apps

You cannot be Siri-ous

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It takes a mensch to say that a rival has done something good. There are few mensches in the world. If you want a productivity slant on this, be a mensch: say when your rival has done something better than you. It’s quicker and you will bamboozle people. It is always more fun bamboozling other people than it is for them to think you’re an idiot.

Because we get it. We know that Apple will never say anything in praise of Samsung. Microsoft will never say anything in praise of Apple. The UK’s Conservatives won’t praise the Labour party; America’s Republicans will never praise Democrats. Which means that on the one hand, we all get it, we all understand this and on the other, there are some amazingly clever people in every one of those organisations who must get it too. Yet still we get smart people in smart companies saying things so stupid that it is like a floodlight on their dangerously petulant world-view.

This comes up today because Microsoft is releasing Cortana. I’m not a gamer so I kept reading that as Cortina, a type of car, but it’s a character name from a game and that’s a good move, I think. But if you want to know what this Cortana actually does, just call it Siri. Cortana is a knock-off of Apple’s voice-control system Siri.

Fine.

Windows Phones should have something like this. Android phones do. And it certainly happens the other way around, it certainly happens that all firms copy all firms: if something works, it goes everywhere.

But.

When Siri was announced in 2011, Microsoft was not a mensch.

Microsoft’s Craig Mundie told Forbes magazine:

“It’s good marketing, but at least as the technological capability, you could argue that Microsoft has had a similar capability in Windows Phones for more than a year, since Windows Phone 7 was introduced.”

Quoted and mocked in Electronista.com, 23 November 2011

Agony. That ‘similar capability’ was an $800m purchase called TellMe which let Windows Phone users – just about – dictate a text message. Mundie looked like a schoolboy arguing his dad is better than your dad and unfortunately Mundie was Microsoft’s chief research officer. (He’s now Senior Advisor to Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO.)

So here’s your chief research officer either genuinely completely failing to understand a new piece of technology or believing that we won’t understand it and he can get away with saying this. Take your pick: neither is good.

Jean-Louis Gassée – ex-Apple, ex-Be and now oftentimes technology pundit on Twitter, summed it up:

Microsoft Research Chief: We had (something like) Siri before Apple. If true: We’re imbeciles If false: We’re imbeciles.
@gassee on twitter, 9:43pm 23 November 2011

Today, Microsoft is no longer pretending Windows Phone got there first, it’s no longer pretending that its TellMe feature works, it is launching Cortana. And Cortana is naturally better than Siri or Google Now. Microsoft’s dad is now bigger than your dad, so there.

Three years on from the launch of Siri, Microsoft’s new Cortana really ought to be good or there’s no point launching it. First reports are that it has fine new features, that it works. But the launch could’ve gone better. BBC News:

…But other parts of the presentation went less smoothly. The app repeatedly failed to convert the weather forecast from Celsius to Kelvin, and also misunderstood a request to make a phone call.

BBC News Online 2 April 2014

If a rival beats you to something, they have beaten you to it. You can’t change that. It would be nice and I argue that it would be disarmingly smart to acknowledge and even praise it. But you don’t have to.

You just have to choose to not look like an arse over it.

Use Microsoft Office for free on iPad – kinda

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It's a trick, but it might be useful if you don't want to pay a subscription just to make one twiddle in a one Word document. As of today – 28 March 2014 – Microsoft Office for iPhone is completely free. Not just free as in you can read a document but must pay to edit or create ones, it's completely free.

But you can run iPhone apps on your iPad. They don't look great. This one doesn't look as good as the proper iPad version of Office released yesterday. But it is Office and it will open Word and Excel documents. Possibly also PowerPoint but, seriously.

You do still have to sign up for a Microsoft account and there are myriad better ways to write and edit documents than on the scaled-up iPhone Office but it works.

Get Microsoft Office for iPhone (it's one app with Word, Excel and the other one together) here.

