Status-Q

An IDC press release, out today, reports that PC sales have fallen again. That's expected now, but they've fallen noticeably faster than predicted: the last quarter was a surprising 14% down on the same time last year.

"At this point, unfortunately", says an IDC staff member, "it seems clear that the Windows 8 launch not only failed to provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market..." And it's not just Windows – Apple's desktop/laptop sales are down, too.

A big contributor, I'm sure, is that we've finally reached the point where operating system manufacturers and other software developers can no longer convince users that it's worth buying a new machine just to run their latest offerings. I'm currently a software developer, for heaven's sake, and even I am feeling no particular desire to replace my four-year-old iMac in the near future.

But a lot of it also comes from the fact that fewer people need to do, on a regular basis, what PCs were designed to be good at doing.

Phones and tablets don't replace a PC, but if you drew a Venn diagram of

• What PCs do
• What mobile devices do
• What people do

over the last few years, it would resemble a lapsed-time animation of plate tectonics. And my point is that 'What PCs do' would be largely stationary, while the others moved around it in ever-more-overlapping zones...

I write quite a lot, but I use a word-processor about once a month. I manage my company accounts, but much more of that is done on a web service than on a spreadsheet. I give talks, but the days when PowerPoint was the only game in town are long gone. And I read emails... while I'm walking the dog.

So, if I'm at all typical, where does that leave Microsoft Office, the core of most PCs' raison d'être? And remember, I'm an old guy. For most people under the age of 25, it probably never was that important. The office suite is dead, and has been for a long time. Long live the browser. On whatever device.

On which note, I should shut down the browser on this iPad and go to sleep...

Thanks to Charles Arthur for the IDC link

TextExpander is one of the most useful utilities on my Mac -- I've used it since it was called Textpander, many years ago -- and it's becoming more and more important on my iOS devices too, since almost every app I use, with the notable exception of the Apple ones, now supports it. And the configuration synchronises across all my devices automatically, making things even easier.

It's arguably more useful on iOS, where it can help overcome some of the limitations of the keyboard. Typing email addresses can be tedious, for example, so I have three-letter abbreviations for most of mine. (Simple expansions like this can also be done using the built-in keyboard shortcuts available in Settings, which will work anywhere, but they don't have the power of the TextExpander ones.)

A current favourite example, since I'm writing more and more in Markdown, is my .mdl abbreviation. It inserts a Markdown link, taking the contents of the clipboard as the URL (which I've typically just copied using the little 'share' button in Safari), and positions the cursor at the right place to type the link text. A link in Markdown, for the uninitiated, looks like this:

[Status-Q](http://statusq.org)

If you work out how many key presses are needed on a standard IOS keyboard just to do the brackets, you'll realise that, though this is already a lot better than writing HTML, to do the equivalent with just .mdl and have it position the cursor in the right place, is a great help if you do it regularly. Which I do!

All very clever, and a great timesaver. But today I added a very simple abbreviation, vvv, which also makes use of the 'insert the clipboard here' capability. In fact, that's all it does: as soon as you type the third v, all three are replaced by the contents of the clipboard, a bit like typing Cmd-V on a regular keyboard. I find this rather easier, particularly in small text boxes on a phone screen: to have a keyboard-based paste function, instead of having to move from the keyboard and tap carefully in the right place, with the right precision and timing not to select anything.

It really is too bad the Apple apps don't support it, but I hope it may be useful for others anyway.

Gosh, it's easy to miss this one:

Finding the Undo and Redo keys on the iPad

I've been using the vigorous-shake-to-undo feature when I'm working in apps which don't have an Undo button, but it isn't always convenient. Especially late at night when I'm trying not to wake Rose...

And your second interesting technology statistic of the day:

• iPhones are being born at a faster rate than people.

I've been trying to shift much more of the paperwork in my life into the digital world, but I was very keen that filing a bit of paper electronically should be as easy as putting it in a folder in the filing cabinet. "Wouldn't it be nice", I thought, "if the only thing I had to do was type a name or a few keywords and everything else happened automatically?"

So I built a system which did just that. This video describes in some detail how the script is set up. You may want to use the full-screen and HD options to make things more readable. If you're less interested in the details and would just like to see it in action, watch the first couple of minutes and then skip to about 13:30.

One thing I don't talk about in the video is the fact that Hazel rules can also look at the contents of the file. So, once the document has been OCRed, the automatic filing can happen based on words that actually occur on the paper -- it might detect your car's registration number (licence plate), for example, in a document and know to file that under 'car stuff' -- which I think is very cool.

