Rolandt

If you want to be guaranteed loads of clicks in this town, write about how everyone is being driven out by high real-estate prices (caused by heartless politicians, shadowy foreign investors, the real-estate cartel, etc etc) and/or about a study that tries to bring real data to the anecdotes.

So this recent study from UBC got loads of attention all around, though some didn’t like the author’s comments (made separately from the study) that the solution was supply first, and then, a poor second, restricting demand.

The study noted that, yes, out-of-town investors (whether from Chilliwack or Chengdu) who buy properties and leave them empty as second homes or investments do drive up prices. Some people were scornful that it took an academic study to come to this conclusion, but the point was not, do they or don’t they. It was: If they do, by how much.

This quantified the increase, noting that it is greater in Vancouver, where there is more of a supply problem, than in New York, where much more supply was already available and more is being added all the time.

Every November, 400,000 aspiring novelists make a commitment to dive into a literary marathon known as National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The goal? Completing a 50,000-word novel in just 4 weeks. Founded in July 1999 by writer Chris Baty (who we’re proud to say leads the UX Writing team at Dropbox), NaNoWriMo has been the catalyst for over a dozen bestsellers. This year, Dropbox Paper is sponsoring NaNoWriMo—and that inspired two of our own to take on the challenge. Today, Jenna Crane, Product Marketing Lead for Dropbox Paper, and Ben Taylor, Content Strategist on the Dropbox Global Brand Marketing team, tell us how their creative flow is going on day three of the marathon.

How far into the process are you? 
Jenna: I am a “pantser.” In NaNoWriMo terminology, there are planners and pantsers: people who plan it all out versus people who fly by the seat of their pants. I had an idea I’d been thinking about for a while, and I’m just starting from the beginning and seeing what comes out.

Did you start with a character or a theme or a plot?
Jenna: I started with a “what if” scenario and fleshed out the implications of that. I did the whole first day without having a single character, then I had to decide, “Okay, who is the person in this book going to be?” On day two, I added a character, and I haven’t written yet for day three.

Are you doing an outline or treatment?
Jenna: The background for me is that I haven’t written outside of work in five or six years. For me, this is really the push I need to start writing again. I’m trying not to be too critical and just use it to get into that mindset again. That’s how I’m approaching this: just writing and seeing what comes out. I’m not trying to be too calculated about it.

Ben: One of my guilty pleasures is reading murder mysteries. And I think if you really polled people, there’d be quite a few who’d admit to that. So I’ve read maybe 30 Agatha Christie novels, maybe four Dorothy Sayers mysteries. I recently got into John Dickson Carr, who is a somewhat forgotten, early 1900s American author who’s famous for the “locked room” style of mystery where someone dies within four walls and there’s apparently no way anyone could’ve got in, but the solution is always very scientific and pragmatic. So I set out by trying to envision the solution to a crime. I wanted the actual outcome of the novel. I figured that all out, then I worked backward. What’s the setting? What’s the time period, which was kind of important because of the logistics of the crime. Then I stumbled my way into some characters.

Did you research a crime or base the story on something you’d read in the newspaper?
Ben: Leading up to it, I purposefully read three or four specific books that I heard were pretty good to try to get some inspiration. The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers is very good. I also read The Three Coffins otherwise known as The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr, which I highly recommend. But I also researched different kinds of poisons, which made me wonder if big brother would come knocking on my door! (laughs) That was basically the research I did. But also, the book is based on a tech company of sorts, so I was able to leverage some personal experience about the nature of a business dinner.

Has it been difficult to shift from business writing to fiction writing?
Jenna: That’s been one of my biggest barriers. For so long, I’ve written in a business context, where I’m trying to be as clear and concise as possible. And I forgot what it’s like to just describe a situation or conversation. It’s a very different muscle. I thought, “Well, I’ve been writing consistently for a decade plus now. I should be able to just switch over to this style of writing.” I got 700 words in and said “Well, there’s the whole plot, so…” (laughs) How do I fill this out and extend it into 50,000 words?”

How would you describe the genre? Is it science fiction?
Jenna: Yeah, a little dystopian and sci-fi-ish.
Ben: Sounds great. When’s it coming out?
Jenna: Never, probably, at this pace! (laughs)

Has your initial idea taken any unexpected turns?
Ben: For this book, because I scoped out the solution in advance, I knew what I was writing toward and that helped. The hardest part for me has been, how do I make it so the heroine can research the crime, have motivation to do so, and stay at least on pace with, or ahead of, the police. And how do you make that realistic?

Jenna: Mine kind of took an unexpected turn in that, in trying to find my character, I ended up putting myself in it, essentially. That’s an easy way to start! (laughs) In doing so, I examined my own motivations for why this idea was exciting to me. It’s about this technological advancement that people are clamoring for, but it has some dark implications. In thinking, “Why is this interesting to me?” I realized it’s because I would totally want that. From there, I thought maybe that’s the way to explore that kind of technology: through someone who wants it, but why?

How much do you feel like you’re steering the story versus discovering it as you write?
Ben: For this book, it’s been more of a steering situation. I could see myself doing NaNoWriMo in the future and being much more of a discovery process. Just hearing Jenna talk about a dystopian future story, that would be really fun. And I’d actually love to write a novel that’s more discovery based, where I just try to write myself into a world like that. But with this one, it’s very mechanical. It’s a puzzle. I have various clues that I lay out as I go. Here and there, a piece will spiral out and I’ll realize I need to go chase after it a bit and get outside of my path for a few hundred words. But largely, it’s been more of a steering process for me on this one.

Jenna: I feel like I’m cheating a little bit because as soon as I started writing about my own experience, the words just flowed out of me. I felt like I was juicing a stone for the first day. I did about 700 words in about an hour. And I did all the calculations: “Oh, no, that means I’ll need to do this many hours per week to get to this.” Then last night, I wrote for half an hour and got 1,100 words. And I thought, “Oh, interesting. Because I’m writing about my own experiences, I don’t have to do too much creative thinking necessarily.” So I’m using that to kind of ease myself into the whole process. One of the biggest surprises is that I thought it was going to be about writing, but it’s not. It’s about ideas and creativity. The writing is just the mechanism through which you explore those things.

How much of yourself would you say you’re putting into either the plot or the characters?
Ben: My wife shares a lot of traits with my heroine. Very observant, quick. Keeps her cards kind of close to her chest, then lets them out at the key moment. That’s made it easier to write her than maybe trying to completely make someone up. It’s been kind of nice because when I’m writing for work, I’ll usually keep editing every sentence as I write it. It’s pretty slow going. And with this, after the first seven minutes, I can usually get going, and I let myself use some adverbs (laughs) and there’s some adjectives floating around. So it’s been freeing to be able to do that and be kind of funny and a little more expressive, even if it’s a little bit wrong or something’s telling me that.

At what point does the work become play?
Jenna: I’ll let you know when that happens! (laughs) That usually happens for me for one of two reasons. One is when I like what’s coming out and I think “Oh, this is fun. I can get behind this.” I’m not at that point right now. I’m like, “Oh, this is crap. I need to go back to reading books and remember how actual people write.” Two is when it’s kind of cathartic, when I’ve written about difficult experiences in my life. That’s when I’ve totally gotten immersed in flow and just realized it’s almost a form of therapy.