Get Microsoft Office for iPad here – if you want

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It's been a long time since I would've automatically bought Microsoft Word for anything, for anywhere, let alone for my iPad. Word's last killer feature was that everyone else had it and everyone needed documents sent in that format. Once we couldn't get it on iPad, we said nuts to Microsoft Office and did just fine with everything else. We did so just fine that now Office has come, it's a shrug.

Partly because we don't need it, partly because you have to pay a subscription to use Word, Excel or PowerPoint to actually do any work.

But aren't you curious? Don't you just want to try it out? You're bound to have some Word or Excel documents somewhere and you can read those in Office for iPad. You can read them in anything, really, but you can get Office and you can have at least something of a play, so give it a go.

Except.

Truly, Apple's App Store has some severe problems when you can't find Microsoft Office for iPad on it on the day it launched. Seriously: search for Microsoft Office or Microsoft Word on the iPad App Store and you will get a slew of other apps first. I couldn't find it at all. Searching for just the word Microsoft is worse.

But somehow Microsoft OneNote pops up in various searches and if you select that, there's a Related tab which does show you Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Don't bother digging, I've done that, here are the direct links:

Word:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/microsoft-word-for-ipad/id586447913?mt=8

Excel:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/microsoft-excel-for-ipad/id586683407?mt=8

PowerPoint (seriously, you want PowerPoint?)
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/microsoft-powerpoint-for-ipad/id586449534?mt=8

Notice the /gb/ part of those addresses: these are the UK (or Great Britain) links but tap them wherever you are, iTunes will figure it out.

Even if it's the best-ever implementation of PowerPoint, that presentation app would come a distant fifth out of the three anyway. Excel is certainly the most powerful and least top-heavy of the three. But I am a writer and I've got form writing about word processors so it is Word I naturally go for. And without yet schlepping through setting up a SkyDrive (or whatever the lawyers require Microsoft to call that now) and definitely without paying around $10/month or about $100/year just to experiment with typing, I've gone for it and got it and am now deleting it.

Good to see it finally arrive. Good to see it seemingly well-worked out. I just need a compelling reason to buy it and it's been many years since its mere existence on iPad would be enough.

How to pick the right To Do app for you

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Let me do the joke first: if you have a Mac, iPhone or iPad, buy OmniFocus. That’s it, we’re done, thank you for coming, I’m here through Friday, two-drink minimum, see your waitress for details, try the veal.

OmniFocus is so good that I’ve been asked whether the makers pay me to say that. And I really would offer it up as the one-stop, suits-all solution except that you can’t just stop once and it doesn’t suit all. It’s pretty close. Two things held me back from recommending it universally and one is that the Mac version has been hard to use. I’m sure I can’t say anything in detail about the beta release of OmniFocus 2 for Mac but I will certainly tell you that it is really good and much easier to use than it was. I’m saying easier, I’m not saying easy. But OmniFocus 1 was always worth the effort it took to learn it, OmniFocus 2 gets you its powerful features much more readily and clearly.

The other thing that has held me back from universal recommendation, though, hasn’t changed. And it won’t change. OmniFocus only runs on Macs, iPhones and iPads. There’s no Android, Linux or Windows versions and seemingly there never will be. I’m fine with that. Better the company stays great on one platform than it becomes okay on a few.

But it does mean I have difficulty recommending To Do apps. Actually, I won’t blindly recommend specific ones – not even OmniFocus when it comes down to it – because everyone is different and the best I can do is point you to some great and good To Do apps. In my latest The Blank Screen workshop, I discussed specific To Do software and hit a snag. To Do apps for iPhone: legion. To Do apps for Android: myriad. To Do apps for Windows Phones: hello?

Try this yourself. Do a google search on “best to do apps for Windows Phone”. You will get many results and several will be articles that state they include such things as To Do apps – but they don’t. I’ve read many top tens, top twenties, top something else and found not one single To Do app in there.

