Software
I love that strap line. It only makes sense if you’ve already used OmniFocus enough so one questions its worth as a general advertising slogan. but to an existing OmniFocus user, it is superb. I am an existing OmniFocus user, it is superb.
I am of course now, immediately, instantly an existing user of the new version of OmniFocus for Mac and I’ll be writing about it again soon. But for now, watch the Omni Group’s videos about OmniFocus on the official set.
I’ve said this from the start of The Blank Screen:
If you have a phone that can run a To Do app, get a To Do app
and
If you haven’t got a phone that can run a To Do app, get a phone that can
The reason is that you need your list with you everywhere and Post-It notes can’t cut it. It’s possible to lose them, it’s impossible not to end up with dozens of the wretched things.
Whereas a phone is part of you and moreover, any task you enter on that phone should then be everywhere. It depends on the app and the phone but, for instance, I’ll dictate a To Do task into my iPhone while I drive and know – know – that it is immediately on my office Mac and immediately on my iPad.
What I’ve been adding in lately is a list of specific recommendations. I can’t recommend phones, I know nothing about Android and if I said an iPhone 5something then you know the iPhone 6 would come out immediately.
But software, I can recommend.
Google any one of the following to find every possible detail plus oodles of reviews – plus in most cases, YouTube videos showing them in action.
For iPhone users
OmniFocus
Reminders (Apple’s own, you’ve already got this)
Appigo Todo
Clear
Wunderlist
For Android users
Any.do
Wunderlist
Todoist
Windows Phone
Sorry, I truly have no clue here and it is not for want of trying. You’ll be astonished how many Windows Phone articles there are about productivity apps which explicitly say they feature To Do software but then don’t. If you know a great Windows Phone To Do task manager, would you tip me off, please? I’m on wg@williamgallagher.com
More details as soon as it’s out – give me five seconds to go buy it myself then I’ll get right back to you – but the new OmniFocus 2 for Mac is being released today. It’ll be on the Mac App Store but get it from the maker instead, the Omni Group at www.omnigroup.com.
It’s coming out at 9am PDT which I reckon is about 5pm BST but I wouldn’t count on my maths even when I’m not excited.
That sounds strange, even to my ears: the idea of being excited about software. Yet the only real surprise to me is that I am this thrilled when I’ve already been using the beta version for months.
But I’ve used that beta on the Mac for those months, I used the previous version 1 on the Mac for a year or more, and there hasn’t been a day – sometimes not even an hour – that I haven’t used OmniFocus for iPhone or iPad in about two years.
I’m particularly glad about today’s launch because I’m running a full-day workshop of The Blank Screen today for the Federation of Entertainment Unions – the Writers’ Guild, NUJ, Equity and Musicians’ Guild – and this will come up. OmniFocus always comes up, the company couldn’t get more adverts from me if they paid, but I have been hesitating in every single The Blank Screen workshop. That’s partly because OmniFocus only runs on Apple gear; if it were on PCs and Android too, I’d be trying to distribute copies.
But the other reason has been that the Mac version was hugely powerful yet very hard to use. You don’t often hear that said about Mac software, but it was. So I used to be torn over recommending it, especially as it’s expensive.
Now I can tell you from experience that the new OmniFocus 2 for Mac is much easier. There’s still a lot to it but it makes sense and it works how you will expect.
There’s just one more thing. It used to be that the iPad version of OmniFocus was the best of three but now the Mac one is coming out and we’ve had a revamped iPhone one for a few months. Today I’d say the Mac version is the best.
But the company confirms a revamped iPad one is coming so the dance begins again.
The rule is that Android users get free apps, iPhone users pay for them. I am an iPhone user and I am more than fine with paying for apps. The amount of use I get from them, the pitifully cheap prices, it’s not a debate. But I do get free iPhone apps and specifically I do often grab paid ones that are briefly on offer as freebies. I’ll do that in part because all those 69p purchases add up and I’ll do it mostly because I’m often poking around an area, looking for a type of app rather than a specific one. And then I also do it because there is a specific advantage:
Free is cheaper than paid.
