Tag: Communication

How to Find Your Tribe and Thrive as a Woman in Tech

How to Find Your Tribe and Thrive as a Woman in Tech

The world of technology has been traditionally dominated by men. But the times they are a changing, as the song says, and more and more women are entering the industry, bringing with them their unique perspectives and skills. So how do you “find your tribe” so that you can thrive as a woman in technology? Let’s take a look at some tips that will help you identify and connect with like-minded women.

Connect With Local Resources

Finding local resources is one of the best ways to start networking with other women in tech. Look for meetup groups, conferences, and events such as hackathons or “Women Who Code” gatherings. Not only will these events give you the opportunity to meet potential mentors or employers, but they can also be great places to make connections with other female tech professionals. If there aren’t any events near you, consider hosting your own! Start small by inviting friends from work or school to join you for an informal gathering at a coffee shop or restaurant. Take advantage of any opportunity you have to put yourself out there and meet new people – it could open up new doors for you in your career.

Make Yourself Visible

Once you start networking, make sure you do everything you can to make yourself visible within your chosen field of interest. Attend conferences or meetups related to your interests, volunteer for projects related to your goals, and speak up about topics related to technology or innovation that matter to you. This will help get your name out there and let people know what skills you have that could be valuable for their team or organization.

Turn Social Media into Professional Connections

Social media platforms like LinkedIn are also great places to connect with potential mentors and colleagues in the tech industry. Use LinkedIn to search for people who have similar backgrounds or interests as yours and reach out to them directly. You can also use Twitter or Instagram hashtags to find relevant conversations taking place around topics that interest you. Don’t be afraid to jump into conversations or ask questions; these platforms offer great opportunities for connecting with peers on both a personal and professional level.

Be Open-Minded & Embrace Change

Finally, when building relationships with other women in tech, remember that everyone has different experiences and perspectives on technology and innovation—and they all deserve respect. Be open-minded when talking with others about the latest trends or technologies; even if something isn’t personally relevant right now, it may become so down the line! Plus, being open-minded is key when trying out new things (like coding languages) or learning new skills (like UX design).

No matter where you are on your journey as a woman in tech, remember that finding your tribe is an important part of the process! Networking both online and offline will help you build connections with other women who understand exactly what it feels like to be working hard for success in a predominately male-dominated field. Also take advantage of opportunities available such as attending conferences or speaking up about topics related to technology or innovation that matter most to you – these small steps can go a long way toward helping build visibility for yourself within your chosen field of interest! Finally, keep an open mind; embrace change and try new things – not only will this keep your skillset competitive but also give insight into potential career paths which may better align with your goals! Good luck!

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Mastering Micro-Learning for Exceptional Technical Writing

Mastering Micro-Learning for Exceptional Technical Writing

Micro-learning has been gaining popularity in recent years as a way to effectively deliver content in short, easily digestible formats. This type of learning is especially well-suited for technical writing, which often covers complex topics that can be difficult to master. In this blog post, we’ll explore how micro-learning can be used to improve technical writing skills and help writers effectively communicate with their audience.

What is Micro-Learning?

Micro-learning is a term used to describe a learning approach that delivers small, bite-sized pieces of information in a manner that is easily digestible and remembered. This approach is designed to help learners focus on one specific topic at a time and retain information more effectively. micro-learning is also well suited for busy professionals who may not have the time to commit to traditional forms of learning, such as attending a live workshop or taking an online course.

Why Use Micro-Learning for Technical Writing?

Technical writing can be a complex skill to master. Writers must be able to effectively communicate complicated information in a way that is easy for their audience to understand. Using micro-learning can help technical writers hone their skills by breaking down complex topics into small, manageable pieces. Additionally, micro-learning is an effective way to deliver training remotely, which can be especially helpful for writers who work remotely or in different locations.

There are four main elements to micro-learning: short duration, focused content, specific learning objectives, and immediate application. When creating micro-learning content for your documentation, it’s important to keep these elements in mind in order to create an effective and memorable learning experience.

Short Duration: The average attention span of an adult human is eight seconds—that’s shorter than the attention span of a goldfish! So when creating micro-learning content for technical writing, it’s important to keep videos, articles, etc., short and sweet

Focused Content: In addition to being short, micro-learning content should be focused on one specific topic or concept. Trying to cover too much ground in one go is a surefire recipe for confusing your audience and achieving nothing in the end.

