Software

Software

Two updates for Launch Centre Pro

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The new: Launch Centre Pro's iPhone version has some twiddles including a new keyboard – and there's now an iPad version.

The links: Launch Centre Pro for iPhone, Launch Centre Pro for iPad (they're not the same)

The cost: the new iPad version is £5.49 and the iPhone one is £2.99.

The rest: the point of LCP is that you can pile a bunch of buttons into one spot on your iOS device and with a tap at least open applications quickly. That's enough for many people but really it's not for launching apps per se, it's best for making those apps do something. So, for instance, I have long had a button that fires up OmniFocus and enters a task. Rather than find OmniFocus – though, look, it's right there on my front page, where else would I put it? – and then open it, then tap to add a task, I can be just right in there typing. In, out and gone faster than OmniFocus itself is.

Or rather, was. I've been noticing that OmniFocus 2 for iPhone running on iOS 7 is usually as quick to enter a task as Launch Centre Pro is. Enough so that I keep going straight to OmniFocus instead of LCP.

Right now I am havering over whether LCP earns its keep on the front page of my iPhone. Right now, probably not. But if I relegate it to any other page then I will simply never use it because it will never be quicker to go via LCP.

But if it's of use to you and if I regain my habit of using it myself, Launch Centre Pro is a good application. And now it has added a new keyboard designed to make typing faster. I've not tried it. I may be the only person in the world who can type just fine on the iPhone, but I can so I do and have never even looked into this one.

Whereas I did soon and fairly often look to see if there were an iPad version of Launch Centre Pro. I reckoned I could do something with that and TextExpander to create a quick way of logging sales. But I couldn't because there was no Launch Centre Pro for iPad.

And now there is.

Same idea, same use and for me the same question of whether I'd use it or not. So far while I'm thinking about the iPhone one, I haven't dropped six pounds on its iPad cousin. But I do go in cycles with this app, I may well be back.

Unread RSS app review – bright and appealing but not there yet

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If you already use RSS and have any Apple news sites in your set, you will today be reading raves about Unread, an RSS reader for iPhone. This is not one of them. But it's close. And the more I use Unread, the more I like it – but the more it bothers me, too.

There are two elements that make Unread notable and very attractive: gestures and text. The text reportedly uses a font called Whitney and it is visibly small yet particularly clear. Reading is a true pleasure on this app. I wish there were an iPad version: Unread feels like the thing to kick back with and relax while you read rather than when you're darting about.

Then you don't have buttons anywhere, you have gestures: you just pull at the screen. Tug left to go into an article, tug right to go back. Unread uses iOS 7's swipe-to-go-back feature that is so natural you keep trying to do it in apps that haven't got it yet. In Unread, it feels natural but also very quick: it's as if thinking what you want to do is enough to make it happen. See an article, start reading an article, and don't notice that you gave a short tug on the screen to go into it.

Then a tug inside an article will get you a menu with options for sharing and for marking articles as read.

That was my first irritation. I had a website's feed that I scrolled through, reading the headlines and the short stand-first introductions to each article but I didn't especially want to read further on any of them. To clear the list of unread, I had to tug to get a menu, choose Mark All as Read, then confirm that before continuing. You can switch off the need to confirm but I confess it took me a surprisingly long time to find the Settings page that allows this. (You just keep swiping left, across from the article, across from the feed, across from the list of feeds, just keep swiping. Once you know it's there, it's far faster than it sounds.)

Getting rid of the confirmation was a boon but I still had to do that Mark All for every feed. Read every article or Mark All as Unread. Those are your choices and it's the same for every RSS reader yet in Unread it is a pain. Reeder has a little button at the foot of a list of articles: tap that and you mark all as read – and you also go immediately back to list of feeds. With Unread, you swipe to get the Mark All option, tap on that, and it does go to the list of feeds but with a beat pause at the list of articles you've just marked as read.

Maybe that's all part of the unhurried feel to the app, which is appealing and is a stated intention of its design. But where in Reeder tapping that Mark All button is natural and quick, somehow having to elect to bring up a menu first makes Unread feel like a chore. I like the lack of buttons and I very much like the swiping around gestures, but this one is a niggle.

