iOS

First look: iOS 10

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If you have an iPhone, it’s just told you that there is an update to iOS 10 available: say yes. You want it. If you’re buying an iPhone about now, it’s what you’ll get on it anyway. And this is all good: iOS 10 brings new productivity features to the phone and actually makes it feel like a new iPhone.

It always does. Every year, Apple releases a new version of the phone’s core operating system and it looks more whizzy, it adds big and small new features, it takes some features away. And it’s free.

From our productivity perspective, I think there are really two improvements: one that we all get, one that only people with newer iPhones do.

That second one is the quickest to explain: if you have an iPhone 6s or 7, or the Plus versions of either, then you can now just pick up your phone for it to light up. It’s like the Apple Watch: when you turn your wrist to see the time, the Watch shows you the time. Otherwise the screen is off. On these iPhones, this is called Raise to Wake and it would be a trivial gimmick except for the other improvement.

There is now much more information and much more you can do with it on the iPhone’s lock screen. So the screen that used to just say the time and Swipe to Open, now packs in a lot of detail that means you won’t need to open. (Swipe to Open is gone now, by the way, and I miss it. Even after two months of using iOS 10 in the beta programme, I miss the familiar swooshing swipe. It’s gone because of TouchID, the feature that means the phone recognises your fingerprint. That fingerprint, that touch, is enough to unlock the phone without the old-fashioned swiping.)

From the first beta release right up to today, I had found the new information on the lock screen pretty useful. With your phone awake, you could swipe the entire screen to the right and get a series of little widgets in a column. I’ve got my OmniFocus To Do list showing the next tasks on my plate, I’ve got a short weather notification, a calculator, a top news story.

These widgets are the easiest to explain and to understand if you’ve not seen any of this in action: you read that last sentence and you got it. They each show some information that I might want. The End. But they also let me act on it: I can tap a To Do task as done, for instance.

Now that the beta period is over and iOS 10 is available for everyone – if your iPhone or iPad can’t run iOS 10 then you won’t be offered it – things are getting still better. App developers have been releasing hugely improved widgets. For instance, a writing app I particularly like called Drafts 4 has a new one where right in the screen I can read my latest notes or start a new one. OmniFocus is about to be updated with the ability to add a new task right there in the lock screen, without having to find and open the app. It’s not that opening apps is exactly a slog, but the faster you can jot down a task, the more likely you are to do that and then the more likely you are later to do the task.

Back in iOS 8 and 9, I pretty much ignored these lock screen widgets and to the extent that I’m not even sure what they looked like. Over the course of the beta I’ve found myself swiping right to launch an app called Workflow a lot or to read the news. In the 24 hours or so since iOS 10 was officially released and I’ve been seeing just how many apps I use have now been updated, I have the problem of wanting to put too much into this screen.

There’s a point when you’ve got so much and you have to scroll so far to see it all that you lose the benefit of the speed and I am approaching that. Still, right now, I can pick up my phone and tap a button to log expenses (via Workflow), tick off a To Do task and see what the next one is, write a Draft note, see what’s happened to this heatwave we’ve been promised, use a calculator and read the news.

I can do all this – and I do. You will. Once you’ve realised that this is all there, once you’ve got it into your muscle memory, you’ll use it.

This all comes from swiping right but there is something you can do by swiping left that helps, too: wake up your phone, swipe left and you’re in the camera. I find I’m so quick using TouchID when I pick up the phone that I’m gone by this lock screen stage but when I remember, swiping left into the camera is handy and fast.

There’s a lot of this swiping going on, though, and it can be confusing. You now know about swiping left and right, but there’s also swiping up. That brings up a control centre that has buttons for switching wifi on and off, turning on the phone’s torch, and another 11 possible things. This control centre comes when you swipe up from anywhere, the lock screen, the home screen or within an app and I use it more than I expected.