Ben: For me, I had the most fun writing when I got to the portion where Scarlett, the heroine, and the detectives end up working together. They’re going over a few of the theories that turn out to be spectacularly wrong. What was so fun about it for me… when I get to a certain point when I’m reading a mystery, I get to a point where I like to put the book down for a minute and think about what I think could be going on. And this was my opportunity to write it the way I think about it. And it’s a classic mystery trope where the book will, at least once if not six times, try to trick you into thinking “This is it! This is the answer!” You can’t do it too much. But I really enjoyed that process of being able to write down the ways where I was thinking, “Okay, here’s one way to think about the entire crime.” It’s not what I actually have planned, but to me, it’s a fascinating way to look at this. And I actually get to write all of it. For whatever reason, I’ve always thought it was fun to think through those different approaches.

What tools do you use to capture notes when you’re brainstorming?
Ben: This is not meant to be an intentional plug, but sometimes I’ll pull up a Dropbox Paper doc.

Jenna: I was gonna say “There’s this amazing thing called Dropbox Paper!” That was going to be my answer. (laughs)

Ben: I wrote about 25% of my novel on my phone. This was just before I started at Dropbox about a year ago. Sometimes I’d be on public transportation or at a park and I’d have a moment of inspiration. Honestly, when I’m not doing the kind of writing we were talking about, where I’m editing every single sentence as I write, in which case I do kind of need a computer. But when I’m just kind of letting it go, I’m totally fine for a hour or so, just writing on my phone. It’s weird. I wouldn’t have expected this four years ago, but I’ve just gotten so used to communication on my phone, and apps have gotten so much better that that’s where I’ll do it.

One thing I will do is sketch things out. Even though I’ll mostly keep things digital when I’m writing or taking a note, I did use pen and paper to sketch out the floor plan of the mansion where the dinner took place and a subsequent scene occurs there. Just looking at the spacing and “Would this person have time to walk from this place to this place unnoticed?” That was the kind of thing I’d do when I didn’t have anything else in front of me.

Jenna: I’ve been using one Paper doc for the writing and one for the notes about the writing. I took a screenshot of the placeholder text that came up when I first opened the doc (to begin the project). I thought it was funny because it really conveyed my feelings at that point:

Jenna: Then my meta notes and to-dos have themes that I want to explore and plot ideas. I’m keeping track of my weekly progress. I’m only 14% of where I need to be on week one.

Has the experience of NaNoWriMo changed your approach to brainstorming?
Ben: For me, it really has been the experience of turning off the inner critic. It’s kind of a cliché among writers. I think what’s nice about NaNoWriMo is that there’s so much to write, and comparatively little time to do it, so you’re forced to push through. It took me a good hour the first time I sat down. The inner critic was deleting things and deleting things. But getting into hour two or hour three—it’s like when you need to lose the hiccups and you finally do, but you don’t realize when it happened—there’s a moment in hour three where you realized, “That inner critic has been off for 90 minutes. How did this ever happen? It’s been a decade since that happened to me. So that was really cool.

WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us.  Tim O’Reilly

Tim O’Reilly has had a backstage pass to the technology change we have been coping with for the past three decades. WTF is his effort to make sense of what he’s seen and offer some counsel about what it may mean for the next decades we’ll be living through. While some cynics and skeptics might view this as no more than O’Reilly’s attempt to hit the speaker’s circuit, there’s value here to those of us with a more restrictive view of the show. Can O’Reilly offer the rest of us valuable insights even if he may have been mostly a combination groupie/roadie for the more visible performers on the stage? My assessment? This is one smart roadie with insights worth paying attention to.

What makes WTF work is that O’Reilly is an unusual blend of techie, communicator, and entrepreneur. In ethnographic terms, he’s been a participant/observer throughout this unfolding process. Most of those reporting from the new territories are one or the other; they are participants either too busy or too biased to offer dispassionate analysis or they are observers too removed from the action to see the really interesting stuff.

One of the early battles was between open vs proprietary strategies. Eric Raymond labeled this as a choice between the Cathedral and the Bazaar. Today it is evolving into the emergence of networked platforms as one of the next arenas being contested. O’Reilly frames this continuing evolution as a requirement to differentiate between value creation and value capture. Organizations that focus on capturing all the value that they create do not prosper as abundantly as those who focus principally on value creation. Those who focus on playing positive-sum games do better—both for themselves and for the rest of us—than those who choose to play zero-sum games. This is a countercultural if not a counterintuitive strategy. The rhetoric of Wall Street and VCs is anchored in a zero-sum mentality; the winners in this new world, however, are playing a deeper game.

What I find especially intriguing about this line of thought is how it makes strategy and organizational design tightly coupled and how it then shrinks the differences between how things work inside the organization and how they work outside. One of the curiosities of large, traditional, organizations is that they cling to the worst practices of centrally planned and managed economies internally as they celebrate the value of the free market outside their walls.

At heart, what O’Reilly is arguing in WTF is not only that this is a hypocritical debate but that it has become a dangerous mindset as well. As he puts it “Amazon Web Services was the answer to a problem in organizational design.” O’Reilly reports on an interview with Jeff Bezos talking through the origins of AWS;

“Four years ago is when it started, and we had enough complexity inside Amazon that we were finding we were spending too much time on fine-grained coordination between our network engineering groups and our applications programming groups. Basically what we decided to do is build a [set of APIs] between those two layers so that you could just do coarse-grained coordination between those two groups.”

Working through this logic is anything but intuitive. Learning how to do so consistently may be the central skill for thriving, or possibly even surviving, in what is to come. O’Reilly has come in for some criticism in his perspective on Uber and its evolving working relationships with its drivers. I think the criticism is overblown and misses the nuance that O’Reilly is attempting to call attention to.

This goes to the heart of what WTF tries to do. Looking at a sample of successes, failures, and yet to be determined experiments, O’Reilly is trying to understand the strategic logic of the world we are brining into existence in a way that would let more of us contribute to that logic. I’m less interested in whether he has worked out the answers than I am in learning how to think along similar lines.

The post Review: WTF-What’s the Future? appeared first on McGee's Musings.

by Igor

Those logging into our webstore today were welcomed with a new Velo Orange website. It's now more easily navigated and mobile optimized. This transition has been something we've been working very hard on and we hope you like it.



With shopping and research going mobile, we also needed to have a mobile optimized website to allow our customers to access VO from any device they want. Be sure to check out some of the new features of the website: zooming in on product images, pop-out quick view, and an improved dealer locator.

This new platform will allow us to manage the website with much greater ease, allowing us more time to focus on the things that makes VO tick: product development and audience connection.

So here is what we are requesting of you: please go to our website and create an account using the email you used to login to our previous webstore. If you are having trouble accessing the new website, you may need to clear your browser's cache and cookies.


This will tie your old account to your new one, and allow you to see your previous orders as well as adjust any shipping/billing information you may need to change since you last logged in. You'll receive an email confirming your login information - simply follow the directions provided.


Domestic shipping has stayed the same, with a free shipping option for domestic retail orders over $150. You must use the code 150SHIP to get the deal. Find the fine print here.

For domestic wholesale orders over $400, you will get an option for free shipping - no coupon code needed.

International shipping has been simplified! Rather than quoting every international order that comes through, we have put a table rate into place for orders under $300. With shipping charges assessed at checkout, processing times with be cut down considerably. If time is of the essence and you need your VO bits stat, just send us an email at info@velo-orange.com and note in the comments section of your order that you would like a quote for your shipping options.

Any orders over $300 USD will receive a shipping quote by default, as these larger orders tend to be too variable for a table rate.

We want your experience to be enjoyable and easy, so please, if you find any issues or want to give us any feedback as you peruse the new website, drop us a line.

Happy riding!

