Marco Polo found – on iPhone

Posted by William Gallagher

Maybe you have to be a Doctor Who fan to be alert to any news with the words “Marco Polo” and “found” but that's how I just discovered a new app that I can't make my mind up about.

Get this new app, run it on your iPhone and the next time you lose your phone around the house, just shout the word “Marco”. Your iPhone will reply at top volume: “Polo!”

I have no idea why the maker chose those words. You can change the “Marco” bit but you won't because there's no changing the Polo response.

Take a look at it on the App Store and be ready to spend your 69p UK, 99c US.

2014 is the Year of Deep Linking

Posted by William Gallagher

Sure it is. It’s also the Year of the Horse, the Year of Family Farming, the Year of Encryption, you could go on and it feels like I have done. But this claim of the Year of Deep Linking aside, writer Liron Shapira makes a reasoned argument for why deep linking is important – and just what it is, too:

Say you’re looking for an awesome karaoke bar, and use Yelp for a quick search. What’s wrong with this picture? Your friend goes on Yelp’s website and searches for nearby karaoke places, then texts you: “Check out all these karaoke places! Here’s a link.” The text comes with a link to a Web page full of karaoke search results. That’s convenient, and exactly what you need. But if your friend is using the Yelp app, the text has to read: “Check out all these karaoke places I found! Open Yelp and search for ‘karaoke.’” The app can’t offer a direct link to the right content, putting you and your friend one step farther from your signature rendition of “Lights.”

Liron Shapira – 2014 Is the Year of the Deep Link – Re/code (15 May 2014)

Okay, so that’s what it is and there is money in searching. Read the full piece for what is happening with this idea, why firms are investing in it and how we are likely to see it everywhere soon.

PS. There are no awesome karaoke bars. Just wanted to save you the trouble of searching.

Grab Word Lens right now – it’s suddenly free

Posted by William Gallagher

It's the app that looked like a joke: point your iPhone camera at a sign written in French and on the screen, you see it in English. It's the universal translator of Star Trek or the Time Lord Gift of Doctor Who except that it is real. Like many, I downloaded the free app just to see if it were true and it was. But you get only a kind of demo limited unless you buy packs such as English to Russian. I can't remember how much those cost but it was enough that I put it off until I was going to a country. I never once remembered to do that.

Except.

Now we don't have to: the whole thing, in-app language packs and all, is free.

It's free because the development company has just been bought by Google. The mark has turned everything free and I am downloading it all right now.

I'm sure it won't remain free for long. I'm not sure whether it will continue as a separate app, though: you can well imagine that Google is intending to incorporate this technology into its other offerings. Fine. Good, even. But the current Word Lens app may not survive so grab it while you can.

Word Lens on the iOS a App Store

Running iPhone apps on Android

Posted by William Gallagher

It’ll never happen. Google wouldn’t give a monkey’s but Apple would. And I don’t know that I’d want it to happen anyway: it wouldn’t be much of a step from that to having every phone run the same software and then where would we be? I don’t like using Android phones but there’s no question that iPhone has benefited from there being competition. Though plainly Android took nothing from iPhone, nooooooooo.

Still, it could happen in theory – because it is happening today, it is just now just about possible to run an iPhone app on an Android phone:

…six Columbia University students have bridged the gap between the two platforms with something called Cider (via The Next Web). Not to be confused with the other Cider software (for OS X), the Android version of Cider essentially fools iOS applications into believing they’re running on an actual iPhone or iPad.

9to5 Mac

There’s work and there’s work. You would never use this in real life. And I have serious questions about the smartness of university students who don’t know the difference between portrait and landscape: have a look at their video about all this.

It’s when an app fails that you realise how much you like it

Posted by William Gallagher

There are bad apps that you either ditch or tolerate. There are good apps that you use a lot. Then there are great ones that you use so much you forget that you’re using an app, it’s just the way things are. (I would offer that there are then even greater apps that are melded into your DNA: if I’m being harsh then I’d say only OmniFocus is like that with me, but isn’t it great that a tool can become so much a part of your life?)

Right up there in the so-great category for me is TripIt and I only appreciated that this week when it failed on me.

This is what is supposed to happen:

Make any travel booking anywhere and get an email ticket from ’em
Forward that email to plans@tripit.com
TripIt parses the ticket and pops every detail into your TripIt account
When you’re travelling, see everything you need on your iPhone

That last doesn’t sound so great but, seriously, it is. I had a thing where I was travelling from Birmingham in the UK to a village in the deepest part of southern France and it meant a lot of train rides and a lot of connections. Many of them were easy and great – I especially loved that I got a couple of hours in Paris both ways – but some were very, very, very tight. There was one where I had six minutes to get across what turned out to be a giant train station on multiple levels and though the guard I asked turned out to speak fantastic English, he also told me the wrong thing. Please picture me running, running and eventually sliding, sliding, sliding Charlie-Brown-like onto my train.