At the other end of the scale, if you have an iPhone, you’ve already got a good To Do app. It’s called Reminders and it’s very basic but what it does, it does very well. Reminders invented the Location Reminder idea – the way that when I leave a certain client’s office, my iPhone will tell me to send them an invoice – which I think should be mandatory now for all To Do apps.

Mandatory is a hard word. To Do apps are also a great example of when the word specifications is bollocks. I do recommend that you try many different apps but if, in so doing, you decided to write up a spec sheet of what they all did, it wouldn’t help you. Remember the Milk would score high for being on the web as well as Macs and iOS; OmniFocus would score low for being limited to Apple’s gear. Yet Remember the Milk isn’t right for me and OmniFocus is. Though I love the name Remember the Milk.

You can’t quantify experiences like using the right To Do app. But you can try.

Picking the right To Do app for you means testing out a lot. But you can limit how many you have to try or buy with this one simple thing: don’t look at a To Do app for mobile phones and tablets or for desktop Macs and PCs or for using online, if it doesn’t have Start Dates. These may be called something else like Defer Until (that’s what OmniFocus calls them and I don’t like that). But when you enter or edit a task, you must have the ability to prevent yourself seeing it until you need it.

Follow. I’m doing The Blank Screen at the Stratford Literary Festival in May. I do not need and I do not want to see that on my To Do list until it’s time to prepare for it in about mid-April. So I don’t. “Prepare presentation for Stratford” is in my To Do list but it has a Start Date of 15 April and until that day, I won’t see it. I can look for it, I can see it when I review all my tasks, but each day as I look to see what I’ve got to do, Stratford will not be one of them – until it’s supposed to be.

Start Dates are as vital as Due Dates and if you use them, they are gold. But even if you don’t and never will, the fact that an app has them is a good indication that the app is powerful. Maybe you don’t need powerful features, probably you do, but it’s better to have them available, isn’t it?

 

Thoroughly biased app recommendations

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But not my bias.

Staff at the fairly new site The Sweet Setup have jotted down a lot – a lot – of apps that they use on iOS and Macs. What's good about it is this is a collection of apps that a group of people have tried and tested, yes, but also come to rely on. There's no attempt to calculate a score or to compare things very much so there are many times that competing apps are mentioned just because they are what the Sweet Setup staff genuinely use.

What's not so good is the repetition in the article. It's divided into useful general categories like Productivity but then only seemingly-useful ones like Mac, iPhone and iPad. If you just dip in to one, you're fine. But I have and rely on the three equally soI read the whole article – until the repetition got too irritating. If something is mentioned in the iPhone section and there is also an iPad version, it gets listed there too along with almost identical text. Almost. Someone has obviously decided they can't repeat the text verbatim but they haven't done anything very good about it.

So read with that one caveat, okay? Here's the direct link to the piece but do then also take a look around the rest of The Sweet Setup.

Windows alternatives to OmniFocus

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Pity me. I go around doing workshops about being a productive writer and I've even written a book about it (The Blank Screen: Productivity for Creative Writers, UK edition, US edition) And it all makes sense, it all works – I promise you that and I have such gorgeous tweets and emails from people telling me so – but there is a big problem. It's the To Do list.

When I started this, the problem was that I'm on a Mac and quite a few people go for that there Windows thing. And my To Do manager of choice only runs on Macs. Actually, I say it's the To Do manager of my choice, I think it's more the To Do manager of my heart and soul. It used to be that in a workshop I would put up a slide showing you OmniFocus and where to get it. And then I'd say: “If you know a Windows equivalent, it would be a huge help for me to hear about it.” Or something like that.

But there are two problems now: I can't automatically and easily evangelise OmniFocus because the app is in a bit of a flux as new versions are coming.

