Software

Software

Don’t put people off with your email address

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The one thing everybody can do is have a decent email address. Don’t share one with your partner, especially not if that’s really clear in the address. At best, it’s confusing because you’re both getting the emails and are bound to miss one that’s for you. But at worst, you look like you don’t use email much and today that equals you not being professional, mr-and-mrs-hullabaloo73@hotmail.com

The very best email address to have is one that ends in your own or your own company’s name, so something like @myself.com. You get those by having your own website, which you need to have anyway, and when you do, then @myself.com is an advert for myself.com every time you use it.

If you like your email service and your address, still think about leaving it if you’re on hotmail or the like. Actually, there’s a technical reason here for moving away from certain email services. If your email solely lives on the web rather than on your computer, if you can’t read your old email without an internet connection, move to somewhere that lets you.

It’s convenient to have the emails online but it’s inconvenient to have them only online. Plus, if that service closes down for any reason, you’re at best scrabbling to copy it all off and at worst you’re screwed.

But back to email address snobbery.

To be harsh about it, @hotmail.com says you’re playing at email; @outlook.com says you’re playing but you signed up too recently to get a hotmail account. Then @aol.com says you’re an occasional email user who only sticks with AOL because you’ve given that address to so many people.

If you’ve an @btinternet address then that’s okay but its an ad for BT and if the address is one of those @myself.btinernet.com then either you look sponsored or that you can’t make up your mind.

Similarly, older Apple email addresses are @mac.com which is just an ad for the company’s Macs; slightly newer ones are @me.com which is doesn’t advertise them, doesn’t advertise you and looks a bit egotistical. Currently all new Apple email users have addresses that end in @icloud.com which is fine: at least you look like you know what the cloud is.

But unless you’re really invested in an older address, if you can’t get @myself.com, then go for Google Mail. This @gmail.com is best because it’s short, it’s modern and it tells anyone who knows about these things that you may be a power email user. Gmail comes with a huge array of tools for managing immense numbers of emails and for something that’s easy to use and even easier to sign up for, it still has that faintly geeky air that you may or may not like.

Remember, too, that nobody says you can only have one email address. I have the one I’ll give you here for when you want to complain over my being snooty about your address. That’s wg@williamgallagher.com.

I also have a personal @mac.com address and I keep it because I like it, so there. But I also have any number of other addresses you like, specifically because I own williamgallagher.com. Yesterday I set up a new address for an author I’m working with to send me text. Earlier in the week I used a groupon offer but I signed up as groupon@williamgallagher.com. If I get a sudden spike in spam and it’s all to groupon@williamgallagher.com, their mailing list policy is rumbled and I switch that address off.

So you can use your address as a tool but the one you choose to send people can reveal much more about you than you’d hope.

Weird day at Google

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Just one more thing about Google, this time partly because it has a lot of news detail that it’s done much better than I could. But mostly because it’s quite funny:

After two hours of technical talk, with nary a mention of new hardware or consumer-level software, the attendees began to get a bit bored. It was at this point that Twitter briefly became a strange meta-I/O, with dozens, or perhaps hundreds of attendees hopping on their Twitter accounts to talk about how bad the show was—while it was still going on.

The Only Thing You Need to Read About Today’s Weird Google I/On Keynote – Mike Wehner. The Daily Dot (25 June 2014)

Sort-of extensive Android coverage

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Strap yourself in: I’m going to name drop. Well, place name drop. I missed all of Google’s Android announcements yesterday because I spent the day in Parliament.

Oh, come on. It’s the best I’ve got, just pretend to be impressed.

Fine.

Fine.

I missed the Google announcements and I had planned to get you some proper catch-up coverage in case you missed it too. But it was a strange announcement.

It was at Google’s I/O conference which is pretty much the same thing as Apple’s WWDC: it’s an annual gig officially for software developers but which has become more. These are now platforms for Google and Apple to show off new things. That’s typically new things for consumers as well as developers, but not necessarily.

This year’s Apple WWDC didn’t have any new hardware, for instance, and it’s considered a success for how much it did for developers. It’s also a success for how Apple-slick it was with the company’s presenting style. It doesn’t always work and when it’s off, it’s a clanging bell, but when it does work, it’s the kind of presentation you would want to give. Quick but not rushed, long enough to be detailed but not long enough to feel padded. Witty helps.

It’s a lot harder to do than it seems and nobody’s expected Google to be as good. You expect Google to have lots to say and maybe to eschew style and slickness for straightforward practicality.

None of that happened.

Not the straightforward, certainly not the style. Instead, it is reported that one journalist in the audience fell asleep. It’s reported everywhere that the presentation was boring, extremely long, extremely padded and while it had many announcements, they were muddled and confusing and lost.