Specific Learning Objectives: Every piece of micro-learning content should have a specific goal or objective. What do you want your audience to learn from this particular piece of content? Make sure your answer is clear and concise before moving forward.

Immediate Application: The best way to ensure that your audience remembers what they’ve learned is to provide them with an opportunity to immediately apply what they’ve learned. This could be in the form of a quiz at the end of a video or article, or an interactive element built into the content itself.

By breaking down big concepts into manageable chunks, micro-learning can help make technical writing more accessible and less daunting. When applied correctly, micro-learning can help writers master even the most complex subject matter. And because micro-learning content is typically short and focused, it’s easy for busy professionals to fit into their already packed schedules. If you’re looking for a way to improve your technical writing skills, consider incorporating micro-learning into your professional development plan.

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Writing for the User Experience: The Three “E”s of Technical Writing

As technical writers, we know that documentation is vital to the user experience but, the best technical writers know that the key to a great UX is to include the three “E”s: expectations, engagement, and empowerment. By keeping these three elements top-of-mind, technical writers can produce documentation that exceeds user expectations, engages them on a personal level, and empowers them to be successful. Let’s take a closer look at each of these three “E”s.

  1. Expectations

The first “E” stands for expectations. It’s important to set the right expectations for your users from the very beginning. For example, if you’re writing documentation for a complex piece of software, it’s important to let the user know that upfront. Otherwise, they may get frustrated when they encounter difficulty using the software and think it’s due to a lack of understanding on their part.

Your users will have expectations too. They expect the document to be clear, concise, and free of errors. They also expect it to be easy to navigate and understand. If your document falls short in any of these areas, users will likely become frustrated and give up on trying to use it.

2. Engagement

The second “E” stands for engagement. In order to keep your users engaged with your documentation, you need to write in a clear and concise manner. Using plenty of headings and subheadings to break up the text will make it easier to scan and don’t forget to include plenty of examples and screenshots to illustrate key points.

In addition, it is also important to engage users on a personal level. One way to do this is by using case studies or real-world examples whenever possible After all, people are more likely to use something if they feel a personal connection to it. When writing your documentation, be sure to use a tone and style that is approachable and relatable. Write like you would speak— without using jargon or overly technical language.

3. Empowerment

The third “E” stands for empowerment. Your goal should be to empower your users with the knowledge they need to be successful. Give them the information they need to complete their tasks efficiently and effectively. Anticipate their questions and concerns ahead of time so that you can address them before they even have a chance to ask In addition, don’t forget to include links to additional resources where users can go for more help if they need it. By empowering your users, you’ll create advocates for your product or service—and for your company as a whole.

The next time you sit down to write some documentation, keep the UX in mind by including the three “E”s: expectations, engagement, and empowerment . . . your users will thank you for it!

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Tips & Tricks: Seven Useful Mac OS Tricks You Might Not Know

 

 

By Juli Clover of Mac Rumors

There are a lot of hidden features in both macOS and iOS that often go under the radar, either because they’ve not received much attention from Apple, or they’ve been forgotten after a period of time.

In the latest video over on our YouTube channel, we’ve rounded up some useful macOS tips and tricks that you might not know about.

Universal Copy Paste – In iOS 10 and macOS Sierra, Apple introduced a universal copy paste feature. On devices where you’re signed into your iCloud account, if you copy something on one device, you can paste it to another. So if you copy something on your iPhone, for example, you can swap over to your Mac to paste it.

Menu Bar – If you hold down the Command key, you can use your mouse or trackpad to rearrange the icons of the menu bar at the top of your screen.

Dragging Text – You can highlight text on your Mac and then hold down with the trackpad or a mouse to drag that text into another app. If you drag text to the desktop, it’ll create a new text clip document.

Split Screen – To quickly access the split-screen multitasking mode on your Mac, click and hold the mouse cursor over the green button in the upper left hand corner of any app window.

Emoji – To insert an emoji into any document or message, hold down the Control and Command keys and then press the space bar to bring up an emoji menu interface where you can choose an emoji.

