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WWDC: What I’ll use and what firms will copy

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This is going to be the norm for all computers soon but Macs soonest. You’re walking through your house writing a quick email on your iPhone and by the time you get to your desk, it’s becoming a long email. You’re wishing you hadn’t started it on the wee small screen there but you’re committed to it so you finish.

Not any more. From later this year when OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 are out, you’ll just put your iPhone down and carry on typing on your Mac. Exactly where you were. If it’s that long a bleedin’ email, you could then just pick up your iPad and head out of the house still writing it.

I can’t say I’ve ever wanted to between all three like that but I have regularly done that business with writing an email on my iPhone. I have very often had to leave for a meeting and therefore had to set things up on my iPad before I go. So the idea of just picking it up and going, I will do this. I will use this.

Apple calls it HandOff, as in handing off work to someone else or in this case some other machine. Samsung will probably call it OffHand and I rather like that better. But soon enough nobody will call it anything at all because this alchemy will be something normal that everybody uses everywhere.

I’ll also use this new business that if there’s no wifi for your iPad, it will connect to your phone and use that’s 3G or 4G connection. I do this now through tethering and it works fine, but it’s something else to remember to do. Something else to fiddle with instead of just working.

I am very big on not having to fiddle, not having to set up, not have to faff through a Wizard or something, but instead just getting on with the work I want to do.

That’s the big takeaway from this year’s WWDC for me. It’s really why I use and like Macs so that the annual announcement had more of this for both the Macs’ OS X and the iPhone/iPad’s iOS, I like that.

Speaking of iOS 8 and speaking of speaking, the only thing I wanted to see come some day was the ability to just talk to Siri on my iPhone instead of tapping a button first. Got it. The feature – it’s called HeySiri because that’s what you do, you say “Hey, Siri” and I’m not wild about that – will only work when the iPhone is plugged in but that’s fine. I add a lot of reminders to OmniFocus while I’m driving so that’s more than fine, that’s tremendous.

Speaking of more speaking of speaking, I’ve already tried an application that ostensibly let me make and receive phone calls through my Mac. It was rubbish. I regretted spending the money. But the odds are that with it part of OS X Yosemite, Apple will have made it work better. So I’m pre-sold on that one too.

I watched the WWDC video late last night and it was full of many little and large nuggets like this. Many, many times I’d nod thinking yep, I’m having that.

I did look at it from a very specific, biased view of simply what I was interested in and what I thought yep about. Possibly the best general roundup of all that was announced was done over on Wired. Do take a look, would you?

Especially as I did 5am-2am last night and swear to god I can’t remember who I am right now.

Where to watch Apple’s WWDC announcements

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Follow this handy guide based on how much you like Apple:

You’re vehemently anti-Apple:
Go anywhere you like and you’ll find plenty else to watch. I think there’s football somewhere. Or is that next week?

You’re vehemently an Apple fanatic:
You already know the answer.

You’re a vehemently uninterested in anything to do with technology:
Well, thanks for reading this site anyway.

You’re everybody else:
The short answer is that you should go to Apple’s WWDC Event page . That’s not only short, it’s obvious. But it’s also new. I’m sure I’ve seen some Apple announcement streamed live but until recently the quick way to find out what is and isn’t announced is to check out an unofficial Mac website and watch as they live-blog the event.

I loathe live blogs. I have mocked live blogs. I can live without being told what music Apple is playing before the event.

And I can live without any of the actual news Apple announces. Yet I like these events, I enjoy them and I would be watching the new live stream. Except:

You’re me:
Throughout the event you’ll be driving to a place near Stratford to talk with a reading group that you’re going to write a story for.

I am obviously and understandably excited about that, but yes, you can bet that on my way home I will see if the recording of the event is up.

Taking the Pomodoro technique to its obvious conclusion

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The Pomodoro technique is where you set a timer and you work for, say, 25 minutes and then take a break for 5 minutes. Then you do it again. And again. The name Pomodoro comes, through a reasonably short but twisty route, from a type of clock or timer that was apparently popular somewhere. This timer looked like a tomato. And the word pomodoro means a kind of tomato sauce. Flash forward to the age of the app and we get this:

Screen Shot 2014-05-13 at 21.37.30

Looks more like a fella with green sunglasses if you ask me, but it’s a tomato timer for the Pomodoro Technique:

Pomodoro Timer helps you boost your productivity using the Pomodoro Technique™, one of the most effective time management methods out there. Not only will you get a fully configurable timer that lets you customize every aspect of the technique, but you will also enjoy a clear and beautiful user interface.

