Software

Software

Quick fixes for a slow Mac

Posted by

0

spinning beachballIf you’re getting that wretched beach ball it means your Mac is struggling – and you’re getting it while doing something as intensive as just opening a folder – then do this:

1) Quit your browser
Especially if you’re not actually using it. And especially, most especially, three times most especially if you the sort to leave a lot of windows and tabs open. Each one is taking up some effort from your Mac as it tries to keep each one updated all the time.

For your own sanity, get into the habit of closing a tab when you’re done with it. Bookmark it if you’re going to come back to it later, but close it now.

In the meantime, though, quitting the browser is a one-click device for speeding up your Mac.

2) Delete things and then empty the trash
I believe the general consensus is that you need to keep about 10% of your hard disk space clear in order for your Mac to work away merrily. (Because it uses some space as it’s going.) If you can possibly do it, go for a third instead.

It makes the most enormous difference, says William who this morning found he had 200Mb of space left on his MacBook Pro’s 250Gb drive. Which Wolfam Alpha tells me is 0.08%.

Yep, I beach balled a lot this morning.

The only type of update you’re going to see about Aperture

Posted by

1

It’s a weird one, isn’t it? Apple’s pulled big applications before – it ditched Final Cut Pro in favour of what was initially a much reduced Final Cut Pro X – but the death of its photo software Aperture is odd. Apple didn’t announce this death, they just rather let it be known.

And now they’ve just rather let a little more be known. Apple has given Ars Technica an update about what will happen next. We know that Aperture and iPhoto are dead, that they will both be replaced by a new application called Photos in OS X Yosemite. And we gathered that Photos would not be a professional tool the way Aperture was. But:

Update: When asked about what Aperture-like features users can expect from the new Photos app, an Apple representative mentioned plans for professional-grade features such as image search, editing, effects, and most notably, third-party extensibility. The representative also clarified the timeframe when Aperture development will end, along with an announcement about its other Pro app offerings receiving updates today.

Apple to cease development, support of pro photo app Aperture [Updated] – Sam Machkovech, Ars Technica (original story 27 June, update 2 July 2014)

If I liked Lightroom more, maybe I’d swap to it. But this makes me think that it will be worth hanging on to see what Photos is like. Afterall, just because Apple won’t update Aperture, that doesn’t mean the copy I’ve got will stop working today.

No. Please, no: an app for rating your colleagues

Posted by

0

It’s called Knozen and thank goodness I can’t test it for you: you have to have a company of at least seven people who have all signed up. It’s just you and me here and I think you’re great.

But if you were to have seven people and you were to use this service, this is the type of thing Knozen would pop up with on your iPhone:

knozen

Those shots are from Business Insider which was able to test it out and so also got screens like this:

knozen2

That’s the data for Business Insider journalist Alyson Shontell who wrote the article about Knozen that gave me a double take. From her piece:

Knozen is a new iPhone app that lets coworkers rate each other’s personalities anonymously. It’s like Lulu is for men, or Yelp is for restaurants.

Founded by former Ladders CEO Marc Cenedella, Knozen pits two coworkers against each other and asks the user a series of questions such as, “Which person is friendlier?” or, “Who is more likely to buy cookies from a girl scout?”

The user then selects which coworker best fits the description and is told how many other colleagues voted the same way. At least seven people from an organization need to sign up for Knozen before they’re allowed to start rating each other to protect everyone’s identity.

Knozen might sound like a recipe for disaster, but Cenedella argues that it’s merely a way to “bring personality to the internet” and that the content is always “positive and upbeat.” You won’t find questions about a co-worker’s appearance, for example

New App That Raised $2.25 Million Lets You Anonymously Rate Coworkers – Alyson Shontell, Business Insider (30 June 2014)

I’d not heard of Lulu – other than the apparently completely separate printing and publishing company – and I also can’t seem to get you a link. But it’s reportedly a women-only app that takes your Facebook friends list and lets you rate the men you and mutual friends know.

But I’m minded more of the Bang with Friends app which became famous for upsetting the delicate sensibilities of Apple for the word Bang and reportedly for having problems with games manufacturer Zynga whose apps include “Words with Friends”. It renamed itself Down and says it’s “the anonymous, simple, fun way to find friends who are down for the night” and you’re saying yeah, sure, and why exactly is it anonymous?