I do remember stopping on the way to help a woman carry an enormous suitcase up some stairs. So, you know, give me credit there: I may have made a mistake booking trains too close together but I’m a mensch under pressure.

What helped me throughout the whole journey was that I could look at TripIt on my iPhone at any time and be shown exactly what I had to do next. What the next train was, where it was, where it was going, what my seat reservation was, any booking references I needed, all that. I could choose to look at any or all of the steps in my journey so if something came up I’d be able to judge if I had the time to do it.

I’m not going to say that it made the journey pleasant when in fact the whole journey was great anyway, but it was a help and a guide and it became automatic that I would check TripIt along the way.

However.

It gets all this information from your email ticket. It parses that ticket: goes through it looking for departure times, train or airline reference numbers and so on. Fine. It’s handy that you just forward your ticket email to plans@tripit.com. (And clever that it’s always that same address: I can show you that address. It’s not a secret one like Evernote or OmniFocus use to let you email details in, it’s a big wide-open for-everyone email address and the smarts are in how it also parses who sent it. If I forward an email to plans@tripit.com, the service sees it’s from me and the details are popped into my account.)

Ticket emails differ between companies, though. TripIt is really good at this parsing but it gets thrown by two things: firstly a company it hasn’t parsed before and secondly if a company changes the layout of its emails. TripIt is an American service and I’m based in the UK so I’m not surprised that I occasionally hit companies that it doesn’t know. When that happens, TripIt sends you a warning that it couldn’t do anything with this stuff and that it has instead kept a copy of that entire ticket email in your account’s notes section. So at least you can see that.

But this week I booked a flight via Tripster and TripIt fell over. It believed it had parsed the email correctly, I got the regular TripIt success confirmation rather than any warnings, but it hadn’t. It believed my flight was tomorrow, it believed there was no seat or airline or reservation number. It was as close to a blank item in my travel itinerary as could be.

But TripIt is so useful when you’re travelling, so very useful, that I’ve taken the time to enter all the details for this trip by hand. Man, it was boring. And the knowledge that I will rely on this detail later actually made me nervous of entering it all, of not making any mistakes.

TripIt usually enters all my details for all my trips and it usually never goes wrong. I know I’m telling you of a time that it failed and that it was a boring time because of that, but it’s made me appreciate how good this app and this service is.

Let me quickly tell you that you can join the TripIt website for free and that there is a free app. I used that free app for years even though I don’t like ad-supported ones: I’d rather pay than have ads, I find them that intrusive. For those years, the choice, though, was between an ad-supported free app or a Pro version that required an annual subscription. I seem to travel more and more, but it’s still not enough for that.

However, at some point the company caved and released an app that you pay for but only pay that once. No subscription. It’s got an ungainly name: it’s called TripIt Travel Organizer (no ads) but it costs only 69p UK or 99c US. When I bought it I paid £2.49 and I still paid up before I’d reached the end of the sentence telling me it existed.

So: I thoroughly recommend, verging on urge you to use the TripIt website and this particular TripIt app.

Taking the Pomodoro technique to its obvious conclusion

Posted by William Gallagher

The Pomodoro technique is where you set a timer and you work for, say, 25 minutes and then take a break for 5 minutes. Then you do it again. And again. The name Pomodoro comes, through a reasonably short but twisty route, from a type of clock or timer that was apparently popular somewhere. This timer looked like a tomato. And the word pomodoro means a kind of tomato sauce. Flash forward to the age of the app and we get this:

Looks more like a fella with green sunglasses if you ask me, but it’s a tomato timer for the Pomodoro Technique:

Pomodoro Timer helps you boost your productivity using the Pomodoro Technique™, one of the most effective time management methods out there. Not only will you get a fully configurable timer that lets you customize every aspect of the technique, but you will also enjoy a clear and beautiful user interface.

Pomodoro Timer costs £1.99 UK or $2.99 US and is available in the Mac App Store.

Call it like it is. It’s crapware

Posted by William Gallagher

Apparently Samsung recently boasted that a feature of its latest phone (this was some minutes ago so there'll have been another latest phone since) was that it came with only 40 pre-installed apps instead of 50 or so. I don't know the details because I haven't the patience for Android – every time I see an Android phone that looks great, I use it for a mo and it feels like it'll be brilliant when it's finished – so I also didn't know how bad this crapware problem is.

