Web & PC stuff

Microsoft buys LinkedIn

So Microsoft have gone and made an all-cash, $26.2 billion offer for LinkedIn and I can certainly see the logic. After acquiring Yammer not so long ago, they’ve now neatly secured the enterprise social media market – through owning two of the largest players – and have the opportunity to develop a unique integrated internal/external offering. 

It’s also interesting that LinkedIn is going to be allowed to continue operating largely independently, and I for one think it’s a good thing… although it’s going to be challenging for LinkedIn to continue growing the network as they’ve already faced difficulties in this area. In part, those difficulties contributed to the overall decline of the share price and the recent profit warning – and that’s just allowed Microsoft to snap up a comparative bargain. 

But LinkedIn have continued to make subtle changes to their service (not all for the best – I’m thinking about Unlisted Groups here!) and continue to look at broadening their user base. The sub-apps they’ve released over recent months and years, for groups and recruiting, as well as their support for self-publishing via LinekdIn Pulse, are testament to that innovation culture they clearly have.

However, it’s likely that the 100+ million monthly active users of LinkedIn and 45+ billion unique page views per quarter, are clearly stats that Microsoft couldn’t ignore. Everyone’s busy buying user data these days it seems, and this is a highly relevant, business-specific dataset which is very closely aligned with the core Microsoft offering. 

Good luck to them I say. I think Microsoft has been much maligned over the years in the press and by the blogerati, but I actually think they’ve turned a corner with Satya Nadella at the helm. Office 365 is very good. OneDrive is improving (despite the reduction in free space offered and removal of the unlimited band). And Windows 10 is one of their best operating systems ever, in my opinion. It all just works. On multiple devices. And in an increasingly integrated and cloud-enabled way. So for that, I’m in support of this acquisition and will be keenly watching to see what comes of it.

OneNote

Having used Trello, Notability, Google Drive/Docs, Evernote, iOS notes and countless other note taking apps and software products over recent years, I’d say I’m fairly well positioned to pass judgement on OneNote.

Made available freely by Microsoft (when?) there are different versions available as apps on iOS and android devices and Windows 10. The full version is available via Microsoft’s Office 365 subscription, or via older non-subscription installations of Microsoft Office – like the Office 2013 product I have.

So, what is OneNote? At its core, it’s a note-taking app, but it’s so much more powerful than that. It’s a collaboration platform; it’s a virtual, access-anywhere collection of notebooks; it’s a powerful, easily-searchable, online filing cabinet for thoughts, documents and ideas. And best of all for me, is the seamless way it integrates across devices.

A typical use-case for me will start with me capturing some ideas on my iPhone, writing out some bullet points. Then when I’m on my commuter train, I’ll pull out my iPad, connect to OneNote and continue expanding on those ideas, sketching out concepts or diagrams with my finger or stylus. Once in work, out comes the laptop and again, connecting to OneNote, my notebook will sync and I’ll pick up where I left off, refining the content I’ve been working on throughout my journey to work. There’s no complicated method of transferring files and thinking about file formats. It just works. Without any complications. And it’s all so very user friendly!

What does it look like? Take a look at this intro video from Microsoft…

There’s a simple but intuitive structure:

  • You have notebooks, which I equate to the likes of a physical ring binder or folder.
  • Within each notebook, you have sections. These are tabbed areas within the notebook. So again, continuing the physical metaphor, these would be the coloured dividers that are typically used in a ring binder.
  • Each section can then have a series of pages and sub-pages.

Features I think are important:

Collaboration

  • Not only editing the same document at the same time, but also version tracking and the ability to highlight changes made by others.

Screen clipping

  • Much more powerful than standard print-screens, especially with a dual monitor setup.

Offline editing

  • Start online, continue offline, or vice versa. The system flexibly syncs with devices so your content is available wherever you want.

OCR

  • Taking picture of a page of notes or a whiteboard discussion and converting that to OneNote text, which then, naturally becomes editable and searchable.