Like Knozen and Lulu, it presents you with a list of people you know – this time solely through Facebook – and you can say whether you would like to get down with them. Look, we’re talking sex. It’s a who-do-you-fancy app. The thing of it is that if they also have this Down app and they have also said they fancy you, sparks are automatically messaged back and forth and either very good or very bad times happen.

I know this because I was hugely amused by the naming problems: with Apple disliking the ‘Bang’ and Zynga objecting to the ‘With Friends’ bit, there wasn’t a lot of the name left. Obviously I don’t know this because I use the app myself and nobody fancies me.

 

A bit specific: using Drafts to log what I’ve done

Posted by

0

I do a monthly report about what I’ve done – last year for a project called Room 204, this year for you, both years really for me – and it’s always been a bit easy because I make proper notes as I go. Except I forgot to do that in May. For the entire month, I forgot. Not once did it enter my head. Must’ve been a quiet month.

But these things really do help me so I didn’t want to forget again. If that sounds obvious, this will sound more obvious: I decided to use my iPhone to help me.

This is going to be really specific but please treat it as an idea of the type of things you can do rather than a recipe for exactly how I think you should do it. Also, please treat it as being infinitely faster to do than it is to describe.

This is what I do when I’ve done something I want to note:

homescreen_400

Tap on Drafts on my iPhone

There’s rarely a minute my iPhone isn’t with me so whatever I’m doing, whatever I’ve just finished, I can easily tap on the Drafts app I keep on the home screen.

The thing with Drafts is that when it pops open, you start writing. (See second shot down there on the right.) Think later about where that text will go – is it an email, an iMessage, an Evernote entry? – just type for now. Plus I use TextExpander which is yet another app but it works with and within Drafts so I just type the letters XTD (TD for Today, X for just in case I ever need to write a real word beginning with TD) and the date appears.

Drafts_400

Note written and Drafts has sent it

It’s the date plus a dash and a space. After that, I type as quickly as I can and then tap the Share button. What you’re seeing here is the end result: I’ve written my note about a thing I’ve done today (or am about to do, actually), then I’ve tapped on Share. Tapped on “Save for That Was Month” and Drafts has done it. It has sent that text to Evernote. It’s left up here so that I can choose to send it somewhere else but instead I just put it away. Next time I open Drafts, I’ve got a blank screen ready for anything else.

That’s it.

Except look at the shot below: that’s a grab from Evernote on my iPhone and you can see it shows that same text I just wrote in Drafts.

evernote_400b
Drafts has sent that text to the end of a note. So I have a That Was Month note in Evernote and Drafts just keeps adding to the end of it. In some ways it’s even more satisfying than my old manual notes because you don’t think about it, you don’t see any of it but the latest, until you go in to check and there are all these things entered.

I should explain that you have to set up Drafts to do this. I don’t find that as easy as some people do but you can see I’ve done it a few times: as well as this That Was Month business, I have a Story Ideas option that does much the same thing. I think of something I can use in a script or a book, write it down, tap Story Ideas and it’s off into an Evernote note.

And I have a general Save to Evernote which, actually, I’ve never used. There are other options below it such as Send to OmniFocus or Email or whatever. A lot of those come with Drafts, the others I’ve gone through setting up what I want. Telling Drafts I want to send text to this particular app or service, to add it as a new note or append to a particular old one, that kind of thing.

How long did that take you to read? Divide it by oodles and that’s how quick it is to use this thing. Which, frankly, means I use it. Did I mention that I have Drafts on my iPad too? So if I’m working on that, wallop, same thing. I don’t believe there’s a Drafts for Mac and maybe I wouldn’t buy it if there were: it would seem daft using it on a Mac when I have Word and Pages already.

So you know, this is what all this costs and where to get it. Everything but the iPhone, that’s up to you:

Drafts for iPhone: £2.49 UK, $3.99 US

Drafts for iPad: £2.99 UK, $4.99 US

Evernote for iPhone: free

Evernote for iPad: free

TextExpander for iOS: £2.99 UK, $4.99 US

This is how it should be: a Safari Extension I’ll use hourly

Posted by

0

Not only will I use it hourly but I want to use it hourly now. The quick news: 1Password will use Extensions so that within Safari, you can get it to enter your username and password.

The slightly less quick news with more detail and enthusiasm… In case you haven’t come across it yet, 1Password is one of those apps that stores your passwords for you. Fine. It also creates ones like Wel6cAct9iB9Bit (that really is one it created, I just got it to do that). It creates these strong passwords and then saves them for you so that you don’t have to remember. You just have to remember the one password you need to get into 1Password. It works on iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac, PC, Windows, all sorts.

