Productivity

Productivity

What a productivity app developer does when not productive

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Take a read of this on Reddit. Those very words – actually, that very word
Reddit – should tell that it won’t be an easy read. Not because of anything actually harsh or hard in the piece, but because it’s on Reddit. Looks very ugly but it’s worth it for pieces like this:

Lately, I’ve been stressed out and find myself caught in a bad, unproductive cycle: I’m tired so I can’t work. But I’m stressed out so I can’t sleep. I wake up tired, only to realize I’m going to waste another day. This has been going on for some x weeks — maybe more.

This isn’t normal for me: I write productivity apps, and I (like to think) I really know my stuff. If you ask me about a common problem about productivity, I probably know how to solve it because I’ve probably suffered from it in the past.

I’m writing this down because I need to follow my own advice. Maybe you need to hear it too. If you don’t need this now, that’s fine. We go through phases in life. I probably didn’t need to hear this 6 months ago.

If you’re stressed out and got caught in a unproductive cycle, here’s something that might help. (self.productivity) – Reddit (20 September 2014)

Read the short but full piece on Reddit.

Nobody knows how to make a can of Coke either

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The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all. Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead — the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space. Coca-Cola did not teach the world to sing, no matter what its commercials suggest, yet every can of Coke contains humanity’s choir.

What Coke Contains – Kevin Ashton, Medium (27 February 2013)

I would recommend the full piece to you regardless because it is a very interesting read. But I think there is a thought here that applies to us as writers.

Nobody knows how to make drama. The number of individuals who know how to make a TV series is zero. We all have to work together and it uses all of everything we know.

I’m serious but you’re looking at me like I’m trying to contort a metaphor. I’m not saying you’re right, but go on, go read the full feature instead. And as you go along, take a guess how many cans of Coke are made every day.

Tug of the cap to The Loop for covering this.

Ideas have their time

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I’m working toward various BBC Radio proposals – you get to submit them via producers in what’s called the offers round at certain times of the year – and I’ve done this a lot. The proposals. A lot. I mean, a lot. Quite often an idea will go very far through the process before it becomes clear it isn’t going to fly.

That’s not for any bad reason, it would often enough be that the BBC released notes on what they specifically didn’t want this time around and an idea or two of mine might be exactly one of those. Even then, the usual reason BBC Radio doesn’t want a certain type of idea is that they’ve just done too many of them. But like anything else you do a lot of, you keep doing a lot of them because they work. So sooner or later, they’ll be asking for exactly that type again.

But.

Usually when it’s been suggested that I bump an idea back to next time, whenever next time is, I’ve mentally regarded that as a rejection. I’m not being pessimistic or self-immolating about it, I think it’s factual. Because ideas go stale.

You have a finite time in which the idea is viable and exciting to you. After that, you’re at least struggling to get back the passion or you’re not even struggling, you’re just pretending.

Plus, I think that even the producer who says – and means – to bring it back next time will often not use it then for much the same reason. They’ve got their plate full of new ideas, one from last time will just seem stale.

There are exceptions. I’m involved in one right now. We’ll see how it goes but I’m into it with a passion.

But. Presume that this isn’t going to happen to you, so that you can the better enjoy it when it does. If you have an idea you want to write, write it while you still want to.

Or to put it another way, get on with it.

Data loss in 1Password: check your database is syncing

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Yesterday I found that 1Password had lost a login and passcode I needed. It’s been confirmed by Agile Bits and the short solution is that you need to recheck that it is syncing the way you told it to, using the service you chose.

I’d chosen Dropbox and at some point there was an upgrade to 1Password which switched that off without notice. From that point on, my iPhone wasn’t syncing to anywhere. Once that happens, it’s only a question of time. And when the 1Password for iOS 8 upgrade was crashing for me on open, I deleted the app and redownloaded it.

Maybe if I could’ve got far enough into 1Password without a crash, I might have thought to check the syncing options. But you set it once, it’s unfathomable that an upgrade would change a key setting and not notify you.

Nonetheless, that’s what happened. And since my syncing was switched off, every password I added on my iPhone was lost when I deleted the app.

