“Siri, cancel my appointment…”

Posted by William Gallagher

I’ve already lost the ability to check the weather on my iPhone in any way other than asking Siri. I already add more reminders to OmniFocus via Siri than I do through typing. And I have some days when Siri is worthless. But I have more days when it is great and sometimes, just sometimes, it is astonishing. A friend had to pull out of a coffee chat and, partly because I had my hands full, partly because I wondered if it would work, I said to Siri:

Cancel my appointment with Steph

And it did.

Took it off my calendar.

As ever when a gap comes up, other events can shuffle about to fill it so I tried saying:

Move my 4pm meeting to 2pm.

And it did.

It genuinely is becoming faster and handier to talk to my phone than to type. Never thought that would happen – and I’m struggling to believe that it has. I remember years of promises that voice control was coming and here it is. If only Siri were consistent.

You don’t have to be creepy about it

Posted by William Gallagher

But do your homework about people. I just had a terribly fun meeting with someone – er, I hope she enjoyed it as much as I did – and before I got to her, I'd read her blog. I'd seen her professional pages, I'd read what she did, I had an idea of some of the work she did.

I intended to stop there. The idea of coming to a meeting entirely cold makes me wince but equally I'm there to meet you, I'm not there to show off my deep research. I really want to meet you: easily the best part of journalism is that you get to bound off and say hello to people you might otherwise never come across. Utterly love that.

And I stopped intentionally looking into this woman's background. But I've been trying a free iPhone app called Mynd and it did some digging for me without my realising it.

Mynd is like a calendar assistant; I found it because I was exploring calendars and looking for why I nearly missed an appointment recently. I also found it because it got mentioned a few times by Katie Floyd on the Mac Power Users podcast. All it does, I thought, is show me my entire day in one screen: how many events I've got to get to, where the next one is, what the weather's like today. I also found that it calculates how long it's going to take me to drive to somewhere and it will say so right there on the screen: you need to leave in 10 minutes if you're going to make the appointment. Sometimes it sounds a notification too. I haven't figured out why it's only sometimes.

But I have figured out that it believes I drive everywhere when really it's more that I drive almost nowhere. So I got a Mynd notification that I ought to get out of Dodge and start the car right now when I was already on a train to London.

I was going to ditch it for doing that. I have Fantastical now that does all the work I need of managing my appointments and events. (Fantastical 2 for iPad is £6.99 UK, $9.99 US. Fantastical 2 for iPhone is £2.99 UK, $4.99 US. The iPad prices are launch offers and will shortly increase by about 33%.) Plus I don't care about the weather and when I do have a mind to wonder about whether it's going to rain, I ask Siri.

But.

There is a panel on this Mynd screen called People and up to now it has always been blank. Today it showed a photo of the woman I was meeting. And it got that photo from LinkedIn. When I tapped on that photo, it showed me her short LinkedIn bio and then it had options for calling her. If you're running late, you open Mynd, tap the person's photo, then tap to send her a message. If you've got the number of her mobile, anyway. Or an email address.

That would be spectacularly handy if I were ever late for anything but usually I'm cripplingly early. Still, it's impressive.

What was even more impressive is that I scrolled to tomorrow, saw the first meeting had a fella's photo there – and behind it was a list of related Evernote documents. It's just reminded me of the last note I made when talking to him. Right there. I'd forgotten I'd ever made a note but there it is.

It's like Mynd gives you a personal briefing before you go to meet someone. I don't think that means you should skip looking in to them yourself, but I feel wildly efficient about tomorrow now. And I won't feel wildly stupid if he mentions the topic of my last note.

Mynd is free for iPhone on the App Store. There's no iPad or Android version.

Have a look at the Mynd website too. It proposes using the software as your sole calendar for a week and I've just learnt that you can do that. Bugger. I think I'll continue using it as an adjunct to Fantastical but it's handy to know that all the ordinary calendar functions are in this Mynd app as well.

Twelve million people can’t be happy

Posted by William Gallagher

But hopefully a lot of them are. Microsoft's Office apps for iPad have been downloaded more than 12 million times in the week since launching. That doesn't really mean 12 million people: I downloaded Word and Excel so that's two right there.