An annoyance is that Unread shows you the list of all your newsfeeds – whether they have any unread articles in them or not. You always get the list and there's either a number next to them or there isn't. The designer of Unread says the app isn't meant for people with hundreds of feeds as I have, but that's what I have, so the fact that I have to scroll past many that don't have anything in them is another chore for me.

But I was persuaded enough by reviews to buy Unread – for a brief time it's on sale at £1.99 UK, $2.99 US – and I'm trying it as my only newsreader. Part of the appeal of it, though, is just having a new view after a long time with a familiar one.

If there were an iPad version, I can well imagine my using that for a relaxed read in the evenings and sticking to Reeder in the day. For now, it's iPhone-only and for me it's a mix of great elements and chores: I really don't know whether I'm going to become a fan or drop it as I have so many RSS readers before.

Cloudy but clearing up – your files in the cloud

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I love that I can turn to whatever screen is nearest me and continue writing. Pick something up mid-sentence if necessary. What I don't love is how you're supposed to find the things you're writing.

This morning I have used iCloud, Evernote and Dropbox for various tasks and I've reached for each of them without really thinking. That is terrific. It's only when you stop to think or, much worse, are stopped and have to think about it, that things fall apart.

If I'm writing a script and come back to it after a few days away, I have to think. Is it in Dropbox? Could well be. Did I really just write notes about it in Evernote? Quite possibly. Or, I think the worst, is it in iCloud? That's the worst because while it's my favourite online storage for a lot of reasons, one of them isn't this: you have to find the right application first. If you wrote it in Pages, you can only see that it even exists by opening Pages first.

So you'vd got these pots of online storage and finding you way around them is a pain. It's a galling pain because the whole point of iCloud, Dropbox and the like is that you are supposed to be able to forget where things are and just get on with it.

There's no answer to this yet. But there is now Collections, a free Mac app that at least tries to help:

Browse your online content
File management for the cloud era. Efficiently browse and edit your Google Docs. View all of your and your friends' photos from Instagram and Facebook. Keep a running archive of your Instagram liked photos and view your entire YouTube watch history, as well the videos you've uploaded, favorited, or liked. With Twitter, view your tweets, your favorites, and the people you follow.

I don't use Google Docs or Instagram, I'm not very interested in photos on Facebook. And if I were to adopt a third-party system like this (as opposed to it being part of the fabric of what Apple or Microsoft provide on their computers) then I'd really want it to be on iOS.

But Collections is trying to address a genuine (if first-world) problem so take a moment to watch the video on the official site.

First world problem solved: copying between Mac and iOS

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Short and simple: buy Scribe and thereafter you can type something on your Mac and it'll just be there on your iPhone or iPad when you turn around. Scribe is free in iOS and US$2.99 for Mac.

Slightly longer and less simple: isn't that what iCloud is supposed to do? Yes, kinda, and it is definitely true that you can and that I do use Evernote for exactly this. I also use Pages for it. And Numbers. But Scribe is meant to be like the clipboard: just as quickly and effortlessly that you copy something and paste it somewhere else, that's Scribe. It's just that you're copying it on your Mac and pasting it on your iOS device.

Hat nod to 99U which says more.

If you must use email as your To Do list…

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…well, you're going to go spare with confusion and the effort you put into managing it all will be achievable but wasted. I'm all for To Do lists but I want to spend the least time on the list and the most time doing the things I have to do. Email just doesn't cut it – but many people disagree and one group of them has also done something about it. Mindsense has released a Mac version of its iOS app Mail Pilot.

You read your email through it as normal but then mark it as if it is a task. So a previously-accused Email To Do-Er would read a message, see that the sender needed them to do a thing, and then they'd mark it as unread. Now in Mail Pilot, you instead have the option to mark something as Incomplete. Later, when you've finally remembered to do the thing buried deep down in last Tuesday's email – and checked that it only needed you to do one thing, not a dozen – you can mark it as Complete.

I sound like I'm knocking Mindsense and their new software but if I worked this way, I would use Mail Pilot. It has quick keystrokes for marking things up, it can set various reminders for you to alleviate the Last Tuesday Syndrome, it's been working popularly on iOS for some time.

