“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.
They don’t, actually. The word productivity doesn’t come in to it. But the company has published lists of the best apps of 2013 for iPhone and iPad – and amongst all the games, there is some tremendously useful software.
I’m not sure what the metric is for defining best: there’s certainly a heavy weighting due to the number of times they’ve each been downloaded, I imagine sales income must be a factor, but there is also an editor’s pick element. You can see the entire list, which features movies, music and TV too, here but note this takes you to iTunes automatically if you have it installed: http://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZContentLink.woa/wa/link?path=Bestof2013
If you don’t have iTunes installed, it takes you to a very boring page suggesting you install iTunes.
But while we’re talking, here are the highlights.
The language-teaching software is the App of the Year for iPhones. Interestingly, the App of the Year for iPads is less immediately obviously productive: it’s Disney Animated, a tour of the film studio’s work. None of the runners-up for iPad are work tools but the iPhone’s pick includes Citymapper, a free journey planner for London and New York. It’s good, it’s free and it’s about New York? I’m sold.
There are also further lists of, presumably, didn’t-quite-make-it items and these include some noteworthy entries. For the iPhone, there’s the calendar replacement Fantastical 2 and the iOS IFTTT app for the If This Then That service. On iPad, the list features the superb Reeder 2 – can you tell that’s the only one so far that I’ve used, and used a lot?
But if you look away from software and into the other categories that iTunes sells, you get some notable inclusions such as Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In and the particularly absorbing Letters of Note by Shaun Usher.
Seriously, though, how many links must a man write down? Have I overdone it this time?
Oh, I will never cease to be impressed by location stuff. You can’t believe the number of times I now use location-based reminders on my iPhone: “Remind me to phone Angela when I leave here”, “Remind me to buy milk at the supermarket”. On and on and on it goes. How did we get by without it?
And today IFTTT – don’t you always have to stop to count the Ts in that? I should set up a TextExpander snippet, hang on… right, I have now, thanks – where were were?
Yes, IFTTT (used my TextExpander snippet there, so I did) has added location features. You have to be using iOS but you can now have IFTTT see when you get somewhere and then make it do something. Their examples are:
“Nearly home? Direct Message the person who should know [via Twitter]”
“When you arrive in New York City, send yourself a map of the subway”
That first one reminds me of the days when so many of us believed we were alone in giving three rings and hanging up when we needed to tell someone that. And the second makes me shudder at the thought of the download cost. I’d want a “Before you leave the UK, send yourself all the big stuff like PDFs and images”.
But the idea is there and it’s a gorgeous addition to IFTTT.
Read some more here: https://ifttt.com/ios_location
Full disclosure: I’m an OmniFocus obsessive (nee user) and I’ve said before that it would take primacord explosive wrapped around my waist to get me to move away from it.
But then, I was pretty addicted to Appigo’s To Do app before finding OmniFocus so I can be moved. More, OmniFocus isn’t cheap. Actually, I think it is ridiculously cheap given how much use I get out of it and how enormously it has helped me but if you buy it and it just doesn’t do it for you, then it’s expensive. There are three OmniFocus versions (iPhone, iPad and Mac) and I spent £80 ($130 US) on all three.
Whereas SlydooTasks is 69p or 99c US. It’s too soon to say that it’s being recommended to me but I am hearing about it and the thing that keeps being said is that it is particularly good at filtering your tasks: letting you see the wood for the trees.
Before you spend that whole 69p and, more significantly, the time that it will take you to explore a new app and decide if it’s the one for you, take a look at a YouTube video by the developer that walks through it all: http://youtu.be/g7wJJhc5sk0
And if you then fancy it, SlydooTasks is in the iTunes App Store (UK link, US link).
The company’s announced free text and data for UK users travelling around the States. I’ve just come back from California and they’re right: my iPhone usage had to drop like a stone for fear of the bill.
I was once lost in France for ten minutes – er, I didn’t just teleport there and get confused, it was the last ten minutes of a trip – and using Google Maps on my phone tripled my bill for the month.
So I love this news. I’m especially pleased because I’m on 3 but it’s great news all round because you know, you just know that other carriers will follow
Details on Cult of Android here:
Three U.K. To Give Customers Free Calls, Texts & Data While They’re In The U.S.
Interesting interview with Phil Libin, Evernote’s CEO, on AllThingsD:
http://allthingsd.com/20131201/seven-questions-for-evernote-ceo-phil-libin/
I have some niggles with Evernote yet it’s so very good so much of the time that I am a fan. Not sure I’d buy an Evernote-branded wallet – they do now exist and this interview is in part about such things – but next time I’m looking for a scanner, the odds are it will be the one mentioned in here.
That is, if it’s available in the UK by whenever that is. Currently Evernote Market, as their new shop is called, is US-only.
But Evernote itself is available everywhere and there’s a lot in this interview about its aims and uses.
This is so new it isn’t here yet. But Tim Stringer of technicallysimple.com is launching a Learn OmniFocus project which will be a mix of videos and tutorials about this software. I’m actually in two minds about this because I’m the type that prefers to learn on the job, to find out how to do things because I need to do them. And it works: I now feel I know OmniFocus very well. But partly because the promise of video tutorials is a good one and partly because I want you to know I’m not the only nut for OmniFocus software, I wanted to show you this link: http://technicallysimple.com/announcements/coming-soon-learn-omnifocus/
That’s an announcement about the new programme and it includes a sign-up form. I’ve signed up.
But it’s an interesting time to be doing this. I’ve mentioned OmniFocus before and doubtlessly will again but there are three versions of it and at this specific moment they are in a bit of flux. The iPhone one was only recently updated so that’s done, if you like, but the iPad and the Mac have a ways to go.
