Birmingham Independent Book Fair

Posted by William Gallagher

I can’t count the number of events and book fairs I’ve been to but today was my first as a publisher. I had a table at the Birmingham Independent Book Fair. Hand on heart: I thought I would get to have a fine time nattering with interesting people and that was all. I’d been planning to go as a punter when I was offered a slot and I reckoned that meant I’d get in a bit early and be able to buy books before the doors opened.

Correct.

Very pleased about that.

But I was also wondering. At these many events and fairs I’ve been to, there have often been very many people sitting at their tables visibly bored. My impression was that this fair would be chiefly for fiction books and poetry, that therefore my non-fiction wouldn’t be of interest. The fair was at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery and that guaranteed that it would be an absorbing spot. But I did secretly prepare myself to be bored.

Not correct.

I didn’t get one single picosecond in which to be bored. I nattered pretty solidly for the entire time: met terrific publishers, terrific visitors and many of them – amazingly many of them – got me to shut up long enough that they could buy my book.

I was there promoting The Blank Screen and it is simply joyous to see someone pick up a copy, start to flick through, then get absorbed and suddenly start reaching for their wallet or purse.

Of course, you can save all that tedious reaching for anything and just buy your copy online. I like you. Here is The Blank Screen on Amazon UK and on Amazon US.

I hope you like it and that I get to see you at another fair some day.

Reeder for Mac now in public beta

Posted by William Gallagher

The short news for Reeder fans: download it right now from here.

The slightly longer news for anyone who isn’t a Reeder fan: it is terrific and you should download it right now from here.

Reeder is a news reading app, an RSS one where you tell it what websites you like and forever afterwards it gets news from all of those sites. Depending on the site, you can read the headline, the standfirst, an extract or the whole article and whichever you get, it looks gorgeous. One tap in the morning and I am reading news from BBC, New York Times, Lifehacker, The Onion and myriad more.

There are many RSS readers like Reeder but I don’t think there is another one that is really anything like Reeder. I’ve long loved its design – most of it, at least – and how well done its text was. Routinely, if I found an article on a site that was just too ugly to read, I’d either bung that piece into Pocket to read later or I’d subscribe to it in Reeder and read it there.

I still remember the instant when I learnt that Reeder for iOS was out. Last September, a new version was released partly to deal with how Google shut down its service that powered all RSS readers. It was a paid update and I paid instantaneously. That’s how much I liked the old one and now it’s how much I like the new.

Yet as good as Reeder is for RSS, I missed having it on my Mac too. That Google shutdown made the Mac one literally unusable and that is almost a year ago. Here’s how good Reeder is: I haven’t replaced it. Not on my Mac. I’ve tried others on iOS but as much as I used to use RSS on my Mac, I simply stopped reading any RSS there.

Until tonight.

What’s been released is a beta version of Reeder 2 for Mac and the final version will be a paid-for app. I don’t know the price yet and I don’t truly care: I have read many thousands of articles through the various versions of Reeder and I open it practically as often as I do my email.

So go download it now from here and be ready to pay whatever the maker demands when it’s out of beta.

France wants to stop emails after 6pm

Posted by William Gallagher

You have to be in France. You have to be a manager there, too, because ordinary workers can lump it: if your boss needs you to answer your emails all day and night, you’ll answer them or else. But if a French plan to protect stressed bosses works, it will logically help everyone. Follow. When your boss is not allowed to go on email in the evenings then he or she can’t be emailing you anything. Everybody wins.

In many jobs, work email doesn’t stop when the employee leaves the office. And now France has decided to act. It has introduced rules to protect about a million people working in the digital and consultancy sectors from work email outside office hours. Those are taken to be before 9am and after 6pm. The deal signed between employers federations and unions says that employees will have to switch off work phones and avoid looking at work email, while firms cannot pressure staff to check messages.

Michel de La Force, chairman of the General Confederation of Managers, has said that “digital working time” would have to be measured. Some emailing outside of office hours would be allowed but only in “exceptional circumstances”.

Could work emails be banned after 6pm? BBC News

I’m more sympathetic to this idea that I might have been before. I used to live by the bleep of my incoming emails and now I’ve switched it all off. Almost all. Certain people’s emails make a bleep but the majority don’t. And I switched off push notifications too. Suddenly my battery life is longer and I am able to concentrate on more work because I just don’t get interrupted so often.

And I can tell you exactly where in Damascus I had this blinding revelation. Do read the BBC article because it is interesting but for useful ideas – specifically for useful ideas you can use right this moment – buy David Sparks’s book about Email from the iBooks Store.

