News

Firefox and Chrome users stay in their jobs longer

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Now if it this were about Internet Explorer, you could joke that users stay longer in their jobs because that browser is slower. But it isn’t about that, so we can’t. Instead, a firm has found that people who uses these other two browsers have certain characteristics.

Cornerstone’s researchers found that people who took the test on a non-default browser, such as Firefox or Chrome, ended up staying at their jobs about 15 percent longer than those who stuck with Safari or Internet Explorer. They performed better on the job as well. (These statistics were roughly the same for both Mac and PC users.)

People Who Use Firefox or Chrome Are Better Employees — Joe Pinskermar, The Atlantic (16 March 2015)

The thinking is that these are non-standard browsers. That is, if you use them, you chose to go get them and it’s the act of even looking into alternatives that marks you out with these distinctive characteristics.

Read the full piece.

A month of networking

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Sounds like torture, doesn’t it? But writer Rachel Gillett did it so you don’t have to – and yet you may want to take her advice. She documents the whole month so do read the full piece but here’s why she did it plus the opening of week one:

I spent the past month doing something most people dread: networking.

As an introvert, the month-long challenge to work my way up to being a superconnector was both a painfully difficult and surprisingly rewarding experience.

WEEK 1: GET TO KNOW YOUR COWORKERS
During the first week of the challenge, I eased into networking by inviting coworkers to lunch. This low-pressure situation promised to help us practice our conversation skills. I asked my coworker Rose to invite another colleague, David, to join us for lunch—and on the walk to our lunch spot I felt very deeply the true awkwardness of this scenario.

I think we were all aware of the social connotation when someone asks you to lunch. One can’t help but wonder, what’s the motivation here, what’s the angle? So as we sat down to eat, I wanted to dispel any fears of a hidden agenda. Our networking lunch was simply an occasion to get out of the office, get to know each other better. After brushing the initial awkwardness aside, we enjoyed a delicious family-style meal of somosas, saag paneer, chicken tikka masala, lamb korma, and naan. We ate like kings, kvetched like yentas, and it was great.

“Be you, be real,” Judy Robinett, author of How to Be a Power Connector: The 5+50+100 Rule, suggested during our live chat. “Connections happen on a personal level first. You want folks with a good head, good heart, and good gut.”

My Painful (And Sometimes Fun) Month Of Networking – Rachel Gillett, Fast Company (16 March 2015)

Read the full piece.

Better networking for beginners

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From Harvard Business Review where they’re probably more into setting up contracts and contacts in hard business than writing, but still:

Meet in person if possible. In a globalized world, geography often intervenes. Last week, I had an initial call with a friend-of-a-friend in Singapore, and we’re not likely to connect in person anytime soon. A phone call is a good start (they’ll at least remember your name and know something about you), but it’s a much weaker form of connection than the alternatives. Video conferences are slightly better; as I describe in my forthcoming book Stand Out, my friend John Corcoran, a Bay Area podcaster, makes sure to conduct his interviews with Skype’s video feature, even though he only uses the audio tracks, because he wants to establish a face-to-face connection. But wherever possible, find out when the person will next be in your city (or vice versa) and make a plan to connect then to cement your new tie.

The Right (and Wrong) Way to Network – Dorie Clark, Harvard Business Review (10 March 2015)

Read the full piece.

Weekend read: BlackBerry’s home town decline

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It’s a little after 5:30 p.m. on a Wednesday night, and I’m sitting in a freezing rental car outside the BlackBerry headquarters in Waterloo, Ontario, looking for signs of life.

Five years and several billion dollars ago, these buildings would have been full, and the windows would have been dotted with busy silhouettes. But today, it’s a ghost town.

The life, death, and rebirth of BlackBerry’s hometown – Kevin Roose, Fusion (8 February 2015)

Do read the full piece: it’s absorbing and also a little more uplifting than you might expect given Blackberry’s fortunes.

OmniFocus videos by the tonne

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I’m still poking around these seeing what I don’t know and seeing what I think of the whole thing but there is now a series of 20 or more video tutorials about OmniFocus.

They’re fairly short and to the point, which I like. If you’re on the fence about OmniFocus then get off the fence and buy it. Or try this YouTube playlist for a visual flavour of the software.

Prepare to feel old: .com is 30

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Exactly 30 years ago, on Sunday, March 15, 1985, a computer company in Massachusetts registered the world’s first dot-com domain: Symbolics.com. And with that, the dot-com era officially began.