I’m only now starting to use something else about it: when this control centre is up on your screen, swipe left and you get music controls. Just play/pause, skip and volume, but often there’s not much else you want. I’ve found that a fast way to pause a podcast when I get somewhere I’m going.

One last swipe. From anywhere, you can swipe your finger down from the top of the phone and you get Notification Centre. This used to be a pointless mess of information telling you things like there was a Facebook message sent to you sixteen million years ago. Now it’s better at showing you useful and recent notifications: if you saw something flash on your screen but you weren’t quick enough to read it, you’ll find it waiting in here.

Swipe to the left on any of these notifications and you get the option to see more, to get more detail, really just to open the app the notification came from.

Then this is either great or confusing, I don’t know: when you have your list of notifications, you can swipe to the right and the whole screen moves over to show you your lock screen widgets.

It took me a while to get used to where things are and even today I’m relearning as newly updated apps are making all of this more useful. In every possible way, iOS 10 is an improvement and it speeds up our work.

Well, nearly every possible way. There is one thing that’s gone and I miss it greatly. Sometime during iOS 9’s year in the spotlight, Apple added a feature to Mail where you could tap to select every message at once and then tap to delete them all in one go. That’s gone. You’re back to having to either delete one by one or mark each one separately, then hitting delete. I have a catch-all mailbox that I check each day for the occasional real message and then want to delete everything else. I remember the pleasure when I found this new option and I am still feeling the pain of it being gone.

One more thing. If you look into this topic of iOS 10 and updates today, it won’t take long before an Android user will tut and say that their phone of choice has had all these features before. Say this to them: “Show me on yours”.

It’s peculiar how important our phones have become but they are perhaps the one device that makes us more productive than we ever were. And now iOS 10 helps us more.

Don’t buy anything from Apple today

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Apple is making an announcement later today – 18:00 BST, 10:00 PDT – and apparently you can find out pretty much everything already by reading rumour websites. I’ve got an easier solution: just don’t buy any Apple products until after the announcement.

You can wait until tomorrow, you know you can. In the meantime, I will be watching the announcement because Apple puts on a bit of a show. It’s exactly the same show every time but it’s usually well done and I usually end up at least wanting to spend some money afterwards, if I don’t actually end up spending some money afterwards.

Times being what they are, ie September, though, you can be sure that iOS 10 will be included in the show and that’s free. It’s been in beta for some months and I’ve grown terribly keen on almost all of it.

You can watch the Apple announcement direct from the company itself right here. One thing about it does give me pause: the last time Apple made one of its announcements I was writing for a website called MacNN and had a really good time covering it. It was like being back in a newsroom. Now MacNN is closed and so I’ll be watching today’s Apple news like a viewer again. That won’t change the news and it can’t matter to anyone but me, but it matters to me.

Recommended: Drafts 4 for iPhone and iPad

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I keep mentioning this software Drafts 4 and often it’s entirely unconscious, more a consequence of how I write so much in it than through any deliberate plan to sell it to you. But I got the chance to expand on exactly why I like it so much when MacNN made it the topic of a Living With column. These are pieces about what something is like after a lot of use, after a long time. It’s interesting because most technology pieces are about today’s new releases and there is only so much you can possibly learn in a short review.

Whereas with a long process of reflection like this, there’s time to have discovered:

It is just a place to write. More than a text editor, less than a word processor, I have been opening it up to write down the odd stray thought for a couple of years. I’ve been opening it up to write the minutes of a meeting. To write a short story. To prepare a script for a presentation. If my brain isn’t somehow befuddled into believing I must open some other writing tool, I automatically open Drafts.

If that were all I did — open, write, rinse, repeat — then I’d be more than happy. I cannot, cannot define or explain this, but there is something pleasurable about writing in Drafts, about the physical typing of words into it, that I don’t get in Word or Pages.

Living With: Drafts 4 (iOS) – William Gallagher, MacNN (27 May 2015)

It isn’t all I do in Drafts 4. Read the full piece for more detail, more explanation and even more enthusing.