Click on the wrong link sometimes

Posted by William Gallagher

Wait. I sound like I want you to deliberately click on advertising links or something that would bring me giant pools of money. What I mean is that sometimes in our constant journey through the internet, the odd left turn can be a very good thing.

There are entire sites devoted to sudden left turns, most notably or at least most famously StumbleUpon.com which has nothing but new links and at most a gentle hand on the tiller to steer you in directions you might like.

But today I was going to meet someone and as I read her blog, I found she's in to productivity and had what sounded like a great link to a David Allen Getting Things Done video. Except when I tapped on it, I didn't notice that I'd actually tapped on the next link down. No connection to productivity, no connection to the woman I was going to meet, just something she had found and liked. Something I had not heard about. So while it took me a moment to realise this wasn't David Allen, I am so glad that I found it:

Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: she had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. An astonishing story.
Jill Bolte Taylor's Powerful Stroke of Insight – TED talks

I should go back and get you the David Allen link too but, ah, Bolte Taylor is more interesting.

Update: the Facebook battery drain is true

Posted by William Gallagher

As always, your mileage may vary, but I’ve been following the advice from this morning’s piece about Facebook and it’s true: my iPhone battery lasts longer now. The quick summary of this piece is that Facebook uses Location Services more than you’d usually want and it uses Background App Refresh far more than anyone in the world who doesn’t work for Facebook would like it to do.

The idea came from a writer named Scotty Loveless of Overthought.org and I wrote:

[His] piece is very persuasive. I don’t know the writer Scotty Loveless and hadn’t heard of Overthought.org before but he argues this point and many others with exactly the kind of reasoned approach that makes you believe him. Certainly enough that I’ve immediately switched off Location Services and Background App Refresh for Facebook – and only for Facebook. I particularly liked that the fella repeatedly avoided the kind of ohmygodstopeverything screaming you see in similar articles.

Is Facebook draining your iPhone battery? Looks like – William Gallagher, The Blank Screen – April 8, 2014

I’ve now tested out what he says and it’s true. Here’s the test:

[Write] down your usage and standby time, press the sleep/wake button (or lock button, as some call it) to put the device to sleep, and set the device down for five minutes. When you come back, take note of the change in time. If your device is sleeping properly, then the Standby time should have increased by five minutes and your Usage time by <1 minute . If your Usage time rises by more than one minute, you have a drain problem. Something is keeping your device from sleeping properly, significantly shortening the time it will last.

And here’s what happened on my iPhone:

Those are two shots taken five minutes apart. It’s got to be approximate since there are no seconds – 61 seconds would therefore count as 2 minutes – and this is probably why the two Standby times are 6 minutes apart. My iPhone was sitting on my desk doing nothing for up to six minutes yet look at the usage figure. Something used my iPhone’s battery for up to two minutes.

And it was Facebook. I know because I took the article’s advice and switched off Location Services and Background App Refresh for Facebook (and not for anything else) and here’s what the same test got me:

My iPhone was again on standby for five minutes and that’s what it shows. But it also shows no usage in that time. None at all.

I’m convinced.

Is Facebook draining your iPhone battery? Looks like.

Posted by William Gallagher

Sorry to play fast and loose with Betteridge's law – which says the answer to any headline question is no – but of course it is. Of course Facebook is draining your iPhone battery. Everything you have and everything you use on your iPhone drains it, that's what the battery is there for. But a new and very persuasive article says it is draining it a lot. Far more than you'd expect and actually far more than it really needs to.

Apps that can make or receive calls, like Skype, Viber, Tango, Whatsapp, and Facebook are able to check for incoming calls without notifying you. I believe these types of apps sometimes abuse this exception and could have possibly influenced Apple to add Background App Refresh as the sanctioned method for this type of behavior.

I think this is why disabling Facebook's background services is so influential on battery life: I speculate they are abusing the fact that they have VOIP call features to run in the background more than they should. It would provide a better experience for people using Facebook, sure, but people would never know Facebook was the cause of their battery life issues, and would definitely blame the device or iOS itself.
The Ultimate Guide to Solving iOS Battery Drain – Overthought.org

The piece is very persuasive. I don't know the writer Scotty Loveless and hadn't heard of Overthought.org before but he argues this point and many others with exactly the kind of reasoned approach that makes you believe him. Certainly enough that I've immediately switched off Location Services and Background App Refresh for Facebook – and only for Facebook. I particularly liked that the fella repeatedly avoided the kind of ohmygodstopeverything screaming you see in similar articles.