Picture-in-Picture – When you watch a video on your Mac, like the YouTube video above, click on the Picture-in-Picture button that’s in the bottom right of the video player (it looks like an arrow pointing at a separate screen). If there’s no Picture-in-Picture button, you can hold down Control and then double-click inside the video to open up a shortcut menu. From there, you’ll have a separate video window that can be moved and resized.

Signing Documents – When viewing a PDF or document in an app like Preview, there are tools for inserting a signature. You can create a signature using a finger on the trackpad of your Mac, which is a handy way to sign digital documents.

Do you have any Mac Tips? Sound off in the comments below!!

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WIT: Mixing friendship and business: What women in tech can do better

 

by Monica Harrington for GeekWire

I joined Microsoft 30 years ago, worked there 11 years, was CMO for two successful companies and one that wasn’t, and then quit tech to focus on reproductive health. I did that for many years, and had some impact as an advocate and elected official (and was named a Woman of Courage by the University of Washington in 2016 for my efforts). But now I’m returning to tech.
Why?

Because at heart, I’m a geek and I miss it. Through high school, my math scores were always higher than my language scores and despite the fact that I got no encouragement to go into a technical field, I somehow wandered in a side door, built a career in tech, and I miss it.

I also think we need more senior women like myself in tech. The numbers tell the story. During my early years in tech, women held 35 percent of computing jobs; by 2013, women held only 26 percent. We’re missing senior level women, we’re missing women mentors, and we’re missing young women who see a future for themselves in tech.
The situation’s bad and getting worse and it didn’t need to be this way.

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, when I was working at Microsoft at a pretty junior level, I built friendships with a group of soon-to-be high-powered women who were capable of doing insane, wonderful things in tech. (I also worked with a lot of terrific men, but that’s a different column.). As we took on more senior roles, our friendships flourished, but we often kept those friendships under the radar.

Now that we’re in our 50s, none of my closest circle of ten women friends from that era are still in tech. OK, one is, kind of. In fact, she sits on the board of one of Seattle’s most important tech companies. That’s pretty powerful. But her day job is spent running a nonprofit. Another sits on the board of Berkshire Hathaway (apparently, Warren thinks she’s very smart), but again, not really a tech role.

Meanwhile, many of the men I know from that era are engaged in venture capital, starting new businesses, mentoring startups, and generally staying engaged in tech.

A recent Pew survey suggests why that happens:

Basically, women in tech have it tough. It’s hard to be tough and assertive in a mixed crowd without triggering the “bitch” reaction. We’re also super sensitive about mixing friendship and business.

If you want to be taken seriously in a male-dominated field (as I was, and as many of my female colleagues were), it can be hard to let down your guard and relax into your strengths, especially if those strengths are perceived as feminine. A strength

I’ve come to recognize in many of the women I’ve come to know and admire is how to be a good and dear friend while also adhering to high standards of ethics and excellence in the workplace.

“I believe women are too often reluctant to promote the women they’ve met in business because when we become friends with women we like and admire, we then feel compromised about mixing that friendship with business.”

I don’t think women need to act like men to be successful. But I do think women need to act more like men to help other women be more successful. What I am painfully aware of is that men are better at connecting in business and promoting qualified friends. They don’t suffer the same qualms about mixing friendship and business.

When you’re building companies, it’s super helpful to draw on the talents of people you both like and respect. And often, that means drawing on the talents of friends.

I believe women are too often reluctant to promote the women they’ve met in business because when we become friends with women we like and admire, we then feel compromised about mixing that friendship with business. Too often, women won’t put forth another woman friend for an opportunity unless she’s the most qualified person on the planet. Meanwhile, the men aren’t worried about that and they promote opportunities regularly to their friends as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Recommending people throughout your network is the lifeblood of an effective venture capitalist.

In my return to tech, I’m committed to assertively mixing friendship and business, and to helping friends I’ve met in business – women and men – who are great at what they do, be part of what it is I’m doing.

If I got to know you at work, and I found you to be smart, innovative, reliable, and just generally a kickass person to be around, I don’t want to hold it against you professionally that we became friends. We all need to embrace the fact that many of the same qualities that make for a great friendship also make for great business relationships.

And to my men friends from several decades of a life in tech, thanks for setting an example of how you treat your friends.

Some of my best work experiences have come about because you had no qualms about recommending me despite that fact that somewhere along the road we became good friends.

Monica Harrington is a startup veteran (Valve, Picnik), women’s health advocate, and now CMO of Exro Technologies.

