Jony Ive interview

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The Financial Times has an interesting interview and profile of Jony Ive, chief designer at Apple, the company that today announced details of its Watch. Ive is credited with the Watch and, says the FT, with getting Apple to its current incredible financial worth:

In great part, that valuation rests on the shoulders of a 48-year-old Englishman. Yet as he lopes towards me down the corridor, in his comfortable suede shoes, bright-blue trousers and baggy, long-sleeved yellow top, his kindly features creased up in a welcoming grin, those broad shoulders seem remarkably unbowed.

Ive is arguably the most influential designer in the world, and yet he does that slightly disingenuous self-effacement thing characteristic of confident people who say they are just part of a team. There is a gentleness about him. He talks quietly and articulately in an accent unaffected by two decades in America. Even when he describes those who copy Apple as little better than thieves, it is with a smile and softness of tone that suggests he would far rather the unpleasant subject had never been brought up.

The man behind the Apple Watch – Nick Foulkes, Financial Times (6 March 2015

Read the full piece.

UK pricing for Apple Watch

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Let’s cut to it. The one you’re going to get is the cheapest. Except the Apple Watch comes in two sizes: 38mm and 42mm. For once the smaller device is the cheaper – doesn’t it cost more to squeeze components down? – and that will cost you £299.

The 42mm one will cost you £339.

This price level is called the Apple Watch Sport and I am not a sporting kinda guy but I will pretend I am as the next level up is a big step. Oddly, the next one is just called the Apple Watch: there’s no qualifier, no extra word in the name. It has the same two sizes and the smaller is £479.

Then there’s the Apple Watch Edition, the gold one. That starts from £8,000.

Told you that you’re going to get the cheapest. I have zero problems with this in terms of the watch: I neither want nor can afford to spend £8,000 on a watch. But the standard straps on the cheapest one do look cheap. I don’t have zero problems with that, I have something just above zero. It’s just that I think they might be uncomfortable: they look uncomfortable.

Still, whatever watch you buy, you can buy other straps, they’re just ranging from doable to silly money.

Nonetheless, they had me since last year.

Read more about the Apple Watch including all the UK pricing details on the official site. You’ve got up to 24 April to save.

Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac Preview

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Quick version: it looks good, mostly – no, wait, here’s how I summed it up for MacNN:

Testing this new beta is, actually, slightly weird: the Mac versions of Word and Excel now look like the iPad versions. That’s mostly true when you first start them up and they present a dialog box with New and Open options, plus templates. Choose one and go into it to edit the document, and the resemblance fades a little.

One thing that made the iOS version of Office a pleasure to use was that it was pared back, that some of Microsoft Office’s more esoteric features were removed. That even makes the Ribbon toolbar more useful, and this new Mac version also tries to balance features with a more minimalist look. We’ll have to see what it’s like after weeks and months of intense use, but at first blush it feels better than it was.

There are points where items seem a bit oversized: certain icons in the Ribbon feel excessive, and intro text as you set up the applications feels loud. That’s not a bad summary of the entire experience of using Microsoft Office 2016; it mostly looks better, Word feels good to write in, Excel feels powerful.

Hands On: Microsoft Office 2016 Preview (OS X) – William Gallagher, MacNN (6 March 2015)

If you’ve got a Mac and some time to kill, go get the Office 2016 preview here. It’s entirely free while it’s in beta and the best way to find out about anything is to use it. Do remember that it’s a beta, though: it’s not complete and it is always possible that you’ll lose work. So don’t do anything important in it.

Also, you could read the rest of my MacNN piece.

Your smartphone is making you thick

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Our smartphones help us find a phone number quickly, provide us with instant directions and recommend restaurants, but new research indicates that this convenience at our fingertips is making it easy for us to avoid thinking for ourselves.

The study, from researchers at the University of Waterloo and published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, suggests that smartphone users who are intuitive thinkers — more prone to relying on gut feelings and instincts when making decisions — frequently use their device’s search engine rather than their own brainpower. Smartphones allow them to be even lazier than they would otherwise be.

“They may look up information that they actually know or could easily learn, but are unwilling to make the effort to actually think about it,” said Gordon Pennycook, co-lead author of the study, and a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology at Waterloo.

In contrast, analytical thinkers second-guess themselves and analyze a problem in a more logical sort of way. Highly intelligent people are more analytical and less intuitive when solving problems.

Reliance on smartphones linked to lazy thinking — ScienceDaily (5 March 2015)

Read the full piece on your iPhone.