“I am a collection of dismantled almosts.”

-

| Anne Sexton

(h/t to macrolit)

Diversify growth streams.

Google will send you traffic, but Google can change quickly.

Get yourself featured more prominently on the company website, newsletters, or outbound emails to customers.

Get inbound links on major news sites which get lots of traffic.

Answer questions on Quora, Yahoo Answers, and Stack exchange.

Build up bases on social media that share the best content from the community.

Develop partnerships with major organizations to help drive traffic to the community.

Whatever you do, start looking at building new streams of members into the community.

submitted by /u/kibwen to r/rust [link] [comments]

From Michael Alexander:

So a bunch of us rode across the Burrard bridge going north. After months of construction, workers are busy removing the fences and barriers on the east side, and the fabulous new bike lane and pedestrian walk is just opening.

 

As I cross the intersection with Pacific Boulevard, for some reason I drop my chain, so I’m standing there wiping my greasy fingers on the only thing available — the top of a traffic barrier– when a grizzled worker walks up  and hands me a paper napkin.

 

Flabbergasted , I just look at him and say thank you so much. And then I think about the riding experience we’ve just had, and I say, “You guys have done such a fabulous, fabulous job on this project.” And he says, “Well, everybody wants a fabulous job and they all want it done immediately.” and I said, “I can be very patient about about this because I know that really good work takes time and thank you, thank you, thank you.”

 

Then I joined my friends at Musette Caffé, the cyclist coffeehouse two blocks up Burrard, and over delicious Cortados, we talked about what fantastic public works Vancouver does, compared to other North American cities.

 

From Christina Capatides with CBS  comes the story of Vanport Oregon and Henry Kaiser. During World War Two this industrialist brought in thousands of African-American people from the Southern United States to work for the war effort in his ship yards. Portland Oregon already had a housing shortage and the Housing Authority would not build additional housing for these new residents. Not to be deterred, Kaiser built a city “on unincorporated land between Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon, and called it Vanport. And it became the second-largest city in Oregon and it was 40 percent black.”

While the rest of Oregon was segregated at that time, Vanport was not, with shared schools, daycare and housing forms. Housing was hastily built with wood foundations. Assumed to be a temporary city for the war effort, it was surrounded by bodies of water held back by a dam. A massive winter of rain  in 1948 resulted in the dam breaking. The entire city of 17,000 people  washed away in 60 minutes. Brochures had been distributed that morning insisting that despite the heavy rain dikes were safe and people would be warned if they needed to leave.

When the dam broke 20 people died and 17,000 sought new housing in Portland, expanding the segregated lines at the time, and forming a large enough minority in Portland to change attitudes and  to have their interests represented. As Ed Washington who was displaced from his childhood home because of the flood observed  “Vanport probably had more to do with the changing of attitudes toward African-Americans and other people of color than any other area in Portland. Nothing left here now, but memories. But you can’t take people’s memories from them, can you? Can’t take that.”

Here’s a video produced by Brian Van Peski on the history of Vanport.

 

 

 

In a major update released today, Apple's Clips app for iOS received a redesigned user interface, Star Wars stickers and scenes, iCloud support for syncing clips between iPhone and iPad, and a big iPhone X feature exclusive: Selfie Scenes.

Selfie Scenes

If you have an iPhone X, Selfie Scenes are definitely the biggest draw of this release. Each of the twelve included scenes places you on a different live background, which you can pan around to explore. You'll experience different music and sound effects, and depending on the scene, even the way you look might change – for example, the included scenes from Star Wars: The Last Jedi make you into a convincing-looking hologram.

Selfie Scenes use the iPhone X's TrueDepth camera to detect depth in front-facing video and, in real-time, replace the background of the shot with an alternative location. Scenes range from outer space, to a traditional cityscape, and an 8-bit world. There's a lot of fun to be had here.

As is true of the new Portrait Lighting feature on iPhone X and 8 Plus, the results with Selfie Scenes can vary depending on certain factors, such as your hair style or accessories you're wearing. In my testing certain scenes worked better than others – Brushstrokes was the worst offender, frequently cutting off parts of my head – but overall I was very impressed by how well the scenes worked.

Despite the fact that when choosing a Selfie Scene, it appears to fill the whole screen, once you get into recording mode you're only able to capture in a square orientation, as before.

Redesigned User Interface

Some common remarks when Clips first launched were that it had a somewhat steep learning curve. Once you adapted, it was easy to use, but that learning period took some investment. Apple has sought to fix that problem by completely redesigning the app for version 2.0.

Everything in the app is now better labeled than before, and is laid out in a more intuitive design too. On the main screen, scenes and posters join the standard camera and library options. There's no need for separate photo and video toggles anymore, thanks to the addition of a new photo button on the Camera screen. A rainbow star button houses filters, labels, stickers, and emoji – all a natural grouping since they're objects you can layer on top of your content.

Overall, the redesign appears to be a simple adjustment for longtime Clips users, and should be easy for new users to pick up as well.

Everything Else

Following the addition of Disney and Pixar content in version 1.1, Clips 2.0 introduces Star Wars to the mix. Besides the two Selfie Scenes featured above, there are Star Wars posters and stickers here too, and they join a host of new posters, stickers, effects, filters, and soundtracks located throughout the app.

One much-appreciated fix is that the full emoji catalog can now be accessed within Clips – before, only a sampling of commonly-used emoji were available. Another low-hanging fruit I'd been hoping would get fixed some day: iCloud now automatically syncs all clips. So if you set up a new device from scratch, you won't lose all your content like before. You can also now start a project on your iPhone, then edit later on your iPad. The iPad app still doesn't support landscape, but iCloud support is a step in the right direction at least.

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When Clips first debuted earlier this year, it was unknown what kind of support the app would receive from Apple going forward. Would it be another Music Memos, released to the public then largely left alone? While Clips 1.1 was an encouraging sign of life, today's 2.0 clearly demonstrates Apple's commitment to this app. And I'm glad for that.

Clips is a fun, simple utility that makes the task of video creation more approachable than it historically has been. While I still wish the app didn't restrict users to making square videos, everything else about Clips makes it an app I hope sticks around a long time.

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The iPhone X's display poses a challenge to app developers. Similar to when the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus debuted, there's a different screen size to work with here, which requires app layout adjustments. But more than simply the new size, the iPhone X brings two extra complications: the notch and an extra tall orientation. In order to best optimize for Apple's current flagship phone, developers need to carefully consider these two factors – failure to do so can result in a particularly unsightly notch, or a UI that's difficult to navigate one-handed.

We're only a week out from the iPhone X's debut, so what we see from X-ready apps today will likely evolve over time as developers are able to live with the device longer. But despite it being early days still, there are several apps that stand out among the best the App Store has to offer for iPhone X.

Halide and Apollo are two apps that right out of the gate put the iPhone X's two upper corners to good use. While I think that most apps, most of the time should leave the status bar alone so that system indicators like the battery and clock will remain visible, where appropriate, developers can get creative with that space.

Halide is a RAW manual camera app with a natural, easy to use set of controls for getting just the right shot. Its iPhone X update took advantage of the device's taller screen by removing all obstructions from the viewfinder, but it also did something creative with the top corners. On one side you'll see a histogram, while the other contains exposure values. Both data points look great at the top of the screen and blend well with the notch thanks to Halide's use of black backgrounds. The only drawback is that when in landscape, those elements don't have enough room to rotate, so they're oriented incorrectly. Nonetheless, they remain useful, creative design touches.

