But I hate computers

Posted by William Gallagher

Writers tend to think I am very technical. Every technical person I know thinks I'm an idiot. I'd like to say that the truth is between the two, but that suggests it's in the middle whereas I suspect I'm only a pixel away from the idiot side. But it's a significant pixel to me because whatever I am capable of ever understanding technically, I did also choose to walk away. I chose to leave computing and go into first media, then journalism, then drama. And I wouldn't change that.

But you don't forget any dabbling you do in technology, just as you never really forget anything if you were raised Catholic. And it is certainly true that I spend my days surrounded by this stuff and might even be said to wallow in it all.

Except it's not technology. It's not computing. At least, it isn't to me.

There is a very easy way to say that, for instance, this morning I have been heavily using iTunes Radio, Pages, Numbers, Excel, Word, Mail, OmniFocus, Editorial, Final Cut Pro X, iMessages and possibly more. Reeder. That's another one. Pocket, a bit.

But I had to think about that. If you had asked me what I'd done so far today I'd have told you I cooked breakfasts, drafted a radio proposal, emailed a lot of people about a lot of things, done my regular financial stuff, got up to date with everything I'm supposed to be working on. I put the bins out and emptied the dishwasher. I would never imagine, never conceive of telling you the make and model number of my dishwasher. It's my dishwasher and I cannot remember what type it is, I just know dirty plates in, clean plates out.

When I like technology, it is enabling me to do something more interesting than play with technology. Yet telling you any of this always sounds like a list of software and hardware – usually iPads more than dishwashers, but there you go – and I'm thinking that's a barrier.

Yes, if you use all these tools they will help you stay creative yet become more productive. Guaranteed.

What I can't guarantee is which tools will help you: for something as abstract and technical as software, applications are vividly too personal to make grand recommendations or rules. I know this, you know this, but in the talking about it all and what might help you most with what, I end up sounding like a geek rather than a writer. I'd be okay with that if I thought I were and if I knew it would be of use to you, but I geek out and imagine every real technical person I know stepping away from me.

Use this stuff. Start with whatever you've already got: you're a writer, you write on a computer, there is no question but that it can do more for you than you realise or you let it. And when you've poked around a bit with that, then start looking into other applications and tools to help you more. You will find them, at some point you will become addicted to them, and you will find that they are not just useful, they are transforming.

I'm not kidding.

Maybe the five productivity apps you need but probably not

Posted by William Gallagher

Two reasons to show you one article about five productivity apps: first, they might help you. But second, I'm fascinated how differently we all approach what we do. I very heavily use exactly one of the five applications mentioned here (iWork with Pages, Numbers and Keynote) and I can't fathom how anyone would leave out 1Password, Evernote and my beloved OmniFocus.

And I shudder at the idea anyone would include a fitness app. Shudder. Told you.

You know and I'm slowly realising that there is no one way to do what we want and that if there were, many of us wouldn't like it. I think I'm at the point where my work flows along just about as well as I can make it and if I pootle around trying other things, it is more curiosity than it is a necessity.

Still, I have a terrible weakness for articles such as Apple Gazette's 5 Apps to Boost Your Productivity.

The most boring feature of iOS 7

Posted by William Gallagher

“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.

Thanksgiving bargain: get TextExpander (Mac) for 50% off

Posted by wg

I actually enjoy typing, I seriously do. I can’t handwrite, I can’t think with a pen, I can only work and fashion words or thoughts with a keyboard. So I resisted TextExpander for years: it’s a Mac utility that lets you type, say, “;em” and if you do it without the speech marks, it types out your email address.

It’s up to you what those letters are, it’s up to you what text gets expanded. Since I started writing Doctor Who stories, for instance, some fans made a Wikipedia entry for me and I am chuffed about that. I chuff about it enough that it’s handy to be able to type “;wiki” and have TextExpander change that to the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gallagher_(writer)

That probably happened too quickly for you to see.

I use TextExpander instead of email signatures: I’m not really a fan of signatures but since I write for so many different people in so many different forms, it’s really handy to be able to sign off with a link to my books if I’m writing to a publisher, to my journalism if I’m emailing a magazine. So I do that. And I do the wiki thing and I do the email address. I do my bank details too: because I keep forgetting them and you don’t want to get a digit wrong in that.