I just think it's Occam's Razor: do you use a stylish-looking, well-made app to try managing your email To Do list or do you stuff email and do this properly in a real To Do task manager?

Mail Pilot is on sale for an intro price of US$9.99

OmniOutliner 4 released today

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The short take on this is that if you bought OmniOutliner 3 from the Omni Group's site any time since January 6, 2011, wait.

Wait for an email that is reportedly heading your way with details of how exactly you can get the new OmniOutliner 4 for free. Free. Nothing. De nada.

Similarly, if you bought version 3 of this extremely good outlining application from the Mac App Store in that time, you'll also get it for free and you also have to wait a bit. The app has yet to work its way through the Apple approval system but when it goes live, it's yours.

But otherwise, go to the Omni Group site now with a credit card. If you've ever bought a previous version of OmniOutliner, you'll find you don't have to spend a huge amount to get the new one. And if you never have, wait a second: watch the introductory video about the new version.

And then whip out the card or tap whatever dangerously handy keystroke you have to make 1Password enter your CC details into online store forms.

Full price is $49.99, paid upgrades start at $24.99 and if you're eligible for a free upgrade, you'll never guess how much it will cost you.

I can't say I have a on/off love affair with outliners, it's a bit more of a tepid relationship that that. But I used to loathe them, I still get edgy, but OmniOutliner just got me through so many different and difficult projects that I am a fan.

Tag. You’re it

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In the olden days, like thousands and thousands of years ago, you would save a document and never find it again. I used to spend a lot of time split between PCs and Macs and regularly I would struggle to understand where something had been saved. (Especially with downloads: where the hell did they go?) More recently, we've had Spotlight on Macs and Windows Something on Windows 7 that mean you can find anything you like pretty instantly.

I know the Spotlight stuff the best: I regularly use it to search for, say, the word “invoice” and tell it that I want to see only Word documents created between April 2012 and March 2013. (Can you guess what I was doing there?) Wallop, there they all are.

That one feature, which so many people simply do not know is right there on their 'puters, has undone two decades of how I work. And it's undone it for the better. I no longer spend time creating chains of folders so that I can find, say, all Acme invoices done for copywriting in February 2013. I just save all my invoices in one place and they're waiting for me. If I want a particular one, Spotlight finds it. If I need to compile something about them all, I just open that one folder.

I think that's probably saved me a gigantic amount of time and effort. So much so that I'm very glad I listened when I was told about it, I'm certain that I have no need for any other solution – but I am also willing to listen again if you've got something better.

And people are saying they have something better. Hand on heart, I do not know. And I have ignored it for years. But now this thing is built in to the OS X Mavericks that I use most days and it's right there. Doesn't make me use it. Doesn't require me to do anything. I can continue ignoring it. But it looks at me. It looks. Like that, that's what it looks like. And all the time I'm hearing people talk about how great this thing is. They say it's so great that it is about bleedin' time that Apple added it.

It is tags.

If I save that Acme invoice, I already have a habit now of calling it by a fairly descriptive name so that I can see what it is right away whenever I open the invoices folder. I stole this idea from David Sparks and his extremely good Paperless book wherein I learnt to name files like this: “2014-01-10 Acme invoice DRI0001”. (To just nip off the subject of tags for a second, because this has proved so useful, Sparks also recommends using TextExpander to put that date in. So I go to save and instead of checking the date, I type the letters “;df” with the semi-colon and without the quote marks, and TextExpander pops in today's date for me. If, as usual, I'm playing catch up, I will then change that date but it's still faster. Now, carry on.)

So I've got Spotlight, I've got this descriptive filenaming system which without my doing anything is always sorted into date order. I don't know that I need anything else.

But still there are tags.

If I save my invoice “2014-01-10 Acme invoice DRI0001”“ then before I hit the actual Save button, I can type in some tags. I can type a row of words like invoice, Acme, copywriting, difficult client, bad day, don't do this again, paid really well, used the word purple, invoiced, not paid yet. And on and on and on. I can type these, they are tags, and so far I have never done it.