Actually, I downloaded Word and Excel, then deleted them – and tonight I just downloaded Word again. None of these are any use unless you pay an annual subscription which is doubtlessly worth it for many but isn't for me. However, you can use the apps to read Microsoft documents. I didn't have any at all the night I downloaded the apps the first time.

But tonight I got one. I'm reading a draft of a book and it happens to have been written in Word. Normally I'd just read it in Mail – that will show you the text perfectly well – or maybe I'd pop it into Pages – which opens Word documents just fine. This time I got Word back, opened it up and it's really good.

The book and Microsoft Word for iPad.

The text is beautifully crisp and well designed, it is a true pleasure reading this document in Word for iPad.

Still not going to subscribe, but now I think I will keep it around. I wonder if we'll ever know how many of the 12 million downloads will stay and how many of those will turn to subscription ones. But you've got to hand it to Microsoft: this is a nice piece of work.

Best news all day – OmniFocus 2 for Mac confirmed for June

Posted by William Gallagher

What’s more, the beta test version is available right now. Or at least, it is to those of us who were on the beta last year and who haven’t forgotten their login details like I have. I’m working on getting those back so I can spend the evening playing with this – seriously, I’m not ashamed to say that to you – and if you haven’t beta-ed before but want to, you can sign up to be added to a list.

When we unveiled our plans for OmniFocus 2 for Mac last year and invited you to try our test builds, it was so we could learn from you which parts of the design were working well, and which parts still needed improvement. We didn’t know what to expect, so we weren’t sure how close we might be to setting a ship date.

The feedback you provided was generally positive: the new design was easier to navigate, and the new Forecast and Review modes were making it much easier to stay on top of all your projects.

But listening to your feedback, we also learned a lot about ways we could make the app even better—and we were further inspired by Apple’s latest designs when they unveiled iOS 7.

We paused our test builds and went back into heads-down mode to focus on the hard work of another round of design and development. Since that time, our team has been working tirelessly behind the scenes on a fresh design that preserves the best features of their original work while adapting to the latest changes to the platform.

With this new design in place, I’m thrilled to announce that OmniFocus 2 is now ready for its final round of testing.

The Omni Group – 26 March 2014

Update – I’ve got my login details back. I’m not kidding: that’s my evening sorted out. Man, I must love this software.

Do go read that full Omni Group blog because it has much more specific detail about what they’ve been doing.

Update 2:

21:01. It’s gorgeous. All the power of the old Mac version but even more of the gorgeousness of the iPad one. I used to hesitate recommending OmniFocus (you couldn’t tell I was hesitating but I was) because the Mac one was hard to learn. It was worth it, but it took effort where the iPad and iPhone versions were straightforward. Now I think the new Mac version is going to be the best of the three.

Thoroughly biased app recommendations

Posted by William Gallagher

But not my bias.

Staff at the fairly new site The Sweet Setup have jotted down a lot – a lot – of apps that they use on iOS and Macs. What's good about it is this is a collection of apps that a group of people have tried and tested, yes, but also come to rely on. There's no attempt to calculate a score or to compare things very much so there are many times that competing apps are mentioned just because they are what the Sweet Setup staff genuinely use.

What's not so good is the repetition in the article. It's divided into useful general categories like Productivity but then only seemingly-useful ones like Mac, iPhone and iPad. If you just dip in to one, you're fine. But I have and rely on the three equally soI read the whole article – until the repetition got too irritating. If something is mentioned in the iPhone section and there is also an iPad version, it gets listed there too along with almost identical text. Almost. Someone has obviously decided they can't repeat the text verbatim but they haven't done anything very good about it.

So read with that one caveat, okay? Here's the direct link to the piece but do then also take a look around the rest of The Sweet Setup.

Windows alternatives to OmniFocus

Posted by William Gallagher

Pity me. I go around doing workshops about being a productive writer and I've even written a book about it (The Blank Screen: Productivity for Creative Writers, UK edition, US edition) And it all makes sense, it all works – I promise you that and I have such gorgeous tweets and emails from people telling me so – but there is a big problem. It's the To Do list.