This is what I deduced but here’s Agile Bits’ confirmation:

Yes, there was a version of 1Password 4 that disabled Dropbox sync for some customers and we did not have a system in place to notify customers if/when this happened. Sorry for that!

I am assuming that if you do have 1Password installed somewhere else you didn’t notice the lack of Dropbox syncing, correct? This is entirely feasible if there aren’t that many items being updated and the items being updated are only being used on the device the update was made on.

Yes, when you uninstalled 1Password for iOS the local database was deleted then. All 1Password data would have been deleted then. Again, I am sorry for this having happened.

Agile Bits support email – 20 September 2014

I’ve said before that 1Password is superbly, even astonishingly great in every single way bar upgrades. The company really falls over on upgrades: the move to iOS 8 causing so many crashes is minor compared to the alchemy one had to go through moving from 1Password 3 to 4.

But this is the first time it has ever lost passwords for me.

And I say passwords, plural, because the odds are that this is the case. There is simply no way for me to know how many other passwords I’ve lost or what they are.

I understand that there is bugger-all Agile Bits can do now but they’re wrong that there was nothing they could’ve done. They could’ve triggered a prompt for all users to check whether they had the fault, they could’ve even just publicised the fact that it had happened.

They could also have deleted their boilerplate last line in the email which reads:

Have a great weekend and please let us know if we can be of further assistance.

End contract prices when your contract ends

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You signed up for a contract mobile phone and accepted that it was costing you a bit for the service and a bit for the phone. Mobile phones are very expensive and the cost gets subsidised by the carriers so naturally we have to pay them quite a bit while we’re under contract.

But you don’t stay under contract. After two years, say, the contract is up. Yet people keep paying their regular monthly bill anyway.

I went a bit pale this week when friend-of-the-blog Steve Fitzpatrick pointed it out. Fortunately, I think I have always gone from one subsidised phone to another. But not this time.

This time I am just out of contract but I haven’t bought the new iPhone. So on Steve’s advice, I went back to my carrier and changed my deal. Now that my contract is up, I own my iPhone 5 so for now I’m keeping that and only paying Three for the service.

The difference is huge. I used to pay £42/month and as of this week, that’s down to £18. It’s a slightly better deal in terms of texts and phone minutes but who cares? It’s the all-you-can-eat data that I wanted enough to pay £42 for but I now have for £24 less. Per month. That’s a quarter of a hundred pounds less.

So thank you Steve. And if you’re in this position, go change to a new contract. Specifically a SIM-only contract.

Curiously, two reasons led to the conversation with Steve that got me this saving. One is that there are two iPhones out and they’re big. I need to see them in my hands before I can really decide whether they’re too big for me or not. There are reasons to like the new iPhone beside size but the size could put me off. Consequently I didn’t just pre-order or plan to buy on release day today.

But the second is that I couldn’t really make the numbers work. The price of the phone under a two-year contract is fine but no matter how I sliced it or how I considered switching to other providors, I didn’t like the numbers. All you can eat data is important to me and every deal was coming in at £45 or above.

Now I’ve gone SIM-only and own my iPhone 5, I’m suddenly looking at £18 a month I’m actually paying or anything above £45. That’s a big difference. That’s a big enough difference that I might skip this iPhone.

Incidentally, if I don’t skip it, if I go buy one, I am now committed to my SIM-only deal for £18. I couldn’t get a subsidised iPhone 6 from Three without paying some terminations fees. But I could buy one from Apple and pay over Apple Finance to get a monthly fee. That’d mean paying Apple a bit every month for the phone and Three a bit every month for the service.

It works out at pretty much exactly what I’d have been paying if I had gone straight for having Three subsidise me.

So I’m no worse off with my potential decisions but I am much better off with what I’m actually paying. And I go so pale at the thought I might very well have continued to pay my old monthly cost forever. You know people must do this. You know mobile phone companies would let them.

If that’s you, then, go sort it out and thank Steve.

Career advice from successful women

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I hesitated over that headline because I think this collection of quotes is smart advice for anyone and so surely the gender of the speakers makes no difference. But some of it does address issues that especially affect women, such as sexism in the workplace.

Also, the more I thought about it, the less I thought it was necessary to use the word career in the headline. This is all ostensibly about work and careers and business but I’m taking general life lessons from it.

