Posts filed under 'Writing'
My Newton MessagePad 2100 remains disconnected from my computer and the world at large while I wait for a) a Newton 2100 Serial Adapter Dongle; or b) Andriano’s Newton-USB dongle. Thus I’m taking this time to play around with my Newton eMate 300 and a few of the available sync programs. To tell the truth, I had heard so many intimidating and frustrating things about synchronising a Newton with a modern Intel-based Mac OS X box that I doubted I’d ever bother with it. Sure, I could always go back to my Pismo and OS 9, but my wife has now claimed that machine, and besides, I want to sync with my OS X address book, calendar, and so forth.
So, my current set-up: a 15″ MacBook Pro, a stock eMate 300, an old-school Mac serial cable, and a Keyspan USA-28X serial-to-USB adapter. One end of the serial cable plugs into the eMate, the other end into the Keyspan, and the Keyspan’s USB connector into my MacBook Pro. Keyspan drivers are downloaded and installed.
First, the most basic sync program: NewTen, by Panic Software’s Steven Frank. This is basically a package installer. I choose my Keyspan connect, set the eMate to dock via serial, and drag a Newton package onto the app. After a little while –remember that a serial connection can be rather slow– the eMate has the package installed. A one-trick pony at the moment, perhaps, but it works well.
Second, Simon Bell’s NCX, also known as Newton Connection. This is an impressive little app that looks to replace Apple’s official Newton Connection Utilities (NCU). While it doesn’t yet do full synchronisation, it currently has the ability to:
- Install packages through a drag and drop;
- Import and export NewtonWorks “paper” (text) files as RTF and Notes files as text, plus Calendars and Names.
- Back up and restore the programs, extensions and data files on the Newton.
- A pass-through keyboard. This is neat. Whatever you type on your computer comes out on the Newton. Drag and drop text on the window to copy it into whatever program is currently open on the Newton, right where you’ve put the cursor.
The latter has proven handy to drop text right into a NewtonWorks or Notes file right from the Mac’s desktop. The export works well too — I’ve written four articles on the eMate thus far (including this one).
The third program I’ve been trying out is NewtSync, also known as nSync. (*cough*) I’ve already used this program to transfer all 200 of my OS X Address Book entries to my eMate, and am now experimenting with its text, outliner, calendar, and newsfeed synchronisation. It’s still an early release, and so I’m attempting each sync with extreme caution, being sure to back up my data often. Thus far, no problems.
I should note that none of these programs were created by Apple, nor are they sponsored by Apple in any way: these are hard-wrought fan projects, pure and simple. There’s something to be said for the dedication needed to program such things, given that the Newton platform was prematurely canceled nearly a decade ago.
More posts later, no doubt, as I learn the ins and outs, strengths and weaknesses, of each of these applications.
June 3rd, 2007
In two articles for DIYPlanner, one about the MessagePad 2100 and another about the eMate, I mentioned how I’ve got the decade-old Apple Newton bug. Given that the site is mostly about paper-based fetishes, there’s only so much I can say there without upsetting the apple cart. (No pun intended.) Here I can say a little more.
It’s a little bizarre: I normally receive a half-dozen email per article, in addition to the 6-12 comments left on the site. These Newton articles not only generated a lot of comments, but some 30 email, and were picked up by The Unofficial Apple Weblog and –giving me a brief and unexpected laugh-out-loud instant in a supermarket check-out line– on the MacBreak Weekly podcast. Most of the email posed the same conundrum: “I’ve always wanted a Newton, too…. Should I buy one on eBay?”
Now, I really hate giving advice like this, and for several reasons. First, the costs of Newtons in the past few weeks on eBay seem to have jumped significantly, no doubt owing to its sudden re-appearance in various media outlets in the weeks leading up to the iPhone. Second, I prefer not to be responsible for someone bidding for a Newton on an impulse and winding up with a $200 device that seems almost antiquated for most modern-day uses. Third, and most importantly, I’ve only had my Newtons for a few weeks. That means I am a base and uninformed Newt Newbie. I’m not fit to give such advice. I tell these people that the Newtons I have work for my purposes, but that they should join the NewtonTalk mailing list, which is overflowing with wise old masters dispensing advice and practical knowledge.