Drafts 4 is available for iOS and costs £7.99 in the App Store.

How Microsoft Word became useful again

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Originally, Microsoft refused to put Word on the iPhone or iPad and trusted that its millions of users would go oh, okay then, we won’t buy an iPad. It didn’t work out quite like that and a fair short summary is that Microsoft shot itself in the foot many, many times.

For once people bought iPads and were therefore required to use alternatives to Word, they discovered there are alternatives to Word. Suddenly all of Word’s brilliance gets forgotten and all of its outrageously irritating problems get remembered as we go discover we can get more done without it. In truth we actually can’t: Word is the most powerful word processor there is but with great power comes stupid problems so something which technically does less is much more useful because we can use it more. If you can get your writing done without Word changing the formatting on you, without Word simply crashing just because you dragged in a picture like it said you could, then you get more writing done.

Shunning the iPad was Microsoft doing its once typical and once extremely successful technique of pitching its bulk against a competitor but this time the competitor won and the blowback damage to Microsoft was huge. Word ceased to be ubiquitous. People stopped buying Word just because it was Word. Not just people who were buying iPads but people who were buying word processors for any machines. Including Windows PCs.

Good. We are now back in a world where you have many choices for how you write your words and if choice can be overrated, it’s better than when we just had the one.

But last year Microsoft finally brought Word to iOS and I wrote about how surprisingly good it was, particularly on the iPhone. I’ve changed my mind a bit since then: I hardly touch it on my iPhone but I do keep Word on my iPad and I use it from time to time. It’s been steadily improved too, plus the original slightly messy business of how you could read but not write in it unless you paid some money is gone. You can now use Word without a subscription and it’s worth keeping.

I don’t find myself moving over to it for everything, even though I’d like to find one single application I could use everywhere. As it is, I’ll write on Drafts 4 for iOS, or Pages for iOS and OS X, on Evernote everywhere, Simplenote in many places and occasionally Word. I feel slightly schizophrenic which is fine, but I also find my writing is all over the place. I’ve a hundred or more pieces in TextEdit. A dozen in OmniOutliner. It can take me a spell to find what I’m sure I wrote the other day.

So I can appreciate what this fella Andrew Cunningham says in Ars Technica. The short summary is that he’s now turned. It took the new beta version of Word for Mac to tip him over, but having the one word processor on OS X, iOS, Windows and Android has snared him:

So yes, Microsoft didn’t make it to the iPad or to any of these other platforms as quickly as it could have or should have. There will be people, including some at Ars, who found other non-Microsoft solutions that worked for them in the meantime. But I find myself revising my initial “too little too late” stance to something closer to “better late than never.” A subtle distinction, maybe, but an important one.

You win, Microsoft: How I accidentally went back to Microsoft Word – Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica (20 June 2015)

Read the full piece.

OmniPlan and OmniGraffle now run on iPhones

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The Omni Group’s excellent project management application OmniPlan and its impressive graphics software OmniGraffle have both had major new releases with many new features. Dwarfing them all, though, is that the two can now also run on iPhone.

Previously… there was a Mac version and an iPad one but no iPhone. Now that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus have big screens, the Omni Group has been moving their apps to the phone.

That’s obviously good: even the bigger screen of the iPhone 6 Plus is not as handy as an iPad or Mac but you always have your phone with you so the usefulness is high. What’s nicer still, though, is that if you already have these apps for iPad, you’ve now got them for your iPhone. For free.

It’s the same app in both cases. Just go get them from your Purchases section in the App Store. That’s still true even if, like me, your iPhone is the older, smaller type, an iPhone 5.

I’ve not been on the beta tests for either of these but I have for the other two Omni Group apps are that coming to iPhone very soon. And I can tell you that having OmniOutliner available on my iPhone has been a huge boon. I don’t have to tell you that having OmniFocus on my iPhone is superb.