Embedding files

  • You can import content, or simply attach files – which is great if you’ve got source documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, etc. so all your reference material is kept in one place.

Printing from Word to OneNote.

  • If like me, you’ve got a lot of old Word Documents, you don’t have to convert these individually to be available in OneNote. You can simply print to OneNote (tip: change advanced options in OneNote so that it creates a single note, rather than individual pages for each page of the Word document!)

Print from OneNote.

  • The other way around to the point above, but OneNote’s desktop version allows you to easily export to PDF and Word, or even as a OneNote file to send to someone else if they’re not on the same sharing network.

Password protection (in full/desktop version only)

  • Lock individual pages or sections behind simple passwords.

Tags

  • Add tags to documents to assist with searching. There are a range of tags available, from critical items, remember for blog, phone numbers, addresses, etc. then once the tag is added, simply “Find Tags” on the menu bar will show these tags in your documents. Very quick and very easy to use!

Checkboxes

  • Actually a kind of tag, but really easy to use. Highlight a list of content and press Ctrl+1 and the list is instantly converted to a checkbox list. Press Ctrl+1 again and the checkbox(es) will be ticked, to mark as complete. And press Ctrl+1 a final time to remove the checkbox. Again, all checkboxes show up in the “Find tags” menu option, showing in the To Do list – across all pages and sections in your notebook. There is the option of splitting this by section or notebook too, in case you have lots of lists.

Keyboard shortcuts

  • There are tons of keyboard shortcuts available in OneNote (as with most Microsoft product). The checkbox Ctrl+1 is just one of them. For a complete list, check out the Microsoft page here.

Subpages

  • As your OneNote use expands, you’ll find that some sections end up having a lot of pages. To help manage these, it’s possible to nest some pages as subpages, underneath others.  And (see OneTastic comment later) there are also some powerful macros available to help with this too, like the very helpful automatic Table of Contents in current section, for example.

Powerful search (also integrates with Delve via Office 365)

  • The search facility is quick, accurate and powerful – and if you’re a full Office 365 user, your OneNotes will start being indexed and presented through Delve too.

Cloud based, so is accessible anywhere

  • This universal accessibility has to be one of the biggest selling points for OneNote. It just simply works. And although cloud based, syncs with devices so OneNotes can be edited offline too when you’re out of wifi range.

Integrates with personal OneDrive.

  • Easily share content to/from OneDrive and with others. Your personal OneDrive has tons of free storage – as OneDrive comes with a very handy 15GB free for personal use. Which if you’re only using it for OneNote storage will take a very long time to fill up. If you’re using OneNote at work too, you can also easily switch from different OneDrive accounts, so you can (if you want) easily access your work-based OneNotes to continue that urgent writing when you’re out of the office – even on your iPhone/smartphone.
  • And if you need more OneDrive space, you can secure an extra 0.5GB of space for every individual you refer to the service, up to a maximum of 10GB. Here’s my OneDrive referral so if you haven’t already signed up, please do use my link! Thanks.

I haven’t taken the plunge yet and opted for a personal Office 365 account.  At £5.99 a month, it’s not exactly cheap… But that’s only for one personal computer. For a household (up to 5 computers + mobile devices), it’s £7.99 per month. As a Netflix and Amazon Prime household, that’s another subscription too far, especially with an older non-subscription version of Office working absolutely fine. The subscription model that Microsoft, Adobe and others are adopting is another story though…

There’s also a useful community around OneNote that has extended the platform with some very helpful macros and plugins. The very excellent OneTastic provides a very good selection of these that can easily be added to the desktop app (but as far as I’m aware, is restricted to the full desktop version (not the Windows 10, iOS or Android apps), but very helpfully creates some very useful shortcuts to make life even easier with OneNote.

So, to wrap up, I highly recommend getting to grips with OneNote.

