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Favourite productivity apps now (briefly) on sale

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There’s a bunch of productivity apps that have just had price reductions. As ever, the price of these is rarely all that much so if you miss a sale, shrug and buy at the full price anyway. But if you’ve been havering over any of them or you just want to try a category of app out, this is a good time.

From all the ones I can see, this is what I’d pick out for you. Click on the titles to go take a look.

MindNode
Mind-mapping software that plays very nicely with outliners and To Do lists such as OmniOutliner and OmniFocus. It’s now £2.99 UK or $4.99 US instead of £6.99 UK or $9.99 US

Appigo ToDo
This was the app I lived in before discovering OmniFocus. There’s a huge amount to love in it and I did deeply love it, I’ve just found OmniFocus is a far better fit for me. Since I moved on, Appigo has released a range of versions and I get a bit confused – some have Cloud syncing, some are for older devices – so read the release notes before you buy. But this one is now £1.29 UK or $1.99 US instead of £2.49 UK and $4.99 US

iDatabase
Never used it. Never heard of it. But it went on sale today and I’ve already told three people it looks worth a go – and they’ve all bought it. One has bought and is sold: it’s just what she needed. Now 69p UK, 99c US instead of £1.49 UK or

Very important: this is for the iPhone version of iDatabase and you’ll benefit from having the Mac version too – and that’s on sale as well. It’s an even bigger sale: iDatabase for Mac is now £1.99 UK instead of £13.99 UK ($2.99 US instead of $19.99 US) and the second I found that out while looking up the price for you, I bought it myself.

Fantastical 2 for iPad
The app that finally got me to change away from the regular Apple Calendar on both my iPhone and my iPad. Buy the iPad version now for £5.49 UK or $7.99 US instead of the usual £6.99 UK or $9.99 US and you’ll be buying the iPhone one soon. Right now that is also on sale: £2.99 UK or $4.99 US instead of £6.99 UK or $9.99 US.

Launch Centre Pro and Launch Center Pro for iPad
Use this to set up one button that, say, rings your mother. Instead of tapping on the phone icon on your iPhone, then contacts, then scrolling to your mother’s name and finally tapping on whether you want to ring her mobile or her landline, you just tap once and your iPhone does the rest. Maybe that would be handy enough for you but LCP can get really powerful – also, disclaimer, I found it a bit confusing – and it can do all sorts of things for you. Ridiculously detailed things.

I recommend you take a look but, confession, I keep popping it back onto my iPhone home screen and taking it off again. The biggest use I had for it was rapidly adding a new task to OmniFocus and it was faster than going through OmniFocus itself and tapping on Add Task. But now OmniFocus 2 for iPhone is so quick, I just don’t find the benefit.

Launch Centre Pro and Launch Centre Pro for iPad (two separate apps) are both $1.99 US now instead of $4.99 US

Take a potter around the App Store’s productivity category for more, but these are the best ones.

Review: OmniOutliner

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I am still tickled that the one thing I am currently dragging my feet over is writing a review of the productivity tool OmniFocus 2 for Mac. I use this constantly. I waited a year for that to come out. But still I haver. I did write several thousands words about it but threw them away: I felt it wasn’t a review as much as it was a manual for using it. There are plenty of places that tell you how to use OmniFocus, I need to get my head straight over what I feel I can usefully tell you.

And getting your head straight is what OmniOutliner is for.

The clue is in the name – actually, the two clues are in the name. OmniOutliner is an outliner made by The Omni Group, the same company that does OmniFocus. They make many applications and, truth be told, the only reason I looked at OmniOutliner first was that I adore OmniFocus so much. It also helps that OmniOutliner is affordable where the other products are expensive. Well, the graphics package and the project planning one are cheap for what they do, they’re just expensive if you only want to play with them. I’d play with the trial versions but I know that before long I’d be convincing myself to buy it.

This is what happened with OmniOutliner. I got the trial of version 3 and before the end of the day had bought it. Before the end of the week there was a beta release of version 4 and I switched to that. Fortunately for my wallet, when version 4 came out officially, I was able to get it for free because I’d bought 3 so recently.