Less so the iPad one. That is by far the best version of OmniFocus and if you can buy only one, that’s the one to only buy. Except the iPhone version was dramatically improved by its being updated for iOS 7 and you have to expect that the iPad one will get the same or a better update too.
The Mac one is harder to explain. OmniFocus has been on the Mac for years and it shows. It just feels old. Looks old. And it is comparatively hard to use: it’s very powerful and I’m glad I got into it right alongside the iPhone and iPad ones, but it’s unquestionably harder to learn. So early this year I was very glad to sign up for the beta test of OmniFocus 2 for Mac and eventually along came a beta version. I liked it very much. Found lots of problems, as you’d expect and presume from a beta, reported them all back, saw at least most of them fixed. And then it stopped. I assumed the firm was done with the beta testing and the final product would be out presently.
No.
What really happened is that Apple had unveiled its drastically reworked iOS 7and The Omni Group paused the Mac development and instead focused on getting a new iPhone app out in time for, and to exploit the features of, iOS 7. They did it, they did it well, and the very first thing I did after updating my iPhone to iOS 7 was to buy the new OmniFocus.
But it was a purchase. It wasn’t a free update. And I am fine with that, I am more than fine with that because OmniFocus has saved, my bacon, kept my sanity and even – yes – lifted my heart. Of course I’ll buy the new one.
Except, the way the Apple App Store works, there can’t be any free or reduced upgrades for even new users. If you bought OmniFocus for iPad today and a new one came out tomorrow, you wouldn’t be happy. I think you’d be happier than you expected because the iPad one is so good. But you wouldn’t be happiest.
So reluctantly, I’m saying hold off buying the iPad one for just a while yet if you can.
The Mac version is different: so long as you buy it directly from the company, The Omni Group, instead of via Apple’s Mac App Store, you’ll be fine: buy version 1 now, get version 2 free (I believe) when it comes out – whenever it comes out. The Omni Group store is here: https://store.omnigroup.com
But there wouldn’t be a need for OmniFocus 2 for Mac if the first one weren’t hard to use so it’s tricky to recommend you buy something that’s difficult, that you may get very frustrated by and which will be replaced at some unknown but soon time.
You might be best off buying the iPhone version and just enjoying that for now. But oh, the iPad one is a treat to use.
…an iPad Air.
I used to think I relied on my old, original iPad but it was a toy compared to the new iPad Air. Mind you, I did give my old one to my mother about two months before the new model came out so I had a lot of time to notice how much I was missing having one. Actually, my OmniFocus work fell off badly: if you don’t know OmniFocus, I should tell you that it’s a kind of bionic To Do manager that pretty much completely runs my life. If you are now intrigued by OmniFocus, I have to warn you that it only runs on Apple gear. It’s also comparatively expensive – well, it’s expensive when you compare it to all the free To Do apps; it is not in the slightest bit expensive when you contrast it to how much use it has been for me.
One of the things it does is let you focus only on what has to be done right now and what can be done right now. It does that by hiding away everything else but that only works, that can only be allowed to work, if you periodically review everything on your list. There’s a thing called Review. It’s not wonderful on the Mac version of OmniFocus, it doesn’t exist at all on the iPhone version, but it is gorgeousness incarnate on the iPad one. So good that you are fooled into thinking it’s an easy thing to look at all your tasks and then as you go through everything, it’s so remarkably easy to see what you’ve got to do that you tend to just go get it done. I timed myself once for The Blank Screen book, just finding out how long a typical review took me and I was astonished that it was two hours.
In those two hours, I reviewed about fifty different projects with a total of, I don’t know, a couple of hundred tasks. I found I’d already done a lot of them – I want to say thirty, I’m not sure now – and as I went through them all and saw ones like “Email Bert to ask for your spanner back” I’d email Bert to ask for my spanner back. By the end of the two hours, I’d marked off many more tasks as done. And most importantly of all, I knew where I was with every project.
And could immediately forget it all. Forget it, knowing that it was all in hand and that it was all in OmniFocus. Knowing that if it wasn’t something that would come up in the next couple of days, I would at least see it during the next review. I could concentrate on now. The fact that you can park the thinking and churning and worrying about things you can’t do yet and instead put all that engine effort into what you can, it’s life-changing.
Except it fell over completely when I gave away my iPad.
So the first thing I installed on my new iPad Air last month was OmniFocus. I swear to you that I breathed out. And I thought that would be something to tell you, I thought that would be enough to tell you, all by itself.
Except you may already know that iPad Airs have a ten-hour battery life. What I did not expect is that I would use up that battery life almost every day. The ten hours is true, actually the ten hours is conservative, but I use the iPad so much that I have had to charge it up again nearly every night. Don’t take that as a criticism of the battery, take it as a gulping assessment of how very, very much I use this machine.
Most of what you may have read on The Blank Screen blog was written on that iPad Air. I’ve written thousands of words on it in just the three or four weeks I’ve had it.
And yesterday, Angela needed my bag as a prop for a play and that meant I couldn’t carry my iPad around with me all day. (As sturdy as it is, it’s also so light you can’t believe it’s strong so I’m looking for a case but haven’t found one I like yet.) I swear to you I got itchy.
And that’s when I realised I am now life-support-dependent on my iPad Air.
Have a look at them yourself. If you happened to choose to go through this Amazon link and then bought an iPad Air or maybe a car, I’d see some cash coming my way. But check it out on Apple’s own store instead: they have a lot more detail and some particularly well-made videos about the product.
Go to a real-life Apple Store too: just walk in and pick one of these up. I was working in Paris the day they came out and I tried one in a store there but wasn’t all that impressed with the apparent lightness. I was by the speed and the gorgeous display. Now that I have one, I’m very impressed with the display, the speed and the lightness too. Maybe I was wearing thick gloves that first time. I don’t kow.