Links to OneNote:

Windows app

iOS app

Android app

Job aggregators 2015

I published an original article back in 2010 about the Job Aggregators that were available online, explaining what they were and including links to the main players at the time. You can read that article here, if you want… but time has moved on and many/some of those aggregators have now closed their doors, shut down for business or merged with other operators, so the job aggregating landscape has changed somewhat. So it’s time for me to revisit the topic and lay out the best aggregators as I see them now in 2015. (Please note that these links will be UK oriented)

I was going to write that these are in no particular order, although over the previous years I’ve had more experience with Indeed, SimplyHired, Trovit and Adzuna and although there’s a huge amount of cross-over between all of these, I would argue that these are probably the major players in this field. In all likelihood they’re probably looking at mostly the same sources. The key difference comes from any working partnerships with direct employers and recruitment agencies, as they’ll typically be providing a feed of their jobs directly to one or more of the aggregators below.

Indeed

One of the main job aggregators in the UK, they also have an international arm too. They have a simple interface that’s easy to use, uncluttered and pulls in jobs from across a wide variety of online media – including not just regular job boards, but publishing houses and newspapers too. Indeed also offer helpful mobile and tablet apps, so you can save vacancies while you’re on the move to review at a later time and date.

The others…

Mobile-friendly impact

So Google announced earlier this year that they’d be introducing further changes to their algorithm to penalise sites that aren’t mobile-friendly, leading many to adopt the phrase Mobilegeddon, in the run up to the implementation on the 21st April. But I can’t help thinking that for all the fanfare and the massess of online discussions about how this could ruin many online businesses, it all ended up being a bit of a damp squib or a latter day Y2K-style issue.

Yes, it was probably more important for high-traffic B2C sites, particularly social media, news and ecommerce platforms that naturally lend themselves to their content being digested on the move via mobile devices. But for B2B sites or even lower traffic blogs (like mine!) I can’t help thinking that the whole impact was over-egged and resulted in significant discussion, research and reworking of websites in the run up to the change.

Having said that, of course it makes sense from a UX perspective to have a website that works in all contexts, orientations and for all screen sizes, but my issue is that the urgency with which many were promoting changes to be made was excessive.

The key issue

But more importantly than that, when you start considering your website traffic in more detail, you’ll see why this mobile-friendly issue may not have been such a big issue after all.

If you think that a typical B2B website, or indeed this blog, may receive anywhere from 5-20% of its traffic via a mobile device. Of that proportion, when you look at Google Analytics, I’ve often seen it further split between tablet devices and mobile devices fairly evenly – so at any one time, a maximum of 10% of web visitors are arriving on the site via a mobile device.

Depending on the design of the platform, it may or may not be a good experience for them – but that’s not the issue here. The key issue is whether an individual has actually searched for your site using Google. Because if they have, and your site isn’t mobile-optimised or responsively designed, then your position in the Google search results may suffer. But remember that the maximum of 10% of web visitors on a mobile device may not be arriving via Google search. They may have bookmarked your site, they may arrive from other inbound links or social referrals – so my contention with ‘Mobilegeddon’ is that the true impact is arguably less than was suggested initially and we’ve been the victim of online scaremongering.

Easy fix

Of course, if your site is based on WordPress (as this one is) then it’s relatively quick and easy to identify a replacement theme that is mobile-friendly or responsive-designed, upload and activate it – and then you’re compliant with the Google algorithm. 

But if you’re managing your site using a different CMS or system, then you might need bit more help and direction. And that’s where Google’s Webmaster Tools come in handy. Once you’ve registered your site with the platform, it’ll be analysed and a report on where any issues (from Google’s perspective) will be made available to you – along with a list of fixes and further advice that you may want to implement. Whether that’s easy or not to implement will depend on your technical ability or the ability of the team or person working on your site, but at least you know where you should be focusing your efforts.

Free test of mobile-friendly status

You can test your site, or any of your competitor sites, using this free Google tool here.

Changing Amazon delivery charges is a risky business

So as a one-time Amazon affiliate I received notification recently that the terms of the free delivery (Super Saver Delivery as they call it) in the UK was about to change (as of 1st May 2015). And in my opinion, it’s not a minor change at all, as they’re changing the minimum qualifying order from £10 to £20. 