I am going to rave about OmniOutliner, I think there’s little chance you hadn’t twigged that yet, but it isn’t an unqualified hymn of praise and I think I am a very low-level user of it. I now use it extensively but, for instance, there are close to myriad options for doing outlines that look pretty. I don’t mean that dismissively: there are design tools that make outlines clear and easy to read even when they are swamped with information. I’ve had a play but I keep coming back to the plain and basic outline.

It’s just that I keep coming back to it for so much. I used to be a determined explorer, always writing to see where the writing would take me. I write Doctor Who radio dramas, though, and those require a treatment outline before you get the gig. And I wrote a 170,000-word book about Blake’s 7 which was the biggest single project I’d ever done and it needed support. I needed support. Then I had a project that required me to deliver ideas to a company. When I agreed to that I thought it would be a doddle but their definition of an idea was 1,200 words of fully worked out story. To do it and to hit the deadlines, I found I was slapping down a thought in OmniOutliner and then seeing how I could expand it. If the story had this, what would come after it? What do I need to get us to that moment? The story would grow from a thematic idea, a one- or two-liner thought into a detailed beat sheet that I would then follow as I wrote up the idea.

That’s the bit I’ve always loathed: having such a detailed plan makes me feel as if I’m not writing, I’m typing. The story is told, so far as I’m concerned. But in that case I fashioned stories faster, I groped toward them quicker. And then there was longform prose in Blake, I think I got into the habit of going to OmniOutliner.

The day I realised I had a problem, though, was when I turned to it on a domestic project. Not writing, just something I needed to do. Usually I’d have done that in OmniFocus but I needed to think through the steps and I found myself writing it in OmniOutliner.

Then in the last 18 months I seem to have grown a new career in public speaking and in producing events. For both of them,  I rely on OmniFocus but I get to my task list through this outliner. Truly, my heart is still an explorer yet I can’t deny that outlining is helping me now with many events and I think a giant part of that is down to OmniOutliner. I’ve piddled about with outliners in, say, Microsoft Word, and it’s been a shrug. OmniOutliner has become a pal.

Last week I did a gig in a college, I took over a three-day writing course and it was an interesting combination of their existing course outline and what I could bring to it. The course outline was rather good, I thought, so I didn’t change any of that, I just worked to see what I could do that would fulfil what they needed and what the students wanted. I planned the three days out in OmniOutliner and you should see it. I can’t show you because so much of it is confidential and I’m just always wary of discussing any detail that’s to do with education and students.

But it started as a copy of the main headings and main times from the college’s existing plan. Then I prefixed it with questions for the college staff so naturally it then also included their answers. I have several writing exercises I particularly enjoy so I have those already outlined in other plans so I dropped them into this outline and moved it around. Added more, deleted bits. Made it fit. Then during the three days I wrecked that lot apart, moving things around, splitting things, adding, deleting. And making huge amounts of notes right there in the middle of the outline. About the one thing I didn’t do was record anything but I could’ve done. There is a button for recording audio. It’s right there.

And speaking of being right there, I did most of this on OmniOutliner for iPad as I ran around but I could also check it and change it on OmniOutliner for Mac.

That was flawless: the outline was just there, whichever machine I went to.

But I did get display faults on the iPad. I have a Belkin keyboard case that when you pop up the iPad in just the right way it links to the external keyboard and takes away the usual iPad one. I found several times that as I broke the connection to the keyboard, because I was folding it away to let me walk around, OmniOutliner would get confused. I wouldn’t get the Apple on-screen keyboard the way you would expect but I would get a toolbar across the middle of the screen where it would be if the keyboard had appeared.

I had no way to fix that in OmniOutliner, I would work around it by quitting and relaunching.

But I look at this outline now and it’s got that glorious feel of a book you’ve worked on for a term. It no longer makes any sense to anyone but me, it is crammed with details even I will forget. And those details meant I was able to write up the student feedback very, very quickly: everything I wanted to say about them I had already made notes about right there in the outline.

I was accused tonight of using too many apps and I think my considered response is just you try to take them away from me. OmniOutliner is now in the tool bag, it is part of what I do, part of how I do it. That’s quite rare: OmniFocus has a permanent place there too but I’m a writer and I haven’t settled on one word processor yet. So you don’t get in easily. But then you can’t take these tools away from me easily, hardily or in any way at all.