Apollo is an excellent Reddit client I reviewed recently. As a feed-based app, it naturally looks great on the tall iPhone X display. But the reason I mention it here is that it contains one tiny detail I wish Apple would adopt systemwide in iOS: whenever you click the iPhone's volume buttons, Apollo uses a custom volume indicator that appears in the upper left corner of the app, where the time normally appears. This works tremendously well. Besides saving a ton of on-screen space compared to iOS's default volume display, Apollo's implementation just feels like a natural fit for the status bar.

The Witness and Alto's Adventure are the only two games on this list, and they're also the only apps with default landscape orientations. While the notch in general seems to blend better in portrait mode than landscape, The Witness and Alto's Adventure are just so gorgeous that my eyes stay glued to their visuals rather than the unsightly bite out of the screen. Notch or not, playing games that look like this on the iPhone X's edge-to-edge OLED display is something special.

Weather Atlas and Things are two apps that simply look and feel great on the iPhone X. They were beautiful apps on LCD displays, and they're even more lovely to behold on OLED. Design-wise, each works well on the taller iPhone X. Weather Atlas features an expandable panel at the bottom of the screen that holds most of its controls, making the app easy to use one-handed. Things is solid in single-handed use thanks to two details: large, spacious headings at the top of each page, and a gesture that lets you engage the search bar (which sits at the top of the screen) simply by pulling down anywhere in the app.

MeasureKit and Warby Parker both employ the full height of the iPhone X's screen, but the way they use the display isn't anything special; what's unique is their use of the TrueDepth camera.

MeasureKit was one of the first AR apps we covered following iOS 11's launch. With its iPhone X update comes one new tool: Face Mesh. This displays a live facial grid of all the data points being tracked by the TrueDepth camera, so as you move your face around, you can see exactly which movements the camera detects, and which it doesn't. Beyond just seeing, you can also browse a list of all tracked data points. It's impressive to see just how complex the iPhone X's face tracking is.

Warby Parker's app has a new feature for helping you select glasses that will fit just right. It uses the TrueDepth camera to quickly scan your face, then takes you to an assortment of frames curated just for you. Clearly, technologies like ARKit and the TrueDepth camera have the potential to be transformative for digital shopping.

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After several years of incremental updates, the iPhone X represents a bold design shift. With that shift developers have fresh opportunities to take their apps in new directions. The main areas of change that interest me are:

• Apps making use of the status bar space on either side of the notch;
• UI elements in apps being adjusted for easier one-handed use;
• The TrueDepth camera being employed in innovative ways; and,
• Apps with grey dark modes making a shift to solid black to fit better on the iPhone X's OLED display.

It will be exciting to see how apps continue to adapt to the iPhone X's form factor and unique features as time goes by.

---

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iPad Diaries is a regular series about using the iPad as a primary computer. You can find more installments here and subscribe to the dedicated RSS feed.

In my review of iOS 11, I noted that the impact of drag and drop – arguably, the most powerful addition to the iPad – would be best measured in the following weeks, after developers had the time to update their apps with richer implementations of the framework. I dedicated a large portion of my review to drag and drop as I felt the feature would fundamentally reshape our interactions with iPad apps and the entire OS altogether. However, I knew that wouldn’t happen right away. With iOS 11 having been available for nearly two months now, I think it’s time to reassess the effect of drag and drop on the iPad’s app ecosystem.

Starting this week, I’m going to take a look at some of the most important tasks I perform on my iPad and how drag and drop is helping me rethink them for my typical workflow. For the comeback of this column, I chose to focus on Bear and Gladys – a note-taking app and a shelf app, respectively – as I've been impressed with their developers' understanding of iOS 11 and intricacies of drag and drop.

When I started researching this mini-series, I assumed that drag and drop hadn't dramatically affected my favorite third-party apps yet. I was wrong. Drag and drop has started to trickle down into several areas of my daily iPad usage, often with surprising and powerful results.

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Starting at $5/month, Club MacStories includes MacStories Weekly – a newsletter delivered every Friday with a focus on iPad productivity and showcasing new and interesting iOS apps. One of MacStories Weekly's regular sections is the Workflow Corner – a weekly assortment of iPad workflows, iOS automation tips, and tutorials curated by Federico and the MacStories team.

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Bear

As I've explained on multiple occasions since its iOS 9 relaunch, I'm a fan of Apple Notes and its system integrations. Apple Notes is my scratchpad for quick notes and random thoughts, as well as a collaborative space where I can share notes with my family and teammates. Notes also features one of the most versatile implementations of the drag and drop framework to date. If you can drag something in iOS 11 for iPad, there's a good chance you can drop it in Notes.

When I shared my iPhone and iPad Home screen on Club MacStories a few weeks ago¹, I described why I was using Bear again alongside Apple Notes. I've always appreciated Bear's design ethos and reliance on Markdown² to easily format notes and unlock advanced functionalities such as automation and inter-note linking. For the past year, I thought that Apple Notes could serve all my note-taking needs for both personal and work-related purposes, but I recently realized that I was missing Bear for tasks such as assembling lists of links to cover on my podcasts, or creating outlines for future stories. While I am not replacing Apple Notes with Bear as I pondered last year, I am now using two note-taking apps for different purposes.

Bear offers one of the most flexible interpretations of drag and drop I've seen on iOS 11 so far. Drag and drop operations within the app are supported across the iPhone and iPad, and they're equally impressive on both platforms, but it's on the iPad where Shiny Frog's work truly shines thanks to multi-app drag and drop.

Drag and drop support was brought to Bear in multiple waves. Soon after iOS 11 came out, the app was updated with the ability to drop plain text into a note and drag out text from an existing one. That's the basic drag and drop that should be considered the bare minimum level of integration in modern iPad apps. With version 1.3, released last month, Bear gained a drop bar and a better way of dealing with formatted text dragged from other iPad apps, such as Notes, Safari, or Mail. These two changes are the kind of more advanced and custom implementations of the new APIs I expected developers to release after spending more time with iOS 11.

Drop Bar

A key concept behind iOS 11's drag and drop that is often ignored by developers is how, besides opening up new possibilities for inter-app communication, it can also be leveraged to enhance contextual interactions within an app. The drop bar in Bear is a great example of this idea applied to batch operations for multiple notes: instead of designing separate UIs for selecting notes and processing them, you can now pick up multiple notes and drop them into a floating menu that contains additional options.

As soon as you start dragging a note (or a stack of notes) in Bear 1.3, a bar pops up at the bottom of the screen, telling you that you can drop items there to share them, merge them, and more. When notes are dropped into the bar, a menu comes up, offering shortcuts to commands that are otherwise only available through nested menus or swipe gestures for individual notes. Rather than engaging a separate selection mode, you can pick up notes with a natural gesture (consistent with other iOS 11 apps), then either drop them into a different tag in Bear's sidebar, or act on them with the drop bar.

After using Bear 1.3 for a few weeks, drag and drop feels like a more intuitive way of exposing sharing and editing controls than a regular Edit button. Copying identifiers for multiple notes or merging them is easier than ever; the latter option is particularly useful to turn scattered thoughts into a cohesive note.

The drop bar also benefits from iOS 11's improved support for sharing multiple files at once: when you export notes in Bear 1.3, extensions such as Files' native one can pick up multiple files and save them to iCloud Drive or other file providers – something that wasn't possible in iOS 10.

The drop bar doesn't revolutionize Bear, but it shows how drag and drop can go beyond moving text between apps and be used to simplify an app's UI and interactions. I wish more developers would consider such enhancements related to drag and drop in both their iPhone and iPad apps.