He's more of the school where he says what something is for so you can decide whether you need that feature or not.

With the two Facebook ones, I don't need either. You don't need either. The location service lets Facebook say your post is from New York City or wherever – and if is were there, I'd be writing that in the update. Background refresh has nothing to do with you getting notifications of messages and comments: they work completely separately. So there is no reason to have it on. None. Not for you or me – but seemingly there's an advantage for Facebook. I am okay with denying them this.

That's the thing that makes me pause: it's oddly appealing to think a genuine problem I'm having is somehow Facebook's fault. But I'm trying all the things the article says and we'll see.

How to block ads that bounce you to the App Store

Posted by William Gallagher

It's the latest thing in advertising and instantly takes the crown for the most irritating. That's a crowded field, what with YouTube ads that play one fifth of a second of the video you want before running a commercial. Or all the popups over YouTube. It's mostly YouTube that's irritating, isn't it? But now we have ads where you read some website on your iPhone or iPad and before you take in a word, you are bounced out of Safari and into the App Store to buy some particular app.

Invariably that seems to be a game one. Usually you can see an ad for that same game on the site but sometimes there doesn't appear to be any connection between the site advertisers and the App Store game.

There is.

What there isn't – necessarily – is collusion with the website. Like you, I presumed that this was the latest type of ad that was being sold by websites to advertisers. But one major site told me that it was done without their knowledge or permission and definitely without any extra money being paid to them. He described it as the advertisers playing silly buggers and it was stopped.

There's your technical workaround, your blocker for these ads. Not a technical thing, not a JavaScript command, not a different browser with blocking extensions and definitely not jailbreaking your phone. Just email the website and tell them this is happening.

It's a bit of an old-fashioned approach, but it can work.

You cannot be Siri-ous

Posted by William Gallagher

It takes a mensch to say that a rival has done something good. There are few mensches in the world. If you want a productivity slant on this, be a mensch: say when your rival has done something better than you. It’s quicker and you will bamboozle people. It is always more fun bamboozling other people than it is for them to think you’re an idiot.

Because we get it. We know that Apple will never say anything in praise of Samsung. Microsoft will never say anything in praise of Apple. The UK’s Conservatives won’t praise the Labour party; America’s Republicans will never praise Democrats. Which means that on the one hand, we all get it, we all understand this and on the other, there are some amazingly clever people in every one of those organisations who must get it too. Yet still we get smart people in smart companies saying things so stupid that it is like a floodlight on their dangerously petulant world-view.

This comes up today because Microsoft is releasing Cortana. I’m not a gamer so I kept reading that as Cortina, a type of car, but it’s a character name from a game and that’s a good move, I think. But if you want to know what this Cortana actually does, just call it Siri. Cortana is a knock-off of Apple’s voice-control system Siri.

Fine.

Windows Phones should have something like this. Android phones do. And it certainly happens the other way around, it certainly happens that all firms copy all firms: if something works, it goes everywhere.

But.

When Siri was announced in 2011, Microsoft was not a mensch.

Microsoft’s Craig Mundie told Forbes magazine:

“It’s good marketing, but at least as the technological capability, you could argue that Microsoft has had a similar capability in Windows Phones for more than a year, since Windows Phone 7 was introduced.”

Quoted and mocked in Electronista.com, 23 November 2011

Agony. That ‘similar capability’ was an $800m purchase called TellMe which let Windows Phone users – just about – dictate a text message. Mundie looked like a schoolboy arguing his dad is better than your dad and unfortunately Mundie was Microsoft’s chief research officer. (He’s now Senior Advisor to Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO.)

So here’s your chief research officer either genuinely completely failing to understand a new piece of technology or believing that we won’t understand it and he can get away with saying this. Take your pick: neither is good.

Jean-Louis Gassée – ex-Apple, ex-Be and now oftentimes technology pundit on Twitter, summed it up:

Microsoft Research Chief: We had (something like) Siri before Apple. If true: We’re imbeciles If false: We’re imbeciles.
@gassee on twitter, 9:43pm 23 November 2011

Today, Microsoft is no longer pretending Windows Phone got there first, it’s no longer pretending that its TellMe feature works, it is launching Cortana. And Cortana is naturally better than Siri or Google Now. Microsoft’s dad is now bigger than your dad, so there.