Okay, there are two specific advantages:
Once you have an app, you have it forever
Actually, three:
Once you have an app, you typically get free upgrades
So if an app that I definitely want then I’ll just buy it. But if there’s one I fancy trying or that I think I will need at some point, I’ll grab it when it goes free – and I may even delete it immediately. Without opening it even once. Because I’ll open it when I need it and all I have to do now is download the thing. Actually, you don’t even have to do that: starting to download it is enough, as I found when I went through the Channel Tunnel part way.
Once you have officially bought the app, you can delete it and know that you are able to get it again whenever you want. For free. Even after the price goes back up, most of the time also after the app has been upgraded later. Some apps make their new versions completely new apps that you have to pay for again and there are apps that do vanish forever. You’re out of luck with those but otherwise, this all works. So, for instance, Lonely Planet made a lot of its travel guide apps free last year and I grabbed the lot, deleted the lot – and then brought back ones when I was actually going travelling.
Quick story? I once advised on an app that was so bad I gave the maker a list of 19 reasons it could not be released. They ignored me, submitted it to Apple, and Apple rejected it with 20 reasons. I still kick myself over the one I missed. But the maker sort-of addressed those 20, enough to get it on sale anyway, and I was required to have it on my iPhone. But it was so bad, I mean it was still so embarrassingly bad that I deleted it. Whenever I’d be in a meeting when I was asked a question about it, I’d just re-download it from the App Store, slog through trying to work out the answer, then delete it again. One day I was asked a question by one editor in the company and couldn’t get it back: another editor had approved it being removed from the App Store forever. I don’t know who that was, but he or she made me look bad in that meeting. And I applaud him or her for doing it. That’s how bad the app was.
But you want to know how to find when apps go free. Try an app way: download the Apps Gone Free
The Game of Thrones (UK books and films, US books and films) writer this week revealed that he still works on a DOS PC. BBC News quaintly explained that “disk operating systems were popular” but, seriously, DOS? Now?
Here’s where he revealed it, but then hang on for what that really means to do this.
The tech website Geek.com did a nice job researching this and brought us a screen grab of what that probably looks like:
But it’s one thing seeing an image and thinking, okay, well, not pretty but it works. And it’s another thing seeing WordStar in action. This is a YouTube video of WordStar 3.0, the version before Martin’s favourite, but substantially the same. Now imagine writing thousands of pages in this.
Maybe you have to be a Doctor Who fan to be alert to any news with the words “Marco Polo” and “found” but that's how I just discovered a new app that I can't make my mind up about.
Get this new app, run it on your iPhone and the next time you lose your phone around the house, just shout the word “Marco”. Your iPhone will reply at top volume: “Polo!”
I have no idea why the maker chose those words. You can change the “Marco” bit but you won't because there's no changing the Polo response.
Take a look at it on the App Store and be ready to spend your 69p UK, 99c US.
Just learnt this and am rushing to tell you because time is ticking: the app Calendars 5 is free for the rest of today only.
I don’t know much about it except that when I was researching calendars for myself, it came up in features and reviews a lot.
I chose Fantastical instead but I’ve grabbed this and will check it out properly at my leisure. Go do the same, would you?
Download Calendars 5 now – but check the price is still free before you tap that button. It’s worth paying for, I can see that already, but free is nice.
UNICEF – seriously, UNICEF? – has released an app called PlayTimer which is specifically built to make you put that bloody iPhone down and go play with your kid:
Together with your child you can set how long you are going to play for and then take your child’s photo to set the playtimer. This will then lock your phone and show a black screen. If the phone is touched in locked mode – say, by a parent checking their work email – an alarm will go off. You can only turn the alarm off by taking another picture of your child – proof that you’re still playing with them. (In case of emergency, you will still see incoming calls and can make emergency calls, as no app has the power to over-ride your phone lock settings.)
UNICEF’s new app lets your children confiscate your smartphone Katherine Crisp (15 May 2014)
Read more on the UNICEF blog here or go straight to downloading the free app from the App Store
There are bad apps that you either ditch or tolerate. There are good apps that you use a lot. Then there are great ones that you use so much you forget that you’re using an app, it’s just the way things are. (I would offer that there are then even greater apps that are melded into your DNA: if I’m being harsh then I’d say only OmniFocus is like that with me, but isn’t it great that a tool can become so much a part of your life?)
Right up there in the so-great category for me is TripIt and I only appreciated that this week when it failed on me.