By today I expect us to see Android fan boys usefully explaining the actual features and details that were hidden in the mess. But for now, I want you to see a good rundown of the event in this article. Really, I want you to see the title of the article.

Do to take a read of “We watched Google’s 3-hour keynote so you wouldn’t have to” on Cult of Android.

Three hours? What the L?

For streaming music, start here

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I play a lot of music while I work yet I’ve been a slow convert to streaming music. Perhaps it’s the millionth time of hearing every track I own that has converted me, maybe it’s just that I tried out iTunes Radio and liked it more than I expected.

But the problem is that here I am, converted , yet I can’t stay converted. I still like iTunes Radio though the increasing number of ads is discouraging me. (You can go ad-free if you subscribe to iTunes Match. But I’ve only got iTunes Radio access because I have a US iTunes account. All my music is in iTunes UK so even if I paid the subscription, I wouldn’t get iTunes Match on that. The fee is $25/year which is fine for just getting radio but knowing it should also give me this other Match feature makes it hard to pay up.)

Very often I want to listen to a particular artist , album or song, though and and iTunes Radio doesn’t guarantee any of that. You choose an artist and get, say, Suzanne Vega Radio which has her plus similar artists. (There are no similar artists to Suzanne Vega, iTunes is lying.) But it’s five to ten and pick ’em whether you get to hear any Vega and close to no chance you’ll hear the song. No chance at all that you’ll hear the album.

So faced with a lot of driving recently, I tried Spotify again. I try Spotify from time to time and can’t ever remember why I stop. Except now. Now I remember. You can get Spotify to play a list of your favourites – or a friend’s list – but at some point soon it will go off the reservation and on to music it’s sure you’ll like. It might be right but I was liking that music fine enough.

You can’t always switch or skip that stuff, either. So Spotify irritates me.

There are many other firms and options, though, and that’s what this linked article is about. There aren’t as many services for us in the UK as there are in this American article but the issues and points are interesting and well made.

I’m pondering this lot. Take a look yourself at MacObserver’s Head to Head Comparison of 14 Streaming Music Services

Zipping files doesn’t do what you think

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Yes, if you zip a file, you are compressing it. You are making it smaller for emailing to someone. So far, what you think is right.

But zipping does absolutely nothing – at least nothing useful – if what you’re sending is a JPEG image or an MP3 file. Because those are already compressed. If they could be compressed further, they would’ve been.

What you’re doing by zipping an image or a MP3 audio is making it tougher for the recipient to open. I just had a thing where I had to unpick why an audio file wouldn’t play on an iPhone: it was because it was sent zipped. All zipping did was make the audio unplayable until I’d unzipped it and resent.

So you are always better off sending JPEG images and MP3 files unzipped.

But.

There is one specific situation when you should zip anyway.

It’s when you’re sending many files to someone at once. Zipping produces one file and it does so regardless of how many things you’re trying to send. So, for instance, I just delivered 40 images to a client and did so by sending them one zip file containing the lot.

They get one file and it has everything.

Now, what I actually sent them was a Dropbox link to the zip file, I didn’t try to send 100Mb of zip to them over email. But the zipping part was the same.

So.

Zip to compress files like word processor documents and zip to gather up lots of files into one.

But don’t zip a JPEG or an MP3 because that’s just a chore.

Microsoft taketh away

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There’s one big disadvantage to how Apple has made updating your iPhone apps automatic: sometimes you wish you’d stuck on the last one.

If you’ve switched off automatic updating and so have a choice about it, don’t update Skype. Because Microsoft has taken away a pretty core feature. The website 9to5mac, amongst many others, explains:

Skype may have recently launched a major update to its Skype for iPhone app, but one rather basic feature went missing – the ability to listen to voice messages. A subsequent update to Skype for iPhone 5.1 still hasn’t fixed the problem.

In a support thread on the Skype site, community manager Claudius provided what must qualify as one of the most unhelpful response ever to complaints by users:

“Voice message playback is not supported in Skype 5.0 for iPhone. Please use Skype on another platform to listen to your voice messages”

Why won’t Microsoft give iOS users access to their Skype voice messages? – Ben Lovejoy, 9to5mac.com (23 June 2014)

That article includes a readers’ instructions for how to undo this stupid thing and go back to an older version of Skype. But you need patience and a steady hand.

Someone else’s OmniFocus 2 for Mac review

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There is definitely an irony to how I keep not getting around to writing a review of OmniFocus, the software that keeps me on track with everything I have or want to do. I think it’s because the software is so important to me that I want to do it justice. Anyway, here’s a review from someone who wasn’t an existing user of the earlier version, isn’t that fussed about any To Do managers, and says up front that they came to OmniFocus as a skeptic.

Spoiler alert: they like it now.

