Wait ’til winter.

Alternatively…

A 2012 Captivate Network study of 600 white collar workers in North America found that productivity drops, on average, by 20% during summer months.

CEO of Growbiz Rieva Lesonsky recommends offering your employees a little extra time off to help them through the summer productivity slump…

“Lots of companies offer summer hours where employees get every Friday afternoon off or every other Friday off. Knowing they have Friday off can make employees less likely to call in “sick” on sunny Mondays.”

If summer hours aren’t for you, why not offer flexible working options over the summer so each employee gets to work from home for a few days. Or offer a few extra holiday days that can only be taken over the summer months.

How to Get Out of the Summer Productivity Slump – Mark, no surname given, Contactzilla (11 August 2014)

I work for myself and I’m not honestly sure whether that would make it easier or harder to get some time off in the summer months. But I’ll ask myself, I’ll put my best case forward to myself and see what myself says.

It’s going to be a visual editor for Evernote: rather than seeing your notes as straight text or on a sort-of corkboard-like arrangement, see them visually instead:

CardDesk is a web application that extends the functionality of Evernote to give you a visual organiser for your notes. With CardDesk your Evernote notes become “index cards” that can be layed out and arranged on any number of virtual desktops.

CardDesk official site

It’s currently in beta: go to the official site to sign up and have a little poke about.

Thanks to friend of the blog, Kerry Kit Murdock.

That’s what it does. Isn’t that amazing? That’s the English to French option and right now, as reported yesterday, you can get Word Lens and all its dictionaries for free.

I remember the day a group of us first saw Google Earth and one guy called it the most impressive thing he had ever seen on a computer. I agreed then, I agree now, yet with Google Earth you can comprehend how it works. It’s a lot of photographs of the Earth. Impressive, even staggering, but comprehensible.

I can’t comprehend Word Lens.

If it just translated, well, fine – listen to me using the word ‘just’ there – because you could rationalise that it must take a word and find whatever the dictionary says is the equivalent. But Word Lens does it in the font (or at least very nearly) of the thing you’re looking at. It does it in the image: it isn’t a report or a notification, it is in the photograph right where the original text was.

If you understand that, fantastic: I will love you forever for telling me.

But in the mean time, mind blown. Go grab it, okay? Word Lens for iOS is right here.

Oh, give me a break: it’s taken years upon years for me to move away from Apple’s own Calendar app on iPhone – I now use Fantastical 2 for iPhone and for iPad (they’re separate apps) – and here’s another alternative that looks rather good.

Logacal is temporarily free and I can’t tell when that will change. But even if it’s gone by the end of this sentence, the price will only have gone back up to £2.99 UK or $2.99 US. The price is not the reason to buy, the price is not what’s good about this app. This is:

That’s one of the makers’ provided screenshots: I can’t show you mine because it has oodles of detail that I shouldn’t show you but which I should show me. Look at that: nuts to monthly grids or daily hour lists, that’s what events are coming up that have to be dealt with.

That shot also shows many To Do tasks and I don’t like putting them on a calendar – so I don’t. But I have a recurring To Do task which is just “Check calendar for tomorrow and week ahead” and I can do that in a thrice with this app.

Get it from the iOS App Store.

Now out in the iTunes App Store: a new contacts app that’s – short version – quick and rather nice to use. The slightly longer version is that it feels like LaunchCentre Pro or Drafts in that you can use it to rapidly do sequences of things.

Mingle calls itself Action-Based Contacts and the idea is that you can hold down on someone’s name in your address book and swiftly slide them over to icons for phone, email, text and so on. Let go, and you are phoning them, emailing them, texting ’em.

I saw it in beta and my entire contribution to the beta program was mentioning that I’d like to see favourite contacts listed. Currently you get your entire address book and since mine is fairly large – 881 contacts it says here – that takes some scrolling. The maker, Samir Ghobril, says Favourites are coming.

Look at the screenshots in the App Store and if you fancy it, buy now: currently it has a launch offer of half off, which makes it 69p.

But do use that link: if you search for the word Mingle in the App Store, the first one you get is a dating app.

La la la. Not listening.

Psychological researchers have found that students who hand-write notes remembering conceptual information over a longer period.

Take Notes by Hand to Remember Information for a Longer Time – Lifehacker

From. The. Stilted. ‘Proper’. Way. Of. Talking – to the very jobs that are miraculously eased by new efficient machines, there’s barely a pixel of this that applies today. Except, that is, for the bucketful of certainty that all this is the way of the future.

Efficiency Exhibition’s Office Robots

This is from British Pathé and around now I’d usually be telling you that there is a lot more to see on the original site. But right now, the word ‘more’ doesn’t feel adequate. The newsreel company has released 85,00 such movies. Go browse or try randomly search for the craziest terms you can think of.