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The only type of update you’re going to see about Aperture

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It’s a weird one, isn’t it? Apple’s pulled big applications before – it ditched Final Cut Pro in favour of what was initially a much reduced Final Cut Pro X – but the death of its photo software Aperture is odd. Apple didn’t announce this death, they just rather let it be known.

And now they’ve just rather let a little more be known. Apple has given Ars Technica an update about what will happen next. We know that Aperture and iPhoto are dead, that they will both be replaced by a new application called Photos in OS X Yosemite. And we gathered that Photos would not be a professional tool the way Aperture was. But:

Update: When asked about what Aperture-like features users can expect from the new Photos app, an Apple representative mentioned plans for professional-grade features such as image search, editing, effects, and most notably, third-party extensibility. The representative also clarified the timeframe when Aperture development will end, along with an announcement about its other Pro app offerings receiving updates today.

Apple to cease development, support of pro photo app Aperture [Updated] – Sam Machkovech, Ars Technica (original story 27 June, update 2 July 2014)

If I liked Lightroom more, maybe I’d swap to it. But this makes me think that it will be worth hanging on to see what Photos is like. Afterall, just because Apple won’t update Aperture, that doesn’t mean the copy I’ve got will stop working today.

No. Please, no: an app for rating your colleagues

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It’s called Knozen and thank goodness I can’t test it for you: you have to have a company of at least seven people who have all signed up. It’s just you and me here and I think you’re great.

But if you were to have seven people and you were to use this service, this is the type of thing Knozen would pop up with on your iPhone:

knozen

Those shots are from Business Insider which was able to test it out and so also got screens like this:

knozen2

That’s the data for Business Insider journalist Alyson Shontell who wrote the article about Knozen that gave me a double take. From her piece:

Knozen is a new iPhone app that lets coworkers rate each other’s personalities anonymously. It’s like Lulu is for men, or Yelp is for restaurants.

Founded by former Ladders CEO Marc Cenedella, Knozen pits two coworkers against each other and asks the user a series of questions such as, “Which person is friendlier?” or, “Who is more likely to buy cookies from a girl scout?”

The user then selects which coworker best fits the description and is told how many other colleagues voted the same way. At least seven people from an organization need to sign up for Knozen before they’re allowed to start rating each other to protect everyone’s identity.

Knozen might sound like a recipe for disaster, but Cenedella argues that it’s merely a way to “bring personality to the internet” and that the content is always “positive and upbeat.” You won’t find questions about a co-worker’s appearance, for example

New App That Raised $2.25 Million Lets You Anonymously Rate Coworkers – Alyson Shontell, Business Insider (30 June 2014)

I’d not heard of Lulu – other than the apparently completely separate printing and publishing company – and I also can’t seem to get you a link. But it’s reportedly a women-only app that takes your Facebook friends list and lets you rate the men you and mutual friends know.

But I’m minded more of the Bang with Friends app which became famous for upsetting the delicate sensibilities of Apple for the word Bang and reportedly for having problems with games manufacturer Zynga whose apps include “Words with Friends”. It renamed itself Down and says it’s “the anonymous, simple, fun way to find friends who are down for the night” and you’re saying yeah, sure, and why exactly is it anonymous?

Like Knozen and Lulu, it presents you with a list of people you know – this time solely through Facebook – and you can say whether you would like to get down with them. Look, we’re talking sex. It’s a who-do-you-fancy app. The thing of it is that if they also have this Down app and they have also said they fancy you, sparks are automatically messaged back and forth and either very good or very bad times happen.

I know this because I was hugely amused by the naming problems: with Apple disliking the ‘Bang’ and Zynga objecting to the ‘With Friends’ bit, there wasn’t a lot of the name left. Obviously I don’t know this because I use the app myself and nobody fancies me.

 

It’s possible this isn’t serious

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The Onion’s new Buzzfeed-like mocking site has a perfect deadpan article about success which I might even have linked to if it were real. I wince admitting that.

Life is short. If you wait too long to go out and do what you want with your life, you’ll never get a chance to see your dreams come true. That’s why I tell people to stop letting the fear of failure hold you back.