I don’t agree with how it argues the iPhone version is too expensive, though, and they are mistaken about the iPad one:

This brings us to our one main criticism, though: Omni Group have chosen to make the iPhone (and forthcoming iPad) version of Omnifocus equal to the Mac version in virtually all respects, thus allowing mobile-centric users to buy and use just the mobile version alone if they choose. While we applaud this, it also means that Mac users who have paid $40 for the regular desktop version ($80 for the Pro version) will have to pay an additional $20 for the iPhone version, essentially just for syncing and quick-entry or editing in the case of some users. The company may want to consider also creating a more lightweight free or low-cost “companion version” for those who primarily use the Mac version and just want some basic on-the-go functions.

Hands on: Omnifocus 2 for Mac – MacNN (22 June 2014)

The iPad mistake first: there already is one and has been for some time. Their confusion is that it is on its first version and a second is currently being developed. Last September we got OmniFocus 2 for iPhone, now we have OmniFocus 2 for Mac, at some point soon we’ll have OmniFocus 2 for iPad.

It’s an interesting little dilemma for me as someone who recommends this software a lot. Rewind a beat to before the 2 versions began coming out: it was very easy to say you should buy the iPad edition. That was easily the best with a mix of OmniFocus’s powerful features and a particularly easy design. OmniFocus for iPhone was fine but you would struggle to use it without one of the other versions in your life. And OmniFocus 1 for Mac was this bionic behemoth that had more power than you’d need to crack a concrete slab but was extremely hard to use.

Now OmniFocus 2 for Mac is the easiest to use and, I think, the best version. I like the iPad one but it’s weird how old it seems compared to the new design. And where I used to always turn to my iPad when I was doing a lot of OmniFocus work like the recommended regular reviews, now I tend to save that up until I’m at my Mac.

Nonetheless, you can do everything most users would use most often usefully on the iPad version. If it weren’t that we know for certain that – and don’t know at all when – there will be an OmniFocus 2 for iPad, I would say the iPad is still the one to get when you can only get one. It’s portable, powerful and easy to use. OmniFocus 2 for iPhone is much improved on its previous version – I liked the previous version a lot, I just like this one more – but I still believe the iPhone version needs one of the others.

MacNN thinks this more strongly than I do. Its argument is that you shouldn’t have to pay so much for an iPhone OmniFocus app if you’re only going to use it to add the odd task in during the day. I’d say that’s fair enough, but there are other ways to add tasks. If you don’t have OmniFocus for iPhone, just email a task into OmniFocus. I do this a lot wherever I am because so much of my work comes through email. It’s just tap, forward, send, gone into my To Do list.

So I don’t agree that one has to use OmniFocus 2 for iPhone. But I suspect you will. I’m not certain now how I got into this but I’m pretty sure I bought the iPhone one first and tried to last with that for a while, tried to get used to it and to test it out. But caved within a day or two and bought the iPad one. Then, inexorably, I bought the Mac one.

That was all version 1 of the software and if you’re wondering, yes, I did. I bought version 2. Both OmniFocus 2 for iPhone, on the day it was released, and OmniFocus 2 for Mac, on the day it was released. Individually they are more expensive than many To Do applications and jointly they are a punch to the bank account – but only if they aren’t right for you. If they are, they are worth the cost and then some.

Wait, this is turning into my own review. I should really get on that.

Find a partner who looks like your ex

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What do you mean, that’s creepy?

I loathe the idea that any of us have a type, that there is certain physical type that we are attracted to. But I know it’s true. And dating firm Match.com is using this to help us. In partnership with the best-not-to-ask-why-it’s-called-this company Three Day Rule, the dating business is asking for photos that it will then use to pattern match.

Look, I’m just telling you, I’m not commenting on this. And I can’t seem to direct you to the US version of Match.com where this happening because my browser auto-routes to the UK one where I am and where my wife Angela is now going to wonder about my browsing history. Ah, I’ve searched for worse. I once looked for football news. It wasn’t for me, it was for a friend.

Before I give you Three Day Rule’s link and wish you well, let me point out that the service costs. It costs good. In the US it’s $5,000 which works out to around £2,937.89. But if that’s the cost of true love and a little creepiness over that whole type thing, there you go.

Match.com is here, though if you’re in the States you’d be better off typing it directly and skipping my local rerouting. And Three Day Rule is here.

Via On the Media

Watch Susan Kare talk about icon design

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Only this weekend, I wrote about the ⌘ symbol and that inevitably led to mentioning Susan Kare. And now she’s here on video, talking about the icons she designed for Apple and many more.

Susan Kare, Iconographer (EG8) from EG Conference on Vimeo.

Full disclosure. I swear I’m alert to Susan Kare in the news because I had a drama character I loved named Susan Hare. Complete coincidence, but.