When I started this, the problem was that I'm on a Mac and quite a few people go for that there Windows thing. And my To Do manager of choice only runs on Macs. Actually, I say it's the To Do manager of my choice, I think it's more the To Do manager of my heart and soul. It used to be that in a workshop I would put up a slide showing you OmniFocus and where to get it. And then I'd say: “If you know a Windows equivalent, it would be a huge help for me to hear about it.” Or something like that.

But there are two problems now: I can't automatically and easily evangelise OmniFocus because the app is in a bit of a flux as new versions are coming.

OmniFocus for iPhone has already been radically updated and I like it a lot. OmniFocus for iPad hasn't and won't be until OmniFocus 2 for Mac is done. Do you buy now or wait? It's easy with the iPhone version: buy it. It's sort-of easy with the Mac one: buy the current OmniFocus 1 for Mac and you'll get version 2 for free when it's released. But OmniFocus 1 for Mac is hard work. I understand it now and I adore the power, but it took me a long time to get there. Even last year's failed OmniFocus 2 beta was a significant improvement in some key areas so surely OF 2 will be too. So I'd wait for OmniFocus 2.

When you buy any Mac version of OmniFocus, do it from the main Omni Group website itself, don't go through the Mac App Store. As handy as that is, there are problems upgrading for free when you have bought via the App Store.

You have no choice with the iPad and iPhone ones and that's also why I hesitate: the iPad one is already the best of the three, can they actually make it any better? Very likely.

But here's the thing. I have all three versions of OmniFocus and I use them all. But when OmniFocus 2 for iPad or Mac comes out, I'm buying them again immediately.

Because I truly don't know of any other To Do software that is this good.

I ask about that and about Windows and so far so far nobody has ever piped up with an answer during the workshop, during the after-session nattering (possibly my favourite part) or over the many emails I get later.

That's not a scientific or statistically valid sampling of people to call from. For the most part, I don't presume any computer knowledge and I don't ask anyone in advance what equipment they prefer to use. But most festival or university blurbs that describe my talk use one of the many texts I give them and they they invariably include the phrase “make your computer work harder for you”. If you were deeply into Windows software already, or Mac for that matter, I don't think that line would sell the workshop to you. So very broadly, I think one can expect fewer than average power-users in a typical workshop. Which means we can equally expect fewer people to know Windows software well enough to tell me what they've got that is as powerful as OmniFocus.

I know I'm right in all this but I want to tell you that I doubt it matters. I doubt that there is actually an equivalent to OmniFocus in Windows. But telling you that now, six years into this post, feels a bit rich. So let me show you what I've been working on for the workshop I'm doing next week. This is a special limited-number workshop for a specific group of writers that I work with on Writing West Midlands' Room 204 programme. I know them so I have an idea of how they like to work and what kit they use. Many are PC fans and I will ask them for advice but I think it's time I stepped up.

So I've been looking into this in detail. Or at least as much detail as you can without owning a Windows PC. I've checked reviews, I've tried all the online web versions I can find and I've downloaded iOS companion apps. No Android, I don't have the facility to test that nor the patience of Job to go through all the Android permutations.

There is nothing in Windows that is as strong as OmniFocus for Macintosh.

However.

I've boiled it down to a few that have one of the core things of OmniFocus: the start date. Let's just take a second to think about that term and what we'd use it for. If I enter a new task in OmniFocus then I can, if I'm fussed, also give it a deadline date. An end date. If I want to, though, I can also stepm in and add what's now called a Defer Until date. In my head it's still a Start Date. But whatever you call it, OmniFocus uses it and uses it for this one specific purpose: to hide it from you.

It's little short of disturbing. You enter a task, tap in a start date and you're sure you've saved it, you're sure, but you cannot see it anywhere.

That's not entirely true. You can see it whenever you do a review of all your tasks. (Reviews are a big part of Getting Things Done, the ideas behind many successful To Do apps like OmniFocus and yet, weirdly, not many systems include it. Note, too, that the iPhone version of OmniFocus hasn't got reviews either. I truly don't understand why and I think it's a big gap. I'm okay because I just do my reviews on the iPad, where it is a gorgeous system. I do think once you start on OmniFocus you'll buy all three versions, but again, they're in flux. I don't know what to suggest.) There are other ways to find and see this new task but the kicker is that you don't get to see it on your main To Do List. It ain't there. At all.