OmniFocus for iPhone has already been radically updated and I like it a lot. OmniFocus for iPad hasn't and won't be until OmniFocus 2 for Mac is done. Do you buy now or wait? It's easy with the iPhone version: buy it. It's sort-of easy with the Mac one: buy the current OmniFocus 1 for Mac and you'll get version 2 for free when it's released. But OmniFocus 1 for Mac is hard work. I understand it now and I adore the power, but it took me a long time to get there. Even last year's failed OmniFocus 2 beta was a significant improvement in some key areas so surely OF 2 will be too. So I'd wait for OmniFocus 2.

When you buy any Mac version of OmniFocus, do it from the main Omni Group website itself, don't go through the Mac App Store. As handy as that is, there are problems upgrading for free when you have bought via the App Store.

You have no choice with the iPad and iPhone ones and that's also why I hesitate: the iPad one is already the best of the three, can they actually make it any better? Very likely.

But here's the thing. I have all three versions of OmniFocus and I use them all. But when OmniFocus 2 for iPad or Mac comes out, I'm buying them again immediately.

Because I truly don't know of any other To Do software that is this good.

I ask about that and about Windows and so far so far nobody has ever piped up with an answer during the workshop, during the after-session nattering (possibly my favourite part) or over the many emails I get later.

That's not a scientific or statistically valid sampling of people to call from. For the most part, I don't presume any computer knowledge and I don't ask anyone in advance what equipment they prefer to use. But most festival or university blurbs that describe my talk use one of the many texts I give them and they they invariably include the phrase “make your computer work harder for you”. If you were deeply into Windows software already, or Mac for that matter, I don't think that line would sell the workshop to you. So very broadly, I think one can expect fewer than average power-users in a typical workshop. Which means we can equally expect fewer people to know Windows software well enough to tell me what they've got that is as powerful as OmniFocus.

I know I'm right in all this but I want to tell you that I doubt it matters. I doubt that there is actually an equivalent to OmniFocus in Windows. But telling you that now, six years into this post, feels a bit rich. So let me show you what I've been working on for the workshop I'm doing next week. This is a special limited-number workshop for a specific group of writers that I work with on Writing West Midlands' Room 204 programme. I know them so I have an idea of how they like to work and what kit they use. Many are PC fans and I will ask them for advice but I think it's time I stepped up.

So I've been looking into this in detail. Or at least as much detail as you can without owning a Windows PC. I've checked reviews, I've tried all the online web versions I can find and I've downloaded iOS companion apps. No Android, I don't have the facility to test that nor the patience of Job to go through all the Android permutations.

There is nothing in Windows that is as strong as OmniFocus for Macintosh.

However.

I've boiled it down to a few that have one of the core things of OmniFocus: the start date. Let's just take a second to think about that term and what we'd use it for. If I enter a new task in OmniFocus then I can, if I'm fussed, also give it a deadline date. An end date. If I want to, though, I can also stepm in and add what's now called a Defer Until date. In my head it's still a Start Date. But whatever you call it, OmniFocus uses it and uses it for this one specific purpose: to hide it from you.

It's little short of disturbing. You enter a task, tap in a start date and you're sure you've saved it, you're sure, but you cannot see it anywhere.

That's not entirely true. You can see it whenever you do a review of all your tasks. (Reviews are a big part of Getting Things Done, the ideas behind many successful To Do apps like OmniFocus and yet, weirdly, not many systems include it. Note, too, that the iPhone version of OmniFocus hasn't got reviews either. I truly don't understand why and I think it's a big gap. I'm okay because I just do my reviews on the iPad, where it is a gorgeous system. I do think once you start on OmniFocus you'll buy all three versions, but again, they're in flux. I don't know what to suggest.) There are other ways to find and see this new task but the kicker is that you don't get to see it on your main To Do List. It ain't there. At all.

It isn't there on your list and it isn't going to be there until that start date comes around.

