You join me live…

It’s 00:14 on Saturday night, leaning over into Sunday. I had a terrific evening seeing My Big Fat Cowpat Wedding in the very darkest corner of Kidderminster – Kidderminster isn’t dark but we got there and the venue was another hour further on into the countryside.

But now I’m home and on the good side, the smell of roasting chicken coming from the kitchen is rather grand. I’m roasting one ready to make up into lunches and suchforth tomorrow. Wish I’d remembered earlier or really just been around my home long enough to do it earlier. Still, it’s a nice smell and it’s nearly enough to keep me awake while I wait for the oven timer to go off.

There is a bad side.

I’m listening to the sound of seven leaks, seven rhythmic drop drops of water in our hallway. They’re close enough to one another that I suspect there’s just a single leak that is sending water running out all over the place. But the plumber I rang isn’t close enough to do anything about it tonight. The certainty that I woke him up coupled to the triple certainty that anything with the word emergency in it costs triple means I’m officially happy waiting for the morning. I’m not really.

You can tell from the way I’m writing to you. I’m using the fact that I’m too worried about the water to sleep yet too tired to stay awake. I’m using it to give me time to talk to you, time to roast a chicken.

If nothing else, I’m using my time.

The limits of iOS 8 Extensions so far

You knew this would be the case: Extensions sounded great and they turn out to be mostly pretty very good indeed. But not up there in the greatness that you’d expected.

Previously… Extensions are a new feature for iPhones and iPads that let your apps play nice. You hardly have to know the feature is there but if you have an app that has Extensions, you can use them very easily. So for instance, when I browse to a site in Safari I can now call up my username and password for it from 1Password while still staying in Safari.

Except.

These things will change and develop over time as people come to use this service and start talking about what they’re not doing yet. Please count this as my talking about what Extensions are not doing yet yet I’d like them to. Even more than I liked the fact that I just got to say “yet yet” for the first time in my adult life.

I’m a writer. Just nod at me.

So. All this is true and all this works great, but the first disappointment was that 1Password can’t enter credit card details for you. The full Mac app can, the iOS app can, but it can’t do it via an Extension into Safari. This is a big shame for me because I buy a lot online and it would save time.

But the second disappointment is more insiduous. I’m sure that the credit card bit will change – 1Password’s maker Agile Bits said so, for one thing – but I don’t know that this other problem will. So let’s please hear it for The Other Problem with 1Password in Safari Via Extentions.

If you’re on a website, you can tap to have 1Password fill in all your details for you. But you have to be on exactly the right site. I’m struggling to reproduce this problem but I’ve stumbled on it many times. You go to a site, tap to have 1Password log in for you and because there is some difference between the site address you’re on and the site address you saved your login for, 1Password doesn’t work.

I think that’s probably a good idea. Make us wait a second to consider what we’re doing and that will probably mean we make fewer rash logins to pages that aren’t what we think they are.

Only, it doesn’t make us wait a second. It makes us wait forever. The 1Password screen comes up and includes nothing. Nothing whatever.

I would like the option to search my 1Password account for what I need.

I also wish there were a way to use 1Password to log in to apps.

Or stepping away from 1Password, why can’t there be – or when will there be, please – a way to use Extensions to save Facebook invitation details? Facebook would rather you lived in its calendar but I don’t so a tap and a tap and a completed appointment entry would be useful.

Especially this week where – though my fault rather than technology’s – I managed to get a date wrong and arrived 24 hours late.

If only I could blame that on Bendgate or something.

Day One journal app goes free (briefly)

Even if you can’t get around to looking at using it yet, grab this now: the acclaimed Day One diary app has just been made free for iOS.

I bought it a couple of years ago and it changed things. I recorded more diary details than I ever normally do and I enjoyed it.

I made a calculated decision to move away from it, though, because I use Evernote so much. I thought it would be the same, that I would journal just as much. Technically speaking, I was right. There’s no real difference between tapping out a diary entry in Day One than there is a note in my Journal notebook in Evernote.

Except that there is a massive difference. For the months I used Day One, I bet I wrote an entry every day. In the year since I stopped, maybe I’ve made two notes.

I should go back to Day One and if you haven’t already, you should go get into it now.