Take me for instance. For years, I dreamed of just reaching out and grabbing a police officer’s gun right out of its holster and running away as fast as possible, but I never even tried because I was afraid of failing. What if I wasn’t able to pull out the gun fast enough? What if the cop yelled at me? What if he caught me and sent me to jail? There seemed to be an endless number of things that could go wrong, so I never even gave things a chance to go right.

Then one day, I decided to just go for it. I saw a cop standing on a nearby street corner and he was kind of zoned out, so I snuck up on him very quietly and reached out for his gun. Was I afraid? Of course I was—but this time, I didn’t let my nerves get the better of me. I just grabbed his gun and I booked it as fast as I could.

Stop Letting The Fear Of Failure Hold You Back – Trey Pagels, self-help expert Clickhole (30 June 2014)

See how that works out for him.

That was June 2014

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Last month – see That was May 2014 – I had entirely forgotten to make any notes about what I’d been doing as I was doing it. That was a big jolt for me because I’d been reasonably diligent about it during the whole year before. And it helps. It helps me feel I’m not standing still. Plus, as I near the end of the month and see there’s bugger-all in the list, it helps me go do something.

So the first thing I did in June after realising this was that I wrote a wee thing for Drafts and Evernote that means I can quickly make a note and know that it will automatically be appended to a list. Then today I spent about twenty times longer writing you a note about how I did this.

That is great for letting me extremely rapidly jot down something I’ve done or am doing, but it’s less brilliant at the end of the month. I’ve got this pleasingly long list of things but it needs some sorting for me to get an idea of the type of work I’ve done. To understand the quality rather than the quantity.

But having sorted through it and obscured the usual confidential details and totted up the various word counts, I can tell you and myself that June 2014 for me meant:

Writing totalling approximately 77,485 words
2 ecourses on productivity issues (9129 words)
2 presentations (971 words)
1 Radio Times reviews (100 words)
1 Lifehacker UK article (500 words)
Edited novel opening and pre-circulated to new group
156 news stories for The Blank Screen (approximately 43,000 words)
4 Self Distract entries (5,211 words)
4 The Blank Screen email newsletters (5,195 words)
Four iPad software tutorials (11,029 words)
Outlined Resistance stage play
Wrote first five pages of Resistance – but all five rubbish and thrown away
850 words of new non-fiction book but also rubbish, also thrown away
1,500 words of new short story, fate to be determined

Talks, appearances and performances
Page Talk panel discussion at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Directed “Murder at Burton Library” for the Burton Young Writers’ group
Represented the Writers’ Guild and the Screenwriters’ Forum in the House of Commons for Parliament’s Birmingham Day
Visited two schools as guest of Royal Television Society
Promoted the Writers’ Guild at two RTS Mini-Summits including one at BBC Nottingham
Guest at Winterbourne Young Writers’ Group
Spoke at Combrook Readers’ Group for short story I’m writing for them

Pitches &c:
22 phone calls
7 specific pitches with 1 rejection but an open door and only 1 non-response

Attended:
Writing Begets Writing – three two-hour briefing/training on mental health work
1x wedding
Curzon Street Station exhibition
Women in Mind at the Birmingham Rep
Frequently Asked Questions at the Birmingham Rep
Writers’ Networking drink (if only for 17 seconds, very rude of me)
Bold Text at the Birmingham Rep

Other:
Produced video for Parliament Day and the Writers’ Guild
Promoted the move to get Alan Plater a blue plaque
Formally invited to join the Royal Television Society’s committee; going through nomination process now
Phone meeting with author re book I’m publishing
Reading/editing her latest two chapters

Why I Can’t Delete a Digital Moment I Don’t Even Remember

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There isn’t anything productive about this, perhaps it’s even the opposite of that. But it fascinated me: writer Jessica Miller very simply and starkly conveys what it’s like when you’re dumped yet she’s doing so in order to examine something more. It’s about memory and perception and technology and ourselves – and it’s about a 34-second audio recording that she includes in her piece:

What you’re hearing might not sound like much, but for me, listening to this clip transports me to a place with weight and dimension and color. It’s mostly me trying to get my microphone-shy boyfriend to talk. To tell me what he feels in this moment when the relationship is new and everything seems right and beautiful. He’s laughing at me because I’m being ridiculous, although he was always a man of few, well-chosen words. And then the kiss. He probably kisses me to get me to stop trying to make him talk. I guess it worked, because that’s where the recording cuts off. But it’s a sound so sweet, and so genuine. In an instant, I smell saltwater, grass, and his shampoo. I feel skin and the late summer air and the feeling of not being afraid to be completely myself in front of someone I care about.