That these machines are working for me is evidenced by my sudden ability to write articles, notes, lists and other text in a focussed environment. While I dearly love my MacBook Pro, it’s filled with distractions, not the least of which is its proclivity to braise the flesh of my lap. By contrast, the eMate 300 (which I’m using to write this post) remains cool to the touch and allows me to actually concentrate on my words without thinking about websites, email, instant messaging, or even fancy graphics. Text, baby, and nothing else. It’s a handier version of an old-fashioned typewriter. This is the same reason why I’ve been debating getting an AlphaSmart Neo or Dana for so long. The difference is that the eMate (besides being quite a sexy looking machine, in my humble opinion) is roughly 1/20 the price. While getting the initial connections set up wouldn’t be as easy as with an AlphaSmart, the screen is bigger, the ruggedness is legendary, the touchscreen works very well, the 20-hour battery life is nothing to complain about, and –well– there’s something very unique about the machine that that makes a guy feel special. I can see why Batgirl likes it.
Perhaps in the next few weeks, I’ll post about how my Newton experiments are going. I’m still learning the ropes and exploring the machines’ strengths and weaknesses, so I might toss my discoveries out onto the Interwebs for those folks meandering down the same path. I’m sure there’s at least one other person out there….
May 27th, 2007
For a year or so now, I’ve been evaluating quite a number of digital brainstorming tools in order to find one that best serves the way I think, the way I make associations, and the way in which I like to fiddle with vague and ethereal ideas before they become solid. I’ve tried plain text editors, wikis, various mind-mapping tools like NovaMind, FreeMind and Inspiration, outliners like OmniOutliner, and “notebooks” like Mori, AquaMinds NoteTaker and Circus Ponies Notebook, but none of these seemed to possess the right mix of power, visual layout, rapid entry, and emphasis on text.
And, oddly enough, the answer has been right under my nose for a while. I had been trying to force Eastgate Systems’ Tinderbox into becoming my digital Commonplace Book, but it was a poor fit for me. I required so much multimedia and OS X services support that I felt like I was trying to force a square peg into a round hole, and eventually I decided upon using DEVONthink Pro. While I have not regretted that decision for a moment, my inner geek still lusted after Tinderbox, having had fleeting glimpses of the power that lay untapped beneath its surface.
In a way, Tinderbox is like the Emacs of information management applications. Beneath each deceptively simple exterior (and, after all, Emacs does seem to be just a text editor), there lies a very powerful system with seemingly endless possibilities. Both require some effort and dedication before you begin to understand the depth of the applications and the myriad uses which slowly make themselves known as you explore their non-obvious capabilities. Like Emacs and its underlying elisp, Tinderbox has some powerful tools beyond the basic ability to write and organise text, and this case, it includes scripting tools, agents, rules, versatile export codes, prototypes and multiple views. And, unfortunately, just like Emacs, both applications are often relegated to niche power-users while mom-and-dad computer users have moved on to more straight-forward, simplistic and user-friendly software.
Let me get back to digital brain-storming for a moment. I’m a strange mix of visual tinkerer and textual thinker, and for me, things like colour, size and proximity of items have to strike a balance with text note names, hierarchy, and the ability to enter large amounts of material. For example, I like the ability to rapidly create notes as little boxes with various colours and short descriptive names, then move them around the various sections of the screen to play with categories and relationships. But once these categorisations are made, I want to be able to see the outline of all my ideas, and to write text and annotations for each item.
People who have used Tinderbox are no doubt grinning right now, as this is a perfect (albeit low-level) match for how this application works. By switching views between Map and Explorer views, one can create and place notes visually, and then structure them within an information-rich hierarchy. The latter, DEVONthink Pro can handle, but not the former.
