I hadn’t even noticed that it was out but reportedly iOS 8 has already had its first update – and something isn’t working.
I’m not clear yet what it is but let’s have Apple sort it before we trying finding out.
update
Evernote for Mac gets needed update
Short version: Mac users who got Evernote from the official site, go back and get the new one. If you got it from the Mac App Store, the update will be with you soon.
Longer version. If you’re an Evernote user then you tend to think that it is great but you have either one or two specific concerns. The one that everybody has is that starting a new note is slow. This is why there are a slew of iPhone apps that do nothing but quickly launch so that you can type something, then squirts your text into Evernote while you go off doing something else.
It’s also why a very welcome iOS 8 Extension is own controls for creating new notes. By itself, that doesn’t make the process much faster but we’re talking nuances here anyway: if it were that slow to start, we’d never start it.
The second concern is chiefly for Mac users. Evernote for Mac could get in knots and become frustrating to use for its speed issues, for how fiddly its tables were.
But I get to say could, past tense, because I’ve been running the updated release all morning and it’s great. From the Evernote blog:
You know what’s better than adding a new feature? Making a bunch of existing ones a million times better. That’s what today’s Evernote for Mac update is all about.
For months, our Mac team has been quietly rebuilding every underlying aspect of the app. This allowed us to tackle speed, sync, and editing in a holistic way rather than piecemeal improvements. On the surface, things look more or less the same. Hidden beneath is an entirely new Evernote, designed to put a smile on millions of faces.
Evernote for Mac: Better Note Editing, Faster Sync and 100s of Fixes – Andrew Sinkov, Evernote blog (22 September 2014)
Don’t update OmniFocus 2 for iPhone yet
You may not have a choice: I just found that my copy has been updated automatically. Reportedly this update was released “inadvertently” and wasn’t intended to launch until iOS 8 arrives in a few days.
The reason I know this is that the update in the App Store says so. It also says that people have been finding problems with it on iOS 7 and that therefore The Omni Group is working to resolve things.
But in my casual use of OmniFocus 2 for iPhone tonight I’ve not hit any snags. Plus, I’m updating to iOS 8 the instant it’s available so the worst that can happen is that I stick to OmniFocus on my Mac and iPad for a little while.
So. If you can avoid the automatic update, do. If you can’t or you haven’t, hopefully it’s a shrug. But at least you’ll know why if you hit a snag suddenly.
OmniFocus 2 for iPhone adds TextExpander support
It’s a small thing – well, probably a big job for The Omni Group to implement, I don’t know – but there is a strong chance you just squealed. I know I did.
TextExpander lets you type a short code like a couple of letters and have sentences, paragraphs or more complex text appear magically. It is great for things you repeatedly but actually it’s only really great on Macs: it works everywhere on Mac, everywhere, it’s perfect and I think mandatory. On iOS, it’s only able to be great if the app you’re using directly supports it.
Now OmniFocus 2 for iPhone supports TextExpander. Fantastic.
Very many of my tasks in OmniFocus start off as email messages that I get. I’ll routinely forward them to OmniFocus to deal with later but often I don’t bother to do anything more to help me out. If the subject is the famously useful “Re: re: re: re: re:” then maybe I’ll change it to something else. But often I don’t and later I’m not sure what the task was. With TextExpander, I can have a snippet – as it’s called – where by typing something like “aaa” will expand out to “Ask Angela about” and then I can type the rest or it can be the existing email subject.
I wish OmniFocus for iPad did this too but that’s being updated so I think you can be safe in assuming that TextExpander support will be in the next release.
Here’s OmniFocus in all its forms on the official Omni Group website. And here’s TextExpander.
“What’s On Your Mind?”
Via The Independent
Microsoft taketh away
There’s one big disadvantage to how Apple has made updating your iPhone apps automatic: sometimes you wish you’d stuck on the last one.
If you’ve switched off automatic updating and so have a choice about it, don’t update Skype. Because Microsoft has taken away a pretty core feature. The website 9to5mac, amongst many others, explains:
Skype may have recently launched a major update to its Skype for iPhone app, but one rather basic feature went missing – the ability to listen to voice messages. A subsequent update to Skype for iPhone 5.1 still hasn’t fixed the problem.
In a support thread on the Skype site, community manager Claudius provided what must qualify as one of the most unhelpful response ever to complaints by users:
“Voice message playback is not supported in Skype 5.0 for iPhone. Please use Skype on another platform to listen to your voice messages”
That article includes a readers’ instructions for how to undo this stupid thing and go back to an older version of Skype. But you need patience and a steady hand.
Firefox: 29’s the charm
Firefox works on everything. When it came out, it made Internet Explorer look embarrassing. (More embarrassing.) Firefox was the darling of every serious technology-minded geezer because it worked better, it worked faster.
I just didn’t like it.
It’s a funny thing. I like Safari and I swear to you that it feels light, that it feels like you just get on with things instead of having chunky buttons and options to slog through. What’s funny is that this is precisely, to the letter, what fans of Firefox say is wrong with Safari.
So, plainly, your choice of browser is surprisingly personal. (As long as it isn’t Internet Explorer. You can go too far.)
I’ve always kept a copy of Firefox around because there is often a site that just doesn’t work in Safari – or doesn’t work in Firefox, I don’t know why I keep finding picky websites. Each time I start up Firefox it irritates me by feeling heavy, kludgy and for CONSTANTLY telling me it is updating itself. I just want to go to a site. I want to go once, I want to go now, I want to get the hell out of Dodge and go back to Safari but, no. UPDATING.
It’s been worse since 2011 when the company announced it was going to update every six weeks or so. I applaud them for not doing the dots: Safari is currently on version 7.0.3. But at first it was wearisome seeing an entirely new version of Firefox coming down the chute: version 6, version 7, version 8… and on and on. I’m sure the developers intend this to seem like they are truly on the ball, at the cutting edge, bringing us the latest technology faster than anyone else. Version 9, version 10, version 11… I just think “Again?” or often “Already?”
My current copy of Firefox is version 26 and it is practically prehistoric: apparently I downloaded it on 14 March, a whole 47 days ago. I don’t even remember using it 47 days ago but I imagine I did and that it updated itself. Hang on. Yep, I’ve just opened it and it’s just updated itself.
To version 27.
I have no clue why it isn’t 29. I do have a clue that I could, with a wee bit of effort, go off now to already get versions 30 or even 31 in beta.
You can tell I’m not going to. But many will and they have very good reasons to find that version 29 is a great one. It’s very customisable, it’s got oodles of features. Hear what from someone who is far more of a fan than I am:
And then read more plus get a download at the official site.