Some further links:

• David Sparks' Paperless ebook
• Hazel, and some more things you can do with it.
• PDFpen, from Smile Software.
• Fujitsu Scansnap scanners

It’s 12 years today since my first blog post -- the first post, at least, on a publicly-readable system that we’d recognise as blog now. I had registered this ‘statusq.org’ domain a couple of days before, and started tapping out miscellaneous thoughts with no particular theme, and no expectation of an audience.

I was using Dave Winer’s innovative but decidedly quirky ‘Radio Userland’ software, a package which is long since deceased but was very influential in the early days of blogging and RSS feeds. Over the years I’ve moved the content through a couple of different systems but I think -- I hope -- that all the URLs valid in 2001 still work today! Most of my early posts do not have a title. The convention of giving titles to what we thought of as diary entries wasn’t yet well-established.

Things that caught my attention in the first couple of months included:

• An appreciation that Windows 2000 was really rather a good operating system. Certainly the best Microsoft had produced so far. (It was also -- though I didn’t know it at the time -- the last version I was to use on a regular basis.) Microsoft were pushing an idea called the ‘Tablet PC’, which was marketing-speak for what had previously been called WebPads, and something called .NET, which was marketing-speak for nobody-knew-what!
• The importance of this new thing called XML, which was giving the world a standard way to store and transmit structured data. I was at a conference where Steve Ballmer described the major revolutions in computing as The PC, The Gui, The Web, and XML. Well, the brackets have become a bit more curly since then, but it was indeed a major change.
• Astonishment that, with the upcoming launch of Mac OS X, the world’s largest Unix vendor was about to become, of all people, Apple! I’d been playing with the early beta versions. It’s been my operating system of choice ever since.
• The bizarre level of press coverage when we announced the impending shutdown of the Trojan Room Coffee pot.
• A survey saying that less than half of US college students were taking hi-fi systems to college, because they were now listening to music from their PCs instead! It was still nearly a year before an amazing thing called the iPod was to appear, and surprise us all.

Here’s a snapshot of Status-Q captured by the Internet Archive in early May 2001

Ever needed to configure a network-based device using a web interface, but found that its default IP address doesn't match the setup of your network? e.g. Your new device uses 192.168.1.* and you use 192.168.0.* ? Here's an easy way to fix it: set up your machine to talk to both subnets at once. Here's a little screencast to show how it's done on the Mac.

A phenomenon that has transformed my life in recent years is the ready availability of audiobooks and podcasts. When I’m shaving, driving, or walking the dog, I’m usually also reading a book, learning something new, keeping up with technology news, or sometimes just being entertained. My iPhone/iPods are used for speech much more than for music, and my bluetooth headset and car hands-free kit are seldom used for actual phone calls! Travelling time, in particular, I no longer think of as ‘wasted time’.

On the audiobook front, the only way to do this is to subscribe to Audible.co.uk (or your country’s variant). Audiobooks can be fairly pricey if you buy them individually -- longer ones, in particular, can run to £20–40 -- but an £8 monthly subscription will get you a book each month. I ‘read’ many more books now while walking across fields than I used to get through by turning a page or two in the last few minutes before I fell asleep. I use the Audible iPhone app for downloading and listening to them.

For podcasts, my first recommendation is not to try and listen to them using iTunes or Apple’s Podcast apps. Far better is to get a third-party app designed for the purpose, (unless you have an old-style iPod which can only be managed in iTunes). My current favourite is Downcast, which will do things like keep your current listening progress in sync across multiple devices, and let you skip backwards and forwards (e.g. to jump advertisments) using easy swipe gestures. Instacast is also a worthy contender.

Anyway, the main reason for this post was to recommend two podcasts that I’ve found consistently interesting and of high quality.

The first is Mac Power Users. Now, you might assume from the title that this weekly programme is all about obscure command-line incantations and developer toolkits, but on the contrary, it’s for normal humans, by normal humans; David and Katie are practising lawyers who just have an interest in getting the most out of their technology, and talking to other guests about how they do the same. And while most of it is definitely for Mac users, some episodes, like this excellent discussions with Fraser Speirs about technology in education, are of more general interest. Sometimes they’ll dive deep into a favourite utility, like Hazel, or a topic, like ‘Geek Fitness’. And at other times, such as when interviewing Alex Lindsay, they end up talking more about efficient ways to get through airport security than about the Apple gear they’re carrying! Unlike many of the podcasts I subscribe to, this one is not primarily about technology news, and I like David and Katie’s relaxed but professional approach.