Pomodoro Timer costs £1.99 UK or $2.99 US and is available in the Mac App Store.

Video – designing how we use computers

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This hits me in so many interests. Design. Computers. Or more specifically, how we use computers to get our work done. How the efforts of software designers enable every single thing I ever do. And this video grabs me because it's about the history of the user interface. It still feels weird using the word history about a time I went through, but there you go.

John Gruber talks history, design, computers, software and people in this talk primarily about Apple's operating systems. It's from 2011 so it's already lagging behind but I just enjoyed the lot over a late breakfast:

Webstock '11: John Gruber – The Gap Theory of UI Design from Webstock on Vimeo.

Reeder for Mac now in public beta

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Screen Shot 2014-04-11 at 20.45.55

The short news for Reeder fans: download it right now from here.

The slightly longer news for anyone who isn’t a Reeder fan: it is terrific and you should download it right now from here.

Reeder is a news reading app, an RSS one where you tell it what websites you like and forever afterwards it gets news from all of those sites. Depending on the site, you can read the headline, the standfirst, an extract or the whole article and whichever you get, it looks gorgeous. One tap in the morning and I am reading news from BBC, New York Times, Lifehacker, The Onion and myriad more.

There are many RSS readers like Reeder but I don’t think there is another one that is really anything like Reeder. I’ve long loved its design – most of it, at least – and how well done its text was. Routinely, if I found an article on a site that was just too ugly to read, I’d either bung that piece into Pocket to read later or I’d subscribe to it in Reeder and read it there.

I still remember the instant when I learnt that Reeder for iOS was out. Last September, a new version was released partly to deal with how Google shut down its service that powered all RSS readers. It was a paid update and I paid instantaneously. That’s how much I liked the old one and now it’s how much I like the new.

Yet as good as Reeder is for RSS, I missed having it on my Mac too. That Google shutdown made the Mac one literally unusable and that is almost a year ago. Here’s how good Reeder is: I haven’t replaced it. Not on my Mac. I’ve tried others on iOS but as much as I used to use RSS on my Mac, I simply stopped reading any RSS there.

Until tonight.

What’s been released is a beta version of Reeder 2 for Mac and the final version will be a paid-for app. I don’t know the price yet and I don’t truly care: I have read many thousands of articles through the various versions of Reeder and I open it practically as often as I do my email.

So go download it now from here and be ready to pay whatever the maker demands when it’s out of beta.

Email hacks – create a temporary group in OS X Mail with TextExpander

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File this under I Needed To Know But Couldn’t Find It On the Internet. So here I am putting it on the internet.

My problem was that I now have to regularly email the same group of about 25 people, a good dozen or more are not in my address book. OS X Mail remembers who you’ve emailed before, whether or not they’re in your address book and that is remarkably confusing. I’ve just been slogging through this and discovered the strangest people are not in my address book: people I email often, people I like enormously, they ain’t in there.

They are now.

Side tip: in Mail, choose the Window menu and the entry for Previous Recipients. You get a long list. A long list. But if somebody is in your book, you get a little contact-card-like icon next to their name. And if they aren’t, you don’t. Click on the first one who isn’t there then option-click on each other one you want. Thump the Add to Contacts button and you’re done.

But with my group, I don’t actually know that many of them. Certainly not enough that I could glance down that list and know who was in the group, who isn’t. So I thought I was faced with adding each one separately and then collecting them into a group.

I was. Except I had a Damascus moment: I’ve got TextExpander.

So this is what I did – and I apologise for how geeky it sounds, I promise that it took seconds.

1) Found the last email to the group

2) Hit Reply to All

3) Selected all the names in the To: field and dragged the lot into the body of the message. They turned from the familiar blue-button names into names plus email addresses. They looked like this: “William Gallagher <wg@williamgallagher.com>” except with twenty-five more of them, all in one massive lump with commas between them.

4) Copy and paste into Word.

5) Search and replace “>, ” (the closing bracket, comma and space that is at the end of every address) and replace with “^p” (Word’s code for a paragraph)

6) Set a tab halfway across the page.

7) Search and replace ” <” (the space and opening bracket that is at the start of every address) and replace with “^t” (Word’s code for a tab)

8) That got me what looks like two columns: the first with people’s real names, i.e. “William Gallagher” and the second with their addresses, “wg@williamgallagher.com”

9) Option drag to select the column of names and the white space over to the start of the addresses.

10) Delete.

11) I was left with one column of addresses.