More on doing fewer things at once

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This may be the thing you need to know most: stop with the multitasking. It is bad. It is rubbish. Here’s someone with a psychology background agreeing with me:

One thing at a time — For many years the psychology research has shown that people can only attend to one task at a time. Let me be even more specific. The research shows that people can attend to only one cognitive task at a time. You can only be thinking about one thing at a time. You can only be conducting one mental activity at a time. So you can be talking or you can be reading. You can be reading or you can be typing. You can be listening or you can be reading. One thing at a time.

We fool ourselves — We are pretty good at switching back and forth quickly, so we THINK we are actually multi-tasking, but in reality we are not.

The one exception — The only exception that the research has uncovered is that if you are doing a physical task that you have done very very often and you are very good at, then you can do that physical task while you are doing a mental task. So if you are an adult and you have learned to walk then you can walk and talk at the same time.

The True Cost Of Multi-Tasking – Susan Weinschenk Ph.D, Psychology Today (18 September 2012)

That last bit about physical tasks was new to me but I think we all need reminding of the problems of multitasking. As ever, read the full piece.

Fitness and Productivity. Oh Dear God.

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We all know that sluggish feeling in the morning. Your body is moving but your mind hasn’t switched on yet. Imagine the impact on your day if you had a dose of endorphins before your morning meetings?

Exercising first thing is daunting, it’s tough, but it truly sets you up for a wonderfully effective day. It gives you a positive, fresh outlook and a real head start. Adding exercise to your day means your productivity will increase because you arrive to work energised, focused and more organised than before. You will be able to think more clearly, your energy levels will be higher throughout the day, you will be less stressed, more creative and better prepared.

Just think about it – you’ve done a workout, had breakfast and are up and at ‘em, feeling amazing – and all before 9am!

Positive Fitness and Productivity – Liz Costigan, ClaireBurge.com (undated

She’s not wrong. I know. I know. Read the full piece for a lot more. Then break it all to me softly.

Weekend read: but what about you?

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I write a personal blog called Self Distract every Friday and today’s one, intended to be just an aside and a musing on things if not necessarily amusing about anything, has caused some comments. Lots of nice things but also people identifying with its topic.

That topic was about conversation and how when we talk to friends, we have to make it a joint, two-way thing. Let me set the scene:

Okay, you may have trouble swallowing this considering how I go on at you every week. But when we meet in person, I am infinitely – infinitely – more interested in you than I am in me. Have I said this to you before? I tell you everything, I must’ve mentioned it: my attitude when nattering away with someone is that I know all about me, I was there, I saw me do it, let’s talk about you.

Truly, time spent talking about me is wasted and boring. I’m not knocking myself, I’m just not interested and I have plenty of time to know me, I might get only minutes with you. And look at you: look at all you’re doing, all you know that I don’t, how could I possibly waste any time talking about me?

I got told off for this today.

It’s not you, it’s me – William Gallagher, Self Distract (6 March 2015)

Read the full piece for what happened – and, much more interestingly, how it might ring some bells with yo.

Anxious people screw up

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No, really? But:

New brain evidence provides insight into why highly anxious people are worst at making decisions when things get unpredictable (Illustration by Ian Smiley)
Highly anxious people have more trouble deciding how best to handle life’s uncertainties. They may even catastrophize, interpreting, say, a lovers’ tiff as a doomed relationship or a workplace change as a career threat.

In gauging people’s response to unpredictability, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Oxford found that people prone to high anxiety have a tougher time reading the environmental cues that could help them avoid a bad outcome.

Their findings, reported today (March 2) in the journal Nature Neuroscience, hint at a glitch in the brain’s higher-order decision-making circuitry that could eventually be targeted in the treatment of anxiety disorders, which affect some 40 million American adults.

Anxious people more apt to make bad decisions amid uncertainty – Yasmin Anwar, UC Berkeley (2 March 2015)

Read the full piece for more. And hat tip to Fast Company for it.

Should we do this too? Recently Rejected opens up

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There’s a new website called Recently Rejected which has artists displaying the work that, yes, well, you got it. Sometimes very beautiful work tossed aside because the intern down the hall did something for half the price.

Do go take a look: I’m not a fan of all of it and you do always wonder what got chosen instead, but there are some absorbing designs in all manner of fields.

But should we do this as writers too? It has a certain appeal but then so does have an unseen bottom drawer of material that we get to drag out, blow the dust off and pretend to commissioners that it’s brand new and just for them.