Productivity

Productivity

App Store bug fixed

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As of thirty minutes ago, Apple has fixed a serious bug in the App Store. If apps were instantly crashing on launch, try them again.

If they still aren’t working, check for updates and that will sort it out.

It’s not clear how many apps were affected: it wasn’t limited to any one manufacturer.

Late last night I installed OmniFocus on Angela’s iPad – because we have family sharing on she can use my copy – and it wouldn’t launch. Whereas I installed my OmniOutliner for her two and that’s fine.

This is one of those cases where the next time you get chance to look at the problem, it’s already been solved.

So that’s good. But I don’t know, bendgate followed by iOS 8.0.1 and .2, it’s not great.

Evernote radically changing its web version

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Even Evernote users forget this: there is a version of it that runs on the web. We forget it because we’re forever in the PC, Mac, iPhone or Android client editions and have rarely any need to go to evernote.com. But we can and it has always seemed as if the Evernote company believed we did. Suddenly, though, there is a reason to.

Revealed in beta form this week is a new online version that is fast and is meant to turn Evernote into the place where you do all your writing. I don’t know: the handiness of the client versions is hard to beat. But the new Evernote.com does look very nice:

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It’s very clean and distraction-free. I quite like some distractions. But if you’re already an Evernote user and you’re okay with using beta versions of software, go to evernote.com and have a look. More details on the official Evernote blog.

Dramatic timing

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Pretend you’re presenting Strictly Come Dancing or The X Factor or any of those: spread things out for maximum dramatic effect – and it’ll help you get it done.

This one needs an example. I’ve just taken over running a programme of about 24 writers who are being paired up into buddies. It got complicated: the number varied, everyone must pair with everyone else but only once, some dropped out, some joined, all that. But in the end, last Sunday, I had the list of who was to work with whom.

And as I was about to post it on the group’s secret Facebook group, I stopped. Instead of the whole list, I just put the first pair up. And announced that I would reveal the rest throughout the day. I was called a tease.

Every thirty minutes for the rest of the day I revealed one pair. It was a daft and a fun idea but you can’t believe how it helped me. I became very conscious that I had to write a new, funny announcement every 28 minutes or so. So I’d post the new one and immediately get on with other work I had to do, shovelled through as much of that as I could before my alarm went off and I did another announcement.

I got a huge amount of work done that day and it felt like a game. If there is anything of yours that you can spread out like this, give it a try, okay? It focuses you like nobody’s business.

Now, there is actually a strong chance that not one single one of those writers noticed this because they could’ve just come on at the end of the day and seen the whole list. So next time I’m going to spread it out over days. I don’t think that will help my productivity, I think it’ll be more fun.

The Blank Screen – Live!

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There’s a rare chance to take my one-day creative productivity workshop for free – if you’re in the NUJ, Musicians’ Union, Equiity or the Writers’ Guild. And if you can get to Birmingham on 23 October. And if you book your space very, very quickly. More details on the Federation of Entertainment Unions site: http://bit.ly/1xtHJNU

Screw what most people think is normal

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That’s a quote from an article I want to show you. The piece is about productivity tips from various people I’ve never heard of but are reportedly great. That’s fine, that’s what caught my eye and what I read on to check out for you. Plus, some of the tips in it are genuinely useful, such as this one:

Niki Papadopoulos: My editor always says, “OK, well, try writing it then.” In other words, she means, get started. She usually says this right after I explain a big sweeping idea for a book or a chapter or an article. Planning is great, but productive people get moving.

28 Secrets of Exceptionally Productive People – Jeff Haden, Inc.com (9 September 2014)

Maybe I like this one because it rather fits with what I was saying earlier about not over-planning

But then I saw that line “screw what most people think is normal” and I like that. I want to say that to you every day. And also now use it as a tease to get you to read the full piece and find out what specific productivity tip it relates to.

Write one sentence

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That writing project you’ve got do to. Write one sentence now. Just dash it off this minute. This minute.

Did you do it? You’re a sentence closer to being finished.

And what kind of crazy-mad Hallmark Card happy-clappy stupid advice is that? You’re a sentence in to your book. Whoop-de-do.

