Software

Software

Ask Me Anything – and now be able to read the answers

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Previously… Reddit’s Ask Me Anything interview platform has become the place to go because the most amazing people pop up on it. There’s no interviewer, there’s just you and this person. Plus maybe someone typing, if they’re not hot on the keys.

President Obama did an AMA. Do you need anything more?

Yes. You need to be able to read these things. If you happen to be on the site when the AMA session is live then you can follow it fine, I imagine. I’ve never used it live. It won’t be exactly as cut and thrust as a verbal discussion so it’ll be a bit boring while you wait for text answers to appear. But it will surely work and you will surely understand what’s happening.

You don’t when the interview is over. It is a mess. Rabbit holes’ worth of comments and sort-of questions and discussions and threads and sporadically an answer from the interviewee. It’s just unreadable. There have been attempts to fix this before but they’ve been by third-party websites that cull the interviews and curate the results. There’s nothing essentially wrong with that, but if you need someone else’s website to make your interview with the President of United States comprehensible, there is a lot wrong with your service.

Now Reddit has released an Ask Me Anything for iOS. Android will follow soon. It’s free and it works well: give it a go and find out just what a gorgeously astonishing range of people have answered questions on AMA.

Dot dot dot – waiting for them to finish a text reply

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You’ve seen this in iMessage, you’ve seen it WhatsApp: you’ve sent someone a message and your screen shows you three little dots. Without ever being told, you knew that this means they’re writing back to you.

Actually, stop for a second. That’s really clever: without ever being told, still we know exactly what it means, we know exactly what it is happening.

Until the dots vanish and theres no reply.

“The three dots shown while someone is drafting a message in iMessage is quite possibly the most important source of eternal hope and ultimate letdown in our daily lives,” said Maryam Abolfazli, a writer in Washington who has tackled the topic. “It’s the modern-day version of watching paint dry, except you might be broken up with by the time the dots deliver.”

Bubbles Carry a Lot of Weight: Texting Anxiety Caused by Little Bubbles – Jessica Bennett, New York Times (29 August 2014)

You are not alone. Read the full piece.

Elders react to Oculus Rift

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It makes a change from all those stories about teenagers reacting sarcastically to old technology: this is a video about older people reacting confusedly to new technology.

Notice that I said older, not old. And ‘elder’ is in the title of the video.

This has nothing to do with how I happen to be old enough that I have only just about got the faintest notion what Oculus Rift is and not quite as much interest:

Wow – TextExpander to radically improve in iOS 8

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Quick version: TextExpander will include a new system-wide keyboard that lets you trigger snippets and thereby expand text.

You’re looking at me like you want the slow version.

First, TextExpander is a utility that is fantastic on Macs and okay on iPhones and iPad. I’ve been working on the new book, Filling the Blank Screen – which is out as an ebook on Friday by the way, paperback next month – and so naturally I have typed that title a lot. I mean, a lot. But when I’m at my Mac, then whether I’m writing the back cover blurb, whether I’m completing a contract, whether I’m discussing the publication in emails, I can just type the letters xftb. Type that and the words “Filling the Blank Screen” are entered for me.

You can work out what the ftb means in xftb. The letters are up to you and the x is just a good habit to get into: few real words begin with x.

Now, I love typing and I love it so much that I ignored TextExpander for years. But it isn’t just for the odd short sentence: I have a bio snippet that after I type four letters, I get 300 words of biography text. A few times a month I’ll be asked for a bio so I type that snippet and then I edit the result to fit whatever is needed or whoever has asked me.

TextExpander also makes sure you are consistent: I don’t do this myself but there are many people who use it to automatically correct regular typing mistakes. So for instance, I keep mistyping “the” as “hte” (I wonder if that’s a cry of hate coming from my soul, as you do) which means I could set TextExpander to replace ‘hte’ with ‘the’ every time I type.

It’s also great for complex yet repetitive pieces of text: once a week I send a certain email to a certain person and I start it with a TextExpander keystroke. That does fill out the email with lots of detail but it also pauses to ask me for the new bits. I fill out a little form that appears and then TextExpander pops all the new bits into the pre-written email and I just hit send.

This is in all ways great.

When you’re on your Mac.

On the Mac, it works everywhere. On iOS it doesn’t. Apple doesn’t allow anything like this to run everywhere so the makers of TextExpander have to persuade app developers to play nice. Many, many do, but not all and not including Apple. So there’s no TextExpander support in Mail on my iPhone, for instance.

Now, Apple announced that iOS 8 will allow app makers to create keyboards. I did not give a damn. Not a monkey’s, not half a monkey’s, I heard Apple say it and it was out my other ear before they finished the sentence. I am fine with the regular keyboard on my iPhone and iPad, fine.

But now Smile Software, the makers of TextExpander, have announced that they will be one of the app companies providing a new keyboard.

And that keyboard will let you expand TextExpander snippets. Everywhere.

Everywhere.

This is huge and transforming because now you will always be able to use TextExpander. In anything. Anything.

I’m sold. Can’t wait for iOS 8 now. Go take a look at Smile Software’s announcement which includes a video demo.