So I started thinking, do I really need to do all of my outlining and writing in DTPro? Of course, the answer is no. Choosing the best tool for the job means evaluating each application on its own merits for the task at hand. For me, Tinderbox has become my brainstorming tool of choice. I like being able to create separate documents as “silos” for each subject matter. For instance, I just created one that outlined a number of business opportunities, and then I worked on another document with some ideas for the next generation of the D*I*Y Planner. These are things that I really don’t want in my DTPro Commonplace Book, at least not until I have something that I feel is somewhat solid and ready to be called “information”, as opposed to a loose but flexible array of insubstantial ideas.
In short, DTPro has become my collection bin for every conceivable type of multimedia information, but Tinderbox has become my repository for half-baked ideas, snippets of incoherent prose, mind-maps of categorical and causal relationships, and brain-dumps that are eventually (well, possibly) massaged into something I’d risk showing to other carbon-based bipeds. It’s for the act of textual creation, an invaluable tool for a writer.
Of course, like any other application, Tinderbox is not without its warts and unsightly blemishes. The price strikes many potential users as extraordinarily high –an initial regular cost of $192 USD, plus $90 per year of updates– but here I’d have to suggest weighing the value of your usage against its cost. Ted Goranson referred to Tinderbox as “a Photoshop-scale application that is underpriced” (and we all know how much Photoshop will set you back).
Other issues concern the documentation: unfortunately for those who learn best by studying example, the manual is structured more like a quick reference help file than any sort of tutorials on how to get the most out of the application. The Tinderbox wiki helps somewhat to fill the gap, but not much. Then there’s the nature of the beast: owing to the complexity of the application on one hand, people have a hard time understanding exactly what Tinderbox can do for them, and yet owing to its deceptive simplicity, others who try the demo write the software off as an expensive and underpowered waste of money. It has almost no support of modern OS X features like services, AppleScript-ability, tight Finder integration, and WebKit embedding (although this might be partly due to the fact that Tinderbox is being ported over to Windows, which lacks these things). And, while Goranson diplomatically called certain components of the application “austere”, others have commented (not unjustifiably) about its interface, which looks basic and somehow temporary, like software in its early alpha form. Supporters of the application are quick to point out that this lack of clutter allows one to focus on core tasks like writing with a modicum of distraction.
Finally, many people seem to have a problem with the fact that Tinderbox seems to be the product of only one man, Mark Bernstein, and that he’s not receptive to other ideas and feedback. From my (albeit limited) experience thus far, I’d have to disagree. True, the Windows port is taking quite a while, but it doesn’t really matter that much to me, since I use Macs most of the time. (My selfishness is showing here.) But looking at the broader vision of how Tinderbox works and what it can do for me, if I were to choose any one person to create such an application, Bernstein is an excellent choice. I have no doubt that he’s an incredibly intelligent man, and almost all of his decisions regarding the functionality of Tinderbox have been spot-on. In fact, I’ve been reading the manual as I fall asleep at night (highly recommended, although the subplots seem forced and the characters are a little two-dimensional), and I’m constantly struck by little eureka moments when I suddenly realise what brilliant little touches are present in the software, although sometimes hidden just beneath the surface. As for feedback, my few exchanges with Bernstein through email over the past couple of years, most of which transpired when I was experimenting with the demos of various versions, have been rapid, quite responsive and thought-provoking. He’s a man with a lot on his plate, but still takes the time to help confused newbies experiment with the demo, probably knowing full well that most of them will never buy. That earns my respect.
Which reminds me, if you do use a Mac and love to write or play with ideas, I’d highly recommend trying the demo, but only if you have enough time to put into understanding how it works; else, you’ll only scratch the surface of what it can do for you, and you’ll walk away from it either confused or disappointed.