But, hey, look at me. You’re a sentence further into your book. It’s written and it isn’t going away, it is only going to be added to. Maybe with one more sentence tomorrow. Probably with a lot more, but at least one sentence tomorrow.

By the end of a year you have 365 sentences. Call it ten words per sentence – no reason, no statistics behind it, it’s just reasonable enough plus it makes the maths startlingly easy – and that’s 3,650 words you’ve written.

It’s not enough. Nowhere near enough. But it’s a damn site more enough than 0.

Don’t spend too much time planning

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Spend some, obviously. But when you have worked out a stunningly precise plan for a project you know that three things will happen, starting with:

1) Some of it will work out exactly as you intended and it’s great

Happy for you. But then:

2) Some of it will be wrong

You will have made mistakes, you will have misunderstood something. And:

3) Something unexpected happens

There is always something unexpected or it would be in your plan and you’d call it expected.

What worries me and occupies me a lot about this is how fragile we really are. You hear about impregnable secure places that get broken into because the plan didn’t consider that baddies could be hiding in the laundry truck. The greatest, biggest, best-defended castle is taken over because who’d be suspicious of those two monks?

There is a saying that you should hope for the best yet plan for the worst. Fine. But don’t plan too much because it’s pointless.

New iOS keyboards: TextExpander in use

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Android users have long, long had the option to replace whatever the standard onscreen keyboard is with anything else they like. Keyboards that are in some way better, if not for everyone then at least for some. That’s cool. The same idea has now come to iOS for iPhones and iPads and that’s cool too.

I just didn’t care. I type fine on the Apple one. Yet if the first thing I bought for iOS 8 was OmniFocus 2 for iPad, the second was the TextExpander keyboard. Switch that on and whatever you’re doing on your iOS device, you can instantly call up every snippet of text you use a lot or just want a lot or just always misspell.

No question: I was going to buy that TextExpander keyboard and I was never going to look at the Apple one again.

But.

All this about using TextExpander snippets where you couldn’t before – such as Mail or any Apple app – is true.

Yet.

I just don’t like it.

The TextExpander keyboard itself saves you all this time with expanding out snippets of text that I use a lot but then it loses me far more time because it is substantially harder to type on. The overall QWERTY keyboard is smaller than the regular Apple one but also each key is remarkably smaller and harder to hit.

I make far, far and three times far more mistakes typing on that TextExpander keyboard. And what you gain in its snippets you lose with the autocorrection and suggested words. There are no suggested words and ‘d like to say that there is no autocorrection but every now and again suddenly I will get a correction automatically applied.

Plus, getting this keyboard means both downloading it and setting it up. The final stage of setting it up is to tell your iPhone that yes, you want the TextExpander keyboard to have full access to your device. Fine, but that option doesn’t appear at all until you’ve been in once, set up everything else on the keyboard, come out and gone back in again.

And then regularly, even routinely, you will swap to the TextExpander keyboard and it will warn you that you haven’t set this full access up. Oh, yes, I have. Oh no, you haven’t.

I suspect that’s a a bug at Apple’s end but the fact that I get it is often is probably tied to how I don’t, afterall, stick with TextExpander’s keyboard. I swap back to it to do a particular complex snippet, then I return to Apple’s own where I can actually type.

That can only happen when you’re using the onscreen keyboard: I’m writing now on my iPad using a keyboard case and it is impossible to use the TextExpander keyboard or switch it on so that I can use my snippets.

So it’s a great idea but it has this first version bug which is probably Apple’s, it won’t or can’t use the regular autocorrection service and the keys are tiny. I think it’s also an ugly keyboard.

Which means I’m a bit disappointed. I wasn’t interested in iOS keyboards before but I am very interested now and it is a disappointment.

TextExpander’s keyboard extension comes with the latest version of the app, which costs £2.99 UK or $4.99 US.

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Yes, I use technology a lot, but…

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I’m going to be circumspect here because I don’t want someone to know that I’m worrying about them quite this much. I’m certain sure they’ll be fine, I just worry because I wonder.

This is someone who does not use technology.

Now, that might be true of you too, except that of course if it is then hello, welcome to your first use of technology. There is no reason you should be in to this stuff, just as there is no reason in the world I should ever be interested in football.

