Software

Software

Weekend Read: When Crowdsourcing Turns on You

Posted by

0

At best you think crowdsourcing is a marvellous thing where people get together to achieve a common goal. At worst you think getting people to do that is cheaper than hiring them. But there is always the assumption that the people are good and the intention is pure. And sometimes, not so much.

We completed three documents in five days, at a breakneck speed that put us third among 9,000 competitors. We had just two documents to go. The secret to our success was our size and our system. My collaborator, computer scientist Manuel Cebrian, and I had created a platform that allowed thousands of individuals to work together on these scrambled documents. Plus, we rewarded assistance by enticing key players with a share of the $50,000 bounty, should we win.

However, my optimism faded suddenly on Day 5. My phone rang, and Cebrian shouted, “We are under attack!” I swung open my laptop and logged into the system, only to see thousands of man-hours of meticulous work disappear in seconds, as virtual paper scraps scattered before me in all directions. It was the first in a series of attacks sustained by our team, and marked the end of our winning streak.

How Crowdsourcing Turned On Me – Iyad Rahwen, Nautilus (23 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

The Verge on the best coming-soon Android features

Posted by

0

This means nothing to me. But if it’s your thing, knock yourself out while I deal with a sudden hankering to visit Vienna. Let me know if any of these features look like they’ll be handy for productivity, would you? Thanks.

Google’s approach for rolling out the latest version of Android, Lollipop, is a little different. There are the usual things we see every year — a new Nexus phone and a new Nexus tablet — but instead of a big event, the company is posting details in blog posts and on the main Android site. So if you’re tracking the rollout closely, you probably have a sense of what’s new and what’s cool in the OS. If you’re not, though, getting a sense of what Lollipop is actually like and what it actually does isn’t easy.

Luckily, we got a chance to sit down with some Google execs last week to get a walkthrough of the coolest features. We won’t know everything until we actually have a chance to use the final version, but there are some clever additions we saw last week. Here are some of our favorites.

12 of the best new features in Android Lollipop – Dieter Bohn, The Verge (28 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

Evernote adds unwanted Context feature

Posted by

0

That is, the new Context feature is unwanted. It isn’t that it does something useful with unwanted features.

I think it’s unwanted but you never know: I might find it useful, you might. But it puts links or information into your Evernote account that the company’s algorithms think you’ll want. If there is something in your notes that in any way lets Evernote reckon you burn to read a Wall Street Journal article, there it is.

This is a Premium user feature and is like a reverse of that other paid-for trick, the Google search look up. If I search Google for something and already have a relevant note, Evernote displays it for me. I use that, I like that, it’s very useful.

What I can’t conceive of is using Context to pull in WSJ articles. Any articles. From anywhere.

Maybe it’ll be something I come to like. Hopefully it’s something I can switch off. But right now I can’t tell either because the new Evernote update for iPhone brought me a different problem.

I suspect it’s re-indexing my Evernote notes or doing some heavy lifting. If it’s searching all my thousands of notes to find me relevant Wall Street Journal articles I’ll be pissed because whatever it’s doing, it’s stopping me using Evernote here on my iPhone 5.

In the last half hour it has got better: I can now get into a notebook I need and some buttons do respond. But I can’t then scroll down the notebook, I can’t get in to the notes.

Usually I like the automatic updates on iOS but I’d have more liked a warning this was happening and I’d even more have liked a warning and the option to postpone updating.

Please don’t picture me crossing my fingers that it’ll work before I get where I’m going today. No, don’t picture that. Instead, picture how useful Evernote is that being effectively locked out of it is causing me these problems and making me this ratty.

Google: the search engine that looked at goats

Posted by

0

It’s not a metaphor. But it is a warning. Here’s the intriguing bit:

A few weeks ago, I discovered that Google knows the lifespan of a goat. Search for “how long does a goat live” and you’ll see it displayed in a special card above the search results. 15 to 18 years! It’s not an important fact, and I can’t imagine people ask it very often — but there it is. I couldn’t tell you where they got the answer (it’s surprisingly hard to nail down, as I’ll get into later) but I’m pretty sure it’s right. It’s the kind of accidental discovery that Google loves to serve up. I went looking for a fact, and there it was. You come away feeling as if the engine knows the answer to any question you could ask.