Here’s The Omni Group’s own video about OmniOutliner 4 for Mac:

Introducing OmniOutliner 4 from The Omni Group on Vimeo.

And here’s the firm’s video for OmniOutliner 2 for iPad:

Introducing OmniOutliner 2 for iPad from The Omni Group on Vimeo.

You can get OmniOutliner for Mac from the App Store but don’t. Get it directly from The Omni Group instead because that’s how you get major updates for free or cheap. On the official site, OmniOutliner 4 for Mac costs $49.99 US (equivalent to £28.90 UK). There are family and education discounts, see the site for details, but there is also an OmniOutliner Pro 4 for Mac that costs $99 US (£58.33 UK). I have no idea what the difference is with the Pro version but the site explains.

Then you have to get OmniOutliner 2 for iPad from the App Store where it is £20.99 UK or $29.99 US.

Five paid apps to replace free Apple ones

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They’ve got to be good to be worth buying for cold hard cash when you already have Apple’s own apps that do exactly the same thing. Yes. They are. This is Cult of Mac round up for nearly half a dozen such very good apps.

I’d like you watch this even if you have previously had no intention of replacing your existing free apps with new paid ones. Because I was like that, I thought I was still like it: since my iPhone comes with a calendar, for instance, and I actually find it fine, I resisted changing.

But now of the five they mention here, I’m already and regularly using two; Dark Sky and Fantastical 2. See why, and what else might go next:

MacPowerUsers on TextExpander

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They beat me to it: I can tell you now that the productivity tip in this Friday’s The Blank Screen newsletter will be to do with TextExpander. But today the MacPowerUsers podcast released an entire 90-minute episode devoted to it.

Katie Floyd and David Price were the final straw for me, the final reason it took to get me to try this software that they – and everyone – claims speeds up your typing. I like typing and I’m fast, I don’t want or need speeding up. But I tried it a year or so ago and now I am everyone. You need this.

One example: I regularly get asked for a link to my The Blank Screen book and obviously I love that. But at first I would go to the Amazon page and copy the URL for whoever asked. Then I got smart and did a shorter one that didn’t break in their email. But that short one is this: http://amzn.to/1dO1nue.

That’s for the UK. If you were an American asking me for it, I should instead remember to give you http://amzn.to/1756A8y which I think you will agree is far easier to trip off the tongue.

But with TextExpander, I found the link once and now just have a little shortcode for it. If I type the following, without the quote marks, “;tbsauk” TextExpander instantly springs that out into the full link for The Blank Screen, Amazon UK edition. Or “;tbsaus” does the US one.

Full disclosure: I use that several times a week on my Mac and it is exactly as quick and deliciously handy as it sounds. But I’m writing this to you on my iPad and that is different. TextExpander needs to get its feet under the table to work and Apple doesn’t allow that on iOS. There are ways it can work on Macs so it does, but for iPhones and iPad, TextExpander only works if the app you’re using allows it. None of Apple’s do. But an increasing number are and there is also the iOS TextExpander app. That’s for organising the stuff, writing new snippets as they’re called, but it also expands this stuff for you.

So I did nip over to that app to expand the “;tbsauk” and “;tbsaus” snippets.

That’s not as lightspeed fast as it is on Macs and consequently I use far fewer TextExpander snippets on this iPad, but in this case it was still quicker and easier to do than to go research the full links from Amazon all over again.

Listen to much more, and I think rather better explained, on the latest MacPowerUsers podcast episode. And then get TextExpander from the maker’s official site.

The 5 tools you need for writing, definitely

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Actually, you could do this with three and those would be:

1) Computer
PCs are cheaper, Macs are better. I vote Mac because I put a big value on the time I no longer have to spend piddling about getting Windows to damn well work. But Macs don’t suit everyone; if you like piddling, save yourself some bucks and get more geeky enjoyment with a PC.

But.