Except that I guess that’s a lie. There is reason to use tech.

I don’t like that. If I told this person that there were reasons, they would all be about work. I run my business through my iPhone and iPad, I am not short of reasons why this stuff is great. But automatically putting it that way feels like automatically saying you should use it. It feels like saying you should forget what you like and don’t like, you should – you must – use technology. That’s not me, that’s not the way I want to be.

Listen, I have a friend who owns an Android phone.

I don’t phone her, but.

You can’t really urge someone to use this stuff by saying they have to. It’s like saying you must buy this computer instead of that because its backside cache is better. It might be true for all I know, but it’s no actual use to for making the decision. It’s no use to you at all.

This particular person does tend to use what I’d call Stone Age computers and I have the impression that doing anything on them is a chore. If that were me, I wouldn’t bother doing it and I think I’d soon conclude that anyone who did is a bit of a geek. Unless you like computers, you wouldn’t put yourself through this alchemy.

So I do get why she might not be drawn to technology. I do. I just think she sees it as something geeks use. I think she sees it all as a toy. That it’s happy for you if you want to play in your sandbox, that it’s not for her.

It is for her.

It is very for her.

She’s joining the legal profession: technology is made for her.

I imagine whatever firm she ends up with is perhaps likely to issue her with a phone but I know for certain sure that the firm she ends up with will be built on technology. She’ll have to use it, so she’ll have to learn it, and I think that makes all this a slog.

You just want to say that of course you wouldn’t miss that appointment change if you could read your emails on the way like all your rivals. You just want to say that Evernote would fix that problem. OmniFocus would completely remove that worry.

You want to say that your rivals will be the ones in court with the ability to find and cite page 112 before you’ve got the book out.

But you don’t. So instead you write a blog post about it and hope that by the end you’ve formed your thoughts into some kind of order, said William writing on his iPad and posting to the web via a WordPress app. Technology much? Doesn’t seem like it here, this seems straightforwardly, boringly obvious.

The limits of iOS 8 Extensions so far

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You knew this would be the case: Extensions sounded great and they turn out to be mostly pretty very good indeed. But not up there in the greatness that you’d expected.

Previously… Extensions are a new feature for iPhones and iPads that let your apps play nice. You hardly have to know the feature is there but if you have an app that has Extensions, you can use them very easily. So for instance, when I browse to a site in Safari I can now call up my username and password for it from 1Password while still staying in Safari.

Except.

These things will change and develop over time as people come to use this service and start talking about what they’re not doing yet. Please count this as my talking about what Extensions are not doing yet yet I’d like them to. Even more than I liked the fact that I just got to say “yet yet” for the first time in my adult life.

I’m a writer. Just nod at me.

So. All this is true and all this works great, but the first disappointment was that 1Password can’t enter credit card details for you. The full Mac app can, the iOS app can, but it can’t do it via an Extension into Safari. This is a big shame for me because I buy a lot online and it would save time.

But the second disappointment is more insiduous. I’m sure that the credit card bit will change – 1Password’s maker Agile Bits said so, for one thing – but I don’t know that this other problem will. So let’s please hear it for The Other Problem with 1Password in Safari Via Extentions.

If you’re on a website, you can tap to have 1Password fill in all your details for you. But you have to be on exactly the right site. I’m struggling to reproduce this problem but I’ve stumbled on it many times. You go to a site, tap to have 1Password log in for you and because there is some difference between the site address you’re on and the site address you saved your login for, 1Password doesn’t work.

I think that’s probably a good idea. Make us wait a second to consider what we’re doing and that will probably mean we make fewer rash logins to pages that aren’t what we think they are.

Only, it doesn’t make us wait a second. It makes us wait forever. The 1Password screen comes up and includes nothing. Nothing whatever.

I would like the option to search my 1Password account for what I need.

I also wish there were a way to use 1Password to log in to apps.

Or stepping away from 1Password, why can’t there be – or when will there be, please – a way to use Extensions to save Facebook invitation details? Facebook would rather you lived in its calendar but I don’t so a tap and a tap and a completed appointment entry would be useful.

Especially this week where – though my fault rather than technology’s – I managed to get a date wrong and arrived 24 hours late.

If only I could blame that on Bendgate or something.