The official name for this feature is the Knowledge Graph, Google’s project for converting information on the web into easily managed cards. The sudden appearance of the goat data says a lot about the piecemeal way Google has been building it. How long had they known about goats? I made a few calls and Google got back with an answer: the card was added a year ago, as part of a broader animal expansion that also included a goat’s mass (45 to 300 kilograms) and height (40 to 58cm), with similar specs for other beasts. Unless you’d thought to Google “how long does a goat live”, you would never have known.

Why Google is learning about goats – Russell Brandom, The Verge (28 October 2014)

Read the full piece for the warning bit. Spoiler: what we think of is fact can be just a lot of good guesses.

Microsoft releases new Outlook for Mac, says Office coming

Posted by

0

I’m not very keen on Outlook but it is a gigantically popular app and it’s good to see it being updated:

Today we are announcing the new Outlook for the Mac, which delivers improved performance and reliability and a fresh look and feel that is unmistakably Microsoft Office. This release offers a more familiar and consistent experience between Outlook on the PC, Outlook on the web and Outlook Web App (OWA) for iPad, iPhone and Android devices.

The new Outlook for Mac includes:

Better performance and reliability as a result of a new threading model and database improvements.
A new modern user interface with improved scrolling and agility when switching between Ribbon tabs.

New Outlook for Mac available to Office 365 customers – Office Blogs

Read the full piece for more about Outlook and the future of Office on the Mac.

Band on the wrist

Posted by

0

Microsoft has release Band, a health, er, thing. There’s a Band app for iPhone, Android and Windows phones plus there is an actual band that you wear. It looks a lot like various smart watch-like bracelets I’ve seen people wearing, except this one just feels like Windows:

Tell the truth, you were expecting it to look like this:

Microsoft Health is a new service that helps you live healthier by providing actionable insights based on data gathered from the fitness devices and apps that you use every day. It’s designed to work for you, no matter what phone you have, device you wear, or services you use. Microsoft Health makes tracking personal fitness easier, more insightful, and more holistic.

Microsoft Band, the smart band powered by Microsoft Health – Microsoft Band official site (retrieved 30 October 2014)

Read the full piece and watch videos on the official site.

Use an email client instead of the web

Posted by

0

I’m prompted to say this to you because of an short article about Gmail whose writer says:

I’ve been using Gmail since 2003 exclusively. It’s awesome. And when I learned the keyboard shortcuts in 2006, it vastly increased my email productivity. I highly recommend taking the time to learn them.

Yesterday I discovered the biggest boon to my email productivity since shortcuts: Gmail Offline, a Google Chrome app that does just what it says: Allows you to read and write email (in the browser) when you’re not connected to the Internet. But that’s not the key point. I haven’t even been offline since I started using it.

Do Your Email Faster by Getting Offline – Ev Williams, Medium (13 May 2014)

He sounds so surprised. Here’s the thing. If you get to your email by firing up Firefox or Safari or Chrome or (twitch) Internet Explorer, then logging on to a site like outlook.com (hotmail.com as was) or laposte.net, you’re reading your email online. (* See that asterisk? It’s important. But shush, I didn’t say it yet.) You’re reading your email online. That’s nice. You can do that from anywhere, absolutely anywhere that you can get an internet connection and it’s fine.

So long as you have an internet connection. You are bollixed if you don’t. And so long as your email provider remains your email provider. A friend recently moved from one broadband supplier to another and in the process was told she would lose her old email address. You know that’s a problem: if there are any statistics into why so many people remain subscribers to AOL then they probably conclude that it is solely to keep that familiar @aol.com address. Same with Hotmail. You keep putting up with the crap because you’ve given everybody that bleedin’ email address and there is nothing you can do about it.

Until forced. Then you change to something good and that may well be Gmail but this is another story.

Back to the online versus offline stuff.

If you work in an office and your PC or Mac there includes Microsoft Outlook, you’re getting your email offline. It might be stored on your company’s network servers but it’s not sitting out there on the internet waiting for you to login or for Microsoft to switch you off.

Back when this used to be an either/or kind of situation, there were advantages and disadvantages to online and offline email. I have always used offline, though, and I’ve done so because it means I have all the email right here. It’s mine and on my Mac and on my backups, you can’t take it away from me without theft and some serious effort.

It’s called using an email client: Apple’s OS X Mail is a client, Microsoft Outlook is a client and email is served to them. Your computer goes off to get email for you and brings it back, you don’t have to keep going to a website or leaving a website tab open.

