Software

Software

Google Maps updated for iOS

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I am alone in this. I find Google Maps really confusing. Confusing to the point of frustration: if I could explain what goes wrong for me, I’d understand what goes wrong and it wouldn’t then go wrong. But just things like telling it I want to go from here to there and I want to walk, I have found myself stabbing at the screen on my iPhone in annoyance.

That would be fine if I liked Apple Maps better and actually for the most part, I do. I like the look, I understand how to use it, I now default to using it first.

But there often comes a time when I have to use something else too. I say that to you about Google Maps being annoying and the time that comes to mind is when I was late for somewhere and I simply could not get this bloody thing to grasp that I wanted directions. And the reason I wanted directions, the reason I was late, was that Apple Maps had only put me down in approximately the right place. I could not see where to go and neither Apple Maps would help me nor would Google Maps step in to save the day.

Common received wisdom is that Google Maps always saves the day. I’ve seen it described as the mapping system that Apple wishes it had. I expect that all the praise is right for things like the level of mapping detail and for the routes it works out, but hand on heart I turn to it as the final option.

I’m a man and still I’d sooner wind down the car window and ask someone for help.

So I was pleased by the news that Google Maps has been updated for iOS and specifically that what has changed is the design. Here’s an example of its new look on iPad:

It’s been iOS 7-and-8-ified, hasn’t it? That’s nice. I like this look.

But I am still confused. I tried it out on a route I used to drive regularly, from my home to BBC Television Centre in White City, London. Had some problems understanding how to do this but the first thing it did was show me the White City area on a map and actually that sent me off down a rabbit hole. I wondered whether TVC was still standing so I tapped on the button to change from the default map view to the satellite image.

Wallop.

Perfect satellite imagery of my home.

Not White City.

Okay, I typed in White City again this time it took me to somewhere in the USA.

I feel like it’s me, that I am just failing to read the instructions but Google Maps is going back into a Miscellaneous folder on my iPad and iPhone.

But it’s free and everybody else loves it, go take a look for yourself.

Briefly free: Path Input swipe keyboard for iPad

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The only new iOS 8 keyboard I’m using is the TextExpander one and that’s not wonderful. The time it saves giving you access to TextExpander shortcuts is a wee bit undermined by how much harder it is to type regular text on it.

But other people like these new keyboards a lot and one in particular is now free. Download the Path Input keyboard before it returns to £2.49 and see for yourself whether it’s any good.

What you wish for may turn out a bit meh: Word is free on iPad

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I’m not a fan of Microsoft. It’s been years since the problems and the failings of Microsoft Word outweighed all its benefits for me but it did and it does have those benefits. Microsoft Excel is and always has been very good. PowerPoint – well, let’s not do that. No need to be rude.

So for years my only interest in whether Microsoft would bring its Office software to the iPad was a kind of business fascination. It used to be that Word was so big, nothing else breathed at all. You can be certain that there were people in Microsoft who believed that keeping Word and Excel off the iPad would kill Apple’s tablet. Be certain of that. Because they were.

And, demonstrably, they were wrong. I think they were wrong enough that it has damaged them. Not because selling Microsoft Word for iPad on day one of the iPad would’ve brought in a lot of cash and kept on doing so for all these years. But because refusing to do it meant people had to find other word processors and other spreadsheets.

Once millions of people found they really, really did not need Word, they recognised that they really, really did not need it. Microsoft may have believed people would avoid the iPad because it wouldn’t run Word and being wrong there would’ve been bad enough. But being freed of Word on iPad means free of Word anywhere.

There are other factors that have made Word stumble and I don’t know what they are. But it’s now getting on for eight years since Microsoft switched Word over to the .docx format and still people send you the old .doc ones. Nearly a decade and people have not upgraded.

In The Blank Screen book I mention discovering after a month that I hadn’t got Word on my MacBook. And a little while ago I thought I was going to write you a news story about how Microsoft Word, Excel and the other one are now available for free on iPad. But instead, I’m thinking about how tedious it would be to switch to Word again.

Let me explain one thing. You have been able to download Word and Excel and the other one for some months now and you could read documents, you just couldn’t create or edit any – unless you paid a subscription.

As of today, not so much. You still can and you still get benefits from having that but you can use Word without it. All you have to do is sign for a free Microsoft account and off you go.