The phone and tablet versions come with their own web browser too. So if I’m organised, I can go into my 1Password app, tap on the name of my bank and that browser will zoom off to their site. Goes to the site, enters my username and some of my security details, then it even presses return. Only with my bank do I stop there. With other things I log into like TheTrainLine.com, it does the lot. One tap takes me to the site and then into the site. Another single tap and 1Password has entered all my credit card details for me.

Except I’m often not that organised. Very often, I will go a site in the regular iPhone Safari web browser and after a lot of fiddling like picking train times, I will reach the login or credit card screen and wish I’d remembered to do this in 1Password. Usually, I nip over to the 1Password app, copy the detail I need and go paste it into Safari. But just occasionally, I’ve moved over to 1Password and redone the whole job just to save that schlepping about.

Not any more. Behind the scenes it’s going to be using Touch ID and Safari Extensions but no matter: in future, when I’ve gone to a site in the ordinary Safari browser, I will still be able to use 1Password to enter my details.

This is how it is on the Mac and PC: wherever I am, I can whack a login detail or an over-used credit card in with a tap or two. This is how it will be on iPhones and iPads.

The company isn’t saying when it will happen but there is a limited beta test going on now and it all requires the forthcoming iOS 8. So you can bet that when the next iPhones come out around September, so will the new 1Password. No idea yet whether it will be a paid upgrade or a freebie but whichever, I’m having it. (Though it must be said, as great as 1Password is in every other way I know, upgrading to a major new version is agony.)

Here’s where you can learn more of the latest official release of 1Password and here’s a shaky video of the beta in action:

Exploit twitter for searches as well as nattering

Posted by

0

I have a hard time separating twitter from my memory of it as a great place for midnight nattering. It’s a couple of years since it was that for me and my sense is that the feel of the place has changed. It’s definitely added more tools for finding news and information, I don’t know if that’s why it’s not my favourite spot at the bar any more.

But if it’s a good tool, let’s use it. First, scriptwriter and novelist Jason Arnopp has some key suggestions in his Five Things You May Not Know About Twitter:

1) HOW TO NARROW YOUR AUDIENCE
If you start a tweet with a username, then only people who follow you both will see it. I still see relatively seasoned Twitter users do this.

For instance, if I tweet the following…

@johnhiggs’ book on The KLF is mind-blowing – read it now!

… then only people who follow both me and @johnhiggs will see it. Which is a waste.

In case this confuses you, think of it in terms of tweeting directly at @johnhiggs, rather than tweeting about him. In the former case, it’s generally well known that only people who follow you both can see the tweet. But when you’re tweeting about someone, it seems like a whole other situation. To Twitter, it isn’t. That tends to be why you often see tweets starting with a full-stop, followed by a username – it starts the tweet with a buffer before the username, so Twitter doesn’t misunderstand and shows all your followers the tweet, just like you want it to, you attention-hungry, power-crazed MONSTER.

Incidentally, that full-stop isn’t some kind of specific code – it’s just the most-used buffer symbol. You could start with a ‘&’ or a ‘$’, but it might well look more obtrusive.

Five Things You May Not Know About Twitter – Jason Arnopp, INT. JASON ARNOPP’S MIND – DAY/NIGHT (27 June 2014)

The full piece has four more like that.

But now Lifehacker steps up with an article that’s like an old Open University maths show: you start off thinking this is easy, this is obvious, everyone knows th – pardon? This was the example of a twitter search that gave me pause, made me do a double take and is the reason I’m telling you about it:

Operator: near:NYC within:15mi | Finds tweets: sent within 15 miles of “NYC.”

So, you type in “near:NYC within:15mi” and you really do get tweets sent by people who were within 15 miles of Manhattan when they tweeted. The trouble is, you wouldn’t know that just from reading the results. Not now, anyway. If something was happening in New York City, this would zoom you in on it.

And the rest of Lifehacker’s examples are equally specific, equally potentially useful. Do read Search Twitter More Efficiently with These Search Operators by Patrick Allen for more.

Be cautious of using beta software – including Evernote

Posted by

0

While the marketing and commercial side of the Evernote company has just brought various goods and products to the UK, the software side has been making big steps. But I’d still wait before you download the latest beta of Evernote for Macintosh.

Well, I say that but I didn’t wait. I’m running that latest beta on my MacBook Pro and it isn’t working. I suspect that’s more to do with how my MacBook is squeaking along with only the tiniest amount of disk space. Dropbox has folded its arms at me, but Evernote keeps crashing.