If you’re buying a PC, you have a million options and every one ends up with you having to make a choice between models that have some clear and obvious difference like a 1Mhz speed increase or something. Ignore salespeople, they will – seriously – just read you the spec sheet you were already puzzling over. Instead, ask a friend who has one, get their recommendation and then see if you can find it on the end of this Amazon UK link. That way, if it all works out for you, I get some pennies from your having bought this way and if it doesn’t, it’s your friend who gets your support calls. Everybody wins and it costs me nothing.

If you’re buying a Mac, you’ve fewer options and they always end up with you needing to make a choice between two very similar models. In all cases, save money by buying the cheaper processor speed and spend money on extra RAM and extra storage space. You’ll thank me later, which is nice as I am going to suggest an Amazon link – here it is, do check this out – but I also think you should go into an Apple Store and ask there.

If you’re looking at me like that for the bit about processor speeds and RAM, Apple Store staff will just tell you straight what Macs are good for and not so good for. They’ll ask what you expect to be doing with Mac: be honest. Tell them straight that you should be writing but you’re going to distract yourself with a photography habit that you only do to be social, that you can stop any time.

They will translate processor speeds – actually, no, they won’t bother translating, they’ll just tell you what it means in terms you can use. And Apple Store staff are not on commission so they’ll push this stuff but it’s more from genuine enthusiasm.

Last, if you’re havering between a laptop, desktop or tablet computer, they all work, they all do the job. You will just typically get more done on the desktop, you will be substantially freer with the laptop and the iPad will do everything, everywhere but you need to think about it more as you go.

2) Word processor
Microsoft Word if you have to, if it’s already on your computer or if you know you like it. Google Docs is fine, if a bit clunky looking. If you did buy a Mac, you’ve just got yourself a word processor called Pages and the odds are that you may never need anything else.

3) Email
How else are you going to deliver work? It’s also great for pitches. Just for god’s sake make sure you get a sensible email address.

Get and use these three and you’re away to the races. But I’d recommend two more:

4) Somewhere to track what and where and when your work is
I track invoices in the Numbers spreadsheet and jobs in Evernote. I track tasks in OmniFocus and I keep an eye on my week with Calendar in Mac OS X.

So this would be one of the five tools and I’m saying it’s – wait, counts on fingers – four different applications. Yes. You could do it all in your word processor though. And the time it would take you to pick up and figure out all these applications would probably be better spent at first on learning what your word processor can do. You’re smart, you can use anything but they all have nooks and crannies that are worth exploring for how they may be able to speed up your work.

When you know your word processor well, though, then start branching out into these others.

5) Kettle
Enough said.

This is how it should be: a Safari Extension I’ll use hourly

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Not only will I use it hourly but I want to use it hourly now. The quick news: 1Password will use Extensions so that within Safari, you can get it to enter your username and password.

The slightly less quick news with more detail and enthusiasm… In case you haven’t come across it yet, 1Password is one of those apps that stores your passwords for you. Fine. It also creates ones like Wel6cAct9iB9Bit (that really is one it created, I just got it to do that). It creates these strong passwords and then saves them for you so that you don’t have to remember. You just have to remember the one password you need to get into 1Password. It works on iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac, PC, Windows, all sorts.

The phone and tablet versions come with their own web browser too. So if I’m organised, I can go into my 1Password app, tap on the name of my bank and that browser will zoom off to their site. Goes to the site, enters my username and some of my security details, then it even presses return. Only with my bank do I stop there. With other things I log into like TheTrainLine.com, it does the lot. One tap takes me to the site and then into the site. Another single tap and 1Password has entered all my credit card details for me.

Except I’m often not that organised. Very often, I will go a site in the regular iPhone Safari web browser and after a lot of fiddling like picking train times, I will reach the login or credit card screen and wish I’d remembered to do this in 1Password. Usually, I nip over to the 1Password app, copy the detail I need and go paste it into Safari. But just occasionally, I’ve moved over to 1Password and redone the whole job just to save that schlepping about.

Not any more. Behind the scenes it’s going to be using Touch ID and Safari Extensions but no matter: in future, when I’ve gone to a site in the ordinary Safari browser, I will still be able to use 1Password to enter my details.

This is how it is on the Mac and PC: wherever I am, I can whack a login detail or an over-used credit card in with a tap or two. This is how it will be on iPhones and iPads.