12) Search for “^p” and replace with “, ” (comma, space)

13) That got me back to one massive block of text that was every email address separated by a comma. Select and copy the lot

14) Open TextExpander and create a new snippet, a piece of text I want to use often. Paste my massive block of addresses and commas in to that and set a short key combination for the lot

So now whenever I’m writing an email message, I can type “;swf” (with the semicolon but without the quote marks) and the To: field is filled out with all of these nice people.

Now, truly, if you read out the above at the standard speaking speed of three words per second, it would take you a minute and forty seconds. I’ve just worked through the instructions again to check and the whole shebang took me… oh… a minute and 35 seconds. Okay. That was rubbish.

But next time I want to email this group, it will take me a seventh of a second. No searching for the last one, no adding some from the address book, some not, just “;swf” and wallop.

There is the downside that the people who weren’t in my address book still aren’t in my address book. As I talk with any of them individually, I’ll have to remember to add them. And I could have continued to just find the last email and Reply to All. I definitely could’ve done that and I have done for a month or more now. But each time I do it, I have to check the list because some people have asked to be taken off the group. Now I can forget that and just email everyone in one go. If anyone new asks to come off the list, it’s a moment’s work to edit the TextExpander snippet.

No, face it, William, this was a five-pound hammer for a one-cent problem. But it’s done now, get off my back.

WHAT YOU NEED

Definitely TextExpander. But then you need that for everything. Promise. Read more about TextExpander on its official site.

Microsoft Word. Any word processor would probably do this but I turned to Word – even though I don’t use it so much any more – because I knew the codes for paragraphs and tabs. See more about Microsoft Word on its site. I used the Mac version which takes a little more digging to find on Microsoft’s site. Can’t imagine why.

OmniOutliner 4 released today

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The short take on this is that if you bought OmniOutliner 3 from the Omni Group's site any time since January 6, 2011, wait.

Wait for an email that is reportedly heading your way with details of how exactly you can get the new OmniOutliner 4 for free. Free. Nothing. De nada.

Similarly, if you bought version 3 of this extremely good outlining application from the Mac App Store in that time, you'll also get it for free and you also have to wait a bit. The app has yet to work its way through the Apple approval system but when it goes live, it's yours.

But otherwise, go to the Omni Group site now with a credit card. If you've ever bought a previous version of OmniOutliner, you'll find you don't have to spend a huge amount to get the new one. And if you never have, wait a second: watch the introductory video about the new version.

And then whip out the card or tap whatever dangerously handy keystroke you have to make 1Password enter your CC details into online store forms.

Full price is $49.99, paid upgrades start at $24.99 and if you're eligible for a free upgrade, you'll never guess how much it will cost you.

I can't say I have a on/off love affair with outliners, it's a bit more of a tepid relationship that that. But I used to loathe them, I still get edgy, but OmniOutliner just got me through so many different and difficult projects that I am a fan.

Tag. You’re it

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In the olden days, like thousands and thousands of years ago, you would save a document and never find it again. I used to spend a lot of time split between PCs and Macs and regularly I would struggle to understand where something had been saved. (Especially with downloads: where the hell did they go?) More recently, we've had Spotlight on Macs and Windows Something on Windows 7 that mean you can find anything you like pretty instantly.

I know the Spotlight stuff the best: I regularly use it to search for, say, the word “invoice” and tell it that I want to see only Word documents created between April 2012 and March 2013. (Can you guess what I was doing there?) Wallop, there they all are.

That one feature, which so many people simply do not know is right there on their 'puters, has undone two decades of how I work. And it's undone it for the better. I no longer spend time creating chains of folders so that I can find, say, all Acme invoices done for copywriting in February 2013. I just save all my invoices in one place and they're waiting for me. If I want a particular one, Spotlight finds it. If I need to compile something about them all, I just open that one folder.

I think that's probably saved me a gigantic amount of time and effort. So much so that I'm very glad I listened when I was told about it, I'm certain that I have no need for any other solution – but I am also willing to listen again if you've got something better.

And people are saying they have something better. Hand on heart, I do not know. And I have ignored it for years. But now this thing is built in to the OS X Mavericks that I use most days and it's right there. Doesn't make me use it. Doesn't require me to do anything. I can continue ignoring it. But it looks at me. It looks. Like that, that's what it looks like. And all the time I'm hearing people talk about how great this thing is. They say it's so great that it is about bleedin' time that Apple added it.

It is tags.