I signed up and off I went. And I also linked my Dropbox account so I could get to a lot of my current and recent documents here on the iPad. It was a chore looking through them all for documents I could open and in the end I just wrote a new one.

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Microsoft Word for iPad is good. It feels better than the PC and Mac ones. But it’s too late for Word to be anything other than a curiosity to me now. I wondering whether that’s the case for most people.

Go take a look for yourself: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft The Other One are all on the iOS app store now.

The city that never sleeps but does stop working early

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When I step out onto Manhattan’s streets, I am taller. Can’t explain that, can’t justify it and I’ve long given up trying to understand it myself. But it is true. I love New York. But apparently it’s not as energetic there as I thought:

People in the Big Apple are pretty productive in their mornings but social media distractions solidly take hold by lunchtime – and the rest of the day is really a wash after that.

That, at least, is one observation from a new Twitter heat-map that aims to take the pulse of the bustling metropolis by analyzing New Yorkers’ Twitter activity over a 5-month timeframe. Researchers behind the map say it demonstrates that Twitter could be a valuable resource to understand human behavior in urban environments.

The Exact Moment When New York Office Workers Start Slacking Off – Carl Engelking, Discover (4 November 2014)

Frightening, much? Read the full piece.

Take naps, just not like this

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Today was the 276th day that I got up to work at 5am and I say this not entirely to boast – actually not to boast much at all as it’s only 276 and I’ve been doing this lark for nearly two years now – but rather to bitch about how I still struggle with going to bed. Two hundred and seventy-six times I’ve got up at 5am. I spelt that 276 out in full because it was the start of a sentence.

(If you kill me and threaten my pets, I still could never begin a sentence with a digit. Partly because I’d be dead, you did that in a stupid order. But I might even be relieved at that instead of the certain knowledge I will soon be writing about 1Password again and it is a right bugger finding different words to put in front of it.)

Anyway. Can’t start a sentence with a digit. But also writing it out in full just underlines how many two hundred and seventy-six times is. It is enough that I should surely to god have worked out how to go to bed at such a time or in such a relaxed way that I don’t want to cry when the alarm goes off.

I’m not there yet, I’m not close. But I’m getting close to being close.

And the latest experiment is the nap.

Lately I’ve been starting at 5am and working through to about 7pm and on days that I take a nap around mid-afternoon, that is a doddle. In fact, I work then to 7pm not because oh-I’m-so-busy but because I’m just into the work and not noticing the time going.

So. I’m not the first to say this and it makes me feel so very old saying it, but here you go, here I am: take a nap.

The good things first. For some reason I really enjoy the sense that I’m getting two days out of every one. I mean, I often feel like this morning was yesterday. Or last night was a week ago. It’s partly my body getting confused but also that when this is working, I am flying through things and it feel as if I am getting so much more done that I must be having more time in which to do it.

So yes, you get refreshed and you do more. Great. The energy you get from a nap, terrific.

But.

I can’t go to bed, even though I work at home. Can’t do it. So I have been napping in my office chair. I tell Siri to switch on Do Not Disturb on my iPhone and then to set a timer for 15 minutes, then I sit there with my eyes closed. And on a good day – I’ve now done this a whole four times, I’m an expert – I go into a remarkably deep sleep.

Except.

Lately it’s been a bit cold and my office tends to be the coldest spot in the house, even though I have a heater in there. So just occasionally and not because I am officially 120 years old, I have a blanket. For three days running now, I have pulled the blanket over my head as I sat there napping.

And.

Today it didn’t work.

I sat there, timer running, Do Not Disturb do not disturbing, with a blanket over my head. And that head of mine thought the words “Our little reading group isn’t perfect, I’ve never said it is.” You’re thinking that’s very random and the part of me that wants to appear in any way mysterious is tempted to just shut up now.

Okay, that was never going to happen. This quote is the opening line of a short story I was commissioned to write. It’s called “The Book Groups” (the plural is everything) and I am going to be reading it at an event later this month. It’s written in first-person prose by a (very) unreliable narrator and that means to me it’s dialogue. It’s a script. I am a scriptwriter even in this short story.

