Software

Software

Review: OmniFocus Video Field Guide

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David Sparks writes a mean Field Guide book: I’ve read his work on going Paperless, on using Email and on giving Presentations. All good enough and interesting enough that his announcement of a video version was enough to be news. That it was a 150-minute video about OmniFocus made it a recommendation. And the fact that you could and can watch a sample segment from it on Sparks’ official site made it a certainty that I would tell you about it.

And a fair certainty that I’d buy it for myself.

Now that I’ve bought and seen it, though, there is more to say. If you do have OmniFocus then unless you’re so good that the Omni Group employs you, then it is easily obvious that you will benefit from this video and enjoy it a lot.

If you’re at the stage of looking into OmniFocus, of looking into To Do apps of any kind, that’s a trickier thing. It’s 150 minutes long but it doesn’t hang about: it gets very specific, very quickly and I enjoy that, but I don’t think it doubles as a selling tool. No reason it should, but if I were back at the point where I was trying to decide whether to buy OmniFocus, I think you need something more first.

Maybe not much more. Try the videos on the Omni Group official site: they’re adverts, of course, but they give you the flavour of the software. And if it looks good to you, try a couple of YouTube videos about it. Then buy OmniFocus and go buy David Sparks’ OmniFocus Video Field Guide for $9.99.

Clickhole: the Daily Habits of 5 Highly Successful People

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Ever wonder what it takes to run Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg credits his success entirely to spending most of his days reading various articles on the internet about the habits of successful people. According to sources in the Facebook office, Zuckerberg can spend up to 70 percent or 80 percent of his workday reading about how successful people live their lives, and even takes several hours at home after work to read more articles about productivity.

The Daily Habits Of 5 Highly Successful People | ClickHole

Read the full piece.

How file formats matter

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This is an article about many of the file formats we are familiar, from HTML to Photoshop, but what interests me is this about word processors:

WordPerfect was always the best word processor. Because it allowed for insight into its very structure. You could hit a certain key combination and suddenly the screen would split and you’d reveal the codes, the bolds and italics and so forth, that would define your text when it was printed. It was beloved of legal secretaries and journalists alike. Because when you work with words, at the practical, everyday level, the ability to look under the hood is essential. Words are not simple. And WordPerfect acknowledged that. Microsoft Word did not. Microsoft kept insisting that what you saw on your screen was the way things were, and if your fonts just kept sort of randomly changing, well, you must have wanted it that way.

On File Formats, Very Briefly, by Paul Ford · The Manual

I could be wrong, of course, but it always seemed to me that WordPerfect was developed by writers and Microsoft Word by engineers. For all that I admire engineers, in this case I think they did a poor job. In WordPerfect, a document is stored in sequence, paragraph by paragraph, fine. In Word, every single paragraph is like a separate document with lots of pointers back and forth to others. It’s like the paragraphs in a Word document are all free-flowing, free-standing and only happen to line up the way you want.

Maybe I’m just too into this stuff, but if you are too, then do read the full piece.

Contact has been made

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Or rather contacts, plural. I hate the word contacts: it’s like networking. I relish meeting people and having a natter but that’s nattering and meeting people: it isn’t networking my contacts.

But.

It is weird how your work changes, isn’t it? In this last year I’ve turned from being locked to my desk to barely being at it. Neither is great: both are problematic. But being away a lot comes from working with a lot of people and I am forced to change my mind about how bad my memory is: I’ve had some awful moments when I’ve gone blank but generally I’m far better at names than I thought. Or maybe it’s just that everyone I meet is so distinctive. They are, but maybe that’s how I’m getting better.

Nonetheless, I’ve been prompted into looking into a way of keeping track of everyone I’m talking with: I can’t promise someone something and then not deliver, I can’t. And earlier this week, the makers of BusyCal released a public beta of BusyContacts which has set me off down a wormhole of looking into this subject.

BusyCal is the calendar app made by the makers of once-powerful and actually just once-existing Now Up to Date which I loved and adored and cherished in the 1990s. Back then they had a companion application called Now Contact. It was so much a companion that the two were just always sold together as Now Up-to-Date and Contact.

Fast forward all these years and the company is doing very well with its BusyCal product but I don’t happen to like it. Purely for aesthetic reasons, it just doesn’t do it for me and since you spend a lot of time staring at this stuff, that matters. I went with Fantastical instead and am happy with it.

But somehow I ended up on the public beta list for BusyContacts. I must’ve registered – and you can do that yourself right here – but so long ago that I don’t recall. Anyhow, a beta copy came my way this week and… I’m not very keen on the aesthetics. Fair enough, really.

But it is interesting. Chiefly for this reason: when you look up someone in your contacts list, BusyContacts shows you the text of the last email exchange you had and a clickable list of all the email contact you’ve had. I adore this. Adore it.

Have spent the week trying to get it on an app that a) I like the look of better and 2) works on my iPhone and iPad.

Tried and failed.

I think I’m going to have to buy BusyContacts when it comes out. But I’d still like it look better. And I still want a way to get this feature on my phone.

