Refresh gets a spot on Notification Centre (still USA-only)

Posted by William Gallagher

Refresh is the app that seems a bit mystical when it presents you with a dossier (its phrase) about the person you are just walking up to meet. Mystical and maybe a wee bit creepy. But sometimes also so useful. Useful enough that I keep mentioning it to you even though it remains a US-only app.

And useful enough that yesterday’s Forbes roundup video of best productivity apps included it, though the presenters didn’t seem to glom onto the creepy mystical element so much. I’m just sensitive.

It’s also not quite useful enough to be as useful as you’d expect. I reviewed it months ago and forgot I had it until some many weeks later when it chimed up with one of these dossiers. But it does it for this person and not for that, it does it before this meeting and not that. And it hasn’t chimed a dossier at me in two months. Enough so that I forgot I still had it, until I got this email telling me about a new update:

There’s a new Refresh for you to try.

We updated the app you know and love to take advantage of new features in iOS 8. You can now install a Refresh widget in the Notification Center to see who you’re meeting each day, and insights display beautifully on any screen including iPhone 6 and iPad!

To install the new Refresh widget, update your app and then click “Edit” on the bottom of your Today screen. Click the green plus next to Refresh and you’re good to go!

Refresh now available as a Notification Center widget! – email from Bhavin Shah, Refresh (21 October 2014)

I am slightly confused by this: the Refresh app itself says you need to update to the new version and then delete the old. Cool. Happens all the time: a brand new app downloads and until you delete the old one, you’ve got two on your iPhone and it all ends in hilarious consequences. But this time, once I’d tapped its update button, there was no second copy. Can’t see where the old one is to delete. Actually would be hard-pressed to tell you for sure that what I have is the new version, except that it does have that bit in notification centre.

Which on my iPhone right now looks thisaway:

I like that it’s Yasmin I’m meeting because she’s an author who routinely fakes all her personal information on Facebook and Twitter and Linkedin so that description of her is nonsense.

If you’re in the US or, like I do, have a US iTunes account then you can get Refresh here and it’s free.

OneHourADay app briefly free

Posted by William Gallagher

What could you achieve in just one hour a day?

Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion – So what happens you set just one hour a day for to achieve your goals?

By breaking down a goal into smaller hourly tasks, it will not only make it easier but also more effective in achieving your goals.

Try this simple app, that helps you get down your desired goals and also a detailed description then start the timer when you are ready to dedicate one hour of your day to achieve your goals. The timer will stop at one completed hour until the next day. It will also keep a running total of all the hours you have achieved towards your goal.

You can set a daily reminder and add additional goals.

Example Goals:
Revising for exams
Playing the Piano
Write a book

Give it a go and see what you could achieve in just one hour a day!

Parents, stop laughing. For everybody else, maybe yes, maybe you can get an hour spare to work on your goals. Even if it’s not necessarily 60 minutes in a row.

I’m not sure of the value of this app. I already work in hours, it just seems to suit me to do one hour on this then one hour on that. But I do it most of the time by asking Siri on my iPhone to set a timer for an hour. (Sometimes Siri tells me “Remember: a watched iPhone never boils.”) So if you have an iPhone that can run OneHourADay, you don’t actually need OneHourADay.

But it looks good, it’s a positive reminder of what you want to do and there is something satisfying about seeing it on your screen. Plus, it was £1.49 (or $1.99) and it’s now briefly free, so do take a look. Watch that it’s still free when you check out that link, though: I’m expecting the free offer to expire soon.

It is not true that I used my iPhone 33 times today

Posted by William Gallagher

There’s a new free iPhone app called Checky that counts each time you tap your iPhone awake. It is fun and a bit sobering but unfortunately it’s also wrong. Listen, I’m not in denial here. I noticed around 1pm today that it reset to 0.

Go grab Checky anyway. It’s free and if you’ve just got an iPhone 6 or Plus, it might give you a sense of your new-toy addition.

Get this right now, right now: 1Password for iOS goes free

Posted by William Gallagher

I believe this is unheard of and I believe you should be getting it now rather than reading this. Get it now. Hurry.

Look, I got my copy in a sale several years ago and it was a bargain price but it was still a price. When I learnt that it was free, I actually didn’t believe it. You know how the App Store doesn’t show you a price after you’ve bought something? It only and forever shows the word ‘Open’? Often I like that, especially if the app was expensive and has now dropped a lot in price. But it means it’s quite difficult to check these things out to be sure that they’re true.

Listen to me, I sound like I still don’t believe it. To put this in one perspective, free is just a £6.99 drop. But to put it in another, I’ve used 1Password a minimum of once every single day – every single day – since I got it around 2009.

It’s a password manager that creates strong passwords and then securely enters them for you. So on the one hand you’re never going to use ‘123456789’ as your password. And on the other, going to websites and logging in to them is now very fast. One tap and I’m at the BBC Radio Previews website, 1Password is popping my username and password in, and I’m off to the races.

That’s a feature that is going to get even better in iOS 8, which arrives today, and the new version of 1Password which will arrive at about the same time. That’s going to be a free upgrade for me, as an existing user, and it will be a free upgrade for you as an existing user – if you go get this bizarre free offer while it lasts.