It isn't there on your list and it isn't going to be there until that start date comes around.

Here's a typical, practical use for that. I'm doing The Blank Screen workshop at the Stratford Literary Festival in May. I've done everything I need to do to get that going, now I don't even have to think about it until mid-April when I'll update and rewrite the presentation. So get it off my list until April. I don't want to see it and I don't want to have to keep thinking “Is it April yet?” (Tell me I'm not the only person who would have to stop to think that.)

Typical, practical and shorter example: if I'm doing a particular job every week on a Tuesday, keep things off my list until the Monday when I need to think about them.

I could talk to you all day about OmniFocus and it would just be cruel if you're on a PC. But if we just and only talk about start dates, then we've got some options here. The following are all Windows apps with web versions that work crossplatform: if there's one you fancy, see whether it has a companion app that works with your phone.

Toodledo
By default, there are no start dates. But go to Account Settings and look for the many fields you can choose to switch on for a task. One of them is start dates and once you've ticked that, every task you enter has the option for a start date.

Appigo To Do
I was a big Appigo To Do user until I found OmniFocus. Since then it's become a little suite of programs including a web client and I'm honestly a little confused over what option gets you what. But as of a few months ago, Appigo To Do includes Start Dates.

It's rather poorly done on the iPhone version: you have no way to realise that this icon is for setting the end date and that one is for setting the start date. None. Do what I did: press everything. When you know which button it is, though, you're set.

Well, nearly. Appigo doesn't have the same control as OmniFocus so it's a touch less refined in what does and doesn't show you. But a task with a start date that isn't today will get separated from more urgent tasks on your list.

Asana
This is team-wide To Do management and that would put it outside my usual sphere of interest: I want to make you, personally and specifically you, more productive. Not companies. I reckon if everyone in a firm is as good as you then that's great, but it's you I'm working with.

It also tends to mean complex. Enterprise-wide software takes some learning and I haven't done that. But Asana promises start dates. It's even an automatic thing. Yet I couldn't figure it out.

There's a line somewhere between To Do apps and Project Management software. I think it might be here.

I'm disappointed that there are no start dates in the best-named To Do software ever: Remember the Milk. Going by the chatter on its support forums, there never will be either. So I'm afraid that means RTM is out for me.

They all are, I suppose: I've said before that you'd need Primacord explosive around my waist to get me away from OmniFocus on a Mac, iPhone and iPad. But there is Primacord, it is possible and I thought – I still think – that it will happen that some day there's going to be a better To Do manager. But it isn't today and it unquestionably isn't on a PC.

Zippy To Do app watches what you do

Posted by William Gallagher

You would need Primacord explosive wrapped around my waist to get me away from using OmniFocus as my To Do manager but that doesn’t mean it has an exclusive on all good ideas. And it doesn’t mean that sometimes I can be rather tempted. Today that temptation is an iOS app called Zippy and it’s because of what it does besides remind you of tasks.

Zippy is the simplest and quickest way to manage tasks and reminders. It provides you with Insights on your habits to help you get better at managing and completing tasks. Here’s what the infographic shows you:

• How many tasks you’ve completed and how many on time
• Completion breakdown by completed early, on time and late
• How far ahead you plan out your tasks and how close to completion time you finish them
• What time of day you’re best at planning and finishing tasks
• Weekday breakdown of when you create and complete your tasks
• How many times you snooze tasks

Zippy on the App Store

I’m not saying I’d like to be told how long it takes me to do a task – Zippy reports the average time from entering a task to ticking it as done – but I’m terribly curious. Not enough to swap from OmniFocus but enough to be very tempted.

If you fancy it too, get it now. Zippy is on sale for 69p UK or 99c US until 4 March. Get it on the iTunes App Store.

More scientific than tossing a coin

Posted by William Gallagher

Coin tossing is really more statistics than science, but we use it for making decisions and now there is a app that wants to do it more scientifically. I’m honestly not remotely sure of the science but that’s what the app smart Decisions claims.

