The iPhone case that tells you when your friends are happy or sad. The Louis CK solution to choosing between two similar things. Plus why Google doesn’t like hiring experts and, separately, what it’s like being an expert dealing with eejits. That last one is a video and as funny as it is, it’s nails-on-chalkboard uncomfortably true.
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Even I think you need to stop working some times. For a bit. Not for long, obviously. But I work for myself and I wouldn’t swap this job for anything – seriously, I get to natter with you, what would I want to replace this with? – so you would imagine that people with office jobs don’t look at it the same way. I didn’t when I had an office job. Well, I did a bit. But the poll company Gallup says only 2 out of 10 workers in America think working late is a bad thing.
They were asked specifically about working remotely, so that’s checking your emails and using your phone rather than having to stay in the office, but still, it’s only 21% of those surveyed who said nah. Don’t wanna do that. Actually, it was 8% who folded their arms and 13% who were disgruntled.
While a strong majority of working Americans view the ability to work off-hours remotely in a positive light, far fewer say they regularly connect with work online after hours. Slightly more than one-third (36%) say they frequently do so, compared with 64% who say they occasionally, rarely, or never do. The relatively low percentage who check in frequently outside of working hours nearly matches the 33% of full-time workers who say their employer expects them to check email and stay in touch remotely after the business day ends.
Among those who frequently check email away from work, 86% say it is a somewhat or strongly positive development to be able to do so. However, this is only slightly higher than the 75% of less frequent email checkers who view the technology change positively. Even among employees for whom staying connected is compulsory, 81% view this development it in a somewhat or strongly positive light.
Most US Workers See Upside to Staying Connected at Work – Gallup (30 April 2014)
There is a stereotypically predictable slant in that young men are more likely to be happy with checking their emails EVERY BLOODY SECOND but also broadly the more you earn, the more you’re happy about working out of hours.
This is an American survey so it could of course be different here in the UK but one suspects not. And one suspects that there are few employers who won’t take advantage of this.
Not only is Notability Apple’s App of the Week, it’s now free. These facts may be related but let’s go download it right now for iOS.
UPDATE: it looks like I got this news very late – the app has been free for most of the week. Seriously, stop reading and go get it. We can find out together whether it’s worth the rave reviews it always gets.
Final Draft is the closest thing to an industry standard for film and television script writers: it’s a word processor that takes a lot of the repetitive formatting drudgery out of writing in this particular form. “Just add words” is the company’s strapline and most films you can think of the last very many years will have been written in Final Draft.
But.
You should see this software. For all its power, it looks ancient and I do very much believe that you’re going to be face to nose with an application for twelve hours a day, it would be good if you liked looking at it. If it just looked like it could do all you need. Then the company irked me beyond all reason with its iPad version. From my own book, The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition):
I like Final Draft but it lost a bucket of brownie points with me for Final Draft Reader: after years of everyone waiting for an iPad version of the app, they released that. More, they said it was because this was what we wanted. Sure, if you ask someone whether they’d like to be able to read their Final Draft scripts on their iPad, they’re going to say yes. Ask them if they’d prefer to be able to read and write them instead, you get exactly the same answer yet that yes is 100% different. That spin and some bugs in the first release put me off. But I do have it on my iPad and I do use it.
The Blank Screen: Word Processors – William Gallagher (UK edition, US edition)
I don’t use it very much. But then I don’t use Final Draft on my Mac all that much:
I do like it on my Mac. I turn to it to write scripts far faster than I ever do Pages or Word because it does make the job easier. If you don’t yet write scripts, you won’t yet get why that’s even possible. But, for instance, when you’re writing a very strong exchange of dialogue between two characters, it is a boon to be able to hit Return after one speech and immediately start the rejoinder and know that Final Draft will pop the right character names in for you.
I first bought a version of Final Draft a good fifteen years ago and I’ve probably only written twenty scripts in it – my Doctor Who work has to be delivered in Word so I tend to write it there or in Pages – but I stick with it because I have it and what I like about it, I like a lot.