Except I guess that's a lie. Tags are new to OS X Mavericks – they're already in Windows, at least since Vista, and that would be great except I read Microsoft's advice on how to use tags and I glaze myself over – but they've been in other things. There are tags in Evernote. And I have used them there.

Just inconsistently.

Hang on. Let me check. How do you check how many tags you've used in Evernote?

Apparently it's 316.

I truly do not remember typing more than one. I remember typing 'recipe'. And I remember that because I spent some time thinking, have I already typed 'recipes'? It turns out I had. So now I have two and I don't know which to use when I search for a recipe. Instead, I just go to my Food notebook or I use Evernote Food. Or I use Paprika, an entirely different recipe app altogether. ("An entirely different recipe app.”)

I told you I don't know. Hand on heart, I said. Are tags any use to me? If they're not, why have I written 316 of them in Evernote? If they are, why have written zero in OS X Mavericks?

I can tell you one reason for that: if you create a tag in OS X Mavericks then every folder you open includes that tag in a list on the side. Brilliant: tap or click on that tag and you only see the files that have it. Tap or click on several tags and you'll see all those files that have both. So with a couple of clicks I could see all invoices sent to the bad client who pays well. But I have 316 tags in Evernote, if I did that in OS X Mavericks, how long would the list of them be? It would be 316 long and by the time I've scrolled through, I could've found the documents.

Oh.

Consider this a live blog.

Because right now, this moment, exactly as I reached for an example to tell you and then wrote it out, I've just changed my mind.

I do think having 316 tags listed out on the screen is ugly and a chore to read through, but I do suddenly see that being able to pick out invoices from a bad client who pays well is something that I would like. And it is something I would use.

I may have to look into tags a bit more, then. I was telling you all this by way of showing that time spent knowing how you can find things on your computer will help you save a lot more time later. And recently I seem to have been in many conversations with fellow writers who complain they can't find anything. But now I'm thinking I should spend that time myself to understand more about tags.

Thanks.

Also, I was telling you this in order to then point you at someone who knows what they're talking about or at least doesn't write to you until they know what they're talking about. That won't catch on. But here's a particularly interesting take on it all from Lifehacker: I've Been Using Tags All Wrong.

The most boring feature of iOS 7

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“Popular Near Me” on the App Store. It sounds good: wherever you are, go to the App Store, tap this button and you'll see which apps are the most popular right there. Where you're standing. Exciting.

I just tried it at home and all anyone seems to be downloading is transport apps for how to get away from here.

Maybe they're trying to tell me something.

The inevitable new toy Christmas post

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This is a test, really. I’m writing to you in Drafts for iPad: I’ve had the iPhone one for a long time and only used it to append some thoughts to a Story Ideas not in Evernote. I like that enough that I decided to buy the iPad one with a Christmas iTunes gift card.  It’s only £1.99 but that’s how on the fence I was about whether it was useful enough to me. Having Drafts in Launch Centre Pro on my iPhone is handy. When I have my iPad out, why not just write directly into Evernote?  But within a few moments of trying out Drafts for iPad and trying to remember how to get my (very few) actions into it from the iPhone one, I think I’ve become hooked.  We’ll see. But one step toward hookednessification will be if this works. I’m writing to you in Drafts for iPad and I think if I press this button it will email the text right into my website. If it does, if I’ve got this Drafts action right, then I think I’ll be using this a lot.   Wish me luck.  Here goes.  Ready?

‘Appy days 2013

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I’m a bit disappointed with Apple’s Best of 2013 pick of apps. There’s no real reason I should be, it’s just a list of what’s sold best and what Apple staff seem to like, but I thought I’d find something great in there that I wasn’t already using. And I admit, I unthinkingly expected to see software that helps you be more productive. This year, more than any, I’ve leant on software to get my work done and it’s been a terribly rewarding, satisfying kind of time because I’ve done so much more in so many more areas.

So when I wrote to you about Apple’s pick yesterday, I started in the expectation that I could show you some great tools.

Since that didn’t really work out, since the Best of 2013 became more of a curiosity than a grab bag of productivity tools, let me do what I wanted it to do. Let me show you the best productivity apps of the year.