By the end of 1985, Symbolics.com was still one of just a small number of registered domains. Today, of course, there are hundreds of millions of domains floating around the Internet.

The Dot-Com as You Know It Is 30. This Is How It’s Changed the World – Daniel Howley, Yahoo (13 March 2015)

Read the full piece for more about that first-ever .com and how far we’ve come in three decades.

Get 1Password and then get more out of it

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You should be using 1Password. I don’t care if you’re on Mac, iOS, Android or Windows, you should be using it. I’m not a blind fan, I find fault with it, but it’s a password manager and you have to have passwords so you have to have a password manager. In my opinion, 1Password is the best of the lot. Plus, it’s free.

If you’re looking at me wondering what a password manager is and whether that’s a real job, think of the last time you bought something on Amazon. Or logged into your email. Or opened Evernote from a new machine. You have to have passwords and you can’t use “donaldduck123” any more. You also can’t use 7J8d7fdJK(** – if you use that same one for everywhere.

A password manager creates these strong passwords for you – and then it remembers them. All you have to do is click a button or press a key and it zooms you off to Amazon, say, and it logs you in.

But that’s not why I want to talk to you about it today.

By dint of what it does with passwords, 1Password is extremely useful in other ways. It’s great at being your bookmarking for websites; it is really good at filling in credit card details; and it actively helps you when you’re being good and making a note of your new software licence.

Go read all this at length on the tutorial I wrote about it for MacNN.com today.

The Blank Screen newsletter for 13 March 2015…

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It’s out. If you’re on the mailing list, you got it HOURS ago. If you’re not on the mailing list, you can put that right.

And you can read this week’s edition online right now.

This week we’ve got a video about decluttering your head and all the tasks in there. We’ve some distressingly persuasive information about switching off our bleedin’ phones and we have the tiniest tip for making meetings go better. But then we’ve all been in meetings that we’d take anything, up to cyanide, if it made them finish sooner.

OmniPlan and OmniGraffle now run on iPhones

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The Omni Group’s excellent project management application OmniPlan and its impressive graphics software OmniGraffle have both had major new releases with many new features. Dwarfing them all, though, is that the two can now also run on iPhone.

Previously… there was a Mac version and an iPad one but no iPhone. Now that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus have big screens, the Omni Group has been moving their apps to the phone.

That’s obviously good: even the bigger screen of the iPhone 6 Plus is not as handy as an iPad or Mac but you always have your phone with you so the usefulness is high. What’s nicer still, though, is that if you already have these apps for iPad, you’ve now got them for your iPhone. For free.

It’s the same app in both cases. Just go get them from your Purchases section in the App Store. That’s still true even if, like me, your iPhone is the older, smaller type, an iPhone 5.

I’ve not been on the beta tests for either of these but I have for the other two Omni Group apps are that coming to iPhone very soon. And I can tell you that having OmniOutliner available on my iPhone has been a huge boon. I don’t have to tell you that having OmniFocus on my iPhone is superb.

Of these four apps, only OmniFocus was already on the iPhone – but it was there in an iPhone-only edition. That was good, I used that thousands upon thousands of times, but now that’s gone and instead we get the iPad edition turned universal. That means we get features that were previously only on the iPad. And yes, that means Reviews. We finally get OmniFocus’s reviews feature on iPhone.

I have been using this lots. Lots.

Ulysses for iPad is here

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Cue frustrated Scrivener users switching. Ulysses and Scrivener for Mac are both writing environments – more than word processors, they provide tools for gathering research and using it in books and scripts and stories – but as of today, only one of them is on the iPad.

It’s a big deal and it’s made bigger by the fact that Ulysses for iPad is good. I’m doing a full review for MacNN.com but my impressions after a few days with the beta are all positive. Ulysses for iPad is Ulysses for Mac, on an iPad. It looks the same, works the same and so far all the features I’ve been trying are the same.

In comparison, Scrivener for iPad has been promised for years. There is reason to think it will come soon but it’s proved a longer job than expected. Presumably it’s because it’s a very difficult job: you don’t just want Scrivener or Ulysses on iPad, you need them to work with their Mac counterparts. You want to be able to pick up your iPad and continue writing something you began on your Mac.

That means documents being the same all the time, being synced across the platforms. But with Scrivener, one single document is really a collection of many parts. Keeping everything together and everything mobile has tasked the Scrivener people.

Ulysses has managed it. It’s not really the same thing, the two applications are not really that similar, but the existence of this iPad version is a huge win for Ulysses.

Check it out on the App Store.