Plus, I’ve just discovered hundreds of email addresses that I use all the time that are not in my Contacts. They’re in my previous recipients list. Who knew? Working to get those out.

Five habits that hurt your productivity

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This is a Globe and Mail article that I think sounds shocked at the stunning idea that multitasking could be rubbish. Ignore that and see this as a refresher and I think it’s useful.

Entrepreneurs are expected to do everything and be everything at all times. It’s part of business, especially when you’re first starting out.

However, there are some seemingly productive habits that you may have formed that are actually killing your success in the long term. The candle that burns brightest, burns fastest, and while it’s crucial for you to be productive with your time, you also need to focus on not burning out.

You’re actually hurting your business with these five ‘productive’ habits – The Globe and Mail

Read the full piece.

New: OmniFocus Video Field Guide by David Sparks

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I would tell you that I am an expert OmniFocus user but it’s a lie. I am expert at the specific bits of it that I use daily. (Hourly.) (Minutely.) David Sparks knows the whole thing and now shows it to you.

He’s done this before with the original OmniFocus in a whole series of screencast videos but now he’s done it more in the form of his Field Guide books. These are all very good, very excellent books that seem to cut through complex issues and just tell you what’s what and what you need to know now. Somehow they are that relaxed and yet by the end you know everything. The books are particularly fine pieces of work and now there’s a video one for OmniFocus.

It’s about all the versions from Mac through iPhone and iPad. And it’s 2.5 hours of video: 150 minutes. You can watch a sample on Vimeo or just go buy the whole thing from Sparks’ site here.

As expert as I think I am, I know about this new video because I’m on the guy’s mailing list and it can’t have been above four minutes since I got the email, checked the sample, bought the whole thing and came here to tell you.

More Black Friday software details

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So this is the year that Black Friday hit the UK. It’s a thing now. But here’s a benefit of the whole shebang: more cheap software. MacLife has a bigger list than I’d seen before and it includes many I’d recommend:

Well, the big Black Friday sale day is upon us. If you’ve been out this morning beating back hordes for physical bargains on flat screen TVs and whatnot, this will come as a welcome respite. Cheap prices and no lines, no shortages, no riots. And if you skip the whole retailer madness on principal or for other reasons, you can still grab some sweet deals right here still.

Price Drop Black Friday Edition: The Weekend’s Best App Deals, November 28 | Mac|Life

Read the full piece.

Writers’ Notes: when you can and when you can’t link to someone

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Easy. You always can. The end.

By chance, I’ve had several conversations this week with people who either wanted to link to my blog or were asking what I thought of them linking to others. Link away, I said. Always. There’s no permission needed and no endorsement implied.

At least, there isn’t from the site or person you’re linking to. If I were to tell you that Brain Pickings is the most amazingly absorbing site I read – which it is, by the way – then I believe I am actually beholden to give you a link. I don’t have to ask the site’s owner Maria Popova and my linking to her site doesn’t mean she’s happy for me to. It doesn’t mean she even knows about me.

It just means that I am sending you on your way. I have a thing: I can’t write anything online without including a link to take you somewhere else more interesting afterwards. I feel that is my duty and also that if I do it, I’ve earned a bit of your time to do some things with and for you.

The site owner you’re linking to do does find out, by the way. They have to look at their traffic but they can and so if a tonne of people click through you to them, they’ll know about it.

And what are they going to do? Multiple choice answer: a) be pleased, 2) be very pleased or iii) one of the above. I suppose if the Ferguson police force linked to me I might be a bit irked but they never will and nobody would click through there to me if they did.

So link away. You’re doing a service and I think this is actually part of the bedrock of the web, that we share sites amongst ourselves.

In this week’s newsletter… November 28, 2014

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What to do when you get things wrong. Say so. Right away. Such as me, for instance, I got a big thing wrong and I admit it right at the top of this week’s newsletter.

Sorry? A man getting something wrong – and admitting it? Songs will be sung of this day.

Also, a couple of Black Friday deals that shouldn’t really happen in the UK but do plus a terribly absorbing video summarising Steve Jobs’ advice about business. Recorded the day after he died, it’s a speech by Guy Kawasaki who abandoned whatever regular talk he was supposed to give and instead talked about Jobs. It’s very Apple-centric as you’d imagine but each word is useful for us whatever our work is.

Plus, it has a comparatively off-the-cuff feel about it so rather than a studied presentation, it feels like a chat.

All that in the newsletter which you can read here and then sign up to get your own copy each week.

Be told when anything happens online

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If you visit a lot of websites all the time, stop and ask me about RSS instead. You’ll have plenty of chances as I rarely shut up about it. But as well as this tool for making websites send you their new articles, there are ways to get all sorts of information without schlepping off to site after site. One new way involves IFTTT and a tool called TrackIf:

TrackIf helps you track the web and alerts you if anything you want changes online, helping you be the first to know when anything happens online. Track price drops on any product at nearly any shopping site. Something you want out of stock? No problem, TrackIf can alert you if it’s available again.

Connect TrackIf to anything – IFTTT

Read the full piece. It’ll either bore you or awaken a brilliant interest in automating te web for you. A brilliant interest that becomes all consuming, but there you go.