Amazon super saver

Amazon super saver affiliate notice

It’s not the first change they’ve made, as the super saver delivery used to be free for all orders. They subsequently introduced a £5 cap, which quickly became a £10 limit – and this was just about acceptable, as it still meant a lot of orders could be considered impulse purchases. And if your basket fell below the £10 cap, sometime you might add something extra items that you knew you were going to use at some point (like a commodity item such as printer paper, or something that cost a couple of quid), just so you hit the minimum order level.

But at £20, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to reach that qualifying cap and it’ll take a good few commodity items to get close. 

I can understand why they’re doing it, as postage charges have increased, so they need to cover their costs. And the prices of many items has also gone up too, so from a consumer’s perspective maybe they’ll not notice the cap as much as I think they will. But from a personal perspective, I think it’ll definitely make me think twice about using Amazon if I know I have to pay postage charges. 

Forcing Prime

Some have said that in raising the limit, they’re trying to drive customers to opting for their Prime subscription. At £79 per year, that’s quite a leap of faith and an upfront commitment to the Amazon way of thinking. And for me, as a happy Netflix subscriber (better quality, more devices, better range of material IMHO) and having had the free trial of Prime – I found a worrying range of products that weren’t eligible for Prime delivery and also didn’t particularly rate their Prime TV/video services. I found their apps clunky (compared to Netflix), their range limited (although they do often have slightly better, more modern movies available) and generally the whole experience just felt a little forced.

I’d much rather they did one thing well, rather than many things in a mediocre manner. Netflix understand that and that’s why I’ve been subscribing for a while. eBay understand it too, and I think that with many of their lower ticket items continuing to be offered with free delivery (and no minimum order value) they might be the big winner as a result of this move by Amazon. At one time Play.com might have been a credible alternative, but since Rakuten have taken over, the platform has gone downhill and seems to be confused about what its raison d’etre actually is – not a smart move in such a fast moving, online, very visible world of online retail!

Convenience

So will I still use Amazon? Probably. Although the delivery charges will make me use it less. And less frequently too, which I think is an important consideration. I’ll not be going online and making an impulse purchase through Amazon any more, that’s for sure. Maybe that’s what they want? Maybe they want us to use their wish lists and basket facility more, so that they can have fewer, higher value deliveries. If that’s the case, then maybe this is a stroke of management genius.

But from a consumer’s perspective, I think they just might have shot themselves in the foot and opened the door to other, leaner, more customer-friendly operators that offer exactly what we want: flexibility, free/cheap delivery, and the ability to make impulse purchases when the moment takes us, not just when we have a sufficiently high value basket of goods.

How to easily create your own font

I’d often wondered how easy it would be to create my own font and having seen various pixel based, graphical editors always placed it in the too-complicated or too-hard camp. But I came across this tool called MyScriptFont the other day which promises to make the process significantly easier.

First of all, there’s no on-screen editing. You simply download a template grid and then using a medium thickness black felt tip, write in the alphabet in uppercase and lower case, along with the main numbers and punctuation. Additional symbols are optional, which in the interest of speed and testing it all, I opted against. Then it’s simply a case of scanning your grid in to your PC and uploading it to the MyScriptFont website.

Once it’s online, the site does its thing and provides you with either a True Type Font (TTF) or OTF which you can download and then easily install into your own machine.

I created mine in about 5 minutes – which you can view or install from here, if you like. It’s not perfect, as I accidentally crossed some of the guide lines so the loops on some of my letters have been cut off during the scanning process, but it was so easy to do, I just felt it worth sharing on here. I’ll shortly be revisiting the site and taking more time on my grid so I can have a perfect font!

Where the site might have a few drawbacks is in foreign language support, or for those instances where pixel perfect accuracy is required. It’s also quite tricky, as I found, to fill in the whole grid without making a mistake… so, unlike me, take your time and do it slowly! And make sure your felt tip pen doesn’t start fading half way through writing.

