Gneo - Todo App Review

I've always been a user of Wunderlist for its excellent compatibility and consistency across many operating systems and browsers, but I saw Gneo on the app store at the introductory price of £2.99 and thought I'd give it a try.

Gneo was released October 30th on iPad and iPhone by Keane and Able, and its main selling point is the fact that it is gesture based. As founder Anthony Keane puts it: "we wanted to give people a way to prioritise tasks based on their relative urgency and importance" - which doesn't sound all that special; there are tons of productivity apps that do this, but the gestures and list views are what makes Gneo stand out from the crowd. And during my use, they are proving to be really useful.

" the gestures and list views are what makes Gneo stand out from the crowd"

There's three ways of viewing your tasks, by date (which syncs with your calendar too), as a big simple list, or in a priority view which is a kind of grid of importance. I often find that even though I have all my tasks on Wunderlist, I'm always scribbling the days tasks down to keep in front of me at all times. The good thing about Gneo's priority view is that you can drag tasks around in order of importance on the grid, so it's just way easier to see and prioritise a big list of stuff to do. And it really works well, the gestures are awesome, you can drag stuff around all over the place, and little touches like flipping the new task card over to reveal a notes section are excellent. 

Gneo's list view and priority views

But it's early stages with Gneo, and this is why I'm sticking with Wunderlist for now. It's a beautifully designed app on iPad and has 80% of the functionality of Wunderlist, but seems a little less useful on iPhone without so much screen real-estate, and there's no Android version at all. There's also no browser or Mac/Windows client, which is a real shame as I'd much prefer to add tasks on a mac then use my iPad to view and tick it all off. One of the main reasons I bought the app is because it syncs with Evernote, and as a big Evernote user I've always been disappointed with the todo functionality. But the Evernote sync is just annoying, it creates a separate note for each individual task, clogging up your main note feed and creating a load of new notebooks if you have several task lists.

Gneo is a great app, and if you are a heavy iPad user I'd highly recommend it. But for the majority, wait until the service gets better and becomes available on more platforms.

Sometimes Simple is Better

If you want distraction free writing then Byword is just that.  Here's a screenshot of it in fullscreen on Mac OS. Sometimes, simple is more productive.

My Essential Mac OS Tools

Better Touch Tool 

Better touch tool gives Mac users the only feature I missed from Windows; the 'snap' windows feature. It also gives you ridiculous control over the touch pad on the Macbook, allowing for gestures for just about anything you can think of. My favourite of these is the 'swipe from corner to centre and back' madness, which when you've mastered it, makes you feel as bad ass as Tom Cruise in Minority Report. Link

ClipMenu

I'm not sure how I ever worked without ClipMenu. It's a super simple clipboard tool that remembers your clipboards history, then lets you paste stuff back straight from the menu bar. It totally eliminates the need for pasting stuff into a notes app for later use, and is perfect for quickly clipping bits that you need to keep for later. It's a tool that is vital for people in repetitive copy-pasta jobs. You can also export the clipboard history.

Memory Clean

Memory clean does what it says on the tin, it's a tool to free up your RAM when needed. It also shows how much free ram you have available so you know when to clean. I never really use this on my MBP with 8 gig of ram, but the Mac Mini I use only has 4 GB and this comes in handy; especially considering how much RAM the Chrome browser seems to use up!

Evernote

I know I bang on about Evernote a lot, but it has so many great features. The Mac version gives you a little icon in the top menu bar, which you can click and type a note straight into (you'll want to add a badass keyboard shortcut for that) but the best feature about this is that you can drag files right into the little icon to upload them, perfect for when you need to take a file out with you last minute. And if you pay for Evernote Premium, the sync is ridiculously fast.

iStat Pro

iStat Pro is actually free, regardless of the 'pro' handle. It is a dashboard widget that displays loads of information about your computers performance, including core temperatures, battery health, cpu usage, and a few more geeky bits.

Best Places to Get Coffee & Work in East Finchley

I like to get out of the house on weekends and do work somewhere I can get a good Coffee and free wifi. These are my favourites in the little place I live called East Finchley.

Campbell & Syme

Campbell & Syme win it for me mainly due to their incredible coffee. The place is run by two friendly chaps who really know their stuff when it comes to quality coffee, so you know you're always going to get a decent single source cup. The wifi is fast and they don't seem to mind you staying for a few hours.

The Phoenix Cinema

The Phoenix  is a really great place to chill for hours on end, due to the fact that it's usually empty except right before a film starts. The selection of herbal teas here is awesome, and they only cost £1.30. Only drawback is that it doesn't open until 11am, so no early morning working. 

Dan & Decarlo 

This place is in a decent location and has the best opening times, 7am - 7pm, and there's almost always a table. The coffee here isn't brilliant, but it's the cheapest and you get a massive cup for the price. Grab the wifi password because the 'free' BtOpenzone wifi sucks.

Interview Tips for Securing a Role in Social Media

After I graduated I began searching for many inbound marketing jobs, and  secured an excellent role within a position focused heavily on social media in which I’ll be running campaigns and also managing accounts. It took me a lot of time and effort to get the role I really wanted, so I thought I’d share some tips for recent graduates on getting a job in social media marketing, as I’ve been to plenty of interviews and know the types of questions to expect.