Here's a typical, practical use for that. I'm doing The Blank Screen workshop at the Stratford Literary Festival in May. I've done everything I need to do to get that going, now I don't even have to think about it until mid-April when I'll update and rewrite the presentation. So get it off my list until April. I don't want to see it and I don't want to have to keep thinking “Is it April yet?” (Tell me I'm not the only person who would have to stop to think that.)

Typical, practical and shorter example: if I'm doing a particular job every week on a Tuesday, keep things off my list until the Monday when I need to think about them.

I could talk to you all day about OmniFocus and it would just be cruel if you're on a PC. But if we just and only talk about start dates, then we've got some options here. The following are all Windows apps with web versions that work crossplatform: if there's one you fancy, see whether it has a companion app that works with your phone.

Toodledo
By default, there are no start dates. But go to Account Settings and look for the many fields you can choose to switch on for a task. One of them is start dates and once you've ticked that, every task you enter has the option for a start date.

Appigo To Do
I was a big Appigo To Do user until I found OmniFocus. Since then it's become a little suite of programs including a web client and I'm honestly a little confused over what option gets you what. But as of a few months ago, Appigo To Do includes Start Dates.

It's rather poorly done on the iPhone version: you have no way to realise that this icon is for setting the end date and that one is for setting the start date. None. Do what I did: press everything. When you know which button it is, though, you're set.

Well, nearly. Appigo doesn't have the same control as OmniFocus so it's a touch less refined in what does and doesn't show you. But a task with a start date that isn't today will get separated from more urgent tasks on your list.

Asana
This is team-wide To Do management and that would put it outside my usual sphere of interest: I want to make you, personally and specifically you, more productive. Not companies. I reckon if everyone in a firm is as good as you then that's great, but it's you I'm working with.

It also tends to mean complex. Enterprise-wide software takes some learning and I haven't done that. But Asana promises start dates. It's even an automatic thing. Yet I couldn't figure it out.

There's a line somewhere between To Do apps and Project Management software. I think it might be here.

I'm disappointed that there are no start dates in the best-named To Do software ever: Remember the Milk. Going by the chatter on its support forums, there never will be either. So I'm afraid that means RTM is out for me.

They all are, I suppose: I've said before that you'd need Primacord explosive around my waist to get me away from OmniFocus on a Mac, iPhone and iPad. But there is Primacord, it is possible and I thought – I still think – that it will happen that some day there's going to be a better To Do manager. But it isn't today and it unquestionably isn't on a PC.

Mixing sound and vision to get the full picture

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I’m a very visual kind of man but, awkwardly, what I visualise is text. I can see words. If you and I are talking, I can choose to see your words as text. Squint a bit and there it is, word by word, white text on a black background, right in front of my eyes. It’s great for transcriptions. But text is so much a par of me and I am so much a writer through and through that I have ignored other visual ways of looking at detail. Okay, maybe I can see scenes visually when I’m reading or writing a script, but when faced with a problem, I used to always just think it through. More recently, I’ve written it down and thought it through.

But then last week, I had a meeting that was intentionally nebulous. It was clearly a chance to pitch something, but I didn’t know what and I was fairly sure that there were no specifics behind the invitation either. It would be up to me and what I could bring to the meeting.

And I mind-mapped it.

Slapped down everything I could think of that even considered crossing my mind in the week before the meeting. I used MindNode for iPad (£6.99 UK, $9.99 US) so it was with me wherever I went and by the morning of the meeting, I had a completely useless mess. But it was a big mess. Lots of things on it. And I started dragging bits around. This stuff sorta, kinda belonged with those bits over there. This one was daft. That one was actually part of my shopping list and I’d just put it in the wrong app.

And then I’d find one that ignited another small idea so I’d add that.

After a bit of adding and subtracting and moving around, I had three or four solid blocks of ideas that were related. I exported the lot from MindNode to OmniOutliner for iPad (£20.99 UK, $29.99 US) which picked it all up and showed it to me as a hierarchy of text lines instead of a visual bubble of blogs. I work better with text, I may have mentioned this, so that was perfect for me.