I also have a rather complicated TextExpander snippet – they’re called snippets – which I run when I’ve started a particular email. Two keys and it’s filled out the recipient, the subject, the body copy of the message and has thrown up a form asking me for the bits that change. It’s a financial thing so it asks me about this account and that invoicing amount and then it pops all that into the message, signs it off and I just hit send.

So I still love typing but I use TextExpander more and more to do more and more of the repetitive, ordinary typing. I installed it back in June and its internal look-at-me statistics panel stays it has saved me 78.88 hours of typing. I am highly suspicious of the maths behind that, but there is no question that it works very well for me and that I’ve come to lean on it a lot. There’s definitely no question because I routinely find it a right pain that you can’t do the same thing on iOS.

(There is a TextExpander for iOS but it’s handicapped by Apple’s app rules and actually right now the firm is nattering with Apple because it’s going to have to change how it does what little it does there.)

But.

The whole point of this is by way of telling you first that there is this thing called TextExpander which is as good as advertised, and second that it is currently on sale.

From about now until Monday 2 December, 2013, it’s 50% off. That makes it £13.47 and just typing those digits makes me wince: I paid twice that. I know it’s worth it. But when it was the full price it was just expensive enough to make me hesitate; at £13.47 I’d have bought it in a bilnk. Let me recommend that you buy it in a blink.

To get the offer, you need to follow this link: http://sites.fastspring.com/smile/product/te?coupon=TE2013BFF

I don’t get any kickback for that, I just get the kick out of knowing that you’re going to have a good time with it.

Me and NYT on Microsoft Word vs Apple Pages

Posted by wg

Last Friday, I went to open a Microsoft Word document someone had sent me and found that I didn't have Word on my machine. It was a true shock: I've had Word on everything since the 1980s when I began writing about word processors in various computer magazines.

What's more, I realised why I didn't have it. When I'd installed OS X Mavericks on my MacBook Pro it had found some problems with the hard disc. Serious, creaking, get out fast problems. So I had it reformat the whole drive and sort things out. I'd backed up everything, I backed it all up again just in case, fine. But apparently I hadn't remembered to put Word back on afterwards.

And here was the reason that the shock was the slap it was: it must be a month, it could be six weeks since I installed OS X Mavericks. So I'd not needed Word in all that time, not needed it or wanted it or assumed I should use it, for at least a month.

What's more, I looked at this document and it was open. My MacBook had seen that I'd didn't have Word and so it had just opened the document in the word processor I did have, Apple's own Pages. I now had the choice of schlepping off to find my Word installer or just getting on with my work so I just got on with my work.

Now, this was one Word document in a project that had involved slightly over fifty of them and I'd done the giant part of the work on my iMac which does have Word and I did use Word. This was just one last document that came through late and I was going to have to send it back as Word; if there had been all fifty left to do this way, I'd have installed Word. I think. But for one job, I just accepted that there would be a final convert-to-Word step when I was done.

I like Pages. I've always liked it. I was on a bus when I got the idea for writing a book about productivity for writers and I wrote the first thousand words of it right there on my iPad in Pages. Perhaps because I'd started it there, I carried on. There was also the fact that mentally I was associating my iMac with the 150,000-word book I was writing about Blake's 7 and I was associating my MacBook with a Doctor Who audio script that was due at the same time. But whatever my psychological reasoning, it was still that I'd pick up the iPad to carry on writing The Blank Screen and that meant it was still the case that I'd write it in Pages.

At that stage, the project was chiefly about getting the ideas down and exploring how to convey it. I later moved all the text to Word to send to my proofreaders, I then moved it to Apple's iBooks Author to do one version. I moved it all to Adobe InDesign to make the paperback and the Kindle versions. But for bashing in the words, Pages on my iPad was perfect. The best word processor is the one you've got now but Pages did that Apple thing of staying out of my way while I concentrated on my writing.

So I did go from liking it to being quite the fan and I was aware of this. I didn't notice that it had supplanted Word on my MacBook. I'm trying to think how much else I must have written in Pages on that machine without thinking about it. Certainly a few radio reviews for Radio Times magazine. Definitely several invoices. Must be a lot, but I just can't remember the word processor I used for what.