The company isn’t saying when it will happen but there is a limited beta test going on now and it all requires the forthcoming iOS 8. So you can bet that when the next iPhones come out around September, so will the new 1Password. No idea yet whether it will be a paid upgrade or a freebie but whichever, I’m having it. (Though it must be said, as great as 1Password is in every other way I know, upgrading to a major new version is agony.)

Here’s where you can learn more of the latest official release of 1Password and here’s a shaky video of the beta in action:

Someone else’s OmniFocus 2 for Mac review

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There is definitely an irony to how I keep not getting around to writing a review of OmniFocus, the software that keeps me on track with everything I have or want to do. I think it’s because the software is so important to me that I want to do it justice. Anyway, here’s a review from someone who wasn’t an existing user of the earlier version, isn’t that fussed about any To Do managers, and says up front that they came to OmniFocus as a skeptic.

Spoiler alert: they like it now.

I don’t agree with how it argues the iPhone version is too expensive, though, and they are mistaken about the iPad one:

This brings us to our one main criticism, though: Omni Group have chosen to make the iPhone (and forthcoming iPad) version of Omnifocus equal to the Mac version in virtually all respects, thus allowing mobile-centric users to buy and use just the mobile version alone if they choose. While we applaud this, it also means that Mac users who have paid $40 for the regular desktop version ($80 for the Pro version) will have to pay an additional $20 for the iPhone version, essentially just for syncing and quick-entry or editing in the case of some users. The company may want to consider also creating a more lightweight free or low-cost “companion version” for those who primarily use the Mac version and just want some basic on-the-go functions.

Hands on: Omnifocus 2 for Mac – MacNN (22 June 2014)

The iPad mistake first: there already is one and has been for some time. Their confusion is that it is on its first version and a second is currently being developed. Last September we got OmniFocus 2 for iPhone, now we have OmniFocus 2 for Mac, at some point soon we’ll have OmniFocus 2 for iPad.

It’s an interesting little dilemma for me as someone who recommends this software a lot. Rewind a beat to before the 2 versions began coming out: it was very easy to say you should buy the iPad edition. That was easily the best with a mix of OmniFocus’s powerful features and a particularly easy design. OmniFocus for iPhone was fine but you would struggle to use it without one of the other versions in your life. And OmniFocus 1 for Mac was this bionic behemoth that had more power than you’d need to crack a concrete slab but was extremely hard to use.

Now OmniFocus 2 for Mac is the easiest to use and, I think, the best version. I like the iPad one but it’s weird how old it seems compared to the new design. And where I used to always turn to my iPad when I was doing a lot of OmniFocus work like the recommended regular reviews, now I tend to save that up until I’m at my Mac.

Nonetheless, you can do everything most users would use most often usefully on the iPad version. If it weren’t that we know for certain that – and don’t know at all when – there will be an OmniFocus 2 for iPad, I would say the iPad is still the one to get when you can only get one. It’s portable, powerful and easy to use. OmniFocus 2 for iPhone is much improved on its previous version – I liked the previous version a lot, I just like this one more – but I still believe the iPhone version needs one of the others.

MacNN thinks this more strongly than I do. Its argument is that you shouldn’t have to pay so much for an iPhone OmniFocus app if you’re only going to use it to add the odd task in during the day. I’d say that’s fair enough, but there are other ways to add tasks. If you don’t have OmniFocus for iPhone, just email a task into OmniFocus. I do this a lot wherever I am because so much of my work comes through email. It’s just tap, forward, send, gone into my To Do list.

So I don’t agree that one has to use OmniFocus 2 for iPhone. But I suspect you will. I’m not certain now how I got into this but I’m pretty sure I bought the iPhone one first and tried to last with that for a while, tried to get used to it and to test it out. But caved within a day or two and bought the iPad one. Then, inexorably, I bought the Mac one.

That was all version 1 of the software and if you’re wondering, yes, I did. I bought version 2. Both OmniFocus 2 for iPhone, on the day it was released, and OmniFocus 2 for Mac, on the day it was released. Individually they are more expensive than many To Do applications and jointly they are a punch to the bank account – but only if they aren’t right for you. If they are, they are worth the cost and then some.