Nearly perfect. I really wanted to then hand the lot on from OmniOutliner to OmniFocus, my To Do manager, (iPad £27.99 UK, $39.99 US). I wanted to be able to tick off the ideas as I got through them in the meeting. I wasn’t able to do that on the iPad; I suspect that it’s something that needs me to use OmniOutliner on my Mac (from £34.99 UK, from $49.99 US). I’ve got that and I use it ever increasingly more, but I wasn’t at my office.

So instead I stayed with the text in OmniOutliner. Made some more changes and additions, moved some more things around. And then I worked from that list in the meeting and it went really, really well.

The whole process went well: the mind mapping on to the meeting itself. Enough so that afterwards I tried mind mapping again, this time to figure out what I’m doing with everything, not just this one meeting. I’m still working on it. But it’s proving useful. And while I can’t show you the meeting mind map as it’s naturally confidential, and I obviously can’t show you this new mind map of everything because it’s in progress, I can show you a blurry version. This is what I’m doing now:

 

map

Zippy To Do app watches what you do

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You would need Primacord explosive wrapped around my waist to get me away from using OmniFocus as my To Do manager but that doesn’t mean it has an exclusive on all good ideas. And it doesn’t mean that sometimes I can be rather tempted. Today that temptation is an iOS app called Zippy and it’s because of what it does besides remind you of tasks.

Zippy is the simplest and quickest way to manage tasks and reminders. It provides you with Insights on your habits to help you get better at managing and completing tasks. Here’s what the infographic shows you:

• How many tasks you’ve completed and how many on time
• Completion breakdown by completed early, on time and late
• How far ahead you plan out your tasks and how close to completion time you finish them
• What time of day you’re best at planning and finishing tasks
• Weekday breakdown of when you create and complete your tasks
• How many times you snooze tasks

Zippy on the App Store

I’m not saying I’d like to be told how long it takes me to do a task – Zippy reports the average time from entering a task to ticking it as done – but I’m terribly curious. Not enough to swap from OmniFocus but enough to be very tempted.

If you fancy it too, get it now. Zippy is on sale for 69p UK or 99c US until 4 March. Get it on the iTunes App Store.

More scientific than tossing a coin

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Coin tossing is really more statistics than science, but we use it for making decisions and now there is a app that wants to do it more scientifically. I’m honestly not remotely sure of the science but that’s what the app smart Decisions claims.

You did read that right and I did type it correctly: smart Decisions with a lowercase s.

For 99c US or 69p UK, you get to list choices in a decision and make some criteria. The app calls them criterions: apparently criterion is the correct singular and criteria is the plural but this kinda covers you both ways. You might want to decide what to drink, in which case your criteria might include price, alcoholic or not, and so on. Perhaps location: if you’re in desert, you might take anything going.

The algorithm does some sorting on this and reduces your choices to clearer, more comparable ones – so not New York has more museums than Dulles but rather Dulles is cheaper than NYC – and offers you a decision.

You need to play with it to see if it’s any use to you and I am resistant because of the criterions and the lowercase s. Ridiculous of me, but there you go.

Have a look at the screen grabs and what little detail there is about the app on the iTunes Store here.

‘Mandatory’ applications from a decade ago

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I’ve just found a backup CD that looks like it’s from late 2002 and it’s like a time capsule. Then as now, I was devoted to software and I ran my life through various applications. Of course I mean my professional life as a writer but also, frankly, everything. Not a single day goes by that I don’t use a good half dozen applications and in every case they have earned that spot. They are so good or they are so right for what I need that I can neither comprehend how I worked without them nor conceive how I could ever work without them in the future.

But the future is a funny place. You only have to look to the past to find that out.

This CD is labelled Mac Apps. It’s a backup of my most precious and most used software in 2002. There’s folder of system bits I’ve not bothered to look into yet, there’s a folder I’ve called Nice for some reason. But then there is a folder called Mandatory. Wherever I go, whatever Mac I work on, these are the tools I have to have with me. There are eleven.