Just in time for Strictly Come Dancing…

Posted by William Gallagher

I don’t seem to be really ready for Strictly this year. Maybe it’s just that I don’t recognise the new celebrities, maybe it’s that I refuse to accept we’re in September already. But to get me back in the mood, I’m thinking about getting some advice from the Dutch National Ballet – and my iPhone.

The iPhone app costs £2.49 UK or $3.99 US and is here.

And here’s a little documentary about the app: part one, part two.

Prototypr for Mac (briefly) free

Posted by William Gallagher

You know how when you need something, it seems to be everywhere? I’m going to be working on an app and so everywhere I look I am reminded of this.

Sometimes it’s useful, as in references on various podcasts. Sometimes it isn’t, as in Community season 5, episode 8, “App Development and Condiments”.

Look out for it.

And then there are times when it’s handy. As in tonight, when there’s a Mac app called Prototypr that has briefly gone free. Usually retailing for £6.99, it’s for building a kind of demo version of your app idea: showing the screens and what it will look like without it actually being able to do anything.

It means you can try things quicker and get to the design you need sooner.

Have a look at Prototypr. I’ve not used it, but while we were talking, I was downloading it.

Todoist Premium on special offer (briefly)

Posted by William Gallagher

As featured in this week’s email newsletter, you can currently get a free six months subscription to the premium version of Todoist.

The deal is via Appsumo, it’s here and it’s worth looking at – but before you buy, check out the free version. It may well be all you need in which case Premium is a waste of your money. It’s a nice waste, mind: you’d be supporting the firm that makes this To Do app you so like, but still.

When you follow that Appsumo link, scroll down. The front page looks like a big ad for Appsumo but it’s just the top: scroll down for a lot of detail about Todoist.

Refresh app: just when you get used to it feeling creepy…

Posted by William Gallagher

It’s still not out in the UK so you’ll just have to trust me here, but there is this iPhone app called Refresh which parses your calendar and prompts you with conversation starters for people you’re about to meet.

Refresh is very clever and it seems supernatural how it combs sources like LinkedIn to present its information. But as well as the fact that I will never use its suggested conversation openers – I prefer “Hello” to “Say, weren’t you on holiday in Marakesh from 16 July to 18 August?” – there are oddities. And these oddities keep reminding you of how Refresh is sitting on the very line between useful and creepy.

It’s meant to prompt you before a meeting and it does so, but not always. I forgot that I still had it after reviewing the app. Until one day, two months later, it pinged with details of the woman I was meeting to discuss a writing project. I showed her what it said and she revealed that it was all wrong: she had purposely lied on LinkedIn and Facebook in order to defeat this kind of thing.

But then I had a meeting right after that and Refresh didn’t do anything. But then I had a third meeting and it pinged.

A few weeks later, I was going to an event I’d produced and it pinged with what it called a dossier about a particular someone else who was going. That was freaky-plus because my calendar just had the event name and there was nothing I could see that named her – and didn’t name half a dozen other people that Refresh was ignoring.

But still, you know, even though I could just delete it and walk away, I am drawn back to it. There is something so smart about what it does that I’m fascinated at the algorithm. Plus, it gave me the name of someone’s partner and I’d forgotten it. So thank you, Refresh.

Except, last night I got something new. Have a look, see what you think. Is this what I was really doing last night?

Ask Me Anything – and now be able to read the answers

Posted by William Gallagher

Previously… Reddit’s Ask Me Anything interview platform has become the place to go because the most amazing people pop up on it. There’s no interviewer, there’s just you and this person. Plus maybe someone typing, if they’re not hot on the keys.

President Obama did an AMA. Do you need anything more?

Yes. You need to be able to read these things. If you happen to be on the site when the AMA session is live then you can follow it fine, I imagine. I’ve never used it live. It won’t be exactly as cut and thrust as a verbal discussion so it’ll be a bit boring while you wait for text answers to appear. But it will surely work and you will surely understand what’s happening.

You don’t when the interview is over. It is a mess. Rabbit holes’ worth of comments and sort-of questions and discussions and threads and sporadically an answer from the interviewee. It’s just unreadable. There have been attempts to fix this before but they’ve been by third-party websites that cull the interviews and curate the results. There’s nothing essentially wrong with that, but if you need someone else’s website to make your interview with the President of United States comprehensible, there is a lot wrong with your service.

Now Reddit has released an Ask Me Anything for iOS. Android will follow soon. It’s free and it works well: give it a go and find out just what a gorgeously astonishing range of people have answered questions on AMA.

Hic – What did I do night?

Posted by William Gallagher

I don’t need this and I’m not suggesting that you do either, but, well, we all have friends who might find this a wee bit useful, don’t we?

Sobrr [is] a social networking app that deletes everything posted to it within a day. Photos, messages, even friends and new connections all disappear after 24 hours, a spin on the ephemeral messaging service Snapchat. The idea, summed up by Sobrr’s catchphrase, is to help users experience “life in the moment.”

Sobrr’s 24-hour limit does two things. First, it offers users a social media safety net. That photo of you doing a keg stand? Share it! It’ll be gone before you sober up. Second, it encourages users to repeatedly check Sobrr for new content they know will soon be deleted.

Social Network Sobrr Deletes Your Drunken Debauchery After a Day – Kurt Wagner, Re/code (16 August 2014)

The full piece is here but you really want to go to Sober directly, don’t you? I mean, your friend wants to go there.