Rich Text to Markdown

In Bear 1.3, the app's text engine can recognize RTFD content dropped into a note and automatically convert it to Markdown. RTFD (which stands for Rich Text with Attachments) is one of the many formats used by iOS 11³ to represent rich text content that may contain, in addition to formatting (styles, headings, etc.), attachments such as inline images. RTFD may be used for selected content in a Safari webpage, a chunk of text from the Notes app, or a photo and rich text selected in a Mail message. And because Bear's custom Markdown-based environment supports both plain text and attachments within the same document, converting RTFD content once it's dropped is a natural fit for the app's text editor.

In practice, this means you can transform rich text from Safari and Notes into Bear-flavored Markdown – all while keeping styles and attachments intact – just by dropping it into a note. The app's instant translation from rich text to Markdown is glorious: I've started selecting entire paragraphs of text from articles to save them as reference in Bear; I don't have to worry about missing links or screenshots because I can select them, drag them into the app, and they'll be converted.

This works from Safari, Safari View Controller, and native WebKit-powered views, which is ideal for archiving interesting links and stories I may come across via Twitter or RSS.

Before drag and drop, this would have required me to either lose the formatting of a webpage upon pasting in Bear, or add an extra step to the process by manually converting rich text to Markdown with a workflow. Now, the system takes care of this for me, and I'm free to jump between Markdown and rich text and simply focus on collecting information in Bear.

Drag and drop also works the other way around: thanks to its multi-format architecture, you can select text from a Bear note and drop it elsewhere; depending on the capabilities of the destination app, it'll either be dropped as plain text (Markdown) or as the rich text resulting from the conversion of Markdown to RTFD.

In everyday usage of drag and drop on my iPad Pro, this has proven to be a good enough solution for moving content between apps that rely on different formats. I can put together a rich note in Bear that contains Markdown formatting and inline images, drop its contents in Notes, and the resulting text will be rich text with the same inline attachments.

Doing the same with Ulysses transfers Bear's text as Markdown and keeps the attachment as an inline image; in Pages, Markdown is correctly transformed to rich text, but the attachment gets lost in the process.

Overall, despite my initial concerns, drag and drop's UTI-based framework has been working well as a bridge between iPad apps that treat rich text with attachments differently. However, there have been some exceptions. Apple Mail, for example, supports sending messages as rich text, but when I drag text from Bear into the message composer, it is inserted as plain text Markdown instead of rich text. Or, if I manually copy text from Google Docs (which doesn't support drag and drop, but that's a story for another time) and paste it in Bear, all formatting is lost in spite of Google Docs putting an HTML version of said text into the iOS clipboard.

In the two months since iOS 11 was released, I've run into these situations a handful of times. They're not major problems that prevent me from getting work done on a daily basis, but these inconsistencies are annoying, and they all have something in common: they stem from lack of deeper user control over drag and drop, which yields a "black box" experience that doesn't show what goes on behind the scenes. This is where Gladys comes in.

Gladys

The issues mentioned above are two distinct cases of destination apps (Bear and Mail) being unable to correctly guess the best data format to ingest. This is exactly one of the primary functionalities of Gladys, and the reason why I've put the app on my Home screen.

I wrote about Gladys for MacStories Weekly⁴ and when the app's 1.1 update introduced iCloud sync and iPhone support. Gladys is my current pick for the best shelf app on the iPad: it's the closest representation of my original vision for an iOS 11 shelf, and it's constantly getting better thanks to frequent updates released almost weekly. Not only does Gladys allow you to drop anything that is draggable on iOS 11 into it, but it also integrates with Files, it has built-in rich previews, offers 3D Touch actions on the iPhone, and lets you label clippings for better organization.

The most powerful feature of Gladys, though, is how it embraces the drag and drop framework by allowing you to peek under the hood and inspect the multiple data formats captured by the app when an item is dropped into it.

When you drop rich text, links, or images from a Safari webpage into Gladys, you can tap on them to reveal an inspector that lists all the available flavors for each item. You can preview individual formats, as well as export them to another app with drag and drop. Other apps do this (Workshelf and Yoink have this functionality too), but I prefer how Gladys lists formats in a popover with buttons to preview anything supported by iOS' Quick Look.

It can be useful to put an advanced shelf app in the middle of a drag and drop session and use it as an "on-the-fly converter" of data in a different format. Let's consider the Bear-to-Mail example again: by just dragging some text from Bear into Mail, it is inserted in the message as plain text, despite the fact that Bear exposes an RTFD version compatible with Mail. By dropping text into Gladys first and opening the inspector, we can manually select the RTFD flavor, drop it in Mail, and enjoy a properly formatted block of rich text that keeps all the styles and elements we originally typed in Bear.

Here's another scenario: a few days ago, I was trying to drag an image from an article in Safari into Bear. I was expecting the actual image file to be dropped into the note, but instead I kept getting the URL of the image inserted in the body text. To work around the problem, I saved the image in Gladys first, picked up the public.jpeg version from the inspector, and dropped it in the note. Instead of a link to the image, Bear correctly attached an inline image file.

It was trickier for Google Docs, but I figured out a way to manually get the HTML version of a text selection from Google's app too. As I mentioned earlier, Google Docs still doesn't support drag and drop on the iPad, which prevents me from dragging text out of the app when I want to continue working on a document in another text editor. To make things worse, copying text from a Google document results in plain text pasted in Bear with all formatting stripped out.

Thanks to Gladys, I was able to investigate the data formats Google puts in the system clipboard when you copy text from Google Docs; Gladys has a handy Paste button in the top toolbar that lets you clip anything in the app without having to perform drag and drop. As it turns out, Google Docs, in addition to a proprietary format incompatible with any Markdown app, also includes a public.html version of the copied text that is recognized by the majority of modern text editors, email clients, and note-taking apps.

Now, whenever I want to export rich text from Google Docs, I can paste it into Gladys, preview the HTML version, select the text again, and drop it into Bear, Ulysses, or Mail. It's not the fastest or most intuitive way of moving text between apps, but it's better than losing the entire formatting of a document, and it shows how iPad power users can take advantage of an app like Gladys to control how data is dropped, pasted, or shared between apps.

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In many ways, we're in the early days of iOS 11 and drag and drop for iPad. Developers are still figuring out the best practices for exposing multiple data formats to apps. As much as Apple's framework aims to abstract this complexity from the average workflow, there are times when I wish iOS 11 came with a built-in shelf option or full-featured clipboard manager to inspect the contents of the clipboard or the flavors of a drag item. Thankfully, apps like Gladys, Copied, and Workshelf are bridging this gap for now.

At the same time, we're starting to see more powerful implementations of drag and drop in apps that rely on the framework for better inter-app communication and easier interactions. This evolution of the iPad app ecosystem is occurring alongside a shift in our workflows and muscle memory: I'm pushing myself to use drag and drop more because, in many cases, I know there's no need for automation when every app speaks the same drag and drop language.

As iPad users, we're learning the best ways to use drag and drop alongside developers. It's an exciting time to use an iPad as your primary computer, and it feels like we've barely scratched the potential of iOS 11.

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Benjamin Herold, Education Week, Nov 12, 2017

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Good article summarizing the major arguments against personalized education* today (* term yet to be defined). Here are the three top arguments: first, the research doesn't show significantly improved learning outcomes; second, personalization is a type of behaviourist reductionism on a screen; and third, personalized learning is (or could be) a thinly disguised push by the education technology industry toward a massive data collection effort. I think we need a bit more substance behind each of these three arguments; the first, for example, is based solely on a single RAND study, which is hardly a comprehensive reserach outcome. And even if "critics believe that personalized learning boils down to kids working alone on software," it doesn't follow that this is actually the case. Still, there may be merit to this broad spectrum of opposition, and it shouldn't be dismissed lightly.