You did read that right and I did type it correctly: smart Decisions with a lowercase s.

For 99c US or 69p UK, you get to list choices in a decision and make some criteria. The app calls them criterions: apparently criterion is the correct singular and criteria is the plural but this kinda covers you both ways. You might want to decide what to drink, in which case your criteria might include price, alcoholic or not, and so on. Perhaps location: if you’re in desert, you might take anything going.

The algorithm does some sorting on this and reduces your choices to clearer, more comparable ones – so not New York has more museums than Dulles but rather Dulles is cheaper than NYC – and offers you a decision.

You need to play with it to see if it’s any use to you and I am resistant because of the criterions and the lowercase s. Ridiculous of me, but there you go.

Have a look at the screen grabs and what little detail there is about the app on the iTunes Store here.

Very, very snap review: OmniDiskSweeper for Mac

Posted by William Gallagher

I tells you, right, I’ve got a 3Tb hard drive in this ‘ere iMac and it got down to just 15Gb free. Without my noticing. How dare it.

If you go below around ten percent free space on your hard drive, you pay for it in a dramatic slowness and that’s what I’ve had lately. This is the fastest machine I’ve ever owned, it is so much faster than my last Mac – a Mac Pro that officially ran for six years but actually I’m still using sometimes – that I could design books using the Adobe CC suite. But suddenly it was a molass at opening a folder.

OmniDiskSweeper saves the day. It’s a tool from the Omni Group and it chunders away across your drive, totting up the figures and tutting a bit, then showing you the lay of the land. You’re spending how much space on movies? Everything’s detailed and shown in such a way that you can quickly zero in on the – in this case – more than a terabyte of files to do with one old job. I am at this very moment copying that lot off to an external drive and intend to luxuriate in an iMac that is restored to life and which has enough room to paddle about in.

OmniDiskSweeper is free. Get it where many fine applications are sold, over at The Omni Group. It interests me, mind, that I would not have heard of or found or considered OmniDiskSweeper if I didn’t happen to be an ardent user of one of the firm’s other products and a pretty ardent user of a second. The Omni Group makes the To Do manager OmniFocus and the outlining software OmniOutliner. I am actually waiting for the chance to give them more money for the next versions of OmniFocus, I like it that much.

Very, very snap review: RescueTime

Posted by William Gallagher

You know how you hear about something and then suddenly it’s everywhere? I’ve been hearing of RescueTime like it’s a new thing but it’s been around at least for a while and it does this (click to see it better):

If you didn’t click – and honestly who has the time to click? – then what it says is that I have spent about a minute and a half in Photoshop today. And that was the result. A cropped screen grab you can barely see. Oh, and also the wee cropped-even-closer graphic in Save a Whole Second When You’re Installing Software on Macs. A minute and a half. Wasn’t worth it, really, was it?

But it also tells me I stopped by the Omni Group website – not a shock, Omni does my long-beloved To Do manager OmniFocus and my recently-becoming-beloved OmniOutliner – and some stuff about how I piddled about in my Mac’s Finder. As you do.

But if that looks a bit rubbish as a snapshot of my entire working day – it’s now 11:45 and I’ve been writing since 5am so I promise I’ve accomplished more than that – it is a terrific snapshot of the three minutes since I installed RescueTime.

In the free version that I’m trying out, RescueTime does this logging so that you can see where in the world you spent your time. I’m looking forward to how it describes my bacon sandwiches at lunchtime. But armed with all this, you can see where you are effective and where you are procrastinating. You can see what on your computer keeps you working and what keeps you from working too. There’s a paid-for Premium version which lets you work with that information directly: it assigns scores to how distracting various sites or activities appear to be to you and then you can say no more. For the next thirty minutes, or whatever you choose, the premium version of RescueTime will deny you access to what most distracts you.

The premium version has other features and costs $9.99 US/month. The free one is impressing me, a whole four minutes in, so I’m going to keep it around for a time longer. I wrote in The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition) about software that blocks distracting websites by actually blocking the whole internet but I have never used any of it. This might change my mind.