someone who's doing some things
I’ve been wondering about starting up Audioboo again. It was always handy for quick thoughts about stuff, and very easy to use without getting caught up in complicated podcasting stuff.
So, perhaps sometime soon(-ish) I might start rambling on about stuff. That is, rambling about stuff even more than I do now anyway.
As far as dealing with email goes, I’m not the best, not by any measure. But with an app like Dispatch, I find it a lot easier. Why? Good question, that’s easy to answer. One of the things I find myself doing a lot of is needing to deal with URLs / links from emails and send them to the right place or places quickly. With most email apps for iOS that means selecting the link to copy it or open it then copy it from inside safari then paste it into whatever app I want, Pocket, or Instapaper for example. With Dispatch I don’t have any of those complications. Tapping a link brings up the options I want in terms of sending it to the right place quickly and simply. No fuss.
In fact, that’s the main reason I bought the app in the first place, but it has a lot more besides, and, as usual, I’m scratching the surface so far and just beginning to find out what else the app can do.
I only just found out that the developer has published a URL scheme for Dispatch. This means that you can launch and run Dispatch from another app with parameters from the calling app. So, for example, you could use Drafts to ask Dispatch to open and create an email to a particular person, from a given account, and with a specified title. In fact, you could even tell it what to put in the body of the email too if you wanted to. That’s quite impressive.
The other thing that I like about Dispatch is that you can include snippets or blocks of text from within the app, like per account signatures and more. That could also be really helpful, but at the moment I’m not using that, so far.
So I’m slowly moving over to using Dispatch as my main email app on my iPhone, and I hope that the developer will eventually make it available for the iPad too as I think it would be brilliant there.
Here’s my little app wishlist so far …
So that’s my little list for now. I wonder what I’ll get from that list?
What a great way to look at all the John Foxx releases and also to work out what I’ve got and what I haven’t!
I’ve enjoyed the previous films in the trilogy. I thought that Shaun of the Dead was excellent and Hot Fuzz was inspired if a little dark, so I was looking forward to The World’s End quite a bit. However, having now seen it I’m not sure it was the climax of the trilogy I was looking for.
In many ways it had all of the elements that should make it brilliant, but it seemed slow to start and a little artificial where the previous films had flowed. I think it got there in the end, and overall I did enjoy it, but it didn’t make me laugh out load as the previous two had done.
Still, it was fun, and I’m sure that’s what they wanted it to be.
This is great news of course, and I’m really happy to hear that they’re making something new for 2014. My personal preference would be for something that’s halfway between Penthouse and Pavement and the Luxury Gap.
Let’s wait and see what they come up.
I’m looking forward to some new material from them in 2014 and remixes too.
Nice one Blancmange. If you’re playing in 2014 I’ll do my best to be there too.
I bought this app a while ago and have only just really started getting to grips with it, but I’ve started to see just how powerful it is. The real power in this app is in the workflow features. Think Automator for mac, but inside an iPad app that’s built for writing and with added power besides.
Editorial is a nice writing app and has a lot of features for writing and publishing, but its real power comes with a series of built in workflows that are pre-configured to do some straightforward things you might need for writing. These built in workflows are great as a place to start from with automation in Editorial, but making simple workflows is also a very easy process. Workflows are assembled by connecting simple building blocks, almost the same as automator for mac. Building blocks like ‘if … then’ statements, copy, select, etc. Combining these together is easy, and you can make some very powerful automated processes.
But it doesn’t stop there either. The workflow editor can also include python code which vastly expands the options available to any workflow. Obviously writing python code isn’t for everyone, it isn’t easy, but the option is there. There is also another option. There’s now an Editorial workflow directory in beta. If you access the directory from your iPad with the Editorial app installed on the device you can directly install workflows to the app without any difficulty at all. What this means in that you can add complex workflows into the app that have been designed and built by other people and use them for yourself.
Apparently in the next version of Editorial the workflow directory will be even more beefed up so you can upload and download within the app itself. That’ll be popular I’ll bet, and it’ll give everyone access to some great workflow and automation.
I’ve got a long way to go with this app and getting used to creating workflows, but I think that it’ll be worth the time investing in this app. In the end it’ll send a lot of time.
I finally watched the Doctor Who Christmas Special. I’d put it off for a bit, but finally I decided to watch it. What an enormous disappointment it was.
Now it’s only fair to say that the last season or so of Matt Smith’s doctor hasn’t been something I’ve enjoyed. On the whole I think it’s been way too sentimental, without clear individual stories, or indeed any real story arc. The main focus of Doctor Who has changed since the ‘reboot’. Over time it has moved. In the ‘original’ or ‘pre-reboot’ stories, each episode or story was about how the Doctor solved a particular problem or crisis, usually involving one or more alien races or enemies. The relationship with his companion(s) was there to serve the story and help to move it along in a variety of different ways, and different companions had different methods to assist the Doctor.
This has all now changed. In the post re-boot Doctor Who world the situation is completely reversed. The story now only exists to serve the relationship between the Doctor and his companion. Notice that there is almost never more than one companion now. This is best shown by the latest Christmas ‘special’, although I can find precious little that is special about it. In this episode, you had the daleks, the cybermen, and the sontarans, together with many others mentioned although not shown. The daleks had the most to do, although that’s not saying much at all. The cybermen had almost nothing to do at all and the sontarans were merely there for comedy value. What a waste of good aliens.
But the actually story (what exceptionally little of it there was), was only about The Doctor and his companion. Everything else was entirely superfluous. Even the Christmas dinner seemed to serve no purpose at all. So what’s the whole thing about now? It’s not the aliens, it’s not the planet, it’s not even about the regeneration, which was dealt with in just a couple of minutes. In effect Doctor Who has just become about the relationship between the Doctor and his current companion, that’s it, that’s all, and nothing more. The science fiction element is almost entirely incidental now, and that’s why I almost can’t watch it anymore.
I have high hopes for the new Doctor, but it’ll only work if the writing is spot on, and so far it’s just got worse and worse, and shows no signs of getting better. The really sad thing is that there’s no need for Doctor Who to be this bad. When you compare the current state of the television show against the stories that Big Finish put together there’s no contest at all. So why don’t the BBC just get Big Finish to take over the whole thing and make it awesome? That’s the question I’d like them to answer, although I’ve no expectation that it will happen.
So it’s an enormous shame, a great missed opportunity, and a terrible way to end Matt Smith’s Doctor. Please, someone at the BBC, sort this out. It really isn’t that hard.
I am Ashley Elsdon 