And under the Surface

Posted by William Gallagher

I’m not sold. But the new Surface Pro 3 does address two of my criticisms of the range. Specifically, I’ve always found Surface tablets to be crazily heavy next to my iPad but Microsoft says this week’s new release is lighter.

Then I’ve had more of a jolt seeing the tiny screen. It’s not that small but it’s oddly shaped, it’s shaped like a long widescreen display which is good and is in fact better than the iPad’s, yet it makes any landscape work feel squashed. And you will spend most of your time in landscape because that’s how the Surface likes it. Fine, so do many people, including iPad owners. I’m not one of them, it just feels far more natural to hold and to use iPad in portrait that I resent any pressure to change.

But now the screen is bigger, so that may be fixed too.

It still runs Windows, though, and I don’t see that changing.

Take a look at Microsoft’s product page – and tell yourself to not keep spotting Apple-esque touches on the page – for the full skinny. Prices start at £639 UK, $799 US.

Creativity isn’t a separate deal

Posted by William Gallagher

Education gets so focused on exams that it becomes siloed into specifically what gets examined and when. There is less learning for the sake of learning and there is an inherent assumption that subjects are different to each other. There is then an assumption the creativity is something that gets labelled as a subject to be handled on its own.

So many of our gut thoughts about creativity are not true. You can be creative in math and science. Creativity can be integrated into the classroom experience. Creativity is not simply another word for “arts and crafts.”

The Dangers of Creativity Advocates – The Creativity Post

The Creativity Post’s full article is about how championing creativity is a good and great thing yet it can damage us too.

Breaking – OmniFocus 2 for Mac releasing today

Posted by William Gallagher

More details as soon as it’s out – give me five seconds to go buy it myself then I’ll get right back to you – but the new OmniFocus 2 for Mac is being released today. It’ll be on the Mac App Store but get it from the maker instead, the Omni Group at www.omnigroup.com.

It’s coming out at 9am PDT which I reckon is about 5pm BST but I wouldn’t count on my maths even when I’m not excited.

That sounds strange, even to my ears: the idea of being excited about software. Yet the only real surprise to me is that I am this thrilled when I’ve already been using the beta version for months.

But I’ve used that beta on the Mac for those months, I used the previous version 1 on the Mac for a year or more, and there hasn’t been a day – sometimes not even an hour – that I haven’t used OmniFocus for iPhone or iPad in about two years.

I’m particularly glad about today’s launch because I’m running a full-day workshop of The Blank Screen today for the Federation of Entertainment Unions – the Writers’ Guild, NUJ, Equity and Musicians’ Guild – and this will come up. OmniFocus always comes up, the company couldn’t get more adverts from me if they paid, but I have been hesitating in every single The Blank Screen workshop. That’s partly because OmniFocus only runs on Apple gear; if it were on PCs and Android too, I’d be trying to distribute copies.

But the other reason has been that the Mac version was hugely powerful yet very hard to use. You don’t often hear that said about Mac software, but it was. So I used to be torn over recommending it, especially as it’s expensive.

Now I can tell you from experience that the new OmniFocus 2 for Mac is much easier. There’s still a lot to it but it makes sense and it works how you will expect.

There’s just one more thing. It used to be that the iPad version of OmniFocus was the best of three but now the Mac one is coming out and we’ve had a revamped iPhone one for a few months. Today I’d say the Mac version is the best.

But the company confirms a revamped iPad one is coming so the dance begins again.

Elizabeth Gilbert: Success, failure and the drive to keep creating

Posted by William Gallagher

A smart, funny, quick TED talk by the author of huge hit Eat, Pray, Love (UK book and film, US book and film) – and specifically about how you have to keep creating, how you need to survive both success and failure. She has a particularly thought-provoking idea about what she calls going home to your creativity.

This is what George RR Martin writes on

Posted by William Gallagher

The Game of Thrones (UK books and films, US books and films) writer this week revealed that he still works on a DOS PC. BBC News quaintly explained that “disk operating systems were popular” but, seriously, DOS? Now?

Here’s where he revealed it, but then hang on for what that really means to do this.