But the thing is, I have absolutely no memory of this even happening.

Why I Can’t Delete a Digital Moment I Don’t Even Remember – Jessica Miller, The Atlantic (29 June 2014)

Now, for some reason I can’t hear her embedded SoundCloud audio track. But I’m okay with that: it’s her story, what she thinks next and now my imagination of what that recording is that engrossed me.

The brute-force way to motivate yourself

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Regular productivity writer Eric Barker has a piece in Time magazine about what he calls the mistake every Productivity system makes:

Productivity systems rarely take emotions into account. And feelings are a fundamental and unavoidable part of why humans do what they do.

We can’t ignore our emotions. Because of the way our brains are structured, when thought and feelings compete, feelings almost always win.

Riffing on a book called Change by Chip and Dan Heath (UK edition, US edition), Barker proposes we think like mad when we’re planning what we have to do but then we do it by feel and specifically by using three steps to “rile up those emotions and get things done”.

The three – detailed in the full piece – are about rewords and peer pressure but my favourite is:

Having trouble finding a reward awesome enough to get you off your butt? Try a “commitment device” instead:

Give your friend $100. If you get a task done by 5PM, you get your $100 back. If you don’t complete it, you lose the $100.

Your to-do list just got very emotional.

That’s broadly the same principle that the website Go Fucking Do It works on (official website, news story on The Blank Screen)

This is how it should be: a Safari Extension I’ll use hourly

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Not only will I use it hourly but I want to use it hourly now. The quick news: 1Password will use Extensions so that within Safari, you can get it to enter your username and password.

The slightly less quick news with more detail and enthusiasm… In case you haven’t come across it yet, 1Password is one of those apps that stores your passwords for you. Fine. It also creates ones like Wel6cAct9iB9Bit (that really is one it created, I just got it to do that). It creates these strong passwords and then saves them for you so that you don’t have to remember. You just have to remember the one password you need to get into 1Password. It works on iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac, PC, Windows, all sorts.

The phone and tablet versions come with their own web browser too. So if I’m organised, I can go into my 1Password app, tap on the name of my bank and that browser will zoom off to their site. Goes to the site, enters my username and some of my security details, then it even presses return. Only with my bank do I stop there. With other things I log into like TheTrainLine.com, it does the lot. One tap takes me to the site and then into the site. Another single tap and 1Password has entered all my credit card details for me.

Except I’m often not that organised. Very often, I will go a site in the regular iPhone Safari web browser and after a lot of fiddling like picking train times, I will reach the login or credit card screen and wish I’d remembered to do this in 1Password. Usually, I nip over to the 1Password app, copy the detail I need and go paste it into Safari. But just occasionally, I’ve moved over to 1Password and redone the whole job just to save that schlepping about.

Not any more. Behind the scenes it’s going to be using Touch ID and Safari Extensions but no matter: in future, when I’ve gone to a site in the ordinary Safari browser, I will still be able to use 1Password to enter my details.

This is how it is on the Mac and PC: wherever I am, I can whack a login detail or an over-used credit card in with a tap or two. This is how it will be on iPhones and iPads.

The company isn’t saying when it will happen but there is a limited beta test going on now and it all requires the forthcoming iOS 8. So you can bet that when the next iPhones come out around September, so will the new 1Password. No idea yet whether it will be a paid upgrade or a freebie but whichever, I’m having it. (Though it must be said, as great as 1Password is in every other way I know, upgrading to a major new version is agony.)

Here’s where you can learn more of the latest official release of 1Password and here’s a shaky video of the beta in action:

Bugger. Got to buy this.