Two very, very big caveats. One, I’m on a Mac so if you’re on a PC today then this is of precisely zero use to you. Well, not quite: there are some things here that are cross-platform. Platform-agnostic. But I’ll never have the patience to read through a list of Windows applications to find the single thing that will also run on my Mac, so if you’re in that boat, have a mug of tea instead and we’ll chat later.

Two, I’m sure some of these apps came out in 2013 but I’m never going to check. These are the tools that have made me enormously and enjoyably productive in 2013 and that includes ancient apps I’ve only just discovered and it includes old stalwarts that I have used for years. I know. Crazy. Maybe that’s why Apple’s list is more entertainment and games: maybe not much came out this year.

Enough. Here’s the list. I tell you now, it’s not as long as I thought it would be.

OmniFocus

(Mac: £54.99/US$79.99, iPhone £13.99/US$19.99, iPad £27.99/US$39.99)

Yes, I have all three and once you’ve bought any of them, you’ll go get the other two as well. So let me add that up for you: in the UK, the triptych costs you £96.97 and in the US it’s $139.97. Prices must vary a bit as I’m sure I spent nearer £80 when I bought them but if you’ve gulped, so have I: I’m going to be buying them again in 2014.

That amuses me a little: I keep saying that this price is incredibly cheap considering what OmniFocus has meant to me and that I would gladly pay it again – and now I’m going to. Because there are new versions coming and they are all paid upgrades. I expect there’ll be a discount for existing users of the Mac one but I know there won’t be for the iPad version because there wasn’t for the new iPhone one.

Nonetheless, the second that new iPhone version was out, I bought it. Actually, it requires iOS 7 so what I did was upgrade to iOS 7 and then immediately buy OmniFocus 2 for iPhone. I liked the previous version very much but I like this even more and use it even more. I’m not entirely sure that is possible, but I do.

All of which is a lot of detail to throw at you when you may have never even heard of OmniFocus. It’s a To Do task manager. But that is a bit like saying War and Peace is a stack of paper with some ink on it. 

OmniFocus may not be for you: it is very powerful and it tends to do your head in a bit at first before you get a whole series of Damascus moments and love it. I wrote in a Mac magazine once that “first it destroys your mind, then it owns your soul” and I meant it as a compliment.

But if it’s more than you need or it’s more than you can face, then £96.97 isn’t cheap, it’s suddenly a lot of cash. So tread carefully but do tread, okay? 

While The Omni Group has not announced its plans, the fairly smart money says that the new OmniFocus 2 for iPhone will be followed soon to soonish by version 2 for the iPad and then at some point for the Mac. This makes things a tiny bit tricky. I’d like to tell you to wait but I also want you to get the benefits of this right now. If the Mac version were easier to use, I’d say pull the trigger: the odds are that if you buy OmniFocus 1 for Mac now you will get version 2 for free when it comes. No guarantees, but it’s highly likely. And that dispenses with the money concern.

But it is a concern that this Mac one is hard to use. I’m happy that I put the work in and I enjoy that the Mac one is very powerful. But I got on the beta test for OmniFocus 2 for Mac early in 2013 and have found it hard to go back. That beta has closed and it looks like whenever OmniFocus 2 for Mac comes out for real, it will look and act substantially different to the beta because OS X Mavericks has brought some new possibilities. But still, even the unfinished beta was easier enough to use that I suddenly found version 1 to be a chore.

How’s this? Right now the very best version of OmniFocus is the one for iPad. It will be updated and it will be radically updated if the iPhone is a clue, but even if you buy it an hour before a new version comes out, it’s still a fantastically tremendous application that will transform you. Not your life, it will transform you.

Enough so that I really did pay the money again for the iPhone one and I really will immediately, no IMMEDIATELY, buy the new versions for iPad and Mac whenever they come. 

Take a look at the video about the iPhone version on this Omni Group page. Then this is a longer video about the iPad version – did I mention it’s great? – and a much, much longer but very good series of videos by independent writer David Sparks about the Mac version.