[Link] [Comment]

Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, Nov 12, 2017

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This post and a previous one from Martin Weller, along with two sites from Katy Jordan, go to support the argument that people working in different domains of open education do not talk to each other, and that they especially do not learn from the lessons of the past. I am not even remotely convinced by the evidence. Only 170 articles were collected on the topic (including a grand total of three by me, including one duplicate listing). The articles are very unevenly distributed over time; it's not at all surprising to see so few references to the early years when there are so few articles listed from those years. Finally, most of the work in open education takes place outside the domain of scholarly publication (the grouping simply reflects the different waves of academics who come to graze on the primary material and take credit for 'discovering' the concepts and ideas wthin).

[Link] [Comment]

If you own a bike, you need a flat-fixing kit. It’s really that simple. Sure, maybe you’ll get lucky and get a flat close to a shop, or the buses will be running on time for once, but even with all that going for you, getting stranded across town will cost you time, money, and precious sanity. You can put together a great kit in less time than it takes to read this guide.

After testing five new two-bay network-attached storage (NAS) devices and comparing them against our previous picks, we found that the Synology DiskStation DS218+ is the best home NAS for most people. The fastest NAS we tested, it offers powerful hardware for the price, includes AES-NI hardware encryption acceleration for added security, has upgradable RAM, and comes with software that’s easy to use.

Though the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the American Red Cross, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention all provide emergency-supply checklists, those lists can be intimidating in their breadth and their specificity. In reality, for the most part you can assemble an emergency kit out of stuff you’d use anyway and may already own. There’s never a bad time to prepare for a crisis by stocking up on gear and organizing it so you know exactly where it is when you need it most. We did 120 hours of research and tested nearly 100 different products to come up with 31 products that will be indispensable in case of a natural disaster—and helpful in everyday life, too.

Although you probably won’t need rain pants during lighter showers or warmer weather, a good pair of rain pants will help you stay dry and comfortable when hiking in heavy rain or in colder climates. To find the best pair, we spent 35 hours conducting research, speaking to experts, simulating a killer wash test, and chasing rain through Portland, Oregon, and Washington State’s Hoh Rain Forest. Based on this testing, we think Marmot’s PreCip Pant, which come in men’s and women’s sizes, are the best rain pants for most people. They are water-resistant yet breathable, come in multiple inseam lengths, have a tailored cut, offer such features as ankle zippers and side pockets, and are more affordable than many of the other pants we tested.

Clips is an app that lets you create and edit videos like you would do in Snapchat or Instagram. Clips 2.0 now adds a ton of features, some of them exclusive to the iPhone X front facing camera. You can embed yourself into 360 degree scenes for instance.

It may be a lot of fun for you, but I don't really do videos. I can imagine that people might edit some content within Clips and then post the videos elsewhere. With iCloud support you can now continue editing on your other devices.

Urbanears has refreshed their Plattan line of headsets. Great colors, very clean design, Bluetooth. And now with the control knob I so like on the Marshall Monitor Bluetooth. (Hint: Marshall Headphones and Urbanears are the same company.)

These are on-ear headsets and very comfortable. You can fold them to store them away in your bag, you can attach a 3.5mm wire if your battery is low or you need to connect to in-flight entertainment. No active noise cancelling though. If you are listening via Bluetooth, you can connect a second (wired) headset to share your music. It's a great inexpensive headset with a design I like.

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How do your review a perfect product? There has to be something that needs improvement. There has to be something that doesn't work.

Nope. I want it just the way it is. I put my b/s detector in overdrive and did not come up with anything:

Apple keeps stressing the fact that this is the future of the smartphone. And with that they mean iPhone. That is exactly what the iPhone X is. The original iPhone was perfected all the way to the iPhone 8. Draw a rectangle, a line above it, a circle below and a rounded rectangle around it. Everybody will recognize this as an iPhone.

The iPhone X is built around new technology. And we have only scratched the surface of what this front facing camera can do in software. Touch ID through glass? You need to think outside your box. Imagine what you can build on a device that reads your face.

Apple has revealed its first two scripted series will include some big-name talent. The first of the series is a revival of Academy Award-winning director Steven Spielberg’s anthology series Amazing Stories, which originally ran from 1985 to 1987.

Spielberg will be working on the new series alongside Bryan Fuller, writer and producer on hits series like Hannibal and Star Trek: Discovery. The Wall Street Journal previously reported on Apple’s revival of Amazing Stories last month.

Apple’s second series, meanwhile, is a currently untitled drama centred on a network morning show. Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston are set to star and executive produce. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the show will offer an “inside look at the lives of the people who help America wake up in the morning, exploring the unique challenges faced by the women (and men) who carry out this daily televised ritual.”

Apple has been investing heavily into original TV programming for some time now. This year saw the release of reality app creation show Planet of the Apps in June and Carpool Karaoke: The Series in August, based on the popular skit from The Late Late Show with James Corden. 

Back in June, the company also recruited Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg, former Sony Pictures Television executives who oversaw many shows during the tenure, including the hit drama Breaking Bad. Altogether, Apple has reportedly set aside a $1 billion war chest to put towards original video content.

That said, the Cupertino, California-based tech giant’s TV efforts may not be going entirely smoothly. Carpool Karaoke: The Series was originally slated for an April release, although it was later delayed without any reason being given.

However, according to a report from Bloomberg, Apple pushed the series premiere back in order to remove subject matter deemed inappropriate by CEO Tim Cook. Specifically, Cook reportedly wanted the “foul language and references to vaginal hygiene” found in some episodes to be removed.

Image credit: Flickr — Gage Skidmore

Via: Variety

The post Apple’s first two scripted series to involve Steven Spielberg, Jennifer Aniston appeared first on MobileSyrup.

As rumours begin to swirl regarding Samsung’s next flagship, one tidbit does more to disappoint than excite.

The report, courtesy of South Korean publication The Investor, states Samsung has decided not to incorporate a fingerprint sensor embedded under the display, which would fix one of the main issues many had with its previous flagship — the awkwardly placed rear fingerprint sensor.

In fact, both the Galaxy S8 and Note 8 shared the feature — a sensor placed very near the rear camera — which led to smudging and was difficult for some to reach.

Instead of an under-display sensor, which The Investor says the company has been attempting to include in several previous devices, the report says the sensor will once again be placed on the rear.

The fingerprint sensor Samsung considered including was likely similar to Qualcomm’s new under-display scanner, which is based on ultrasonic, rather than capacitive, technology.

The tech was introduced over a year ago by Qualcomm and can capture low-resolution images of a user’s fingerprint even through opaque materials — like how ultrasounds work to capture images of fetuses. In June, Qualcomm predicted commercial devices with the under-display sensors would arrive in devices in the summer of 2018.

That timeline lines up more closely with the Samsung Galaxy Note 9, and the report suggests that Samsung may try to feature that tech in that device — which is one silver lining.

Source: The Investor

The post Samsung Galaxy S9 probably won’t have a fingerprint scanner under the display appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Canadian national carrier Bell has partnered with Chinese device manufacturer Huawei, as well as Ontario-based Internet of Things (IoT) service provider BeWhere, to connect an Ontario winery to the internet through LTE-M.

