How Awesome Is Scrivener

Scrivener continues to pop up here and there, like Planet Money's Adam Davidson on the Evernote Podcast. Its fans cut across a wide gamut, such as novelists, lawyers, students, professors, and reporters. And now it's even on Windows.

What makes Scrivener so amazing is that it changes long-form writing into something manageable. Instead of scrolling through endless pages of a long document, or trying to create some sort of document map or thumbnail drawer, you have the document split up as you like, and you can navigate and move effortlessly, when and where you like. It can be "chunkified," broken into chunks of material in ways that are useful (and then combined at a later point). You can zoom in and out on the material as you like, getting an eagle's eye view or a very granular view. This is precisely what long-form writing requires. Plus, it passes one of my main tests for a piece of software: IT DOESN'T CRASH.

An interesting experience for many Scrivener users is how many amazing features are under its hood. Many have commented, in blogs or podcasts, at how a "wish it could do this" became a "it does do this!" moment. The software has been extensively thought out, with powerful features that can be discovered with a quick search of the menus or the manual, but without a lot of bloat or endless icons.

I had a "it does do this!" moment not long ago, when I was wanting to search and modify the synopses of a project while in another section of the project – Scrivener can do precisely that, allowing you to edit the found synopsis from within the search panel. This means you don't navigate away from your current place; you can search, edit and add, close, and keep going. Amazing! Quick References are also terrific, they allow you to open different parts of a project in mini-windows, so that you can work on multiple sections at the same time.

So here's to Scrivener, the most powerful long-form writing tool on the planet.

Mac Messages Beta Application: Privacy Issues

The Messages App, available as a beta download, is pretty nifty: it automagically syncs your Mac texting to other iOS persons with your iPhone and/or iPad. This re-introduces a kind of instant messaging back to the computer, which is something I haven't done in a long time. Somewhere along the way, email and then texting killed instant messaging. I rarely use instant messaging unless the person is in another country, or I'm offering someone some technological help.

A larger question for me is, what about privacy? If you're like me, you use texting for the informal and direct communcation with friends. Email has long been the purview of official correspondence or conducting business. Work and business so invaded email that many people use it infrequently these days; it became something like checking the mail for bills and statements, rather than an actual communication with a friend.

Texting is more personal and is, therefore, something I don't want to just show up on my screen on my laptop. What if something is read by the wrong person, or misunderstood? What if a joke between friends is read by someone who doesn't know it's a joke? Texting becomes different if it's popping up in various places, instead of going from one phone to another, which is how we tend to imagine texting: it's quick, easy, direct, and secure.

One could quit the Messages application, but that sort of kills its usefulness, as it's supposed to be right there and in sync, if it's to be really useful. There's a weird trade-off here, as the directness and invisibility of texting is now something more ubiquitous and visible.

The Messages application and iCloud sync changes the tone of texting – the text goes from your iOS device to Apple's servers and then your computer screen. Be aware of this, if you use Messages, and don't leave the application just running in the foreground for all to see.

Desktops, Laptops, and iPads (Or, Trucks and Cars)

There is a lot of prognosticating about the future of Mac OS X, in the light of the stunning success of iOS that runs on iPhones and iPads. Many people are guessing that the Mac laptops and desktops (if they even survive) of the future will run something like iOS, and not OS X.

There are lots of reasons why iOS is superior to Mac OS X. iOS is immersive, focused, simple, and intuitive. There is no need of a mouse and its distancing effect (you're moving this small brick thing, which moves a cursor, which you can then use to interact with the things on the screen), as you simply press the things you want to happen. There's also this wonderful exploratory nature of iOS; manuals are largely gone, and you discover what things do and their features through play and experimentation. This is part of the joy of these devices, and why they are so personal, in that they invite you to discover them on your own, without a daunting manual or difficult system of options and inputs. You don't have to worry about breaking it, since the operating system and its files are hidden from you; you can't accidentally delete the system files or something. You can't even delete the standard iOS apps if you wanted to. Apps can be easily re-downloaded, and most all problems can be fixed by the mystical iOS reboot. The real fear is dropping it, the cost of replacing it, and the data that's on it (though with iCloud and the cloud in general, the last is greatly mitigated). iOS and especially the iPad are the computers we wanted decades ago, when they were buggy, slow, and difficult--installing a printer was a chore, setting up a machine was frustrating, and virus/malware stymied the most hopeful family member from really enjoying the WWW. So the power of iOS, and its astronomical growth, is obvious.