I have version 8.something.or.other and the reason I’m telling you about this today is partly because version 9 is out. It’s partly because version 9 doesn’t add anything that makes me want to upgrade. And it’s mostly because Final Draft is getting a lot of criticism for not adding much, for being such an old-fashioned application, and for costing £154.99 (Amazon UK) and $178.68 (Amazon US). I’ve put Amazon links there rather than directly to FinalDraft.com because the savings are substantial: the US one is officially $299.99.
It’s specifically got a lot of criticism on Scriptnotes, a podcast co-hosted by Craig Mazin and screenwriter John August. He also develops a rival to Final Draft called Highland (£20.99 UK, $29.99 US in the Mac App Store but you can get a trial version if you go via the official Highland store). You would expect August to be critical of Final Draft: not so much because it’s a rival to his own software but because he developed that software to replace Final Draft in his own work. August wrote Corpse Bride, Charlie and the Choccolate Factory, Big Fish, the Charlie’s Angels movies and more. He should be the prime target audience for Final Draft but he and Mazin have been critical enough of it that Final Draft’s CEO Marc Madnick and product manager Joe Jarvis came on the podcast to discuss the software.
It did not go well.
Marc: Hey, we made a lot of bad decisions over the years. You live and learn. This is what running a business is. We’re 40 people. There’s not an office really in the world that has 40 people dedicated to one thing. And that’s screenwriting and screenwriting software. And, quite frankly, we listen every day. We service our customers. We listen every day. We love the good comments and we listen to the negative ones. Believe me, we take them to heart.
Craig: Do you think I’ve had any interesting or reasonable criticism for your product, or you think it’s all just a bunch of bunk?
Joe: I read every single podcast.
Craig: I’m not asking if you read it. I’m saying do you agree with me?
Joe: I want to absolutely know. Do I, well –
Marc: Sure, yes. Yes, some of your criticism is warranted.
Joe: I can’t think off the top of my head.
Marc: I don’t remember those. I remember the ones that aren’t warranted.
Craig: I think that’s weird. I would remember the ones that are warranted.
Marc: Hold up. This is our business.
Craig: Yes.
Marc: We know exactly, top to bottom, what the customers want, what they need, and we listen. You have to make business decisions on how you do it, when you do it, how you implement it, not implement it. It’s really what it’s all about. But we know. We’re engaged. And we understand. And we hear the criticisms. And some of your criticisms are warranted. And some of them are, I feel you might be misinformed.
Scriptnotes, Ep 129: The One with the Guys from Final Draft — Transcript
I am so impressed that this podcast has a transcript every week. I read it because listening was proving a bit painful. I don’t have Highland, I do have Final Draft, I’ve not listened to John August before, I have seen some of his films. The headline summary from this Scriptnotes was that the Final Draft people came across as not listening.
Craig: But I can now purchase an entire new software program for half the cost of what you’re charging for an update that has a few features thrown in. And that to me seems out of whack. That’s where I just say, look, I’m not saying that it’s right or wrong. The market doesn’t have right or wrong. It’s just a market.
Marc: You are in the minority. Fact.
Craig: Well, I’m in the minority now. But, I guess I’m just sort of surprised that you guys are sort of going, “And you’ll always be in the minority. We don’t see a problem. We don’t see any icebergs.”
Take a listen to the podcast here. It was actually recorded and aired in February but that episode caused enough of a flap that the next edition was about the storm it caused too. Then apparently another, different podcast took up the story and this week MacPowerUsers did too. That’s how I heard about it, I regularly listen to MPU.
So I heard about it there as MacPowerUsers interviewed John August – not just about this story – and then I went off down a rabbit hole of following the links and uncovering more. MPU linked to Scriptnotes linked to the next episode linked to the transcripts. It’s been a weird little storm took so long to reach my shore but now it’s here, I keep thinking about how Final Draft handled it and how the software itself feels like an embodiment of its makers. All software does yet you can’t always feel it as clearly as you do here.