Actually, what exactly does successful mean either? If it means being successful at being a woman then if you’re a woman, success. I’m a man, so I’ve failed already.

And if I were the type of man who ignored advice because it’s from a woman, I would truly be a failure then. So I’m taking this advice.

I just suspect the better headline would therefore have been “Advice From”.

It’s Advice From a longish blog post that specifies it has 15 such tips, though I note they come from only 11 women: Tina Fey gets quoted four times. But my favourite of them all and the one I think is most relevant to us as writers is one of hers in which she says:

The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30…What I learned about bombing as a writer at Saturday Night is that you can’t be too worried about your “permanent record.” Yes, you’re going to write some sketches that you love and are proud of forever—your golden nuggets. But you’re also going to write some real shit nuggets. And unfortunately, sometimes the shit nuggets will make it onto the air. You can’t worry about it. As long as you know the difference, you can go back to panning for gold on Monday.

Tina Fey quoted in 15 Career Tips from Smart Women – Joanna Goddard, A Cup of Jo (16 September 2014)

Do go read the other 14. They are smart quotes. But then also go buy Tina Fey’s book Bossypants: I’ve never met Fey and don’t really know her work beyond a few episodes of 30 Rock yet the book feels like she’s sitting there with you telling you these great stories. Fantastic writing style and a huge amount to say.

New on the App Store: Bundles of Apps

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We’ve had box sets of films and TV series since there were any boxes to put them in yet it’s taken billions of downloads of a million apps before we’ve had the advantage of bundles of them.

The idea – new to the revamped App Store in iOS 8 – is that you can get four or so apps from the same developer and save a little bit of money over buying them separately. Only a little bit, but.

Go to the App Store today and you’ll see a banner ad for app bundles. Take a look.

But easily the one that leaps out at me is the Omni Group bundle. The Omni Productivity Pack contains:

• OmniFocus 2 for iPad
• OmniOutliner for iPad
• OmniPlan 2 for iPad
• OmniGraffle 2 for iPad

Currently that bundle costs £94.99 as opposed to a total of £111.93 if you bought them separately. So that’s a saving of £16.94 which is not to be ignored. But in each case this gets you the standard edition of the apps and it costs more for the Pro versions.

But look at me: I already own OmniFocus and OmniOutliner. For people like me, Apple’s borrowed its pricing model from TV series: I can “complete my bundle” for £53.01. To buy the apps I haven’t got, OmniPlan and OmniGraffle would otherwise cost me £69.98. So that’s a saving to me of £16.97.

I don’t need either OmniPlan yet or OmniGraffle maybe ever, but these are the kinds of savings the new idea brings and that’s got to be good.

Now the great, the great and the not so great of iOS 8

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All day I’ve been turning to my iPhone or iPad to do something and finding it subtly different because I’ve taken the free upgrade to iOS 8. And finding it subtly, slightly, gradually and superbly better:

• It’s easier and quicker and clearer to tell Apple Maps you’re walking instead of driving

• Voice iMessages. I had this on WhatsApp when I was reviewing that and thought it a nice idea but, meh, I’ll never remember to use it. Today, the first day it’s on iOS 8, I sent half a dozen voice iMessages, barely having to think

• “Hey Siri, take me home”. Just saying that aloud in the car and finding Siri firing up the map us unnatural

• Recent and favourite contacts. Double tap the home key to switch to another app and along the way there are icons for the people you speak and email and text with most often. Tap on one then text, phone or email them

• Today View. Being able to see my current OmniFocus To Do tasks and tick them off. Being able to launch quickly into Evernote right from there.

• Swipe that Email Down. Push your reply down out of the way while you peek to see what’s just come in to your inbox

• Sharing. Sending a webpage to Pocket, to Evernote, to OmniFocus and being able to add details before it goes

• Using 1Password from within Safari.

• Quick deleting emails with swipes

• Spotlight searching looks through your phone, your email, your browser history and the web and Wikipedia

That’s ten things right there. The killer thing for me is that I know there is more yet they’ve already become so familiar I can’t remember to question whether we’ve always had them. I used an iOS 7 iPad earlier this evening and it just felt old.

So, you know, reading between the lines here, I’d say I think iOS 8 is a hit.