The tech website Geek.com did a nice job researching this and brought us a screen grab of what that probably looks like:

But it’s one thing seeing an image and thinking, okay, well, not pretty but it works. And it’s another thing seeing WordStar in action. This is a YouTube video of WordStar 3.0, the version before Martin’s favourite, but substantially the same. Now imagine writing thousands of pages in this.

Fascinating New York Times self-assessment

Posted by William Gallagher

Get this while you can. The New York Times has done a fairly enormous study of its successes and failures in digital and at keeping print subscribers – and the whole report is online. I expected a PDF and instead it's a series of what looks like photocopy JPEGs and that makes me wonder how, shall we say, endorsed this online publishing is. Grab it now.

The Times is interesting because it has been so big and it has done so much and it has made a success of its paywall. Yet it is still struggling as all newspapers are struggling and this report reveals just how much. Most tellingly, just from the introduction, is the information that New York Times articles get read more on other sites or services such as Flipboard than on NYT's own. And that readership of the paper on smartphones has taken a little fall too.

But then the report is not without its unintentional moments of interest too:

The anxiety that filled the newsroom only a few years ago has mostly dissipated. The success of the paywall has provided financial stability as we become more digitally-focused. The sale of other properties like The Boston Globe has allowed the leadership to focus squarely on The New York Times. Both Mark Thompson and Jill Abramson have established themselves as willing and eager to push the company in new, sometimes uncomfortable directions.

Jill Abramson was forced out of her role as Editor this week.

Put – the – phone – down

Posted by William Gallagher

UNICEF – seriously, UNICEF? – has released an app called PlayTimer which is specifically built to make you put that bloody iPhone down and go play with your kid:

Together with your child you can set how long you are going to play for and then take your child’s photo to set the playtimer. This will then lock your phone and show a black screen. If the phone is touched in locked mode – say, by a parent checking their work email – an alarm will go off. You can only turn the alarm off by taking another picture of your child – proof that you’re still playing with them. (In case of emergency, you will still see incoming calls and can make emergency calls, as no app has the power to over-ride your phone lock settings.)

UNICEF’s new app lets your children confiscate your smartphone Katherine Crisp (15 May 2014)

2014 is the Year of Deep Linking

Posted by William Gallagher

Sure it is. It’s also the Year of the Horse, the Year of Family Farming, the Year of Encryption, you could go on and it feels like I have done. But this claim of the Year of Deep Linking aside, writer Liron Shapira makes a reasoned argument for why deep linking is important – and just what it is, too:

Say you’re looking for an awesome karaoke bar, and use Yelp for a quick search. What’s wrong with this picture? Your friend goes on Yelp’s website and searches for nearby karaoke places, then texts you: “Check out all these karaoke places! Here’s a link.” The text comes with a link to a Web page full of karaoke search results. That’s convenient, and exactly what you need. But if your friend is using the Yelp app, the text has to read: “Check out all these karaoke places I found! Open Yelp and search for ‘karaoke.’” The app can’t offer a direct link to the right content, putting you and your friend one step farther from your signature rendition of “Lights.”

Liron Shapira – 2014 Is the Year of the Deep Link – Re/code (15 May 2014)

Okay, so that’s what it is and there is money in searching. Read the full piece for what is happening with this idea, why firms are investing in it and how we are likely to see it everywhere soon.

PS. There are no awesome karaoke bars. Just wanted to save you the trouble of searching.

Do self-driving cars come as standard or is it a KITT?

Posted by William Gallagher

Re/code has an interesting view on Google’s self-driving cars, the invention we’ve wanted since Knight Rider began in 1982. And it’s the invention we are surely most wary of:

The Google self-driving car has come a long way. On a demo excursion through Google’s Mountain View campus and surrounding neighborhoods today, the white Lexus self-driving test vehicle I rode in was much less of a conservative driver than I anticipated.

Sure, it followed the rules of the road, but it also accelerated into the open lane in front of us and then nudged itself around a truck that was edging into our lane so we could drive ahead without pausing.

Maybe I was kidding myself, but from my vantage point in the back seat, I didn’t feel unsafe in the least. The car braked for jaywalkers, paused when it was coming around a curve and couldn’t see whether the light in front of us was green or red, and skittered when it worried that a bus might be turning into our lane.

Liz Gannes – Re/code (13 May 2014)

Gannes’s full feature is a balanced look at the pros and cons of driverless vehicles and of exactly where we are with them now.