The Scriptnotes podcast and many of the places that have followed made the analogy that Final Draft may be the QuarkXPress of its day. Quark was the page layout software that every magazine you’ve ever heard of used – until every magazine you’ve ever heard of switched to Adobe InDesign. That was partly because InDesign is just better but also Quark was fatally slow to respond and its responses were inadequate. It takes a lot to get people to switch away from a particular piece of software but once they’ve gone, you can’t get them back.
I’m not buying Final Draft 9. I haven’t regularly updated it, I think I skipped versions 6 and 7, for instance. So maybe I’ll be back for version 10. But it’s not as compelling or appealing as it once was.
It’s not like you can do a great deal about it, you are going to have to say hello to people – but the moment you do, you’ve given them an impression of what you’re like.
“From the first word you hear a person speak, you start to form this impression of the person’s personality, says Phil McAleer, a psychologist at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, who led the study.
In his experiment, McAleer recorded 64 people, men and women, from Glasgow, reading a paragraph that included the word “hello.” He then extracted all the hellos and got 320 participants to listen to the different voices and rate them on 10 different personality traits, such as trustworthiness, aggressiveness, confidence, dominance and warmth.
What he found was that the participants largely agreed on which voice matched which personality trait. One male voice was overwhelmingly voted the least trustworthy, “the sort of guy you’d want to avoid,” McAleer says. The pitch of the untrustworthy voice was much lower than the male deemed most trustworthy. McAleer says this is probably because a higher pitched male voice is closer to the natural pitch of a female, making the men sound less aggressive and friendlier than the lower male voices.
You Had Me at Hello: the Science Behind First Impressions – National Public Radio (5 May, 2014)
It’s not as if the impression people get is what you’re really like. You’ve made that impression and it is sticking. Have a read of the full NRP article and also listen to the radio station’s feature about it – plus test yourself and your own reactions to a series of voices.
So this guy, right, he rings me up to ask what I think of him installing anti-virus software on his PC.
“Have you got the box there?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Read the back to me.”
He did. Rattled off every detail on the back and said: “So what do you think, William?”
“I think you now know ten times more about anti-virus software than I do.”
I’m not blind to the problems of viruses and security on computers but I am on a Mac, it is true that I don’t have to think about it so much. I’ve grappled with the issue when setting up people’s PCs enough that viruses are one reason I stopped ever doing that: I can’t tell whether you’ve got a virus because I did something wrong or because nobody could’ve stopped it.
Apparently nobody could’ve stopped it. Symantec, long-time maker of anti-virus software, says that there’s no point to it: anti-virus doesn’t work. Brian Dye, Symantec senior vice president for information security told the Wall Street Journal that anti-virus “is dead”. Now, he then went on to say: “We don’t think of anti-virus as a moneymaker in any way.” That’s a significant difference: I’ve no reason to wish Symantec stops making money, but your lack of cash income doesn’t equal my having to give up on anti-virus.
That Journal interview is focused on what the company is doing with its business and it’s true that Symantec is moving away from anti-virus software. It’s also true, unfortunately, that it’s because such software isn’t working any more. Says the Wall Street Journal:
Symantec Corp. SYMC -0.05% invented commercial antivirus software to protect computers from hackers a quarter-century ago. Now the company says such tactics are doomed to failure.
Antivirus products aim to prevent hackers from getting into a computer. But hackers often get in anyway these days. So Mr. Dye is leading a reinvention effort at Symantec that reflects a broader shift in the $70 billion a year cybersecurity industry.
Symantec Develops New Attack on Cyberhacking – Wall Street Journal
Very broadly, anti-virus software works by recognising virus code – and it recognises it by comparing it to a database of existing viruses. That always meant that a brand-new virus would get by because it didn’t match any previous one and this is, again very broadly, why you’d have so many updates to anti-virus software. Now viruses and other malicious code tend to be new. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Mr Dye estimates anti-virus now catches just 45% of cyberattacks”.
What this means for Symantec is that fewer people are buying its software. What this means for users is harder to tell: Symantec, McAfee and Norton are reportedly moving to software that detects suspicious activity more than it does this code-comparison.
Want.
