First look: iOS 10

Posted by William Gallagher

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.

Caring for your partner with technology

Posted by William Gallagher

Over on MacNN.com there is a quietly remarkable article about using and being required to use technology when caring for someone. In the last few days, Managing Editor Mike Wuerthele’s wife had a stroke. Naturally you know where he is now both physically – constantly in hospital with her – and emotionally. During these especially hard first days, he’s finding that technology and particularly iPads are a recurring feature. Reading his piece, you feel that sometimes this is aggravating as it’s another form on another iPad but other times that it’s a help, that these devices and others are helping the recovery process.

It’s a fascinatingly personal article despite his efforts to avoid being personal at all: he doesn’t name his wife, he doesn’t say which hospital they’re in. He’s written it and will be back writing more specifically to bring some attention to medical aid and hopefully let others know what is available and what it all achieves. His article does exactly that but read it to see how a partner and a carer’s pain trembles just under the surface.

Read Technology in Recovery: Out of the ER, into the fire on MacNN.

How Microsoft Word became useful again

Posted by William Gallagher

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.

How to use OmniFocus when you have to use Windows

Posted by William Gallagher

If the To Do app OmniFocus ran on Windows and Android as well as Macs and iOS, I’d just wear an OmniFocus teeshirt and point at my chest when asked how to be more productive. But it doesn’t and, besides, I like talking. So instead I ask you what computer and phone you’re on and if it’s the right answer, I tell you about this gorgeous and transformative software. And if it isn’t, I used to go um. Now I go: take a look at this post on the excellent Asian Efficiency.

Well…you actually have a lot of options. Some workarounds are limited while others can make your workflow seamless. It really depends on the IT restrictions at work (firewall, forbidden web services, policies, etc) and how flexible you are.

None of these solutions are close to ideal (the best solution is to use a Mac at work) but some come pretty close. Some fixes only allow you to send stuff to OmniFocus (which is good enough for some people) whereas others want to use OmniFocus as their preferred task manager.

Just pick and choose the option that works for you. With that said, here are seven options available to you.

How to Integrate OmniFocus When You Have to Use Windows at Work – Thanh Pham, Asian Efficiency (27 June 2013)

Read the full piece for the seven answers. As they say, none are miracles but together a couple of them might be just right for you.

Ulysses for iPad is here

Posted by William Gallagher

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.

Review feature coming to OmniFocus for iPhone

Posted by William Gallagher

This made me sit up. The Omni Group is revamping its productivity apps and bringing ones to the iPhone that have only ever been on the iPad – and that now includes OmniFocus.

OmniFocus is a To Do app that has long, long, long been on iPhone and I’ve used it pretty much hourly for the past three years. But when there were three versions of the app – one for iPhone, one for iPad and one for Mac – it used to be that they each had differences. Each were best for certain things. The iPhone one, for instance, was best for adding new tasks on the go and looking up the next thing you needed to do.

It specifically lacked a feature called Review where you go through every task in every job and make decisions about whether to keep them, whether to do them, whether you need to do anything else. This is a fairly quick thing to do but you tend to do it when you’re in a fairly reflective mood and don’t have new tasks flying at you from everywhere. So the Review feature was on the iPad and the Mac versions of OmniFocus and it didn’t exist at all on the iPhone one.

“That’s a really important feature and I think a big omission from the iPhone OmniFocus” I said back in September 2014’s If you can buy only one OmniFocus, get the iPad version. Not anymore.

The Omni Group recently announced that it was bringing all its iPad apps to the iPhone and like anyone else, I didn’t think of OmniFocus because it was already there. I am keen to see OmniOutliner, that’s the one I was looking forward to and in fact I am beta testing it right now. But otherwise there is the project planning app OmniPlan and a diagramming tool called OmniGraffle, that’s what I assumed was coming to iPhone.