What do you think of her recommendations for women in technology? Tell us in the comments below?

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App of the Week: One Drive

OneDrive for iOS Updated With Redesigned Interface, Drag and Drop, and FilesApp Support

 

By Tim Hardwick of MacRumors

Microsoft released an update to its OneDrive app on Tuesday that adds support for the Files app in iOS 11 and brings a host of other new features many of which are responses to user feedback.

To begin with, the interface has been overhauled to make better use of screen space and make filenames easier to read, while an ellipsis button next to each item brings up a new contextual options menu, so users no longer need to long-press a file to take actions.

 

More generally, thumbnail images have been made larger, shared files are now easier to spot, and the multi-column list view on iPad has been redesigned to be less cluttered and give items and filenames more room to breathe. Another welcome enhancement in version 10.1 is expanded preview support for over 130 file types, including Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, RAW, 3D objects, high-precision DICOM, TIFF files, iWork Files, Java/C/Swift, and many more.

In addition, OneDrive now supports drag and drop, enabling users to drag files to emails and move them between open tabs on iPhone and iPad. Several iPhone X UI fixes are also in evidence, with the interface now displaying properly in landscape orientation, while a number of annoying bugs have been fixed, including one that made search results vanish whenever a file was opened.

OneDrive is a free download for iPhone and iPad available from the App Store.

How do you feel about running Microsoft Apps on iOS? Sound off in the comments below!

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Tales from the Orchard: Apple can win electronic medical record game with Health Records in iOS 11.3

 

 

 

By Larry Dignan of ZDNet

Apple’s next update of operating system for iPhones and iPads will include a feature called “Health Records” that may ultimately be best positioned to aggregate electronic medical records for individuals.

The move to electronic medical records and the patient portals that go with them has been underway for years.

There are multiple players in the space and tech giants such as Microsoft and Google and now Apple have been inserting themselves into the health care market.

Meanwhile, wearable device companies can also be players in the patient data game. Fitbit and Apple have been partnering with medical device makers and that data can ultimately be rolled up into a portal and health record.

 

So what’s in Apple’s favor with Health Records in iOS 11.3?

1 The Apple Watch and iPhone is a conduit for micro-level data such as heart rate, activity and if in some cases medical conditions. Apple’s HealthKit already gives the company a foothold in the healthcare market.

2 Apple is good with partnering. Just like Apple has with enterprise technology giants, the company has partnered with the leading players in the health record space. Apple is going for the aggregation approach and partnering to suck in data from participating medical institutions in one place.

3 The leading medical data players are on board with Health Records. Apple is starting with a dozen hospitals including Johns Hopkins Medicine and Penn Medicine and has connections into Epic Systems and Cerner. Epic and Cerner are the leading players in the medical record management space. Think of Epic as the SAP of hospital management software. The hospitals listed as Apple’s launch partners run on Epic and Cerner for the most part.

4 Apple is going along with standards. Health Records is based on FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), which is a standard for transferring electronic medical records.

5 The healthcare industry has already done a lot of the heavy lifting. The real work to move to electronic medical records has occurred over the last decade with a push from the government. All that IT integration primed the pump for a player like Apple to bring healthcare data to consumer devices.

6 Apple’s enterprise footprint can be leveraged. When Apple is pitching its health record and portal wares it appeals to IT executives directly.

7 Privacy. Apple has played the privacy marketing well and differentiated itself from Google’s cloud and data centric approach. In areas like artificial intelligence, Apple’s approach is a handicap. In healthcare, that approach is an asset as Health Records will be encrypted and protected under a user’s iPhone passcode.

What do you think of Apple’s influence in our Healthcare System? Sound off in the comments below!

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WIT: The Dangers of Keeping Women Out of Tech

 

 

By Mallory Pickett of WIRED.com

IN 1978 A young woman named Maria Klawe arrived at the University of Toronto to pursue a doctorate in computer science. She had never used a computer—much less written a line of code—but she had a PhD in math and a drive to succeed in a male-dominated field. She was so good that, nine months later, the university asked her to be a professor.

Today, however, computer science is one of the few STEM fields in which the number of women has been steadily decreasing since the ’80s. In the tech industry, women hold only around one-fifth of technical roles. In light of these stats, the prevailing view in Silicon Valley these days is “This is terrible, let’s fix it.”

