Metadata or it didn’t happen

Posted by William Gallagher

Our car was filled to the brim, children and dogs and all. Halfway through the two-day trek to see family in Norway, my wife was at the wheel. I was fiddling around with my brand new iPhone, which truly seemed a magical product after years with Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones. The large touchscreen, the integrated GPS, and the 3G data connection made the phone a window to the world where data and the physical finally coexisted and interacted in a way that felt right to me. It was also a window into the behaviors of other people accessing this world.

Someone—I do not know who—had used Gowalla to tag this little island in the middle of the lake as a point of interest, and so the island became interesting to me. The chance meeting with this island, which existed to me only as a data point, has remained in my mind for years. What did the existence of the island, not as a physical place in the middle of a lake in Northern Sweden, but as a digital place discovered on my phone, really mean?

What Happens to a Place When the Data About It Is Lost? – Finn Arne Jørgensen, The Atlantic (24 June 2014)

Well, it means this was surely written between 2007 and 2012 as that’s the lifespan of Gowalla. With that new iPhone reference too, you’re looking at 2007. But such is life, such is the way the web works, this is from The Atlantic which insists it was written this year.

So there are a couple of extra layers to this now. There’s the original point about mysterious points of interest on digital maps and the thought of who placed them there, why they did it and what the place means to them. But now there’s also what happened to this specific place and to all places that were marked on Gowalla and the answer seems to be that they have just gone. Vanished. (There’s a tiny bit about what was supposed to happen to the Gowalla data on Wikipedia. You can trust it about an online site.)

And there’s the business of when this was really written and posted. You may notice on The Blank Screen that every quote has its full first-publication date stated but there is an argument that you make your website seem fresher if you don’t.

I don’t agree with this. Certainly if your latest post is dated six months ago, you’re in trouble. But otherwise, I think you just cost readers some confusion. Most of the time I don’t care when something is written but there are moments when it becomes an issue. Such as here when we can just about place Finn Arne Jørgensen in his car in a certain point in time as well as a certain point in Norway.

Maybe he’s just a very slow writer. But he’s an interesting one. Take a look at the full piece.

More good stuff from iOS 8

Posted by William Gallagher

It’s the update that keeps on giving little gorgeous details. This is a favourite of the less-obvious ones: iOS 8 gives you a bit of a nudge about what’s using your phone’s location-aware feature. Often you need that, more often you don’t.

It’s funny how many apps want to use your current location, it’s as if the developers fancied trying it out because it was new. The result is that every app seems to ask you to allow it to keep tabs on your location and over time you say yes enough that it becomes a long list.

Which eats into your battery power because they all keep yelling “are we there yet?” at the phone.

Now iOS 8 will nudge you. Just occasionally and just the odd app at a time. But when it happens, you get this. (And I said yes to this one.)

Time and space

Posted by William Gallagher

I got up at 5am this morning to write but I also came to a certain spot. Instead of my office, I am in my living room working on my MacBook Pro with its endearing keyboard fault. (There’s something wrong with the W and Q keys so every time you’ve read w or q I have actually keyed Apple-1 or Apple-2: I set a Keyboard Maestro shortcut to save me having to take the keyboard apart or take the time to bring it in for repair.)

But the reason I’m here is that here is where I started writing a short story. I’ve been commissioned to write one and as part of the job, I had an evening with a readers’ group. When I got home that night, I had an idea pounding away at me and I had to get it down, so I sat on my couch and typed a few notes. That was the intention. I ended up writing around 500 words of story, feeling it out, experimenting, testing whether the idea was really a story.

And every now and again, I come back to this couch to continue it.

It just feels right. I had this with The Blank Screen book which I wrote primarily on my iPad while working on a massive non-fiction title in my office.

Location matters more to me than I realised and I think it might mean more to you than you’ve thought. I don’t know, but I’m surprised at the depth of difference it’s made to me and if it helps me this much, in some intangible way, then I want to see if it helps you.

Follow. I don’t consider myself a journalist any more but I certainly was one for a long time and as part of that I grew the ability and the preference to write wherever I happen to be and for however long I happened to have. A sentence here. An article there.