Corel WordPerfect 3.5 Enhanced

I’m astonished that this was there as late as 2002. I liked WordPerfect for Mac, I was in a minority there but I did, yet it ceased to exist such a long time ago. I think this was me hanging onto it to the bitter end but the bitter end must’ve come pretty soon afterwards because WordPerfect for Mac doesn’t run on Mac OS X.

Desktop Printer Utility

Not one single clue what this is for.

Disc Burner and Disk First Aid

Notice the c and the k endings. I’m just saying. I could work this pair out if I tried, but it’s not going to happen. Except that I did use a descendent of Disk First Aid just yesterday: Disk Utility. Was it truly ever mandatory, though?

DVD Region Switch Autolauncher

I don’t know what the autolauncher bit did now but region coding, I well remember region coding. This commercial decision to block people from buying DVDs outside their own home region. Even if the DVD they want has never and will never be released there. Nobody with any interest ever stood still for that decision, and I didn’t either.

Final Draft 4.1

I still use Final Draft today. I have version 8.0.3.1 but there is a version 9. I’m unlikely to buy that. But I did buy Final Draft for iPad, it’s still useful enough to me to be worth upgrading sometimes and the Mac one does stay in my dock.

Microsoft Outlook

There’s mandatory because I liked something and there’s mandatory because some firm or client demanded it. Surely this is the latter. I don’t remember there being an Outlook for OS 9, I thought the Mac version was called Entourage around this time. But here it is. And there it goes.

Now Up-to-Date and Contact

Oh, now, these I miss. These I’d be using today if I could. It was actually a pair of applications: Now Up-to-Date was a Calendar and Now Contact was an address book. I remember they worked together very well and that every time I’ve tried an calendar or address book since, I’ve been judging it against these two. If I imagine I would’ve held on to WordPerfect for as long as I could, I know I wouldn’t have given up NUDC willingly. But times move on, hardware and operating systems move on, you can neither buy NUDC now nor run it on any current machines. It’s a loss. Mind you, I’m no longer the power user I was for calendars so the one that comes on my Mac is fine enough for me. Especially as OmniFocus, my current beloved To Do manager shows you today’s tasks along with a peek at the calendar for today’s events. So useful. But I’ll raise a mug of tea to NUDC tonight.

OED

And I will sob about this. Weirdly, it’s not six hours since I told someone the tale. Back when I worked on computer magazines, journalists used to blag more than they blogged. Some people got press trips to Vegas, practically everyone got computers on short- and long-term loans. My biggest blah was this. The Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM. The original disc is still on my shelf. But neither it nor this backup copy has worked in a long time. I’d have said since the 1990s but presumably I’m wrong. Still, it’s another victim of changing and developing platforms and operating systems. I miss this more than I can say and I don’t believe you can buy an up to date version: you can only subscribe to an online one for more than I can afford or blag.

PageSpinner 4.1

Not a clue.

Virex

What? Anti-virus on a Mac in 2002 and I called it Mandatory? Let’s just walk away from that. I was young.

I wonder what hardware I was using then. I think it was a black PowerBook but I’m rubbish with computer names and models, I only remember what I do with them.

I’m feeling all nostalgic for a time not a heartbeat ago. I’m feeling as nostalgic for the OED on CD-ROM as you might be for whatever music was in the top twenty in your school days.

But I look at each of these applications, at least the ones I can remember what they did, and I can see how much better things are today. NUDC would look out of date, I know. Seriously, I know: there was a failed project to bring it back in the 2000s and I was right there using the betas and contributing. OmniFocus plus OS X’s address book and calendar together beat NUDC. I know.

Yet in another ten or twelve years, will I even remember what OmniFocus does? It’s not like there’s a huge clue in the title.

Thanks for letting me tell you all this. It’s been a buzz.