In Southern California, Klawe has done what tech has not. For the past 11 years, she has served as the president of Harvey Mudd College­—a small liberal arts school in Claremont, California, known for its intensive STEM focus—where the number of women in its computer science program has grown from 10 percent to 40 percent. On the subject, she’s optimistic: Change is possible. Now it’s the industry’s turn—and it could take a lesson from Klawe.

When you meet with men in the tech industry, can you tell that some of them doubt women can succeed in technical work?
That they don’t think women are suited for this? Oh, yeah.

People say that?
I was yelled at by one CEO who said his company was bringing women into technical roles but that if he saw it get to 30 percent, he’d know their hiring process was really screwed up. So I asked if he knew that we’re graduating women in computer science at more than 40 percent. He just blew me off. And when I asked him why there are so few women on his leadership team, he just said, “Gender isn’t an issue for us.”

So what about those screwed-up hiring practices? How do they work?
Look at the interview process. If I’m interviewing somebody, I would probably say, “Oh, it’s so nice to see you, welcome to Harvey Mudd, we’re really delighted to have you here with us.” But it would be quite common for a tech company to start an interview without even saying good morning or good afternoon, just: “I want to know what you know about pointers in C++, so show me how to do that.” Very adversarial, bragging, trying to show how much smarter they are. There are some women who feel perfectly comfortable in those environments, but I would say for the most part they don’t. Also, that kind of environment is just obnoxious.

But that’s how so many companies conduct interviews. Google comes to mind.
Google has studied their interview process, and I’ve heard that it overpredicts success for men and underpredicts success for women. [Google disputes this.] They just haven’t changed much.

Should they change? Judging from how well these companies are doing, it seems like those methods work. I mean, Steve Jobs was apparently an asshole—
He was an asshole. I met him.

—and Amazon reportedly has a terrible work environment, yet these are successful companies.
Yep.

So why change just to be friendlier to women?
Google, Facebook, Microsoft—all these companies were successful because they figured out a new way to make money. Google monetized search through advertising, Facebook became an advertising platform, Microsoft created a dominant software platform. But it’s probably an error to associate their success with their managerial style or their culture.

Some would say those managerial styles and cultures are crucial, not coincidental.
Let’s go back to the first big tech companies, like IBM and HP. Both were highly inclusive, really worked on hiring and promoting women and people of color. In fact, virtually every woman or person of color who’s a leader in the tech industry today—who’s roughly my age, 66—came up through IBM or HP. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and all the people in that generation came along in the ’80s or late ’70s. This happened to be a time when girls and young women were being turned away from computers. Computers became a boys’ domain almost overnight.

How?
Women were once about a third, maybe 35 percent, of the computer science majors in this country. Part of that was—I mean, this sounds so ridiculous—but part of that was because women had better typing skills and were thought of as being more careful. In the ’70s women were majoring in computer science because it was something they were expected to be good at. Then we had personal computers entering homes and schools.
There are two kinds of things you can do on a PC as a child. One is word processing. Bo-ring! The other is playing games like Pong and Space Invaders—computational power at that time couldn’t do graphics more sophisticated than that. And who likes to play those kinds of games? Boys. So it’s not particularly surprising that very quickly boys took over.

Is there a business reason for getting back to a culture in which computers aren’t seen as a boy thing?
The reality is, if tech companies can’t persuade more women and people of color to major in computer science, they are not going to be able to fill the positions that they have. Everybody’s looking at the same talent. They absolutely know what it costs to recruit a single person, and they know that if their churn for employees is, say, every 13 months, that’s not a good business case for them.

 

So when you actually start to increase the enrollment of women in computer science programs, what happens?
Well, at pretty much every place—not just Mudd but Carnegie Mellon, MIT, University of Washington, UBC, Princeton—that has made a significant effort to recruit women into engineering and computer science, not only do the female students do as well, they also take on most of the leadership roles.

With that in mind, have you noticed a change on campus?
Huge. It’s more social, people are happier—it’s just a different vibe. Before, there was a very particular culture, which is fairly common, where computer science is the central focus in the lives of most of the students. They read Reddit and GitHub, they play a lot of videogames, they do hacking projects. There are still students like that, but there are also people who care more about ballroom dancing.