These small gripes and oddities notwithstanding, consider me firmly in the Tinderbox camp. In all the various applications I’ve tried, both commercial and Open Source, I haven’t come across one that’s quite so attuned to the way I play with ideas and write text. I’m not sure if I think like Tinderbox, or Tinderbox thinks like me, but I know it’s an environment which encourages creativity without distraction, and yet feels wholly comfortable to use. A winning combination, indeed.
December 20th, 2005
Anyone who has worked in video/film or larger multimedia projects knows that the tasks of scriptwriting and pre-production are not as easy as they first appear. Now, it’s not just the rigid structure of the script itself which is the only issue — if it were, the simple macros for Word, OpenOffice.org Writer and other word processors would suffice — but it’s also the need to track characters, share the script with others, write production notes, do breakdowns of scenes, characters, props, CGI, special effects, locations, and so on. And if you opt for a professional scriptwriting applications like Final Draft or Movie Magic Screenwriter, you’ll have to forfeit several hundred dollars US for applications that are often buggy, or at least outmoded by modern UI standards. So if you’re a budding screenwriter or a multimedia scripter on a limited budget, what are your options?
A few hours away from me, in the unassuming little provincial capital of Newfoundland named St. John’s (pop. about 120K), there toils a little crew pumping out some high-class software. Their flagship product, a screenwriting and pre-production application called Celtx, is something I’ve kept one eye on for a long while. (Coincidentally, I wasn’t even aware that this was a local project at first.) An Open Source application based on the Mozilla –yes, as in Firefox– code, it’s come a long way in the past year or so. When last I peeked at it, it was a very early version that proved rather slow, bug-ridden, and the cause of much aggravation when doing any degree of writing. But how it’s changed! Now, it’s a little shining star carrying with it hope for all those who have been burned by the unstable and costly Final Draft (or one’s inability to afford it in the first place).
Celtx is a comprehensive software package designed for people who work in the Film, TV, Theatre and New Media industries. It combines full-feature scriptwriting with media rich pre-production support and enables online collaboration. (celtx - Overview)
I’m seen a number of Mozilla-based applications in the past, but this one puts them all to shame. Not only doesn’t it “feel” like a browser in any way, but the functionality is, by far and away, one of the most comprehensive scriptwriting experiences I’ve ever encountered. Besides including a server synchronisation that permits others to see the script, its pre-production breakdown and database system allows you to insert text, graphics, video and audio which are all linked to the salient parts of your script. For example, when you mention a particular location, for example a park, you can have the script link directly into its database where you can keep a picture of the park and some key points to remember about it. Almost anything can be linked into this database, including props, makeup, F/X, production notes, electrics, and so on. In essence, it’s a one-stop shop to take you from writing the script all the way into pre-production — perfect for multimedia use and independent filmmakers.
And since it’s Open Source, it’s free of charge. If you’re a scriptwriter of any type, or dream of writing the great American/Canadian/etc. screenplay, be sure to check out Celtx.
November 21st, 2005
Merlin over at 43 Folders has a post about a wonderful site for writers called Language Is A Virus. It’s easy to get caught up in all the great mind-bending (and mind-freeing) techniques awaiting unwary visitors in almost every corner of the site.
One of the things Merlin links to specifically is a list of Jack Kerouac’s Belief and Technique for Modern Prose. I started falling in love with Kerouac’s books back in the last year of high school, and it was about this time that my writing really took off. I found this particular list in a book about the Beat Generation, lingering in a stack of library discards (the content was deemed “unsuitable”), and it spoke to me immediately and with such a voice as I’ve never heard. This single page has been my chief source of inspiration for creative writing for a long time, and I have carried around a tattered type-written copy of it now for 18 years.
I’m glad to see it revived for the digital age, when Kerouac’s work might be deemed “suitable” once more.
