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Hello, Tech Tails readers!
I hope everybody had a solid run of weekends since our last issue. I have spent these last few weekends trekking around New England and New York for festivals, weddings, and various other summer activities and excursions. In the process, I’ve been having a blast getting some sweet photo’s on my iPhone 7 Plus of the summer sunshine decorating the various landscapes and ecosystems. This past weekend I spent a few days in the city of Syracuse, NY for a wedding. Instead of hopping on the interstate and doing a straight shot, my partner, Emily, and I decided to take “the road less travelled” and zip through windy mountain roads. And it did not disappoint. Having never been on the VT to NY ferry myself, we made the decision to embark over beautiful Lake Champlain to NY, (which promptly gave me a brief bout of sea-sickness. I’m a land-mammal, what can I say?). Once I got my sea-legs, I was able to grab some nice shots of the sun bouncing off the waves. It was worth it.
We’ve got some great content for you readers this edition. As always, don’t hesitate to reach out to any of us with some Apple-related tech questions. That’s why we’re here! If there’s a subject or topic you’d like to see from us, we’re always accepting suggestions!
Enjoy,
Connor “Mal De Mer” McGinnis
connormcginnis@smalldog.comIs E-mail Taking Over
E-mail is great, but sometimes there’s just too much of it at work. Ok, don’t jump to conclusions just yet about me, I know e-mail is critical for most of us to perform our jobs. However, it can get a bit overwhelming and, to be honest, annoying. Sharing information as a collective team frequently brings with it e-mail that just clogs your inbox. We all can probably say we have a friend or co-worker that overly uses the share all option or responds with unnecessary answers. To continue with my theme of honesty, this is why I Bcc ( blind carbon copy ) any company wide e-mails. I have found Bcc to be the only effective means of not cluttering up the in-boxes of others with excessive responses. It is unfair, however, to insinuate that a cluttered in-box is solely due to those who overshare. Marketing offers and other junk fills your inbox almost at breakneck speed. It seems we are being bombarded from every corner, and it sometimes seems to me that my e-mail loads feel like the pile of dirty laundry that seems to never end.
Here at Small Dog, we rely heavily on e-mail for communication and the Apple chat program. Chat is a very effective means of quick communications with individuals, but it’s become more challenging to have group chats. Another downside to Chat is it’s perhaps overly easy to send a message in error to the wrong person. Most of the time there is humor in the wrong chat sent, but it’s also resulted in some red faces of embarrassment.
Recently I learned of a group messaging service Slack, which is free but includes paid plans with additional features. Slack, which has apps for macOS, iOS, Windows, and Android, isn’t conceptually all that different from Apple’s Messages app. You type short messages and other people in the conversation can reply. You can share graphics or other files in the discussion, and search through past messages. Slack supports person-to-person voice calls, and if you switch from a free to a paid plan you can also use team, group calls, video conferencing, and screen sharing. One of the hiccups we’ve had here at Small Dog with Chat is that not everyone uses the same version of software or, in the case of trying to AirDrop a file, not being able to use personal iCloud accounts.
An appealing feature of Slack is that it has channels that are easy to create. It can bring together all communications relevant to a particular workgroup, project, or topic. You might have a private #marketing channel for everyone in that department, a private #annual-report channel for the people who need to put together that document, or a public #facilities channel to talk about burnt-out lightbulbs and stuck doors. I feel this is a way better way than organization-wide mailing lists because you can pay attention to just those channels that matter to you, and ignore the others.
You can also choose to be notified of replies to threads you’re in. Then you can override those defaults for any channel or conversation you’re in, which lets you make sure that important messages get through and water cooler chatter doesn’t interrupt you. Plus, if you leave your computer, Slack can repoint notifications to your mobile devices automatically, with separate settings to make sure you aren’t overly nagged while at your kid’s soccer game.
Slack provides tons of other features that can prove useful in organizations of any size. You can share and comment on files of any type, which is far more effective than sending attachments around in email. You can create “posts” and get others to edit them collaboratively—a boon when trying to craft the perfect bit of text for some purpose. And you can integrate hundreds of Internet services into Slack so it can act as a single dashboard for many other apps.
We have not deployed Slack here at Small Dog, time will tell if we do choose to make a switch. However, this find was an exciting one for me to come across so I wanted to share this software tip with our readers.