I promise to be more concise about everything else on the list. <Smiles nicely but has fingers crossed behind his back>

Evernote

Free or US$35/year for premium (gets you extra features)

It’s an app you can make notes in. There must be eleventy-billion such apps. And okay, you can also pop PDFs in there. Images. You can make a clipping from a web site and drag that in to Evernote. Okay.

But I was in a meeting, right, and suddenly needed a contract that had nothing to do with that day’s work. “Oh, yeah, that one,” I said and then called it up on my iPad exactly as if I’d been a soothsayer and known to bring it with me.

That worked and made me look very good because whatever you put in Evernote, you can get out of Evernote – wherever you are. I enter a gigantic number of notes in Evernote for iPhone and Evernote for iPad but I also use the Mac one a lot and I’ve used the PC version on occasion. I’ve been waiting in someone’s office and I’ve used their computer to open the Evernote website. And in each case, wherever I am, whatever I’m using, every single note I’ve ever made is right there.

Pages

Now free

I was on a bus going to my mother when I had an idea for a book. Because I had my iPad and it had the Pages word processor on it, I started to make some notes – and by the time I’d got to her, I’d written the first thousand words of what became The Blank Screen book. That book became a workshop that I’ve now run for individuals, students, university staff, colleges and in online seminars. And it became this blog, which is how I got to meet you. I’d call that worth the price of admission.

Mind you, I would like to mention now that I paid for Pages. It only became free toward the end of 2013 and if you think I’m narked by that, no. Fine. I think it is very undervalued but if you can get it for free, terrific. I’ve got so much out of this software already that I am completely fine with having paid whatever it was. Something preposterously cheap, I remember that.

Incidentally, I do have Word on this Mac. I’ve had Microsoft Word on every machine since the 1980s and I’ve used it on every machine. But the other day someone emailed me a Word document when I was using my MacBook. I’d had a problem with the hard disk on that and had wiped it completely, installed OS X Mavericks and got back to work. And there I was with this Word attachment, suddenly realising that I didn’t have Word.

Not only did I not have Word on there, for the first time in all those years, but I also hadn’t noticed. I’d reformatted that drive a month before and used the machine endlessly. Hadn’t noticed Word was gone.

And I didn’t have to notice now, either. Because my Mac just opened the document for me in Pages. 

I had to send that document back in Word format and Pages just did that for me too.

Adobe InDesign

Part of Adobe Creative Cloud, monthly rental cost varies

I used to work a lot on Radio Times, the website, and a bit on the magazine. There was this job where the site regularly needed some text from the mag and by chance of the schedules, it was always a bit easier to get it straight out of the magazine pages before they went to press. I leapt at it. It was a tedious, trivial and surprisingly slow job and I sped it up with some Word macros that would take the heavily formatted magazine text and make it heavily unformatted for the website.

But it also meant using the page layout program, Adobe InDesign. It is ridiculous how little you needed to know in order to do the thing I needed to do, but I would take the time to just explore InDesign for a minute or two each week. And over the years, especially since I was taking text from some superbly designed Radio Times pages, I learnt a lot. Taught myself InDesign.

To the extent that earlier this year Radio Times hired me back to work on a book specifically because I knew Adobe InDesign. And I learnt even more from doing that book work, to the extent that when I got back to my own office, I could and did design my The Blank Screen book in Adobe InDesign.

Read more about it and the whole Adobe Creative Cloud.

Keynote

Now free

Presentation software. This – and the Pages and Numbers spreadsheet that I use daily – is part of Apple’s iWorks suite of productivity applications and I’m really surprised they weren’t in the company’s pick of the year. They were great and cheap, now they’re pretty great and free. This year’s new versions shed some features (that are apparently coming back slowly) and gained some others. 

For the work I do, I have barely missed any of those features, whatever they are, and I have very much enjoyed using the latest versions. So far I’ve only used Keynote to present The Blank Screen workshop once but it was a pleasure. No one has ever said that about PowerPoint.

Read more about Keynote for Mac (and the iPhone/iPad ones are the same) on Apple’s page.