This is what is supposed to happen:
That last doesn’t sound so great but, seriously, it is. I had a thing where I was travelling from Birmingham in the UK to a village in the deepest part of southern France and it meant a lot of train rides and a lot of connections. Many of them were easy and great – I especially loved that I got a couple of hours in Paris both ways – but some were very, very, very tight. There was one where I had six minutes to get across what turned out to be a giant train station on multiple levels and though the guard I asked turned out to speak fantastic English, he also told me the wrong thing. Please picture me running, running and eventually sliding, sliding, sliding Charlie-Brown-like onto my train.
I do remember stopping on the way to help a woman carry an enormous suitcase up some stairs. So, you know, give me credit there: I may have made a mistake booking trains too close together but I’m a mensch under pressure.
What helped me throughout the whole journey was that I could look at TripIt on my iPhone at any time and be shown exactly what I had to do next. What the next train was, where it was, where it was going, what my seat reservation was, any booking references I needed, all that. I could choose to look at any or all of the steps in my journey so if something came up I’d be able to judge if I had the time to do it.
I’m not going to say that it made the journey pleasant when in fact the whole journey was great anyway, but it was a help and a guide and it became automatic that I would check TripIt along the way.
However.
It gets all this information from your email ticket. It parses that ticket: goes through it looking for departure times, train or airline reference numbers and so on. Fine. It’s handy that you just forward your ticket email to plans@tripit.com. (And clever that it’s always that same address: I can show you that address. It’s not a secret one like Evernote or OmniFocus use to let you email details in, it’s a big wide-open for-everyone email address and the smarts are in how it also parses who sent it. If I forward an email to plans@tripit.com, the service sees it’s from me and the details are popped into my account.)
Ticket emails differ between companies, though. TripIt is really good at this parsing but it gets thrown by two things: firstly a company it hasn’t parsed before and secondly if a company changes the layout of its emails. TripIt is an American service and I’m based in the UK so I’m not surprised that I occasionally hit companies that it doesn’t know. When that happens, TripIt sends you a warning that it couldn’t do anything with this stuff and that it has instead kept a copy of that entire ticket email in your account’s notes section. So at least you can see that.
But this week I booked a flight via Tripster and TripIt fell over. It believed it had parsed the email correctly, I got the regular TripIt success confirmation rather than any warnings, but it hadn’t. It believed my flight was tomorrow, it believed there was no seat or airline or reservation number. It was as close to a blank item in my travel itinerary as could be.
But TripIt is so useful when you’re travelling, so very useful, that I’ve taken the time to enter all the details for this trip by hand. Man, it was boring. And the knowledge that I will rely on this detail later actually made me nervous of entering it all, of not making any mistakes.
TripIt usually enters all my details for all my trips and it usually never goes wrong. I know I’m telling you of a time that it failed and that it was a boring time because of that, but it’s made me appreciate how good this app and this service is.
Let me quickly tell you that you can join the TripIt website for free and that there is a free app. I used that free app for years even though I don’t like ad-supported ones: I’d rather pay than have ads, I find them that intrusive. For those years, the choice, though, was between an ad-supported free app or a Pro version that required an annual subscription. I seem to travel more and more, but it’s still not enough for that.
However, at some point the company caved and released an app that you pay for but only pay that once. No subscription. It’s got an ungainly name: it’s called TripIt Travel Organizer (no ads) but it costs only 69p UK or 99c US. When I bought it I paid £2.49 and I still paid up before I’d reached the end of the sentence telling me it existed.
So: I thoroughly recommend, verging on urge you to use the TripIt website and this particular TripIt app.
The Pomodoro technique is where you set a timer and you work for, say, 25 minutes and then take a break for 5 minutes. Then you do it again. And again. The name Pomodoro comes, through a reasonably short but twisty route, from a type of clock or timer that was apparently popular somewhere. This timer looked like a tomato. And the word pomodoro means a kind of tomato sauce. Flash forward to the age of the app and we get this:
Looks more like a fella with green sunglasses if you ask me, but it’s a tomato timer for the Pomodoro Technique:
Pomodoro Timer helps you boost your productivity using the Pomodoro Technique™, one of the most effective time management methods out there. Not only will you get a fully configurable timer that lets you customize every aspect of the technique, but you will also enjoy a clear and beautiful user interface.
Pomodoro Timer costs £1.99 UK or $2.99 US and is available in the Mac App Store.