According to a November 9th, 2017 media release, the Henry of Pelham vineyard in the Niagara region will be able to “remotely monitor temperature and water levels, prevent vine disease and ultimately improve the health of its plants,” by connecting to Bell’s LTE-M network which was announced earlier this year.

“We’ll be able to automatically act on temperature inversions by turning on fans when temperatures change, ensuring the health of our grapes and an optimal product for our customers,” said Matthew Speck, the owner and viticulturist of Henry of Pelham Family Estate Winery, in the same release.

“The solution is not only economical and scalable, it gives growers a good view of the vines’ temperature needs to improve quality and drive sustainability.”

Huawei’s involvement in the project comes as a result of work done by the Government of Ontario in 2014 and 2015.

Premier Kathleen Wynne met with Huawei representatives during trips to China, and the company committed “up to $303 million for research initiatives in Ontario over five years,” according to a November 9th, 2017 Ontario media release.

“I look forward to connecting even more Ontario companies with world-leading innovators, experts and businesses, like Huawei, on my upcoming mission to China and Vietnam, and to bringing more investment and job opportunities home to Ontario,” said Wynne, in the same November release.

Bell plans on formally launching its LTE-M network — designed specifically to connect IoT devices to the internet — in 2018.

LTE-M should improve IoT efficiency, while reducing power consumption as well as improving coverage underground.

Source: Bell, Government of Ontario

The post Bell partners with Huawei and Ontario-based BeWhere for LTE-M partnership at an Ontario winery appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Hot off the heels of yesterday’s broadcast report, the Canada Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has released its annual Communications Monitoring report for wireless and internet usage.

The report reveals some interesting figures about Canadians, beginning with the fact that 2016 saw three million more mobile broadband subscriptions than 2015 — representing a 13.3 percent increase.

Canadians are also consuming an average of 1.2GB of mobile data every month, which is a 25 percent increase from 2015.

Interestingly enough, the report also highlights that “more than a quarter of those who subscribed to a monthly data plan had at least 5GB of data,” which seems to suggest that more Canadians are able to afford more data every month.

It also seems that LTE and LTE-A adoption is on the rise. According to the report, 98.5 percent of Canadians have access to LTE, while 83 percent of Canadians have access to LTE-A.

Canadians wireless subscriptions have also exceeded landline subscriptions. The report states that 86.1 percent of households have wireless service, while 71.9 have a landline.

Additionally, 27 percent of households only have wireless service, while 13.2 percent of households only have a landline.

Canada’s wireless retail market generated $23.2 billion in revenue in 2016.

The majority of Canadians’ communication service spending — roughly 40 percent — goes to mobile wireless service.

Canadians are also consuming more internet

Canadians consumed roughly 128.3GB of data per month in 2016 — factoring both downloads and uploads — representing a 23.4 percent increase over 2015.

“Over the last five years, Canadians’ monthly data consumption increased by an average of 40 percent each year,” reads an excerpt from the CRTC’s November 9th, 2017 media release about the telecom report.

The report further reveals that Canadians are no longer willing to put up with slow internet. Roughly 26 percent of Canadians are currently subscribed to an internet plan that offers at least 50Mbps of download speed.

“Five years ago, only 3.6 percent of Canadians subscribed to this speed tier,” reads another excerpt. “By the end of 2016, 84 percent of Canadians had access to download speeds of at least 50Mbps and upload speeds of at least 10Mbps on fixed broadband internet services.”

The retail internet market also generated $10.2 billion worth of revenue in 2016.

It’s interesting to note that only 21 percent of Canadians’ communications service spending goes to internet services.

In total, the CRTC reports that Canada’s telecommunications revenues totaled $48.7 billion in 2016.

The post Canadians are using an average of 1.2GB of data per month on wireless devices, says CRTC report appeared first on MobileSyrup.

While Pixel 2 users have had fewer issues with their smartphone compared to Pixel 2 XL owners, the device is still far from perfect. One of the device’s most frequently citied issues on the Google Product Forums is that its microphone sometimes doesn’t work during phone calls and while communicating with Google Assistant.

Within a dedicated discussion thread in the Google Product Forums a user has found a unusual fix for the problem.

Blow into the device.

That’s right, user ‘Adam Zeird’ has found out that blowing into the bottom speaker — like one would with an old Nintendo game cartridge — will cause the microphone to start working again.

Meanwhile, blowing on the speaker while the microphone is working will cause it to stop functioning, which is likely how many microphones stopped working in the first place, as it’s only natural to blow into the bottom speaker when talking on the phone.

This solution has not only worked for Zeird, as a number of other users have reported the fix working for them as well. Some users have found blowing into the device’s USB Type-C port will also cause the microphone to start functioning again. One user has posted a video of himself performing the fix to confirm that it actually works.

With blowing fix not being permanent, other users have found simply returning their phone for a replacement has been the best solution.

Other users have mentioned that blowing has fixed the issue for their Pixel 2 XL as well.

Unlike the Pixel 2, the Pixel 2 XL has a large array of hardware and software issues such as screen burn-in, an odd clicking noise and an audio whining after video recording.

Source: Google Product Forms, Via: Android Police

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Anyone looking to download Google’s new file manager for Android is in luck.

In lieu of the fact that the app was quasi-leaked a few days ago, the beta version of Files Go is now available for download on the Google Play Store.

Caesar Sengupta, lead for the Next Billion Users team at Google, made the announcement in a tweet.

Looks like some of you found our Files Go Beta We thought we’d make it available for a few more of you on the Play Store. Feedback welcome! https://t.co/qXLb1V0bKu

— Caesar Sengupta (@caesars) November 9, 2017

As MobileSyrup’s Patrick O’Rourke wrote, the Files Go app makes it easier for users to organize the photos, video, audio and documents — and everything in-between — on their phones. Files Go is a like a lot of the other file managers you can already download on the Play Store, with the addendum that this specific app is made by Google.

Files Go also lets users wirelessly transfer files between devices — sort of like Apple’s AirDrop — via Bluetooth. The difference between AirDrop and Files Go, however, is that you can only transfer files to other Files Go users.

Still, that’s a small price to pay for what is effectively a completely wireless data transfer that doesn’t require an internet connection.

The Files Go app is available free on the Google Play Store, and is compatible with all devices running Android 5.0 or above.

The post Google’s Files Go app is now available in beta on the Play Store appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Canadian national carrier Telus has reported its third-quarter earnings.

According to a November 9th, 2017 media release, Telus generated approximately $3.4 billion CAD in revenue during its third quarter 2017 earnings. This represents a four percent increase since Q2 2017.

Telus’s wireless network generated $1.8 billion in revenue. Telus’s wireline network generated $1.1 billion. The company added 124,000 wireless subscribers last quarter, increasing its total wireless subscriber base to 8.8 million.

Telus also reported that it now earns an average of $68.67 (ARPU) from its customers, which is a three percent increase from the previous quarter.

“Further supporting these results is the Telus team’s consistent execution of our longstanding broadband growth strategy, underpinned by the long-term investment we are making in our generational fibre build which is resulting in Telus networks being consistently recognized as among the fastest and most reliable in the world,” said Darren Entwistle, president and CEO of Telus, in the same November release.

Entwistle’s comment seem to hint at a PCMag report released in September 2017 that revealed that Telus’s wireless network is the fastest in Canada.

According to Doug French, Telus’s vice president and CFO, the company will also complete 50 percent of its next generation fibre build in early 2018.

French added that “we are estimating our capital expenditures in 2018 to be approximately $2.85 billion.”

Telus previously reported a Q2 2017 revenue of $3.3 billion.