July 8th, 2005
Back in the bronze age –my high school and university years, to be more specific– I spent a lot of time writing fiction. Just like every other struggling writer (and perhaps those with far more experience), the development of plot and subplot elements within story lines proved to be one of the most intimidating and frustrating parts of the writing process. And, like so many others during that epoch, I turned to index cards. I’d jot down a title like “Man peers down into sewage drain” and then use the rest of the card for details. Afterwards I’d lay out the cards on a large table and shuffle them about till I was satisfied with the progression. Nowadays, I often use outliners for that purpose, but they never felt, well… authentic to me, at least as a writer.
Enter the Writer’s Café, a woefully under-publicised application from a UK husband-and-wife team that seeks to deliver an authentic writing experience in ways other software falls flat. The duo is an interesting couple: Dr. Julian Smart is a fairly well-known software developer, the man behind the cross-platform wxWidgets project, and Harriet Smart is a novelist with several books to her credit. For this product, they combined their respective disciplines to create an application that might prove invaluable –if not essential– to many writers.
Writer’s Café is essentially a suite of writer’s tools. The emphasis is not on word processing –there are too many of those out there already, including the free OpenOffice.org Writer– but rather on the development of ideas and the organisation of material. StoryLines is their equivalent of the index-card-shuffle, and you can create several streams, one for each plot line. You can create detailed content for each card and even add annotations and an image, then export the whole lot to an external file as a report suitable as the basis of a first draft (it even supports OpenOffice.org format). Another application serves as a hub for:
- Keeping a journal
- A “notebook” for writing down your loose ideas and developing them
- Displaying random inspirational quotes the developers have selected (they call them cookies)
- Timing your writing, with optional prompts to kickstart your brain
- Creating simple brainstorming diagrams or collages, with ovals, rectangles, pictures and text interconnected with lines and arrows
- The scrapbook: this is essentially an outliner in which you can organise text, web links, images, collages and shortcuts to files on your hard drive
There are a few other applications, such as WordTiles (like a fridge-magnet poetry tool) and Forty Thieves, a card game to help de-stress. Also included is a 60-page ebook called Fiction: The Facts, which should prove handy to beginning writers, and a catchy theme song by Jay Goldmark called Untie Your Tongue. (Hey, why not?)
So is this for you? Well, it depends. There are a few things I really like about it. First, it’s cross-platform, running on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (which is probably a bigger deal for me than it is for you). Second, it does a great job of creating a nice little self-contained system for writers to develop, research and arrange ideas, plots, locations and characters, even if one’s computer skills are fairly basic. Most things work by dragging and dropping or by simple menu commands. An effort has been made to keep it flexible but user-friendly. Third, I like that it caters to writers and the writer’s mindset… everything is ordered and implemented in such a way to make a writer feel at home, using standard time-honoured nomenclature and techniques. Even the title is meant to evoke this. Fourth, the StoryLines program is definitely a best-of-breed, and I can’t say I’ve seen many comparable pieces of software, at least in terms of helping writers to re-arrange and annotate their plots. (I’m not about to mention the oft-hellish Dramatica here.) Last but not least, the program contains functions that are normally only found in higher-end and more technical applications, albeit here they are far more basic and intuitive (read: less intimidating). Programs like DEVONthink Pro and Visio would scare the pants off many creative writers I know, but Writer’s Café should hit the sweet spot in terms of balancing technical know-how with the need to be productive as a writer.
Downsides? Well, there are a few. Depending on what applications you already use, the Scrapbook and Collage tools can seem rather primitive and a little clunky. Unless you’ve invested time, money and effort into learning other applications, though, you’ll still do fine by these tools. The text tools are another matter, however. I understand that the emphasis is placed upon developing your ideas, and not to recreate a fully-functional word processor, but the lack of certain functions like search/replace are a little frustrating if –for example– you decide to change a character’s name or a location. That being said, you can do a search within the application and replace text manually, or simply export the “report” to your word processor and just change the words there when you begin work on your first draft. The good news is that (according to a post in the forums) improving the text tools is high on the developer’s to-do list.