Be able to describe accounts you’ve managed

Having really clear and detailed examples of accounts or campaigns you’ve managed is very important. Most interviewers will ask you about this, and it’s particularly useful if you can describe things like:

• Challenges you encountered whilst managing campaigns
• How you overcame these challenges
• What you learnt from the experiences
• What you enjoyed the most
• Something you changed for the better

Most of all, it is important that you describe even negative situations in a positive way, and be able to demonstrate how you can take these experiences and bring positive learning from them to the new role in a way which will benefit the organisation. I found that interviewers didn’t mind that some of the campaigns I’d dealt with weren’t huge, it was more important to focus on what I’d learnt from them, no matter the size.

Have solid examples of campaigns you admire

As well as personal examples of things that work, also think about case studies from some campaigns you admire. What were the best practices you saw from the campaigns? What can you take away from the campaigns and apply elsewhere? Why were they so successful? All these points will help in showing that you have an understanding of social media and when it is beneficial for an organisation. It may be best to use an example that isn’t related to your personal experience; for example if you worked on a B2B campaign previously, you could choose an example that was B2C, to broaden your knowledge.

Be able to describe how you use tools and analytics

Being organised and analysing the work you do on social media campaigns is a real strong point in the eyes of an employer. Data is so important as it directly relates to KPI’s (and therefore ROI) for an organisation.

I won't go into detail about social media and ROI - that’s a subject for another article, but I will say that different organisations will have different KPI’s in mind for their social efforts. Some will focus on gaining followers, some on the conversations etc; and they want to know how these measurable's have an affect on things like sales or visits to websites. This means it must be clear how you used analytics or tools in previous campaigns to measure KPI’s, and how that impacted directly on the organisation.

Even if your tools for measurement were as simple as an Excel spreadsheet - if it worked well for you and you stayed on top of your workload and produced results, then brag about it.

Have knowledge of many networks

This is such a simple point which can be overlooked easily. I found one thing that always impressed employers was my ability to describe why Google+ is so great. It is a great skill if you can look past just Facebook and Twitter and describe why other networks might be worth using and why. For example why is Pinterest so popular with e-commerce or fashion? How do Vine & Instagram provide more human ways of interacting with audiences? Showing that you can be creative with different networks is a really strong skill.

Have predictions for future trends

Employers want to see that you are interested and active in the industry you are trying to break into, and one of the easiest ways to demonstrate this is by following predictions for future trends in social media marketing. The fact that you can show the initiative to be able to follow industry trends will convince the interviewer that you can respond to change and are adaptable. Combine this point with examples of previous campaigns and show how invaluable your knowledge will be to the organisation.

I hope these points are useful, please comment if you feel I've missed anything really obvious out and I'll add it in. I'm also always willing to help out, so get in touch on Twitter @willkennard or on Google+.

4 Months on With The Samsung Series 3 Chromebook

I’ve had my Chromebook (Samsung Series 3) for over 4 months now, so I thought I’d do a very quick review of the device now that I’ve lived with it properly. Just to make it clear, this is a review of this specific device and not Chrome OS in general, which I think is a superb operating system and way of working.

I have to say straight off that the Samsung Series 3 could not possibly replace my Macbook for work uses, so if you’re thinking of getting this as a main device, I wouldn’t recommend it. Of course I don’t expect a laptop that costs just over 200 quid to be some sort of media powerhouse, but at the same time, there’s no way you can rely on it in meetings, and you can’t install a lot of applications that the majority of workplaces use.

A few main problems I have with the device is trying to play video files (avi, mp4 etc) and Youtube clips; they just end up stuttering like crazy. Also when trying to use Google Music (a service I usually love); as soon as another tab is opened the music stutters. There are several known fixes for these problems, but I’ve tried them all and even a system reboot and still no luck. These are two things that just make the device seem slow and the operating system feel almost incomplete. Using the HDMI port is extremely temperamental too, and it seems to just decide when it wants to work properly, even when using the same TV. However, I know that Google will only improve the OS on this particular device over time, and I’ve no doubt that these problems will be sorted. Let’s hope so.

Now there are plenty of good things too. The device is super light and portable which makes it really good for just chucking in your bag and taking with you without the bulk of a normal laptop. I’d honestly say this is the best part about the device, coupled with the excellent battery life. I absolutely love the keyboard; it just feels amazing to type on. Which brings me to my next point of the device being great for writing. Google Docs and drive do naturally work wonderfully on it, so these in factor with the size and keyboard make it a good choice for writers on the move (yes Google Docs works offline fine).

Overall I’d recommend the Series 3 Chromebook for people looking for a content creation device to complement a home PC. It’s good for a days use on one charge, and very portable, but it doesn’t have the media power of slightly more expensive Windows devices.

Another note: get a case for it! It scratches

really

easily. 

Google Keep Initial Impressions

So Keep is official and launched. It looks really great, I love the idea of quickly colouring your notes, and the interface is much cleaner than Evernote or even Wunderlist, and certainly a hell of a lot cooler than Scratchpad. In fact, the browser based interface https://drive.google.com/keep/ just looks amazing. Simple, immediately understandable and very fast.

But what first strikes me is that this product seems to be best for Google users only. I realise that Google will eventually release it everywhere (as they are planning to do with a lot of products i.e Google Now) but how long will it take them? People are so used to Evernote that it'll be hard to switch, which will be made much worse if the users of Evernote are on iOS devices or a phone with a version of Android lower than 4.0.

I would love to start using this app regularly, especially considering it runs so quickly on my Chromebook (compared to Evernote which is extremely sluggish) but I feel like it's another burden on my already fragmented

productivity apps.

Hopefully it'll get better and more compatible quickly. But for now, I'll stick with Evernote. I hope you're listening Google.

Google Keep