What’s so important about having ballroom dancers be computer scientists?
If computer science is going to affect every aspect of society—and it is—you really would like to have some dancers, and some artists, and some doctors able to work at the interface of computer science in their field. That’s where the demand will be. Having that breadth of knowledge means you have better teams working on projects.

Sure, but is teamwork as important as your ability to write good code?
These days, agile software development often relies on pair programming, where you have two people—a driver and a navigator. The driver codes, the navigator looks over their shoulder and asks questions, and they flip roles about once every half hour. The result is much higher quality software. There are fewer faults.

Yet women still feel unwelcome. What changes at Mudd addressed that?
One was to make the introductory computer science course less intimidating. If you emphasize needing a special kind of brain, students who are underrepresented will do much worse. But if you say this is a discipline that rewards hard work and persistence, everyone does better.

We also started emphasizing more practical applications in introductory classes. In the past we presented computer science as interesting just for its own structure. That was very effective at attracting white and Asian men to the discipline, but only a subset of them, and it was generally not effective for women or people of color. When you start to make the argument that computer science is worth studying because of the things you can do with it, you attract not only more women but also a lot of men who wouldn’t have been interested in the usual approaches.

If everyone knows it’s a good idea to be more inclusive, and everyone wants to support their female employees, why aren’t more companies doing it?
Because changing culture is hard. Every company has somewhat different attributes that make recruiting people and keeping people difficult. Apple is one company that I don’t think is particularly trying. They hired their first VP of diversity and inclusion, and that person stayed for less than a year.

Are some companies succeeding?
Etsy convinced people who weren’t in software development jobs to be trained for technical roles, and they managed to get to almost 30 percent female in their engineering population relatively quickly. Accenture is doing extremely well and came in at roughly 40 percent female in their hires last year.

How did they do that?
The executive in charge of hiring came to me for help. I said, first of all, change your job descriptions. Don’t just list the technical skills you’re looking for. List communication skills, creativity, and people skills, so women will know it’s a workplace that values those things and because those are traits women tend to have more confidence about.

Gender isn’t the only concern, of course. If the percentage of female technical employees is in the teens at many companies, black and brown employees are—
In the single digits! Like, one-handed digits.

What is Harvey Mudd doing about that?
The truth is we made very little progress on race until about five years ago.

What happened?
We had been running a program where we would bring in 35 to 40 high school students for a weekend, and it was primarily aimed at students of color and women. Five years ago, we doubled the program and did two cohorts instead of one. And I started reaching out to African American leaders across the country. We also did research on how to recruit more Hispanic students, and we learned Hispanic families want their kids to stay close to home. So we needed to focus on admitting students from schools in Southern California.

What would you say to schools that are not making these changes?
What’s facing us is a very, very different future. The haves will be the people who have the skills that are needed, and the have-nots will be the people whose skills are no longer needed—because of automation, because of AI, because of robotics. We don’t know how fast certain kinds of routine jobs will go away, but we do know it will put a further income gap between people who have that kind of education and knowledge and people who don’t. If there are not many women, or people of color, or older people, or low­-income people getting that technical education and those technical jobs, it’s going to further polarize the situation in the country. It’s a question of transforming our society so a large enough fraction of people have opportunities for productive work.

So the stakes are high.
We want the Earth to survive. It’s pretty straightforward.


Do you have a woman in tech you admire? Tell us about her in the comments below!

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Tips & Tricks: These cool tricks will help you up your drag and drop game on iOS 11

Here are some of the cool things you can do with drag and drop in iOS 11.

 

 

By Joseph Keller of iMore.com

Drag and drop is one of the marquee features of iOS 11. You can drag photos, documents, and other items from one location on your iPhone to another, whether that’s between apps or within a single app. While you might have a handle on the basics of drag and drop, there are some cool tricks that you could have escaped your notice.

Here are some of the best tricks that drag and drop has up its sleeves:

Drag within apps
Drag multiple items
Move text between apps
Drag contacts and addresses into Maps
Open links in Safari

Drag within apps

 

 

While a lot of Apple’s marketing with drag and drop focused on your ability to drag items between apps, you can also move items within an app. So, copy text from one note to another, or drag photos into a new photo album.
One of the great things about this is feature is not strictly confined to the iPad. While you need an iPad to really take advantage of the full range of drag and drop capabilities, apps like Notes and Files let you drag and drop items on your iPhone as well, as long as you stay within that app.