But I can't see OS X really going away. I'm typing this in OS X right now, with two monitors and a full keyboard at work, and I can move my eyes between multiple windows and screens. The benefits of iOS--its speed, immersive screen, size, and little weight--are also its downfall, as you really do need a separate, tactile keyboard to do serious work (as Harry McCracken discusses, with Katie Floyd and David Sparks), you can't work from multiple windows and screens simultaneously, and you can't use apps in direct conjunction with each other (such as, you can't use 1Password to fill in your address via an extension to the browser [yes, you can do this from the 1Password browser itself, but it's a bit kludgy]). It's a mono-tasking world with iOS, and that has its benefits, but do we really work one application and screen at a time? In writing and researching, I'm flipping to the internet and PDFs and notes and research in various applications. I'm moving from notes and texts to email responses. This is not as fast and fluid on iOS. Yes, you can multitask between apps on iOS, but it's still successive, not conjunctive. You have to cumbersomely send files between applications, and flip back and forth across various windows, instead of a seamless synchronicity of multiple windows and applications.

So, here's to multitasking, not in the distracting mode (where you're on facebook while writing, which never works) but in the conjunctive working mode. Here's to multiple windows and screens when it's what you need. iOS is great for travel, portability, checking in, or doing those things that are immersive and naturally monotasking, but to really get to work on the farm, you need a truck.

Going Paperless: The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M

I made the move into the paperless world some months back, with the ScanSnap S1500M from Fujitsu. This scanner really is remarkable. It's a workhorse (War Horse?), chomping through documents as it scans double-sided and spits them out.

I'm using it in the following ways:

• Scanning new important documents: tax-related stuff, auto repair files, that I need to archive for that "just in case" scenario
• Archiving old material, such as class materials and lectures (from 20 years ago!), that I want access to
• Saving children's artwork and school materials

It's key to have the scanner nearby. If it's not within reach of your computer, you will end up with a pile of to-be-scanned documents that becomes overwhelming. It's best to scan as you go, in small batches, rather than letting it stack up for weeks and then having to separate out papers and scans into different groups.

For materials that are being archived, I use Evernote, which has terrific tagging, categorizing (in notebooks), and cloud service. Scans can be sent directly into Evernote to be preserved, both locally and in the cloud, and then available on mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, etc.).

For items that are sensitive (such as receipts, tax documents, banking, etc.) I store them locally on my hard drive; things for immediate use, I put them in Dropbox.

The only snag I've run into is, well, snags. Old papers, such as my decades-old notes from college courses, don't always do so well. Some of the papers have been in a folder a long time, so the papers are bent, stuck together, or had a staple (now rusted) stuck in them, so they don't separate properly. You sometimes have to do work with a stack of papers, fanning and separating and turning them around, to get them to pass through individually through the scanner. This is more a fault of the paper than the scanner.

Some papers don't need scanning. Why should I scan my bank statements or car insurance policy? I can file and replace them quite easily. For things that change regularly, or that a financial institution is keeping on file, I don't bother with scanning--it's not always useful or time-saving. When I scan, I either need it archived, or I need it available digitally. For things that don't meet that criteria, they get sensibly filed. I don't know that you can ever truly go paperless, but you can certainly cut down on the bulk of it.

Instapaper, Reeder, and the iPad

Lots of people use the iPad for different things, from video to news, games, or as a laptop replacement device.

The indispensable thing I use my iPad for, besides class lecture outlines (PlainText) and keeping attendance, is reading stuff from the internet. And this is where Reeder and Instapaper are indispensable.

Used to be, I left a browser window open with lots of tabs, which were all the things I came across during the day that I wanted to read. Stuff would hang around there, and I would either go through them to close the window, or forget about the page, and then quit Safari or restart, and then run into, what do I do with these pages now? If Safari crashed, I would rebuild the links through the history, but it was a real pain.

With the Instapaper link on my laptop browser, I can send stuff to my Instapaper account whenever I like. I can even do this from the iPad and the iPhone. Then, when I launch Instapaper, either as a webpage or in the iOS application, there it all is, beautifully preserved and ready, and sans the ads and extraneous links--just glorious information. Links can be sent from anything on the internet, such as facebook, email, and twitter.

Reeder is the great RSS experience, where subscriptions to websites can be quickly scanned and sent to Instapaper with a simple swipe. I almost never use an RSS reader on the Mac, since Reeder on the iPad is so terrific.

So my late evening ritual? Time with Reeder and Instapaper on the iPad, where I get caught up on news, technology, stocks, and so on. They are the applications I use daily, and which make the iPad such a great experience.

So thanks, Marco and Silvio.