The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, known as ‘SGU’ to its numerous fans, is a discussion of recent and historical science news hosted by some very smart people -- Steven Novella, for example, is a neurologist at Yale -- who try to separate fact from fiction. They do a lot of background research on stuff that has recently made media headlines, and present the results in an interesting and entertaining way. Recommended if you want to keep your head when all around you are losing theirs.

Both of these should be easy to find using your podcatcher of choice - just search for the names.

A friend of a friend has recently had what must be one of the most life-changing experiences anyone can go through. While in hospital for an operation, she had an apparently very rare but not unknown reaction to the anaesthetic, and found herself, suddenly and unexpectedly, completely blind.

She's a very smart and resourceful woman, though, and is making serious efforts to discover what technology can do to help in her situation. And it's an interesting challenge. I have some friends who have major visual impairments but can still use computers if, for example, the fonts are large and high-contrast, and they sit very close to the screen. And others have been blind from birth and have developed a whole range of skills to cope with it.

But for someone who has had to make the transition suddenly and unexpectedly in later life, and doesn't have, for example, the ability to read braille, what can we geeks do to help? Well, there are the obvious things like screen-reading and voice-dictation software, which are useful if the underlying operating system and apps make it easy to navigate the rest of the system. On the Mac, at least -- I can't speak for Windows -- there is quite pervasive VoiceOver integration at a fairly low level, so you can do most things, but learning it is tedious, and the challenge is then to navigate things efficiently using a wide range of key combinations on a keyboard which she's still getting used to not being able to see.

But one thing we should be able to do these days is take advantage of the power of mobile devices more. A surprise to me is that the iPhone, with its slab-like non-tactile surface, turns out to be remarkably good, mostly due, again, to Apple having thought about this stuff pretty early on. But I hope we'll start to see more apps that do, say, OCR-to-speech with minimal button presses, to allow people to read road signs and restaurant menus.

One of the best apps I've come across in my brief investigations is one that I think I'll also use myself. It's called Fleksy, and it's a soft keyboard that uses predictive text technology to allow you to type just the approximate shape of the word as it would appear on a QWERTY layout and then swipe to the right - it will guess the word for you, and speak it. This is vital for blind people, of course, but also makes it much harder for any of us to get those accidental word-substitutions that can cause so much misunderstanding. (A favourite was when an attractive female friend of mine, on a work trip and feeling in need of a drink, once texted her male colleague "Time for a quickie in the bar before we go?". Except that a small slip caused her to send "Time for a quickie in the car before we go?", which had a rather different interpretation...) Anyway, if Fleksy makes a mistake, you can just swipe up or down to pick another choice, or left to delete the whole word and do it again. I found I could type whole sentences immediately without looking at the keyboard. You can then send them to the clipboard, to email, etc.

This is not a new idea, of course - my friend Cliff developed the Swype system many years ago, for example - but I think it's a very nice implementation. I often wear a bluetooth headset when walking the dog, because I listen to so many podcasts and audiobooks. Now I can use it to help me send messages and respond to emails while tramping through the mud.

Just as the original T9 predictive text system (of which Cliff was also a co-creator) grew out of work done to help disabled people, so apps like Fleksy can also benefit the rest of us.

And in the meantime, any other recommendations for my recently-blind friend would be greatly appreciated!

There's an amazing thing I've just discovered after installing an SSD in my laptop: Microsoft Office products now start up at a reasonable speed!

I've only just realised that, because I open them so rarely. (It's one of the joys of working for myself that I can largely pick the tools I use.) In fact, I realise, I probably download updates for Office components more frequently than I actually use them.

That's an interesting phenomenon; there ought to be a word for it. I'm probably unusual in having Microsoft Word work that way, but there are many of my lesser-used iOS apps that will be updated several times between successive actual executions of their code.

This is a real cultural shift from a world where big corporations would debate for months before rolling out an update to a program. On the web, we've grown used to the idea that a piece of software might not look quite the same the next time you log into it. But it's now true of many apps in my pocket: something will have changed in an app before I run it again. I could quite easily pull my phone out one day and discover that last night's update had broken something and I could no longer access the boarding pass I need for that plane...

I guess it's a tribute to progress in software development, or perhaps to the Apple software-approval process (a real pain for developers but in many ways a boon to customers) that this so rarely happens.