All of which is nice for me and I could just recommend Pages to you in the certain knowledge that you already have a word processor and have no need to move to a new one.

But Pages just went through a big change. It became free for new users, for one thing. I've said before that I find the free Google Docs a bit clunky and ugly yet I like it more every time I see that price. I do wonder at the decision to make it free: it's obviously very nice for new users and I've no problem with the fact that I bought my copies because I've had a huge amount of use out of it. Yet if you make something free, you do devalue it.

I remember a friend complaining that Word, at the time, cost several hundred pounds and saying why on a Earth would it? “It's only a word processor!” I suggested that she try making one and she'd then see what an enormous job it was. She didn't appreciate the brilliance of the work that had gone in to just a word processor that cost hundreds of pounds. She didn't believe me when I reported that Microsoft had up to then spent a billion dollars developing it. (True.) How much less would she now regard a free word processor?

Curiously, the word free gets people buying, so to speak, and I'm sure it gets people devaluing the word processor, but it doesn't stop anyone bitching about problems. In this case they're right: the new, free version of Pages for Mac in particular has issues.

The key aim of Apple for this release has been to make Pages on the Mac work the same and work with the same documents as Pages on iPad and iPhone. Fine. It also has this thing now where I can send anyone a pages document and they can open it – not through conversions, not through any fiddling and actually not just opening the document either. They can open Pages. Whether they've got it or not. Whether they're on a Mac or a PC. Click on the document I send you and, if you want, you're reading and editing it in Pages in your Web browser.

Apparently it is startlingly marvellous to all of us who get what is happening and can see how hard it is to do – but, infinitely more importantly, for those who do not happen to understand all that's happening, it is just a Pages document. They have no need to tell the difference between owning Pages the application and running Pages in their browser. That is a truly remarkable accomplishment and it is how computers should be: our work is what matters first. It's also a true sea change from the Microsoft approach which makes everything just difficult enough that you appreciate and you value all the company is doing for your money.

But I say it's apparently this good because this is what I keep hearing – and I have yet to have the slightest need to use the feature myself.

And the problem many people have is that in order to get this new feature, to get the ability to work across platforms, Apple has stripped Pages down and lost key features. That's what it feels like: really it's more that they started again and haven't built it back up to all it was.

The only thing is, I've no idea what the missing features are. For me in my current work, the only thing I've hit is that it's slightly more of a pain switching on the word count. (The same cross-platform good stuff and missing features bad stuff has happened to Pages' stablemates Numbers and Keynote. I've seen the difference in Numbers and that's more annoying to me.)

Apple promises that it is bringing all this stuff back and, actually, I believe them. This is what they did with the video editing software, Final Cut Pro X. And since it's not causing me problems at the moment, it's easy for me to carry on believing them.

Plus, I like the new look and feel of Pages. I like how I get on with my writing and then if I need something, if I need some tool, I look up and find that tool just about exactly where you'd think it should be. Contrast that to Word where you have a thousand icons and have to hover over them all to see what they do.

When I started writing this to you, I didn't realise how much I wanted to say. I'd found an interesting article in the New York Times that compared Pages and Word and I wanted you to see it. So I wrote the headline “NYT on Microsoft Word vs Apple Pages”. Having now blathered on at you at this length, I've just gone to change that headline to “Me and NYT” on it. And I'm mithered over whether that now sounds as if I wrote the Times article. Sorry for any confusion there.

And if you haven't had enough of musings about Pages vs Word, do take a look at the NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/28/technology/personaltech/pages-scores-technical-knockout-over-word.html?_r=0

Saving: 1Password is 40% off

Posted by wg

US holiday savings seem to be here in UK too: 1Password for iOS is about 40% off. Between my iPhone, iPad and also the Mac version (not currently discounted)' I must use this password- and credit card-manager about 20 times a day.

It stores all your myriad passwords, credit card details, all sorts. Tap a key and it'll go to a site, log you in and fill out all the credit card details so you can spend fortunes easily and rapidly. Hmm. But I do recommend it. Upgrading from one version to another has sometimes been bile-ful but when that's done or you're buying it for the first time, it is a fine piece of work.