Today the company announced that OmniFocus is coming too. All of the company’s apps are coming to iPhone and they’re coming in Universal versions which means:

Since all of the apps in the Omni Productivity Pack will run on both iPad and iPhone, there will no longer be any need to purchase a separate app just to run OmniFocus on iPhone. The price for the new Universal app will be just $39.99 (a savings of $9.99 compared to the current two-app pricing for customers using OmniFocus on both devices)—and it will be a free upgrade for anyone currently using OmniFocus 2 for iPad.

Omni Productivity Pack coming to iPhone in Q1, 2015 – blog post by by Ken Case, Omni Group (8 January 2015)

I’m not honestly fussed about the pricing because this stuff is so useful to me that it’s now just a mandatory purchase. But:

Customers who want to upgrade from the iPhone app to the Universal one can simply pay the difference in the prices by taking advantage of a $20 Complete My Bundle option we’ll make available. Of course, we’ll continue to update OmniFocus 2 for iPhone, but Pro features such as custom perspectives will only be available in the Universal app.

I have all three versions of OmniFocus available today and I use them all, all of them, constantly. So for me I’ll just be using a new version of OmniFocus for iPhone some day shortly. Which I realise means I will actually delete the old iPhone-only edition. That’s not something I thought I’d be saying to you: I’m actually going to delete a version of OmniFocus.

That’s practically a Dear Diary moment. Not sure when it will be but as I say, I am on the beta test for OmniOutliner for iPhone so it’s well along and I’m expecting the shipping products to be out in the next couple of months.

Important presenting tip: don’t press buttons

Posted by William Gallagher

If it’s a speech or a story, I like to memorise what I’m going to say so that I can look at the audience and perform rather than just read. Fine. But I do bring the speech and I bring it on my iPad where I will have been making changes along the way. Also fine.

Just be careful, okay?

I gave a performance last night reading from a script I had in Drafts 4 on my iPad. I’d changed the settings so that the text was extra large and that it was white text on a black background so that I didn’t have an unearthly glow about my chin.

All very, very fine.

But Drafts 4 is for writing and doing things with text, it isn’t for reading. And at one point, about a third of the way through, I smoothly scrolled down to the next paragraph – and my finger caught an on-screen button.

With two hundred people staring at me, this button highlighted half the script, ran a macro over it all, inserted URL links and pasted whatever in the hell I last had on the clipboard. I watched this thing doing rapid-fire editing changes in front of me and saw my script reduced to unreadable rubble.

I realise now that I could’ve picked up the iPad and shook it to undo but have you ever done that in front of a capacity crowd in a theatre? I’d look like I was twitching.

I’ve listened to the recording and I can tell you the moment it happened. But I did have the speech memorised enough that I could carry on. And it worked out. One woman from the audience told me afterwards that my speech had made her cry. I thanked her but I was actually thinking “yeah, me too”, though probably for different reasons.

Lesson: don’t press buttons. More practical lesson: lock your script early and save it as PDF rather than keeping it as editable text.

Review: PDFpen 2 for iPad

Posted by William Gallagher

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

Posted by William Gallagher

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.

Droptask comes to Android

Posted by William Gallagher

It’s a To Do manager especially for visual thinkers – and as of today it is on Android as well as iOS and the web. Droptask does this:

DropTask is a powerful productivity tool enabling you to visualize your workload in a unique and engaging way. Simply drag and drop tasks for all your essential to-dos, and organize them within larger colorful circles to truly see the bigger picture. With powerful functionality delivered intuitively to the user, DropTask adds simplicity to even the most complex projects and provides effortless task management for teams and individuals alike.

Take a look at the official site or go straight to the Google store for the new Android version.

Alternatively, wait for me to get my finger out and review the iOS version like I’ve been trying to do for two months. There is an irony in how I fail to do a review of a To Do app, but it’s not an irony that helps you much. But if you like Droptask on Android or the web, do take a lookout it on iPhone and iPad too.