Admit it: Sometimes you just want to punch your PC, or slap your smartphone, or knock your notebook.
We all get riled by technology once in a while, with all those feeble batteries, endless updates and spinning wheels of death.
But what if our devices could see it coming? What if they could pick up the tics and tells of our brewing anger — or, for that matter, any other emotion — and respond accordingly?
It’s not as crazy as it sounds. To hear experts tell it, this is where technology is going. Researchers and companies are already starting to employ sensors that try to read and respond to our feelings.
Devices that Know How We Really Fee – New York Times (May 4, 2014)
Ask a firm called Softwatch and they will wiggle their hand in that kinda, sorta, ish way. They've been esearching it and conclude in part that:
When examining the data, a clear observation is that the overall usage of the different applications is relatively low. This is extremely true with PowerPoint which is hardly being used. From our engagements with customers we have found that in most cases, the usage levels were far below what they perceived before using the service. As a general statement, these results indicate that at least 80% of Office users can move to alternative cloud based solutions.
The fact that 68% of the users don't use any application heavily lead to a conclusion that this population can be moved to alternative cloud based solutions rather easily and their Office licenses should be decommissioned. Specifically, the Inactive and Viewers populations which accounts for 29% in Excel and Word and 70%(!) in PowerPoint. It’s safe to say that these populations are the low hanging fruit for that matter.
You can already tell from reading this that Softwatch was looking at how people can be moved from the expensive Microsoft Office to alternatives such as Google's cloud ones like Google Docs.
Which is all well and good, even if one can lament the idea of any research ever being done for the hell of it instead of with an interest like this. And the results are unsurprisingly surprising: maybe companies don't realise how little their staff use the various parts of Microsoft Office, but you know that PowerPoint makes you ill.
So if you are somewhere that this data could get you where you want to go, ie away from Office, you go read how whole thing and make yourself some notes. Except, I think this is the killer fact from the report's research methodology:
The analysis is done on the three main components of the MS Office package: PowerPoint, Word and Excel. Please note that Outlook, which is commonly used by all users, is excluded from the user segmentation analysis.
If you didn't exclude Outlook, then, you'd have got a different story. To my mind, that means you got a different story.
I’ve noticed that whoever walks in to a supermarket at the same time as me is who will walk out at the same time too. We are driven around stores like machines, guided to what we want and where they want us to buy it, then kicked out as quickly and profitably as possible. I’m fascinated by how these stores work and so this article held me up this morning.
Once Dangler has set up his basic pricing rules, he’s ready to start testing out potential discounts and special offers to try and improve sales. He goes for an aggressive price cut on the own-brand natural yogurt, cutting the profit margin to a few pennies, and the volume of predicted sales balloons as a result. It turns out that people are really price-sensitive when buying cold desserts. Alas, a large proportion of the gains is offset by a drop in branded sales, meaning the idea would probably result in worsening relationships with suppliers in exchange for a modest increase in profits. We keep searching for the optimal solution, with every small change having an immediate trickle-down effect on related products. It’s like a chaos theory testing suite, with each price being a flap of a butterfly’s wings. The only thing missing is a button to make the system automatically optimize everything, you still need humans to input scenarios.
Along the way, I discover phenomena like asymmetric cross-price elasticity — an eight-pack’s price affects sales of four-packs more strongly than vice versa — and the fact that a “buy one, get one free” offer is more cost efficient than a straight 50 percent price cut (that’s because some people will still take just one).
Read the whole piece to find out who this Dangler is and how while this is an article about American supermarkets, it is featuring software owned by Tesco here in the UK.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/2/5667606/supermarket-price-optimization
There’s a new productivity tip that isn’t in my book and hasn’t yet appeared on this site (though, full disclosure, I can’t keep it secret, I may have to say it later today). But you can read it right now in the new weekly email newsletter which also features a productivity buy of the week, more technology news and a daft video. I wasn’t intending to make the daft video a regular feature but so far it’s proved irresistible.
Take a look at the latest issue right here – and if you fancy getting it delivered right to your doorstop each Friday, just let me know by signing up here.