screen – which is out as an ebook on Friday by the way, paperback next month – and so naturally I have typed that title a lot. I mean, a lot. But when I’m at my Mac, then whether I’m writing the back cover blurb, whether I’m completing a contract, whether I’m discussing the publication in emails, I can just type the letters xftb. Type that and the words “Filling the Blank Screen” are entered for me.

You can work out what the ftb means in xftb. The letters are up to you and the x is just a good habit to get into: few real words begin with x.

Now, I love typing and I love it so much that I ignored TextExpander for years. But it isn’t just for the odd short sentence: I have a bio snippet that after I type four letters, I get 300 words of biography text. A few times a month I’ll be asked for a bio so I type that snippet and then I edit the result to fit whatever is needed or whoever has asked me.

TextExpander also makes sure you are consistent: I don’t do this myself but there are many people who use it to automatically correct regular typing mistakes. So for instance, I keep mistyping “the” as “hte” (I wonder if that’s a cry of hate coming from my soul, as you do) which means I could set TextExpander to replace ‘hte’ with ‘the’ every time I type.

It’s also great for complex yet repetitive pieces of text: once a week I send a certain email to a certain person and I start it with a TextExpander keystroke. That does fill out the email with lots of detail but it also pauses to ask me for the new bits. I fill out a little form that appears and then TextExpander pops all the new bits into the pre-written email and I just hit send.

This is in all ways great.

When you’re on your Mac.

On the Mac, it works everywhere. On iOS it doesn’t. Apple doesn’t allow anything like this to run everywhere so the makers of TextExpander have to persuade app developers to play nice. Many, many do, but not all and not including Apple. So there’s no TextExpander support in Mail on my iPhone, for instance.

Now, Apple announced that iOS 8 will allow app makers to create keyboards. I did not give a damn. Not a monkey’s, not half a monkey’s, I heard Apple say it and it was out my other ear before they finished the sentence. I am fine with the regular keyboard on my iPhone and iPad, fine.

But now Smile Software, the makers of TextExpander, have announced that they will be one of the app companies providing a new keyboard.

And that keyboard will let you expand TextExpander snippets. Everywhere.

Everywhere.

This is huge and transforming because now you will always be able to use TextExpander. In anything. Anything.

I’m sold. Can’t wait for iOS 8 now. Go take a look at Smile Software’s announcement which includes a video demo.

Try writing 300 words

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Yeah, yeah, it’s supposed to be a book. Or a play. Or a whatever, something that’s a rather long and daunting job. Just tell yourself that you’re going to write 300 words on it right now:

I use this trick to great effect because I know I can write 300 words, at the same time that I rarely ever just write 300 words. The technique gives me an imminently attainable goal that I have no excuse not to achieve and focuses on the actual starting rather than on the finishing.

The next time you’re either stuck or procrastinating on a writing project, give yourself a goal of writing 300 words on it. (Click to tweet – thanks!)

Procrastinating on a Writing Project? Use the 300-Words Trick – Charlie Gilkey, Productive Flourising (25 August 2014)

Do I want this? LG teases round smart watch

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Short answer, probably no.

LG is soon to unveil a smartwatch and it will be round. That is surprisingly alluring to me, except of course that we’ve seen squared-off watches and we’ve seen bricks around people’s wrists so maybe it’s not surprising.

But what this teaser doesn’t do – well, it doesn’t show you much of the watch at all really, but what else it doesn’t do is acknowledge you’re not going to buy one when you think Apple is about to release a smartwatch.

I’ve no idea if or when Apple will but all the signs point to it and those signs are enough to make me pause before dropping hundreds of pounds (or whatever LG charges) on something else. I do like Apple design so I expect any watch that company does to be deeply thought out and genuinely useful. Probably also expensive. But I’d rather spend a lot of cash on something good than a little less cash on something that isn’t.

But I’ll be looking to see what LG does with this.

Google Slides

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Sounds like a headline about something bad happening to the company. But where Microsoft has PowerPoint and Apple has Keynote, so Google now has Slides. It’s a presentation application and it came to the iOS App Store today:

Google Slides makes your ideas shine with a variety of presentation themes, thousands of fonts, embedded video, animations, and more. All for free.

With Google Slides, everyone can work together in the same presentation at the same time.

All your changes are automatically saved as you type. You can even use revision history to see old versions of the same presentation, sorted by date and who made the change.

Google Slides official site

Go take a look at the free app.

MacPowerUsers: How and whether to use a To Do app

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This is really more an iOS thing than a Mac one and there is a spot of Android-osity in it too, but this week’s edition of the MacPowerUsers podcast is all about whether you actually need a To Do app.

Spoiler: you probably do.

But not definitely.

Listen to David Sparks and Katie Floyd discuss the topic and if you don’t use a task manager app, you might feel good about it. If you do, you might learn something. And if you’re in between, if you’re looking to use an app but don’t know which of the myriad ones available, you’ll certainly learn a lot.

MacPowerUsers episode 210: Task Management