Reeder 2

Universal for iPad and iPhone: £2.99

In 2012, it was for iPhone, iPad and Mac. And I used them all. It’s a newsreader, an RSS newsreader, which means rather than my going to a couple of hundred websites to read news and articles, they come to me. I’ve already messed with your head and your patience by going in to immense detail, so lemme just say that the world has changed. Right now Reeder for Mac is no longer available while a lot of work is being done under the hood.

I miss it more than I can say. And I’ve used alternatives but still Reeder and most particularly the new Reeder 2 are so well designed and just, you know, right, that I simply don’t read RSS on my Mac any more. The second it’s back out for Mac, I’m having it and I’ll get back to using it on all my machines.

Read more about Reeder and a tiny bit more about what’s happening with the Mac version on the official site.

1Password

Angela showed me this on her iPhone one day and I wondered why anyone would want such a thing as a password manager. By the end of that one day, it was on my iPhone and on the front screen too. Later, I showed Angela the Mac version and that’s now on her machine.

This is why. I need to do some financial things in a minute so I’ll press the Apple and / keys here on my Mac and it will open 1Password. With one tap 1Password will open up my bank’s online banking website, enter my account numbers, passwords and all that. It doesn’t go all the way on that site: I have one last page to go through, one last piece of security, but it’s so fast getting to that point that I use it constantly.

And then later if I am booking train tickets – I’m always booking train tickets – 1Password will log me in to thetrainline.com and it will enter all my credit card details when I tell it to. 

I appear to have a preposterous number of websites I use that require passwords and so I have a preposterous number of passwords – an increasing number of which are generated by 1Password to be extra hard to crack. No more using the word ‘pencil’ as a password here. 

There is one thing I don’t like and it is the agony when you upgrade from one version to the next on iOS. It isn’t an upgrade, it isn’t an installer, it is alchemy. I can’t fathom how it can be so hard to do but once it’s done or if when you’re buying it for the first time, everything is so well done and easy that I can’t resist it. I know for certain that I use 1Password every single day, without fail, and I suspect I usually use it many times.

We could stop now

Those are the tools I spend my life in at the moment. I do also lean on iTunes a lot because I like telling it to play me an hour’s worth of music and then I’ll write until it stops. Plus I’ve been addicted to the new iTunes Radio which this very day also went live in the UK.

Then I came to really relish using iBooks Author to do the iBooks version of The Blank Screen (here’s the UK iBooks one and here’s the US iBooks one). TextExpander is one of those utilities that is so useful you forget it isn’t part of the Mac generally, but I’ve forgotten that it isn’t part of the Mac generally. Same with Hazel and Keyboard Maestro, both of which I’m just coming to use.

I really did expect that this would be a vastly longer list. Can you imagine that? In any average day I must surely use above twenty different software applications and I use them hard, but it’s only this set that I can honestly point to do as being the key productivity tools for me this year.

Next year may be a little different. I expect to carry on with all of these but I did a couple of projects using OmniOutliner for Mac (an outlining program from the same firm that makes my beloved OmniFocus) and now I’ve just got that for iPad too so it’s featuring more in my usual workflow. Bugger. I’ve been trying to avoid the word workflow. Ah, what can you do?

Similarly, I’m actually writing this to you in MarsEdit, the blogging tool that I’ve heard so much about for so long. I’m only on the trial version but it’s pretty much as good as advertised so I may very well continue with it. We’ll see. It doesn’t exist on iOS and I write a huge amount there so it’s not a guaranteed mandatory purchase or if it were, it isn’t guaranteed that I’ll use it a lot.

Whereas I want to give an honorary mention to some hardware. The best thing I ever bought was my 27in iMac last December: Macs do last a long time so my previous office Mac was a good six or seven years old and this new one boomed, just boomed into my working life. But then maybe the best thing I ever bought was my iPad Air as right now it is the thing I use most. I use it more than my kettle. I know.

I had thought that I used my original iPad a lot and while I didn’t regret giving it to my mother, I missed it more than I expected. And then I bought the iPad Air and am using it perhaps ten times as much as I did that original one.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I never step away from one keyboard or another and I see why you say that, but I can prove you’re wrong. By going now.

I need tea. Can I make you one?