Kinder people, or ones with stronger filters on their website than I have, tend to call it bloatware. It's the apps that come on your phone from the manufacturer and you can't get rid of them. I'm an iPhone user and I find it irritating that Apple won't let you delete any of the many apps it provides. Just taking a quick look now, I can see my iPhone 5 has about 22 and I'm using 12. The rest are tucked away in a folder but I can't delete them.

That's actually much more than I expected to find. I am including the Settings app plus the Phone one, the one that you use to make, like, actual phone calls. So there are ones without which it isn't a phone, I don't mind those. And I use the Camera, Photos, Mail, all sorts. But there are about 10 I simply never open. Stocks. Weather. All that.

Still, even if we said I never used any of them, that's 22 Apple pre-installed apps versus a whoo-hoo newsworthy 'only 40' Android ones. You would be hard-pressed to come up with another 20 or 30 apps that you could think a manufacturer would include but that's because you're smart and sensible. You wouldn't put, say, three text message apps on, would you?

You're not Samsung, plainly. Buy a new Samsung phone and you get Samsung's text message app. Fine. But you may also get one made by your mobile phone carrier and you definitely get Google Hangouts, which also does text messaging.

It's the same with many others and the argument in favour of it all is that you get choice. Bollocks. The apps are there because of deals and contracts that benefit the makers and not the customers. I've nothing against the makers getting benefits: if they don't, they cease to be companies. But at least let me swear at you once on the day I buy your phone and spend an hour deleting all the crapware.

Time magazine says:

Users aren’t completely powerless to fight back, at least. If you’re bothered by bloatware, you can go to Settings > Applications (or Apps on some phones), then swipe over to the “All” section. Tap on any app you don’t want, and press “Disable.” Ignore the message that says it may misbehave if it’s a built-in app. As long as it’s an actual app, represented by an icon in your app tray or on your home screen, you shouldn’t have any problems. But even this isn’t a perfect solution, because these apps are still hogging space on your device, and removing them is still a chore.

Friday Rant: The Ever-Sorrier State of Android Bloatware – Time magazine (9 May 2014)

Reportedly there is likely to be a special version of Android that is sold without bloatware. You'll have to pay extra, naturally. Wasn't there a version of Windows that came without the crap too? It is a funny world where the absence of something is a unique selling point and you get charged extra for it.

At least Android phones don't come with all those stickers on the front.

Be all you can be, you complex little soldier you

Posted by William Gallagher

I like quotes. I am genuinely inspired by certain quotes. There’s this one from Steve Jobs –

Great artists steal

Though actually what I find inspiring about it is that Jobs stole it from Picasso.

Then there’s this from Cervantes:

Translation is like reading the back of a tapestry

Though actually what I find most inspiring about this one is that Cervantes presumably said it in Spanish.

What I don’t like are quotes that seek to inspire. That seek to be a touchstone for your life. I’ve written before about the worth of finding a line that encapsulates the piece you’re writing – such as a sentence about its real theme so you don’t keep wandering off – and as ever and always, what works for you works for you.

So maybe you’ll take this new free app more seriously than I do. Maybe you’ll find it helps. In which case, go grab it: Daily Productivity Quotes is out now on the iOS App Store. It’s an iPhone app so it looks a bit ugly on an iPad but I’m not very likely to be opening it often.

Free today – Lists To Do for iPhone

Posted by William Gallagher

I've not used it, not even heard of it before two minutes ago – but on being told of it, I wanted to make sure you knew too. This fairly basic-looking tasks app, Lists To Do, is free for today only.

It's usually 69p so it's not like that will destroy your bank balance, but To Do apps are so important that it's worth checking out a lot of them. And a lot of 69p can add up.

So do take a moment to check this one out here.

Finally – work offline with Google Docs

Posted by William Gallagher

Previously on Google Docs and spreadsheets: you really had to be online to use them. There was a Google Drive app that let you work on this stuff in, say, your Dropbox account. But from today, you can get Google Docs and Google Sheets for iOS and work whenever you like.

I'm not a fan of Google Docs: I revise my opinion every time I see the price – it's free – yet I've found it clunky to use. And clunky to have online all the time.

This could change my mind – and I am shocked at you for making the connection that Microsoft Office for iPad just came out. Total coincidence.

Get Google Docs here and Google Sheets there. A presentation app is reportedly coming soon.

As ever, by the way, do go via these links to get the apps: going straight to the App Store and searching for them by name does not find them. Ridiculous and hopefully changing soon, but true.