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I bought an iBook called Paperless by David Sparks some time last year – wait, this is iBooks, this is the 21st Century, I can tell you in a flash… I bought it on 10 January 2013. It’s a very good read, it changed how I do a lot of things in my work, all’s good.

Then the same fella released a book about Email and I thought nah, I know from email. Then caught some of his MacPowerUsers podcast about the topic and thought, well, okay, possibly I don’t know quite as much as I thought. So on 15 November 2013 I bought the MacSparky Field Guide to Email

But that’s it. No more. What can this fella cover that I’d need?

Cue this morning and this announcement:

I’m pleased to announce the newest MacSparky Field Guide, Presentations. Most presentations are terrible. That, however, does not need to be the case for your presentations. This book explains how to create your own exceptional presentation. This Presentations Field Guide explains how to plan a presentation that will connect with your audience, the technical wizardry to create a stunning presentation, and walks you through presentation day to make sure it goes off without a hitch.

New MacSparky Field Guide: Presentations – David Sparks, MacSparky (30 June 2014)

I do a lot of presentations now. I have no choice. I’ve got to buy this. I would’ve bought it immediately and now be telling you what I think of it, but it’s not out yet. You can pre-order it for £5.99 UK or $9.99 US and it will ship on 21 July 2014. While we wait, here’s a short video trailer for it:

Turn CDs into LPs – like, a bit like vinyl, like, really

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Vinyl records store music in long grooves that a needle bumps its way through. CDs store music in light pits that convey on and off, 0 and 1 to a laser. But now Londoner Aleksander Kolkowski is taking CDs and cutting grooves into them. After he’s done his doings, you can play music off the CD – on a vinyl record player, never again a CD drive.

Not for all that long: this reborn CD doesn’t hold enough music to include a three-minute pop song.

It’s transforming a disposable media storage device made for cloned copying into a one-of-a-kind cult object. In a way, it’s very tongue in cheek. There’s a lot of fetishism about vinyl, but I see this as quite throw-away, really. I do it for free. People bring a CD and I give them one in return. On a few occasions people have asked me to go into commercial production, but that’s not really my intention.

Aleksander Kolkowski speaking to The Atlantic (30 June 2014)

Do read the full article from The Atlantic as it’s got a lot to say about his artistry, his physical technique and about the state of vinyl collection.

Be cautious of using beta software – including Evernote

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While the marketing and commercial side of the Evernote company has just brought various goods and products to the UK, the software side has been making big steps. But I’d still wait before you download the latest beta of Evernote for Macintosh.

Well, I say that but I didn’t wait. I’m running that latest beta on my MacBook Pro and it isn’t working. I suspect that’s more to do with how my MacBook is squeaking along with only the tiniest amount of disk space. Dropbox has folded its arms at me, but Evernote keeps crashing.

So I’d like to caution you about trying it out: I have done the sensible thing and only put this new version on one of my machines. It’s only un-sensible because this is the machine I’m working from today.

I would also like to tell you what’s new about it but I have yet to get beyond the crashing so I have to settle for showing you Evernote’s own list:

Here’s a list of everything that’s new and improved in this release:

Speed

Sync is more than 3x faster. Users with lots of Shared Notebooks and Evernote Business users will see the biggest improvements.
New notes sync instantly so they’re immediately accessible on your other devices.
Share notes without waiting for a sync to complete.
Launch and quit times have been reduced dramatically.
New keyboard shortcuts have been added to jump to the note list for easy navigation (CMD + |) and you can now tab between the search field, the note list, current note title and note body.
Energy consumption when the app is idle and in-use has been significantly reduced.

New Features

Tables can now be re-sized, and have configurable background colors and border styles.
Images can be re-sized right in the note editor. Just click an image and drag the handle in the bottom right corner.
Search results are now ordered by relevance.
Faster notebook selector at the top of the note list remembers your recently used notebooks.
Redesigned checkboxes in the note editor are easier to click.
Evernote will now stay logged in by default.
Stability Improvements

You can see why I downloaded it. And why I am keen for it to start working. Get it here.