Of these four apps, only OmniFocus was already on the iPhone – but it was there in an iPhone-only edition. That was good, I used that thousands upon thousands of times, but now that’s gone and instead we get the iPad edition turned universal. That means we get features that were previously only on the iPad. And yes, that means Reviews. We finally get OmniFocus’s reviews feature on iPhone.

I have been using this lots. Lots.

Ulysses for iPad is here

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Cue frustrated Scrivener users switching. Ulysses and Scrivener for Mac are both writing environments – more than word processors, they provide tools for gathering research and using it in books and scripts and stories – but as of today, only one of them is on the iPad.

It’s a big deal and it’s made bigger by the fact that Ulysses for iPad is good. I’m doing a full review for MacNN.com but my impressions after a few days with the beta are all positive. Ulysses for iPad is Ulysses for Mac, on an iPad. It looks the same, works the same and so far all the features I’ve been trying are the same.

In comparison, Scrivener for iPad has been promised for years. There is reason to think it will come soon but it’s proved a longer job than expected. Presumably it’s because it’s a very difficult job: you don’t just want Scrivener or Ulysses on iPad, you need them to work with their Mac counterparts. You want to be able to pick up your iPad and continue writing something you began on your Mac.

That means documents being the same all the time, being synced across the platforms. But with Scrivener, one single document is really a collection of many parts. Keeping everything together and everything mobile has tasked the Scrivener people.

Ulysses has managed it. It’s not really the same thing, the two applications are not really that similar, but the existence of this iPad version is a huge win for Ulysses.

Check it out on the App Store.

Essentials: TextExpander

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I just wrote this on MacNN.com:

Get this essential Mac tool for speeding up your typing

Here’s the thing: yes, TextExpander speeds up your typing, but some of us like typing — and some of us are 120 words per minute. If you’re one of the latter, that doesn’t automatically rule out that you wouldn’t be interested in the venerable TextExpander’s speed, but we figured it wouldn’t be that much use to us; or so we thought. Doubtlessly, if you are a slower typist, then the speed is the key reason to buy TextExpander — but it does so much else, it is so useful in other ways, that we are now dependent on it, and wish we’d bought it ten years ago.

Hands On: TextExpander 4 for OS X, TextExpander 3 for iOS – William Gallagher, Electronista (18 January 2015

Well, I wrote that and then I wrote a lot more, almost every bit of it finding new ways to enthuse about this software. It is that good, seriously. I found out while writing this review that I’ve been using TextExpander for 10 months. Can’t believe it – and yet I find that easier to comprehend than the fact that there was ever a time I wasn’t.

Read the full piece.

Excellent new app: Evernote Scannable

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Seriously, if this had come out a few hours earlier I’d have made it the buy of the week on The Blank Screen newsletter – and it’s free, that’s a great buy of the week. I wonder if I can make it buy of next week?

This is all Evernote Scannable does: it scans business cards – or receipts or anything, really. But it’s how it does it and what it does then, that’s what is so good.

It’s good enough that I bid to be the one to review it on MacNN and this is part of what I’ve just said there now:

It’s not often that software makes you laugh, at least not for good reasons. But the new Evernote Scannable is so fast at scanning documents that on our very first go we failed to get our thumb out of the way quick enough and it scanned that. We really did laugh at this big, fuzzy thumb – and were then delighted and surprised and genuinely impressed with what happened next. Evernote Scannable removed our thumb from the image. Automatically. The final result has it replaced by the same white as the document we were aiming at.

In this case, the effort was fairly pointless as our thumb obscured half the planet and we had to redo it. But you’re going to use Evernote Scannable a lot for business cards and this means you don’t need to put them on a table before scanning. Just hold them toward the camera, try to cover up anything important with your fingers, and the app will scan what you want it to scan.

Hands On: Evernote Scannable – William Gallagher, MacNN (9 January 2015)

It is very fast at scanning, it’s not really scanning as I think of the word. Just wave your phone at something and, wallop, scanned in, where’s the next one? You can zoom through getting receipts – I detest receipts but you have to have ’em – and once you’ve said that yep, this is what you want to happen, a single tap sends the scans off to Evernote.