If I save that Acme invoice, I already have a habit now of calling it by a fairly descriptive name so that I can see what it is right away whenever I open the invoices folder. I stole this idea from David Sparks and his extremely good Paperless book wherein I learnt to name files like this: “2014-01-10 Acme invoice DRI0001”. (To just nip off the subject of tags for a second, because this has proved so useful, Sparks also recommends using TextExpander to put that date in. So I go to save and instead of checking the date, I type the letters “;df” with the semi-colon and without the quote marks, and TextExpander pops in today's date for me. If, as usual, I'm playing catch up, I will then change that date but it's still faster. Now, carry on.)

So I've got Spotlight, I've got this descriptive filenaming system which without my doing anything is always sorted into date order. I don't know that I need anything else.

But still there are tags.

If I save my invoice “2014-01-10 Acme invoice DRI0001”“ then before I hit the actual Save button, I can type in some tags. I can type a row of words like invoice, Acme, copywriting, difficult client, bad day, don't do this again, paid really well, used the word purple, invoiced, not paid yet. And on and on and on. I can type these, they are tags, and so far I have never done it.

Except I guess that's a lie. Tags are new to OS X Mavericks – they're already in Windows, at least since Vista, and that would be great except I read Microsoft's advice on how to use tags and I glaze myself over – but they've been in other things. There are tags in Evernote. And I have used them there.

Just inconsistently.

Hang on. Let me check. How do you check how many tags you've used in Evernote?

Apparently it's 316.

I truly do not remember typing more than one. I remember typing 'recipe'. And I remember that because I spent some time thinking, have I already typed 'recipes'? It turns out I had. So now I have two and I don't know which to use when I search for a recipe. Instead, I just go to my Food notebook or I use Evernote Food. Or I use Paprika, an entirely different recipe app altogether. ("An entirely different recipe app.”)

I told you I don't know. Hand on heart, I said. Are tags any use to me? If they're not, why have I written 316 of them in Evernote? If they are, why have written zero in OS X Mavericks?

I can tell you one reason for that: if you create a tag in OS X Mavericks then every folder you open includes that tag in a list on the side. Brilliant: tap or click on that tag and you only see the files that have it. Tap or click on several tags and you'll see all those files that have both. So with a couple of clicks I could see all invoices sent to the bad client who pays well. But I have 316 tags in Evernote, if I did that in OS X Mavericks, how long would the list of them be? It would be 316 long and by the time I've scrolled through, I could've found the documents.

Oh.

Consider this a live blog.

Because right now, this moment, exactly as I reached for an example to tell you and then wrote it out, I've just changed my mind.

I do think having 316 tags listed out on the screen is ugly and a chore to read through, but I do suddenly see that being able to pick out invoices from a bad client who pays well is something that I would like. And it is something I would use.

I may have to look into tags a bit more, then. I was telling you all this by way of showing that time spent knowing how you can find things on your computer will help you save a lot more time later. And recently I seem to have been in many conversations with fellow writers who complain they can't find anything. But now I'm thinking I should spend that time myself to understand more about tags.

Thanks.

Also, I was telling you this in order to then point you at someone who knows what they're talking about or at least doesn't write to you until they know what they're talking about. That won't catch on. But here's a particularly interesting take on it all from Lifehacker: I've Been Using Tags All Wrong.

Apple improves Gmail support in OS X 10.9.1

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Right now my Mac is nudging me. Oi, William, it’s saying, I’ve got something for you. That’s nice but what’s nicer is that I can say nudge me again in an hour or maybe try me tonight or perhaps tomorrow and the nudging will go away.

And it will come back so I don’t have to add to my To Do list that there is a new version of OS X Mavericks, I certainly don’t have to remember that lottery-number-length “10.9.1”. I can just agree to it being downloaded the next time I leave my desk.

The significant digit of the 10.9.1 is that last .1 because this is a small, minor, trivial update so I’m happy to just let it loose while I go off somewhere. But it’s also one of those teeny updates that bring important things – to some people. If you are a heavy Gmail user then you’ve apparently been narked by how OS X Mavericks broke Apple’s support for Gmail. It didn’t break it enough that you could see it had died, no, it just bent it a bit so that you’d be working away unaware that something wasn’t right.

I don’t believe anyone lost any data, this was a matter of convenience but an important matter of convenience. Apparently.

I’m not particularly a fan of Gmail – ask me why some day, it’s trivial but it sticks with me – so I don’t need the update for this. But there are also tweaks akimbo for software that I do use, such as the Safari web browser.

Plus, it’s such a quick download and such an automatic don’t-need-to-think-about-it kind of job that if you’d started it instead of reading this, you’d be updated now. Sorry about that.

Your Mac will be telling you the update is available but if it hasn’t yet, check up the Software Update option in the App Store.