video

Video: David Allen on stress-free productivity

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Small thing. I’ve said video up there in the headline but actually, whisper it, this isn’t really about bringing you that video. Which is good because it may not be here.

It should be. Take a look right between this paragraph and the next.

Was there a video? If there was, and your name is Adam – and you have the most brilliant job title I’ve ever seen – then hello Adam, Happiness Engineer, all seems to be working now. If there isn’t a video but you are Adam, um, hello.

And whether there is a video or there isn’t, if your name isn’t Adam, then hello you too. How’ve you been?

Inkspill Writing Retreat – intro video and exercise

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Listen, we talk all the time about productivity but we are writers, we need to write. Last weekend I contributed a series of writing blogs and suchforth to Inkspill, an online writing retreat run by poet Nina Lewis. You can still see and even take part in the entire weekend just by going to her official site. And I’d recommend that for seeing the work of my colleagues on the retreat, Charlie Jordan and Heather Wastie.

But let me bring you what I bought to the table. Today, a video introduction that I grant you makes little sense out of context and within which I do look half-dead with sleep. But it also includes a writing exercise that I especially like doing with people. Plus, it’ll tell you what’s coming up over the rest of this week: each day I’ll post one of the writing exercise blogs I did for Inkspill.

I hope you like them and that when you’ve seen this video, you rush me caffeine.

Video: Forbes on the best productivity apps

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There’s a pile in here that I hadn’t heard of. I think the format of having two blokes stand there talking to each other is as irritating in this as it is on television – what, no, really, I am so surprised to learn of this app you’ve only mentioned in every rehearsal and while we were writing the script – but what they’ve got to say is useful.

Breathtaking future from Adobe – er, and Microsoft?

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Is it bad that I look at this, want it and then when I see it’s Microsoft think twice? Microsoft tends to do feature lists really well, as in adding a lot of features to the list. It tends to demo well too. But then in real life the perfect demo crashes all the time. Or the features on the list don’t actually do what you thought they would (see the howls of WordPerfect users forced to switch to Word and learning that Microsoft literally – literally literally, not just very – could not do Reveal Codes). Or the features are just so hard to find that you wonder whether they’re really there or not.

So the Microsoft element of this makes me cautious. And I suppose it’s interesting that Adobe is getting into bed with Microsoft more: it makes you wonder if they’re really thinking of abandoning their power user base over on Apple gear.

But if you’ve ever used Photoshop, Illustrator or other main Adobe apps, this will impress you.

 

 

One key reason to love iOS 8: TextExpander

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Previously… TextExpander is this great, great Mac app that is bleugh on iOS. Yes, you could still tap a couple of keys and have them expand out to pages of text, but you had to leave whatever app you were in. Leave Mail, go to the TextExpander Touch app, tap the couple of keys, select all the expanded text, copy, go back to Mail, paste.

Short alternative: you never bothered.

It was worth having TextExpander Touch for those apps that did allow it to work, but there weren’t a huge number of them and none of Apple’s did. So no joy in Mail, Safari or Pages. None of that.

Now, as of today and the moment that iOS 8 drops, it’s all change. The new iOS 8 allows alternative keyboards and TextExpander provides one. Whatever you’re using on your iPhone or iPad, you can be using the TextExpander keyboard and that means all apps, everything, everywhere, includes TextExpander features.

I’m about 80% ecstatic. I was 100% but it turns out that I prefer the ‘normal’ Apple iOS 8 keyboard. TextExpander’s one looks a little weedy to me and, potentially more seriously, if you use this then you lose the new auto-complete suggestions feature of Apple’s keyboard. That’s where it tries to calculate what word you’re likely to type next and offers a selection to you as you go. I don’t know yet whether I like that. But I should probably avoid getting used to it because it ain’t there on the TextExpander keyboard.

David Sparks has been on the iOS 8 and TextExpander betas and he’s produced this video. About half of its two-minute running time is devoted to how you set this stuff up but then he’s got examples of it in action. That’s the bit to watch for.