Meet someone, see their business card, snap and it’s in your Evernote account. Without a thumb.

Read the whole piece, go on. I get really enthusiastic in it.

Review: PDFpen 2 for iPad

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I’ve started writing reviews for MacNN.com and just once in a while I think some of the pieces are useful for us as writers and creatively productive kinds of people. I mentioned WordTarget very recently but this is more serious and I think more useful: it’s an app for reading PDFs on your iPad. Now, there are eleventy-billion such apps but this is much more useful because it lets you edit the PDFs.

Let me explain in this extract from the full MacNN piece:

Here’s a true story about what PDFpen 2 does. A Windows-based firm produced a year-end report that was about 80 pages and most importantly took many, many hours to create. It was all highly complex, auto-generated figures — and one huge spelling mistake. They didn’t see the mistake until the final PDF was about to be sent out to clients. Fixing it meant re-running the whole process, re-calculating everything: it meant not sending the report until tomorrow.

Luckily, one guy in the firm had PDFpen on his iPad. He opened that PDF, typed in the correct spelling, sent the PDF on its way. Total time: five minutes — and three of those had been spent on panicking.

Hands On: PDFpen 2 for iPad (iOS) – William Gallagher, MacNN (23 December 2014)

Read the full piece because PDFpen 2 for iPad is perhaps the software I most recommend out of around thirty pieces I’ve done for MacNN so far.

Got it: an iPad app for transcribing interview recordings

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Excuse me while I do a spot of SEO: interview, interviewee, interviewing, interviewer, journalist, ipad, audio, sound, recording, transcribe, transcription.

There. Hopefully this means the next poor sod searching for this type of app can avoid spending the ENTIRE EVENING on the hunt. Here’s the thing. I have to be away from my office tomorrow but I have a very pressing job where I need to transcribe an interview I recorded some weeks ago. I hate transcribing with the same passion that EVERY SINGLE WRITER EVER does and I just wanted some help.

Specifically, I wanted an iPad version of Transcriptions, a freeware app for Mac that simply lets you play back audio while you type out what you hear. Missed a bit? Tap a keystroke and the audio scrubs back 5, 10, 15, 20 seconds. Nothing in all this land will make transcription fun but this helps. My great regret is that I didn’t discover it until I’d transcribed fully two thirds of the interviews I’d done for a Blake’s 7 book.

Now I just need that on iPad, please. You quickly start throwing your hopes out of the window when you can’t find something so I was reduced to thinking I’d have a notetaking app that just played back audio. A bit. Enough to save me having to skip back and forth between two apps.

It turns out that there are three types of application that get returned when you search for terms like “best ipad audio transcription” or “best iOS apps for journalists”. The first and most common search result is the transcription service. For various prices and with various different trial periods, you can record audio in the app and send it off to a human being somewhere to do your transcription job for you, for a fee.

Fine. Not what I want, but fine.

The second type of app does what I want but only to audio that you record with the app. Nice, fine, but useless to me with my existing recording.

How long has it taken you to read this far? Did you skim? Good for you. The answer is that the best option available is Notability for iPad. It costs £1.99 for iPad and iPhone together. It’s only £1.99 but it’s also a lesson to get good apps when they fall free, even if you don’t want them. I got Notability last May when Apple made it App of the Week. I downloaded it, tried it, saw why people liked it so but felt it wasn’t for me and I deleted it.

Now all these months on, I can just re-download it. And I did so after a couple of hours of trying everything else.

Notability is not perfect. But I can import the audio from Dropbox, I can play it back and there is a 10-second rewind button. I would like a way to skip back 10 seconds from the keyboard as reaching up to tap that button does break the flow of my typing.

But tomorrow I will be sitting in coffee houses alternating between transcribing interviews for a book and writing a script. I could do without the hell that is transcription but otherwise that sounds like a pretty good day to me.