The post Telus reports $3.4 billion revenue in Q3 2017 earnings report appeared first on MobileSyrup.

mkalus shared this story from The Omni Group.

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Our new podcast The Omni Show begins with two episodes: an interview with Kristina Sontag, Omni’s Test Manager, and an interview with Curt Clifton, OmniFocus engineer.

The Omni Show’s tag line is “Get to know the people and stories behind Omni’s award-winning productivity apps for Mac and iOS.” It will be interviews, mostly, since we have such a great group of people. From time to time — after an Apple event, for instance — we might produce a roundtable or other kind of special.

Your host is Brent Simmons, engineer at Omni and podcast veteran, whose experience means he can tell a microphone from a pizza, which makes him eminently qualified (though somewhat hungry for pizza).

We aim to keep episodes around half-an-hour or shorter, with no commercial interruptions, and we plan to publish every two weeks, though not strictly.

You can find The Omni Show on Twitter @theomnishow. Let us know what you think!

mkalus shared this story from Day One - Medium.

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In its thinnest form, mindfulness can be described as being aware of something. The sky is blue: I’m mindful of the color of the sky. The air is cool: I’m mindful of the changing seasons.

This is a poor understanding of “mindfulness”, though. If being mindful of your surroundings is what mindfulness means to you, then it’s time to explore the art of being mindful.

And me being me, I believe being mindful begins and ends with keeping a journal.

In a deeper form, mindfulness is the art of being in the now, being in the present. Mindfulness is about understanding each context you find yourself in. It’s about being aware of not just what your surroundings are, but who, where, why, and how your surroundings came to be. In many respects, it’s about being completely cognizant of where you are now and understanding why this came to be.

Being mindful is also about more than being careful — it’s equally about knowing just how far you can go. Gently holding a baby can represent mindfulness of the baby’s vulnerabilities, but being mindful can also be represented in knowing exactly how to handle a baby. The power of being mindful only grows when it’s taken outside its normal, careful, even apprehensive definition.

From this chair, writing and recording is the ultimate result of mindfulness. Scratching out the finest details of any given memory requires the initial forethought to be aware of your surroundings and the wise afterthought of putting the specifics into words. Putting words to a memory, in many ways, makes that memory tangible.

Tammy Stone says it better than I ever could over at The Tattooed Buddha:

Even as we wax nostalgic or panic about upcoming events, we are pausing and carving out the time, here and now, to explore these feelings. The act of writing keeps us tethered to the present and allows us to take a step back from what preoccupies us as we become acutely aware of our selves as witness or agent of the memories, worries, desires or concerns we experience. To worry is to be lost in the chaos of an emotion. To know or articulate that I’m worried is one step removed — I am aware, I have the choice of breaking it down and taking action. Or maybe there’s no solution, but still I write until the feeling’s intensity subsides; I hold a space for the emotion so it can weaken its grasp on me, as all things do when confronted with our gentle attention. Journaling and meditation both allow for this very healing ability to show our selves love, to observe and hold space for our emotions.

If being mindful is about recognizing and absorbing your current surroundings, and if writing requires putting concrete words to emotions, then drawing on your memories and writing out your emotions in a journal becomes the penultimate form of mindfulness.

The power of this is in its application: Keeping a journal can paint a mindful brush over any facet of your life.

• Maintaining a transcript of each conversation with your spouse may be overboard, but listening with the intention of learning and capturing their current reasoning, their current emotion, and the current context behind your spouse’s thoughts will foster a greater love and respect.
• Analyzing a major financial decision and recognizing how those people already in your life can help you or how they will be affected by your decision can be organized in a journal. After the decision has been made, reviewing who and how people were impacted will help you make stronger decisions in the future.
• Being mindful of your own personal health (both mentally and physically) begins with a recognition of how you feel right now and a plan to recover and rejuvenate. Once you’ve recovered, revisiting your journal can help you combat the next time your body feels off-kilter.

Admittedly, there is a small lag time between “being in the now” and “recording what you experienced” — it’s impossible to be mindful of the present while recording it at the exact same time. Who can forget the reality of a photo like this:

Being mindful and keeping a journal isn’t an exact science, but it’s possible to cut the lag time between “now” and “recording” by keeping a journal on you at all times — either a pen and paper or a digital journal. I’d be remiss to only promote Day One for keeping a mindful journal — it’s entirely possible to keep a pen and a small memo book on your person to physically write a journal entry.

In fact, physical pen and paper may be a superior tool for being mindful in your journal. Absorbing the here and now can be easily distracted with the capabilities of snapping photos, shooting video, and typing out immediate thoughts. Going for a meditative walk, utilizing and reflecting on each of the five senses, and finding a picnic table or park bench to sit down and write will likely offer more mindful benefits than going for the same walk and snapping photos along the way. While the camera in your smartphone is the best camera period, it works against the need for you to use your memory.

However, finding a place to write with pen and paper isn’t always possible. This is where Day One steps in. As an example, practice using Jaclyn Desforges’ guide to How to Become More Mindful Using Nothing But a Journal (with a few modifications, of course):

1. Go for a long, mindful walk.

Take 15 minutes and walk around the block or walk through the park. Leave your phone in your pocket and make sure it’s silent. And just walk. Absorb. Soak everything in. Use each of your senses and make mental notes. Just walk and be aware of your thoughts, feelings, emotions, and surroundings.

2. Draw on your memories.

Maybe your 15 minute walk turned into a half hour or hour long walk. Whenever your senses snaps out of their mindful state, grab your phone. Snap a photo — any photo — of the here and now. Save it to your camera roll and forget about it until later.

When “later” arrives, pull up that photo and add it into an entry in Day One. I use this photo as a memory springboard; with the iPhone’s “Live Photo” feature, you can even listen to the sounds of the photo and view a three-second video of your surroundings at the moment of the photo.

From here, use the photo to jog your memory and write. Write down the specifics of the scene. Answer the who, what, where, when, why, and how questions. Note your emotions and feelings during that 15 minute mindful walk. And also note how you’re feeling now.

3. Get into the habit. (Or, in my words, “apply and reflect.”)

Making that mindful walk a habit is the key to experiencing and learning from the power of mindfulness. Both figuratively and literally.

Apply this mindful walk exercise in every situation possible. Whenever you’re faced with a new decision, sit down and be alone with your thoughts surrounding the decision. If you’re in an impactful conversation, listen to learn and reflect on the conversation later. Be in the “now” right now, and record and reflect on the “now” later.

Most importantly, do this regularly. Give yourself a few minutes before bed to write down and reflect upon the day’s events. Being mindful and organized has a wide range of benefits, with sleep being a major benefactor.

Wrap Up

To state that hope is lost for all the people shooting photos in the moment in the photo above isn’t entirely fair. The elderly lady in the front row without a phone isn’t practicing the answer to all of our world’s problems simply because she doesn’t have a phone.

But the lesson to be taken away from the photo is the reality of cognitive distraction. Being mindful, aware, observant, and cognizant of the “now” fights against the urge to be somewhere else. Undoubtedly, the phone is our window into the world of “somewhere else”.

It doesn’t have to be, though. When used correctly, the phone can act as a gateway back into that moment and can help materialize your memories of that moment. The phone can jog your memory and provide a canvas to create tangible, concrete memories. And afterwards, it can help to quickly bring up a concrete memory and ensure you make informed, mindful, and well-thought-out decisions.

Be present. Be now.

Record later. Reflect later.

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Journaling and Mindfulness was originally published in Day One on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.