Part of moving to drama is that I’m having to reach further inside myself and somehow what’s around me physically is getting in the way.

I still can and I still do write wherever and whenever I can. But coming to this couch to write the short story, going to the Library of Birmingham to do my regular OmniFocus reviews, it helps.

I’ve found this through accident. Can you try it deliberately? Try writing your next thing somewhere else and see if it helps you.

And then explain to me how I can claim this helps me write my short story when I’m visibly not writing it, I’m visibly talking to you instead.

Vague is good. Or something.

Posted by William Gallagher

It is great to know where the nearest pizza place is. (The other night I was RAVENOUS and every else was closed. My iPhone found an open Pizza Hut and gave me precise details of where it was, how long it would take me to walk there and exactly how soon I'd arrive after its closing time.) Then it's reportedly great to have Facebook say where you are. I don't do that so much, I don't tend to check-in to places, but oodles of others do and they love it. I like getting an update that someone I know is somewhere amazing. But I don't need and I don't want to know which room, say, they're in at Buckingham Palace or how high up the Statue of Liberty they've got. That's too much and Macworld's Mike Elgan says companies know this. They know it and after all these years and all this work and all that effort designing systems that can tell us location details, they are choosing to be deliberately vague.

In every case – Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, Safari for iOS and Google Chrome “Canary” – the companies have access to perfectly specific data and could easily show it to you. But as a service to you, as a user benefit, they're presenting you with vague information in place of specific information.

Why is vagueness a user benefit? Simple: Vagueness is humanizing.

I'll give you an example. People in real life don't say: “Wow! I just spent one-hundred and ninety-seven dollars and forty-two cents at Costco.”

They say: “Wow! I just spent a couple hundred bucks at Costco.”

People round numbers, guestimate how long things will take and speak in generalities. And they do it on purpose. Vague information is easier to receive and comprehend.

The Rise of Vagueness as a Service – Macworld 10 May 2014

It's a smart observation and I hadn't made it.

Use location reminders for work you don’t like

Posted by William Gallagher

It’s not that I don’t like invoicing. It’s that I don’t do it. I’m far more interested in doing the work. Today, for example, I am infinitely more interested in the fact that I’m working with a group of young writers as we create a play. Infinitely.

But it is an unfortunate fact that if one does’t get paid, one stops being able to eat and that stops one being able to do this work. I really want to survive to the play’s performance, so I have to get paid. And being freelance, that means I have to invoice.

I am full of good intentions to do with everything financial. Fortunately, I don’t have to be. I’ve set a location reminder.

I’m working in a library today. When I leave that library, my iPhone will bleep with a reminder that I need to invoice for this work.

That’s all. I may not do it right there and then, but I have a train ride after it so I probably will. I think I may come across as very mercenary, invoicing within ten minutes of finishing a job, but if I don’t do that, I don’t invoice at all, so.

If you have an iPhone, you have location reminders. They are in – and they were introduced to the world in – Apple’s free Reminders app. Every good To Do app since then has taken that idea and so I use the one in my beloved OmniFocus.

When technology makes you giggle and is still useful

Posted by William Gallagher

Oh, what did we do before our phones knew where we were? The service If This Then That (IFTTT) has now added features that will act on your going somewhere or being somewhere and it's tremendous. I use the hell out of location-based reminders: I am forever telling Siri on my iPhone to remind me to this or that when I get here or there. Forever. But IFTTT has much fancier uses and Lifehacker just compiled some of the most deliciously daft, make-you-smile ones that are also useful.

For example, my favourite is being welcomed home automatically a-la Marty McFly with your own theme song a la Ally McBeal:

Nothing is cooler than walking into a room to your own theme music and this recipe makes that possible by using IFTTT, Dropbox, Hazel, and Automator. Basically, when you enter a location, the recipe creates a text file in Dropbox which triggers Hazel, then starts an Automator workflow that turns on iTunes and plays a track. You could use this basic idea to launch pretty much any Automator workflow you wanted.

Okay, maybe it's stretching things to say this is useful. But others in Lifehacker's list are – and that's why they're not my favourites.

Location, location, location – in IFTTT

Posted by wg

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