Also back in the day, leaving that connection open cost you money. I knew someone who stay online while slowly peck-typing her emails, not appreciating that it was only when she hit Send that she needed to be online. I did tell her that and her internet connection did keep dropping the line because, as far as it was concerned, she wasn’t using it for a very long time. But I have no doubt that she persisted until whenever she got broadband.

These days we can have both worlds. I have all the advantages of having my emails on my Mac but they are also on my iPad and iPhone, moreover they are also also on any computer I chose to login to. Where you might have to go to hotmail.com to get your email, I can elect to go to iCloud.com to get mine. I did this most recently at a secure mental health establishment where I wasn’t allowed my iPad or iPhone but could use their office computers.

So that’s all good, then. You can get your email online or offline, whatever what you like, and so long as your supplier doesn’t stiff you, you’re so good to go that you never even realise there’s any choice to be made. Until you do what this Williams writer did and move to an email client, then you find out the other big benefit. The benefit so big that it surprised him and it now surprises me that not everybody knew this:

The reason Gmail Offline makes you faster at your email is because:

It’s freaking fast. Gmail proper is fast, most of the time. But sometimes it takes a second or two (or three or…) to archive or reload your inbox. When you’re plowing through email — especially with shortcuts — that seems like an eternity. Gmail Offline removes those waits, pretty much completely.

Yep. That would do it.

If you’re on Gmail, Williams is enthusing about Gmail Offline, and here’s where we:

*throw in an asterisk.

Purely and entirely to be awkward and not because Google wants to take over the world, Gmail Offline uses your web browser. It has to be Google Chrome with extensions so it’s really turning your browser into something that uses local storage like a regular document-creating application. But it’s your browser. So all that stuff I said about how you can tell you’re reading email online because you use a web browser, not so much.

But offline is faster? Very much.

Using OmniFocus for meeting agendas

Posted by

0

This is entirely stolen from Asian Efficiency: I just read this on there and it’s like they knew what I needed. I now run a particular regular meeting for the Writers’ Guild. More than other meetings, this one seems to have tasks that keep coming up: generally things I have to tell the committee, things they’ve asked me to discuss, that kind of thing. And I’ve struggled a bit because I have an OmniFocus project devoted to the Guild and it’s already pretty long and big and messy. I was thinking of turning that into  folder with some kind of General Writers’ Guild Bits project and a Things for the Meetings kind of project.

But that idea is about as ugly as the names I was giving them. And as I pondered ugliness versus efficiency, I read this:

The easiest way is to set up a single action list called “Agenda” and you dump all discussion items in there. So whenever you have an idea, you can either dump it into your inbox or immediately move it to your “Agenda” single action list.

If you want to elaborate a little, use the notes section of the task where you can freeflow and type all your thoughts about a particular agenda point (on desktop, click on the paperclip icon on the right or press CMD+’ (apostrophe)).

The next time you have a meeting, pull up the “Agenda” list and simply go through each point you have in there and check things off. It’s that simple!

How to Setup and Use OmniFocus as an Agenda for Meetings – Thanh Pham, Asian Efficiency (26 March 2014)

Do read the whole thing, would you? It’s written in a way that’s hard to usefully quote but easy to read: it’s an article based on a discussion that took place in Asian Efficiency’s paid-for premium service. What’s convinced me is the Socratic way it builds up into a picture.

Microsoft updates OneNote for iOS

Posted by

0

I’m an Evernote user so I have little experience of Microsoft’s equivalent but I did work with a guy last week who has the most impressive use of it I’ve seen. And he uses it on a Surface, so it took some impressing. If I weren’t so comfortably settled into Evernote with several gigabytes of data in it, I’d look at OneNote, especially as Microsoft seems to be updating for iOS pretty promptly these days.

Since I don’t use it, here’s someone who knows it better enough to tell you what’s new:

Microsoft has pushed out updates for its OneNote client on both iPhone and iPad, adding support for new features added in iOS 8 and a design that’s optimized for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

Users can now password protect sections of documents directly from mobile devices (a feature that used to require a Windows PC). Those with an iPhone 5s or newer will also find that they can now unlock password-protected sections of documents using Touch ID. That feature isn’t mentioned in the iPad change log, so users on the iPad Air 2 or iPad mini 3 might need to wait for a future update to enable it.

Microsoft OneNote for iPhone and iPad updated with iOS 8 support, iPhone 6 design, and more –Mike Beasley, 9to5Mac (28 October 2014)

Read the full piece.