So I’d like to caution you about trying it out: I have done the sensible thing and only put this new version on one of my machines. It’s only un-sensible because this is the machine I’m working from today.

I would also like to tell you what’s new about it but I have yet to get beyond the crashing so I have to settle for showing you Evernote’s own list:

Here’s a list of everything that’s new and improved in this release:

Speed

Sync is more than 3x faster. Users with lots of Shared Notebooks and Evernote Business users will see the biggest improvements.
New notes sync instantly so they’re immediately accessible on your other devices.
Share notes without waiting for a sync to complete.
Launch and quit times have been reduced dramatically.
New keyboard shortcuts have been added to jump to the note list for easy navigation (CMD + |) and you can now tab between the search field, the note list, current note title and note body.
Energy consumption when the app is idle and in-use has been significantly reduced.

New Features

Tables can now be re-sized, and have configurable background colors and border styles.
Images can be re-sized right in the note editor. Just click an image and drag the handle in the bottom right corner.
Search results are now ordered by relevance.
Faster notebook selector at the top of the note list remembers your recently used notebooks.
Redesigned checkboxes in the note editor are easier to click.
Evernote will now stay logged in by default.
Stability Improvements

You can see why I downloaded it. And why I am keen for it to start working. Get it here.

Evernote Market reaches Europe

Posted by

0

The Evernote company has just announced it will now ship to addresses in Europe. What it will ship is a collection of bags and clothing that are fine but also some hardware that is rather good. In particular, there is this:

evernote-scansnap-e1380217395237

That’s an Evernote edition of a ScanSnap scanner of which the company says:

The ScanSnap Evernote Edition, a collaboration between Evernote and Fujitsu, is not only the first of its kind – it’s the best in its class. You can put nearly anything in it, push one button, and with lightning speed it scans, senses, and autofiles your photos, receipts, business cards, and documents into your designated Evernote notebooks. Before you can walk away for a cup of coffee, you’ll get a simple notification to let you know Evernote has done your filing for you.

Except, you pay a lot for the Evernote colour and logo. I mean, a lot. This model costs £475 through Evernote Market but is functionally equivalent to the ScanSnap iX500 which you can currently get from Amazon UK for £318. In the US, the Evernote edition is $495 and the iX500 equivalent is $424 from Amazon USA.

I started telling you this because I thought it was good that Evernote Market was expanding outside the USA but now I’m just going to stick to Amazon. Still, take a look at Evernote’s description of the scanner as it’s good – and the market has other products.

MacPowerUsers podcasts hits 200th edition

Posted by

0

This is now a weekly fix for me: every Monday there is a 90-minute audio podcast on a single Mac topic such as Evernote or handling email. There’s the odd edition that has just no interest for me or, whisper it, when it’s focused on a guest who is a bit dull, but otherwise, MacPowerUsers is now an automatic thing on a Monday morning.

It started for me when I wanted to know about the Hazel application and a Google search came up with one episode of MacPowerUsers. Listened to that, bought Hazel, barely use it.

But instead I kept coming back to look up more episodes and after a while I realised I must’ve listened to eighty. That was a year or more ago now so the odds are that I’ve listened to forty more since.

The 200th episode, now available, is look back at the series so far which is probably therefore more interesting for existing listeners. It’s fun for existing listeners. If you’re new to it and fancy a dabble, try the recent Evernote episode, Calendars and Contacts and just keep on going.

Looks like I chose the wrong one: Apple kills Aperture

Posted by

0

So Apple brings out this Aperture software and at first everyone thinks it’s the consumer iPhoto or it’s a Photoshop knockoff. They think it’s too complicated to successfully be the former and too rubbish to be the later. But Adobe launches Lightroom and now with two big applications in the same area, that area becomes a market.

For some years now, if you were a professional photographer or you just fancied being one (hello) then you either bought Aperture or Lightroom for the managing of your photos.

Not any more.

As of now, Aperture is dead.

With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture.

When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS.

That’s Apple’s official announcement. The company is also helping people move to Lightroom.

But I like Aperture. I can carry on using it but it won’t be developed further and it’s true that Lightroom has more and better features. But Aperture was a bionic iPhoto to me and I liked it. So I’m not happy at Apple’s decision.

But them’s the breaks. You invest in a piece of software – both literally and, I think more importantly, in time and effort – and the software goes away.

It’s hard.