Now, I reckon if you’ve read this far then you’re in, you’re committed, you’ve invested time here and I can tell you something those lesser people who don’t read to the end of articles will never know. It’s this. I am very proud of how often actors have told me that learning my scripts is easy because the dialogue is good. It’s natural and real and it is what the characters would say. I am very proud of that. I recognise that if you don’t happen to be a scriptwriter you might not feel the import I do, but I am and I really do.

And, whisper it, I think I agree now.

Because I can perform The Book Groups. Not read it, I don’t have to read it anymore, I can perform the entire story from memory and in character.

This is relevant because of what happened in the nap today. I sat there with the blanket over my head, I mostly-silently performed The Book Groups, practicing away. I looked like I was furniture that had a drape cloth over it and was moving like a ghost in response to unseen and unheard drama.

I looked like a prat and a half of full-cream milk.

And Angela was working at home today.

Video: David Allen on stress-free productivity

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Small thing. I’ve said video up there in the headline but actually, whisper it, this isn’t really about bringing you that video. Which is good because it may not be here.

It should be. Take a look right between this paragraph and the next.

Was there a video? If there was, and your name is Adam – and you have the most brilliant job title I’ve ever seen – then hello Adam, Happiness Engineer, all seems to be working now. If there isn’t a video but you are Adam, um, hello.

And whether there is a video or there isn’t, if your name isn’t Adam, then hello you too. How’ve you been?

Pardon? Microsoft embracing Dropbox storage

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This removes another block to my using Microsoft Word for iPad. Up to now – and remember that isn’t very long, it’s not a huge time since Word and Office first came to iPad – you have had to use OneDrive for storage. That’s Microsoft’s equivalent of Dropbox and iCloud and it’s convenient if you’re an Office 365 subscriber. If you’re not, it isn’t. Not so much. Certainly not as handy as being able to save and open documents directly with Dropbox.

I’d have said Dropbox was an obvious route to go. But I’d also have said Microsoft would never do it. And the result was I never even thought about it enough to write it. So this was a surprise:

Microsoft and Dropbox are teaming up today to more closely integrate Dropbox into Office. The surprise partnership will benefit Dropbox users who use Office across desktop, mobile, and the web as Microsoft’s productivity suite will soon become the standard way to edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files stored on Dropbox storage. Office for iPad will benefit the most, with an update coming in the following weeks that will allow Dropbox users to link their account directly to the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint iPad apps.

Dropbox and Microsoft form surprise partnership for Office integration – Tom Warren, The Verge (4 November 2014)

This isn’t just that you can fiddle your way into sometimes using Dropbox, it is that you can seemingly even choose to skip OneDrive completely.

Now, if only Microsoft would sell a version without an annual subscription. Read the full piece.

Is Inbox Zero for Sociopaths?

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No.

The campaign by productivity experts to convince us that all successful people have achieved Inbox Zero is directly at odds with our very human desire and need to stay in touch and sustain our relationships. We need to ask ourselves if the guilt we feel for not having a totally empty inbox is worse than the guilt we feel for treating heartfelt communiqués from those we love as just another task we have to complete.

Which is all to say that you should maybe feel a little horrible for not responding to those long emails. Keep them around until you have time to really respond to them—even if takes months. Jot a brief note to the sender letting them know it might be a while, but you will respond.

Is Inbox Zero for Sociopaths? -Melissa Kirsch, Cafe

Read the full piece.

But, seriously, what? I like – no, I love – long emails, I just don’t see that equals my having to keep them in my inbox. Takes all sorts.

Is this the most useless feature of the Apple Watch?

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Could be. First the feature, then why it’s useless:

[Jony Ive says] Just yesterday, somebody was saying, ‘Wow, do you know what I just did? I set the alarm in the morning, and it woke just me by tapping my wrist. It didn’t wake my wife or my baby,’” he recounted. “Isn’t that fantastic?”

“San Francisco Treasure” Jony Ive Talks Apple Watch at SFMOMA Gala – Nellie Bowles and Dawn Chmielewski, Re/code (1 November 2014)

It is fantastic and it would make my getting up hours before Angela that much easier. So far, so Apple.

But.

It’s beyond likely that the Apple Watch will need charging up every night. Maybe I’m jaded because I’ve had problems with the ordinary alarm on my iPhone, but I think this is going to be a feature that has to wait for better battery technology than currently exists.

Ive was talking at a San Francisco event; read Re/code’s full piece.