Wait, this is turning into my own review. I should really get on that.

I have no clue what to say. Star Wars: Scene Maker

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Disney has released a new iPad app that, wait, take this from the mouth of a horse:

MAKE STAR WARS YOUR OWN!

Become the master of your own Star Wars video universe! Create your own scenes, choose your favorite characters, control their actions and dialogue, record your masterpiece, and share your Star Wars story! The Force of your imagination is with you!

FEATURES:

· Create your own Star Wars universe and bring it to life with imaginative play and countless options.

· Select from 3D environments with 3D models of your favorite characters, weapons, and ships.

· Use dialogue straight from the Star Wars films, or record your voice and apply a Darth Vader, Rebel Pilot, or Storm Trooper filter to put your words into any character’s mouth!

· Switch between three cameras, each of which can track or follow the action, to record your scene from multiple angles!

· Chooose a musical score taken from the Star Wars films, write your own iconic Star Wars “Title Crawl” and end credits, and share your finished scene with your friends!

If you get the free app – it’s a big download but it’s free – you’ll hear all of this again but done in the style of a movie trailer. You’ll also get the Star Wars theme, which I do like, I have bought the soundtrack, repeated so often that you won’t like it, you will throw away that soundtrack.

I do just wonder what I would’ve thought of this when I was a kid and Star Wars first came out. I also wonder how much the in-app purchases would’ve cost then. Now they are £1.99 each for Death Star Attack and Cloud City Something or £2.49 for the pair.

Without those, you get the full game/scene experience, just with only a plot from Return of the Jedi. Do you remember when everybody knew that Return of the Jedi was the worst Star Wars film? We were so young.

Get the app here.

The short history and long reach of iOS

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If I were going to contort this into a piece of advice about being productive, I'd be saying something about how small moves and tiny steps really add up. I think I'd also being saying that sometimes you need to say bollocks to everyone else and keep going. To know that it is better to take some criticism lumps now and really earn the praise later rather than try to please everybody each step of the way.

All that is true. I've just surprised myself. I was honestly thinking it was a contortion saying all that, that it was plainly a justification for just showing you something I enjoyed reading. But having written it down, I realise I mean it.

Still, I did just enjoy reading it. The Verge wrote about the development of iOS, the operating system that has underpinned every iPhone I've ever had:

In what is widely regarded as his greatest presentation ever, Apple's Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world on January 9th, 2007. In the five-plus years since then, the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch have literally redefined the entire world of mobile computing. That world is moving so quickly that iOS is already amongst the older mobile operating systems in active development today. That certainly doesn't mean it's underpowered or underfeatured — quite the contrary. Through what can only be described as relentless and consistent improvement over the years, Apple has made iOS one of the most feature-rich and well-supported platforms on the market.

iOS 7, the system currently powering Apple's mobile devices, offers an easy-to-understand smartphone operating system to new users, a powerful platform for app developers, and a relatively un-fragmented experience across multiple devices. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about iOS is how similar the OS as it exists today is to the OS as it existed 2007, yet the number and breadth of features that Apple has baked in since then is mind boggling. Far from suffering from the “feature creep” that typically bogs down operating systems over time, iOS has managed to stay relatively snappy and is more internally consistent than anything else available today. And iOS 8 — launching on devices this fall — looks to evolve the story even further.

How did we get from a platform that began without third-party apps, multitasking, or even copy / paste support to where we are today? Read on to see exactly how Apple evolved its mobile platform over the years, in our history of iOS.

A Visual History of iOS – The Verge

HeySiri – so much for jailbreaking

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It was the one feature I liked on Android – though, as ever, that meant it was on one Android phone somewhere – and it was then the one thing that might make me jailbreak my iPhone.

OkSiri… makes Siri listen all the time. No pressing a button and waiting a mo before speaking to Siri, it is listening all the time. And specifically it is listening for a phrase such as “OK, Siri” that it then recognises as its cue to work.
This I Might Jailbreak For – William Gallagher (1 June 2014)

Glad I didn’t bother now. Maybe the one WWDC announcement that most grabbed me was HeySiri. (I don’t like that name any more than I do OkSiri, but.) It is exactly what that OkSiri is, except it’s official, it will work.