My only other qualm, and it’s a fairly minor one, is that of aethetics. The cross-platform widgets set seems a little out of place on Mac OS X, and things lack a little of the Aqua “elegance” that many expect from most native applications. Likewise, the application icons seem rather primitive, not at all lickable or even anti-aliased. That being said, Writer’s Café looks quite natural on Windows, and only slightly awkward under Linux. These issues mean little when contrasted against the value of the software, though.
While I probably won’t be giving up my cherished DEVONthink Pro or other professional tools very soon, I can certainly recommend Writer’s Cafe for those writers stuck in the mire of a story going nowhere, or for those trying to get along with only a regular word processor. Many professional writer’s tools –several of which are of inferior quality or hopelessly complex– cost several hundred dollars, so at $45 USD, Writer’s Café is a great deal. StoryLines itself is worth the cost of admission.
If you’re interested, the UK’s Practical PC site has a review of Writer’s Café with screenshots, and of course the Writer’s Cafe website has plenty of information as well as a downloadable demo.
June 30th, 2005
Just working around the clock….
On the plus side, I think I finally found my Holy Grail of personal content management, the new version of DEVONthink (Mac OS X only, I’m afraid). It hasn’t impressed me as an ideal solution in the past, but the last few iterations are amazing. It’s been quite an enabling little beast for my job at hand, allowing me to sift through thousands of pages of text (plain, RTF, HTML and PDF), find related entries, track my sources, manage all related media, and write various documents without bother or fuss. Its capabilities are constantly surprising me. Stay tuned for a write-up….
April 29th, 2005
“Vanity publishing” tends to sucker a lot of wanna-be writers who don’t know any better. A regular publisher will take on the costs of publishing and marketing your book at their own risk, and give you an advance calculated upon their estimate of probable sales. Needless to say, it’s not easy to get a book published in this way: they have to be absolutely convinced of the quality of your work and its potential in the marketplace. Vanity publishers, on the other hand, will pass on the costs of publishing to you, and only offer a royalty as a contractual token (usually $1). Certain of these will pretend to be valid and respectable publishers, claiming that their crack editorial team will carefully adjudicate your book and pass their judgement upon its quality and suitability, but then offer contracts to publish materials that would give a Vogon Captain the shudders. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America conceived of a brilliant sting to shed light upon one such vanity publishing firm and what they would actually consider publishable material. From their page Atlanta Nights - The Worst Book Ever Written:
A collection of SFWA authors (and, ahem, non-authors) concocted to write a very poorly written book. Under “direction” of James D. Macdonald, each author was given minimal information from which to write a chapter (with no idea of the chapter’s location in the book, time of year, background of the characters, what the plot was, etc.), and encouraged to write poorly. It’s a truly awful book, a serious contender for Absolute Worst Book Ever Written. The result was submitted “for review” by PublishAmerica to see if “has what this book publisher is looking for.” It did. 
PublishAmerica offered a contract.
You can read the actual book (disclaimer: may cause spontaneous hemorrhage), the acceptance letter, the contract, and more. See also www.WriterBeware.org.
February 9th, 2005
Found via WOYP: 50 Strategies for Making Yourself Work. Although this is meant mainly for writers, there’s some good general advice there, too.
Work avoidance is one of the major paradoxes of the writing profession. Generally, writers want to write (or want to have written), but all too often we find ourselves doing anything else but. We’ll mow lawns, do the dishes, polish silverware–anything to keep from facing the blank page. At the same time we know we eventually have to get to work, so we come up with all sorts of strategies for forcing ourselves to the keyboard.
I can personally vouch for many of them, including the “put the wristwatch in the drawer” one, as I tend to overwatch the clock when I’m facing a blank page. Not knowing the time helps me forget about the long moments of nothingness, and keeps me focussed. Of course, on a computer this isn’t so easy.
January 20th, 2005