Google Slides

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Sounds like a headline about something bad happening to the company. But where Microsoft has PowerPoint and Apple has Keynote, so Google now has Slides. It’s a presentation application and it came to the iOS App Store today:

Google Slides makes your ideas shine with a variety of presentation themes, thousands of fonts, embedded video, animations, and more. All for free.

With Google Slides, everyone can work together in the same presentation at the same time.

All your changes are automatically saved as you type. You can even use revision history to see old versions of the same presentation, sorted by date and who made the change.

Google Slides official site

Go take a look at the free app.

MacPowerUsers: How and whether to use a To Do app

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This is really more an iOS thing than a Mac one and there is a spot of Android-osity in it too, but this week’s edition of the MacPowerUsers podcast is all about whether you actually need a To Do app.

Spoiler: you probably do.

But not definitely.

Listen to David Sparks and Katie Floyd discuss the topic and if you don’t use a task manager app, you might feel good about it. If you do, you might learn something. And if you’re in between, if you’re looking to use an app but don’t know which of the myriad ones available, you’ll certainly learn a lot.

MacPowerUsers episode 210: Task Management

Video: using Apple’s Reminders app

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It’s not the most powerful To Do task manager around but it is free and it did introduce the whole idea of location reminders. Oh, how I love those: “Remind me to go to the supermarket when I leave here”. Wonderful.

But I use that feature via OmniFocus, which ties in to it, rather than in Reminders itself. So I’m not a big Reminders user but here’s someone who is:

Tutorial- Reminders App from cmarcotte on Vimeo.

How to find something on the App Store

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The iPhone and iPad App Store is the best of these app stores in every way bar one. Usually the argument that it’s the best of them is said to be because of the sheer number of apps you can get. It’s certainly true that there are a lot: something like 1.2 million.

I’d say the reason it’s the best is that the apps on it are the best. The most mature, the most feature-rich, the simply best-designed. Hopefully it won’t always be thus but Apple has the benefit that coding for iOS and then releasing your apps is easier on its platform than on Android. And Android has the problem that its users don’t pay money. It’s a fascinating example of how a culture can arise around a technology; iPhone users will pay for an app they want, Android users think if it isn’t free, there’s something wrong with it.

Mind you, even on iOS you get people saying £3.99 is expensive or overpriced and that’s a laugh.

Just on this issue of culture and technology, I do also enjoy how there’s a funny snobbishness with some developers who make announcements apologising for releasing on the iOS App Store first. They say a lot about how great their Android version will be but the thing is that it’s plainly easier for them to code for iOS.

Nonetheless, there can be few App Stores where it is harder to find the thing you want. Macworld has done a feature about finding apps that I want you to see but as full as it is of advice for how to search this bleedin’ thing, I don’t think it’s critical enough. When Microsoft Office finally came out for iPad, I went on the store and I searched for the words “Microsoft Office” and I still couldn’t find it.

I don’t think there can be a worse example of how hard it is to find apps. IF they weren’t so useful, wouldn’t sane people give up? The doubtlessly sane folk at Macworld have persisted far better and far further than I have and they’ve got five solutions for you.

I want to suggest a sixth. One of theirs is that it’s worth searching on the developer’s name. It’s not guaranteed to help, they say, but it can and if you like one developer’s app you may well like other ones they do. I agree with that very much and would add that when you find one, there is a tab called Related that shows you the firm’s other software right there.

This is how I found OmniOutliner after being such a fan of OmniFocus and now I am such a fan of OmniOutliner. I hope this happens to you too and if it does, this Macworld article will have helped.

Is this good or bad? Quicken 2015 for Mac is out

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I’ve never used Quicken, not once, not on any platform, but when I was writing about computers I was aware of it as a popular accounts and budgeting application that ran on both Mac and Windows. Then I became aware that the Mac version became significantly poorer than the Windows one. Now after a seven-year hiatus without a new Mac one, there’s a new Mac one.

That’s got to be good.

But it’s still not on a par with the Windows one. I looked at the company’s chart listing great features both versions have and the first one is:

Free feature improvements included*

Golly. I’d consider that padding wherever it comes in the feature list but that it’s number one – and that it comes with a footnote which says this is only true until August 2015 – I’m not running to buy this.

Still, the Mac needs this kind of software: there are people who run Windows machines solely to run Quicken on. True, maybe today they run Windows in a partition on their Mac so it’s the same machine but it’s still a big and expensive faff.

I’m choosing to look at this instead as Quicken coming round to the Mac market and I’m choosing to see this as a first step. That’s partly because the company explicitly asks you to vote on what missing feature you’d like to see done next.

I don’t think that’s very impressive. Especially not as I understand that all the features on offer are already in and working for the Windows version. I get that it’s got to be harder converting them to OS X than it might seem, but still if I were tempted by Quicken, I think I’d wait a few years until they’d caught up.

If you’re in need of a money manager for Mac, take a look at the official site and see for yourself. You can’t try out a trial version of Quicken for Mac, there isn’t one, but the company does say that there is a 60-day money back guarantee. Look into the detail of that before you buy, though, okay?