Drag multiple items

 

 

You don’t have to drag things one at a time with drag and drop. If you’re moving something like photos or documents, once you start dragging the first one, just tap others with a different finger and they’ll shoot over to your existing dragging activity. This way, you can quickly move a bunch of related documents into a new folder, or drag photos into a brand new album.

This isn’t just for different file types, either. You can also use this trick when you’re rearranging apps on your Home screen. This way, you can drag multiple apps into a new app folder or a different Home screen at once.

Move text between apps

 

As a writer that likes to work on his iPad and has to use a lot of quotes, I find this next trick particularly useful. If you’ve got text in one app, whether it’s a note you’ve written down or a section of text from an article or document that you want to quote, you can now just drag it between two apps. Just highlight the text you want to move into your app of choice, then drag it from its origin point into your app.

Drag contacts and addresses into Maps

 

 

This is a neat little trick that makes getting directions to a new place easier. If you have a contact with an address that you’re unfamiliar with, you can easily find that address and get directions by dragging that contact’s name from your list and dropping it into Maps. The app will shoot right to that address, letting you then ask for directions that you can then share with your iPhone with AirDrop.
You can also do this with addresses that you find in other apps or anywhere on the web. Simply drag the address to Maps, and you’ll see the exact location and have the option of getting directions.

Open links in Safari

 

If you’re reading an article or email or something else that has interesting-looking links, you can now drag those links into Safari to check them out. Just drag the link into the Safari app, drop it, and Safari will open that link. Note that if it’s just a new tab with nothing in it, you’ll need to drag your link into the address bar towards the top of the screen.

You can also do this within Safari. Just drag your link, open a new tab, and drop the link in the address bar if you want to have that link and your existing content open at the same time.

What cool things have you discovered about iOS 11? Tell us about it on the comments below!

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WIT: We all must think about ‘balance of tech’ – Randi Zuckerberg

 

By Peter Hamilton of the Irish Times

“Nobody ever came up with an idea that was going to change the world when they were 24/7 glued to their phone”, Randi Zuckerberg, an entrepreneur and former Facebook employee, has told delegates at a conference.

Speaking at the Pendulum Summit, a conference in Dublin’s convention centre, Ms Zuckerberg said that “we all have to think about the balance of tech”, warning that while it can do incredible things, it doesn’t spur entrepreneurship by itself.

An older sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Randi began her career in digital marketing at advertising agency Ogilvy before joining the social media giant in its infancy.

She told the conference about the company’s ‘hackathon’ events, where “every few months everyone at the company was invited to pull an all nighter…there was one rule, you could not work on something that was related to anything you did on your day job.”

Ms Zuckerberg herself came up with the Facebook Live idea at one of those Hackathons. While the first ever transmission was only watched by two people the idea ultimately became a success after Katy Perry launched a world tour on the platform and “politicians from around the world saw an opportunity to speak directly to their constituents” with Barack Obama becoming an early adopter.

Ms Zuckerberg quit the company after the successes of Facebook Live because of a “complicated relationship with both tech and Silicon Valley”.

“On one hand I loved being part of a company like Facebook that was changing the world, I loved being in Silicon Valley where everywhere you walk people are talking about solving big problems. I hated being the only woman in the room for 10 years,” she said.

“Even today, my best advice for young women going into technology, is to have a mans name like Randi.

“I had a growing complicated relationship between the huge digital divide we see in the world. We live in a world today where some of us have amazing access to technology and advice and business and speakers. All of us in this room we are so lucky and then right in our back yard’s are millions of people who don’t even have WiFi access, and millions of people who are going to be left behind from this new economy and for me, I had trouble sitting with that.

“Some of the very tools we were working on and creating, they were used very differently by the world then how we dreamed they’d be used. For example, I remember waking up during the time of the Arab Spring and feeling so proud, waking up every morning thinking, wow, we’ve given a voice to everyone.

“And then I woke up the day after this last election in the United States and thought, wow, we gave a voice to everyone. It’s complicated,” she added.

Ms Zuckerberg is now the chief executive of Zuckerberg Media, a company she founded, and has just finished writing 30 episodes of a television show based on a children’s book she has written called “Dot”.

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