In terms of applications, there are a lot of paid font solutions out there that designers and organisations use and pay for, but this one is absolutely free – and pretty unique too. It’s not going to be suitable for every application, but the speed at which you can get your own custom handwriting based font is hard to complain about.

List of online courses, free training and MOOCs

I’ve been impressed with the pace of development of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and have even signed up for and studied some subjects through various platforms. But what I wasn’t aware of until recently, was that there’s a handy MOOC aggregator that’s been developed which looks across all the available courses online and presents a single interface for searching across them.

This resource is called Class Central and includes courses from the following providers:

Through Class Central, I’ve been able to discover a wider range of courses and have signed up to future classes as a means of continuing my professional development.  Most are free, although Udacity seem to charge for a lot of their content. The other suppliers typically offer an unverified programme which doesn’t cost you anything, but you don’t get the certificate at the end to demonstrate you’ve studied. The certificate is less important than the learning for me, so I wasn’t too bothered by this.

Many of the world’s leading universities and centres of higher education have made a selection of their course materials available online. Live courses offer an interactive element with assessed coursework and tests, whereas archived courses are still accessible with self-study being achieved through the blended learning approach of text and video material. 

At least two of the MOOC providers listed above – Coursera and edX – offer iOS apps which I’ve found particularly good, not least because they allow you to download course material to the app so that you can watch videos and read documents offline when you don’t have an internet connection. 

So, if you haven’t explored the world of MOOC’s yet, I implore you to give them a go. Challenge yourself and learn something new!

PDF splitter free online tool

Occasionally I have to work with some huge documents, typically as PDFs, but I don’t always have my laptop with the full Acrobat package on it. When that happens, and I need to break the PDFs up, I use a free online PDF splitter tool called PDFSplit! – which is available here.

It can extract all pages in a PDF to individual PDFs, or just grab a certain section of a PDF and save it into a new file. It’s quick. It’s online. And it’s free.

Video download tool

Continuing the theme of highlighting free online tools that I’m finding useful, there’s a tube downloader that’s got a great range of download options and approved sites. It’s called Tube Offline and is a firm favourite of mine.

Obviously you need to check the legality of downloading and storing videos that are available online, but it’s been very helpful to capture some online videos so they can be watched offline, when I don’t have an internet connection. Kids’ cartoons, training videos, fitness lessons – download them for free with this tool and they can then be stored on your iPad, iPhone or other mobile device to watch when you’re on the go. 

And if the file you download isn’t in the right format, this file converter here is pretty handy too, which also includes a download option to grab videos straight from online streams. Or the online converter tool – here – which I’ve highlighted previously.

Free, online file converter tool

Although I’m a big fan of Calibre and use it to manage the bulk of my e-book collection, occasionally, I just want to quickly convert individual documents or ebooks. And for this purpose, I’ve come across a helpful free, online book converter tool – cunningly called “Online Converter Tool” – and you can access it here.

Just saying it’s an ebook converter tool is a little misleading though because it can do a lot more than that. It can convert to most of the main ebook and document formats – including ePub, mobi (for Kindles) and PDFs – but it will also convert audio files into different formats too, including to AAC, MP3, OGG, WAV and WMA (among others). 

Similarly, there are video converters – think AVI, MKV, MOV, MP4, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and WMV – as well as device-specific settings for iPhone, iPads, Android devices and others. And there are also free online converter tools for images (BMP, EPS, GIF, JPG, PNG, etc.), documents (DOC, DOCX, HTML, PDF, RTF, TXT, etc.) and even archive converters (7Z, ZIP, etc. – but no RAR). 

Considering it’s a completely free resource, the few files I’ve thrown at it were dealt with quickly and produced flawless PDFs from ePubs, with no watermarking or other additions to my document. So it’s earned a place in my bookmarks and will no doubt be a tool I continue to use in the future.