A lot of software and hardware firms are having sales in the US because of Thanksgiving – it's not a huge deal in the UK, we're bigger on the Fourth of July – and it's simply easier to mark applications down worldwide than schlep about through Apple's App Store settings to limit it to the States. But you can be sure the price will go up again in just a few days so go take a look at it now. And if you're undecided, if you haven't got time to check it out now, just buy it.

That's what I did in a sale many years ago. Bought it and meant to use it but just forgot. Then my wife Angela showed me it on her iPhone and within the day I'd moved it to my front screen. Later I used the Mac version and showed her. Now we both rely on 1Password enormously.

Here's the link to the iPhone and iPad version that's on sale: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/1password-password-manager/id568903335?mt=8

Reeder 2.1 now out

Posted by wg

You can argue whether this is screamingly productive of me or not, but I use Reeder perhaps forty times a day. In case you don't know it, Reeder is a newsreader so when I have a moment standing by my kettle, I'll flick through headlines and read articles there. At least it's quicker than going to each of the 200-odd news sites I read. And definitely quicker than going to them and finding that nope, they don't have any new news since the last time I checked them three minutes ago.

There are many newsreaders: just search the App Store for the phrase 'RSS' as it's that little-used Really Simple Syndication that powers them all. RSS makes news come to us and I can't fathom why it hasn't taken over the world.

But I got into it very many years ago and have used very many RSS apps yet now it would take primacord explosive wrapped around my waist to make me stop using this particular one. Reeder is that good. It used to be even better when there was an iPhone, an iPad and a Mac version and it will be better again in the same way. Some day. Hopefully soon.

In the meantime, Reeder was updated for iOS 7 while I was away on holiday and I bought the new version immediately. You and I hadn't met on here then or I'd have rushed to enthuse about it to you. Instead, I had to tell everyone in earshot and they all looked like thank you, yes, that's really great, William, whatever makes you happy.

Now that you're here and version 2.1 has just this minute dropped on the App Store, let me enthuse about it live. Here's the only bit you really need to know, here's the App Store link: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/reeder-2/id697846300?mt=8

But I'd also like you to know that among the myriad bug fixes and semi-demi-myriad new features, there is a particular fix I am going to enjoy. Recently when you ran Reeder in the iPhone and there was a new story with an embedded video, no power on Earth would make that play in landscape. It as solely in portrait. This was the only thing that ever made me think I preferred the previous version of Reeder. But now it's apparently fixed. At least on the iPhone it is.

I say apparently because that's how quickly I've rushed the news to you: the update dropped this minute, this moment, and as we've been speaking, the app has been updating itself on my iPhone. Off to watch some video landscape and also to go get it all for my iPad.

Grab quickly: TextEver Pro free for today only

Posted by wg

Don’t read this, go straight to the iOS app store and get TextEver Pro while it’s free: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/textever-pro-take-evernote/id542597312?mt=8

But hurry. Seriously, hurry: it’s free there for today only and the day is ticking away like mad.

TextEver Pro is a universal app for both iPhone and iPad which usually costs £1.99 or $2.99 (though, confusingly, the price varies a lot and there are different editions just to throw you). It’s similar to Drafts in that it is a notebook app that opens up ready for you to start writing immediately. However, it’s keyed in to your Evernote account so it’s really a rapid way of creating notes and doing some quick editing of recent ones.

I’ve found it slightly confusing: I want to be able to knock up a note swiftly and I particularly like that it has one-tap buttons for adding the date or the time but once I’m done, I’m done. I want it saved. So far I’m really not clear when the note goes away and when you can carry on editing it or when you can call up a recent one.

You can set a passcode on it but that seems to me to add a beat longer and, if not defeat, then at least nobble the purpose. Plus, if it can recall older Evernote notes to edit, then unless I add a passcode to TextEver Pro, I’m losing the whole benefit of having one on Evernote itself.

Nonetheless, it’s here and it’s free: I’ve grabbed it for both iPhone and iPad. And I like it enough so far that I’ve added it to Launch Centre Pro.

William