Three years on from the launch of Siri, Microsoft’s new Cortana really ought to be good or there’s no point launching it. First reports are that it has fine new features, that it works. But the launch could’ve gone better. BBC News:

…But other parts of the presentation went less smoothly. The app repeatedly failed to convert the weather forecast from Celsius to Kelvin, and also misunderstood a request to make a phone call.

BBC News Online 2 April 2014

If a rival beats you to something, they have beaten you to it. You can’t change that. It would be nice and I argue that it would be disarmingly smart to acknowledge and even praise it. But you don’t have to.

You just have to choose to not look like an arse over it.

Get Microsoft Office for iPad here – if you want

Posted by William Gallagher

It's been a long time since I would've automatically bought Microsoft Word for anything, for anywhere, let alone for my iPad. Word's last killer feature was that everyone else had it and everyone needed documents sent in that format. Once we couldn't get it on iPad, we said nuts to Microsoft Office and did just fine with everything else. We did so just fine that now Office has come, it's a shrug.

Partly because we don't need it, partly because you have to pay a subscription to use Word, Excel or PowerPoint to actually do any work.

But aren't you curious? Don't you just want to try it out? You're bound to have some Word or Excel documents somewhere and you can read those in Office for iPad. You can read them in anything, really, but you can get Office and you can have at least something of a play, so give it a go.

Except.

Truly, Apple's App Store has some severe problems when you can't find Microsoft Office for iPad on it on the day it launched. Seriously: search for Microsoft Office or Microsoft Word on the iPad App Store and you will get a slew of other apps first. I couldn't find it at all. Searching for just the word Microsoft is worse.

But somehow Microsoft OneNote pops up in various searches and if you select that, there's a Related tab which does show you Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Don't bother digging, I've done that, here are the direct links:

Word:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/microsoft-word-for-ipad/id586447913?mt=8

Excel:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/microsoft-excel-for-ipad/id586683407?mt=8

PowerPoint (seriously, you want PowerPoint?)
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/microsoft-powerpoint-for-ipad/id586449534?mt=8

Notice the /gb/ part of those addresses: these are the UK (or Great Britain) links but tap them wherever you are, iTunes will figure it out.

Even if it's the best-ever implementation of PowerPoint, that presentation app would come a distant fifth out of the three anyway. Excel is certainly the most powerful and least top-heavy of the three. But I am a writer and I've got form writing about word processors so it is Word I naturally go for. And without yet schlepping through setting up a SkyDrive (or whatever the lawyers require Microsoft to call that now) and definitely without paying around $10/month or about $100/year just to experiment with typing, I've gone for it and got it and am now deleting it.

Good to see it finally arrive. Good to see it seemingly well-worked out. I just need a compelling reason to buy it and it's been many years since its mere existence on iPad would be enough.

Best news all day – OmniFocus 2 for Mac confirmed for June

Posted by William Gallagher

What’s more, the beta test version is available right now. Or at least, it is to those of us who were on the beta last year and who haven’t forgotten their login details like I have. I’m working on getting those back so I can spend the evening playing with this – seriously, I’m not ashamed to say that to you – and if you haven’t beta-ed before but want to, you can sign up to be added to a list.

When we unveiled our plans for OmniFocus 2 for Mac last year and invited you to try our test builds, it was so we could learn from you which parts of the design were working well, and which parts still needed improvement. We didn’t know what to expect, so we weren’t sure how close we might be to setting a ship date.

The feedback you provided was generally positive: the new design was easier to navigate, and the new Forecast and Review modes were making it much easier to stay on top of all your projects.

But listening to your feedback, we also learned a lot about ways we could make the app even better—and we were further inspired by Apple’s latest designs when they unveiled iOS 7.

We paused our test builds and went back into heads-down mode to focus on the hard work of another round of design and development. Since that time, our team has been working tirelessly behind the scenes on a fresh design that preserves the best features of their original work while adapting to the latest changes to the platform.

With this new design in place, I’m thrilled to announce that OmniFocus 2 is now ready for its final round of testing.

The Omni Group – 26 March 2014

Update – I’ve got my login details back. I’m not kidding: that’s my evening sorted out. Man, I must love this software.

Do go read that full Omni Group blog because it has much more specific detail about what they’ve been doing.

Update 2:

21:01. It’s gorgeous. All the power of the old Mac version but even more of the gorgeousness of the iPad one. I used to hesitate recommending OmniFocus (you couldn’t tell I was hesitating but I was) because the Mac one was hard to learn. It was worth it, but it took effort where the iPad and iPhone versions were straightforward. Now I think the new Mac version is going to be the best of the three.