Writeroom, AwesomeNote and Instapaper

I got writeroom for mac during macheist 3 for free. Recently I became interested in writing again and decided to give it a try. I was impressed with how much I like the no distractions approach to writing. Sure it is inconvenient if you need to do stuff like checking references and getting some “inspiration” from someone else’s work. But for writing down stuff that is 90% opinion like my blog it’s just perfect. Another cool feature is the “typewriter effect” of keeping the area I’m currently typing in the middle of the screen.

I’m finding it surprisingly therapeutic to just write stuff down… it’s sort of the GTD way: get stuff out of your head and into a “System”. This “system” consists of a directory of text files synchronized with SimpleTex.ws.

In fact when I start to work seriously on my thesis I plan to take a no distraction’s approach by turning off IM, email and facebook notifications and closing firefox instead of just moving to another space.

I’ve written most of this post on my iphone which i’m finding much more appealing for text input than before. In part that’s because I decided to shell out the 4 eur that writeroom for the iphone costs (yeah didnt even wait for a promotion… It was a leap of faith! Much better than evernote and still capable of online sync. I’m not dropping evernote for actual notes completely, just for blog posts and other large blocks of text that aren’t strictly speaking “notes”.

I had previously began using AwesomeNote for quick notes such as song names and contact info (names, emails, skype/IM contact) before either adding them to the app (facebook, skype,…) or addressbook at a more convenient time. I do not need these notes to be synched.

I’m also more interested in reading. I was using read it later but the iphone app has some inconveniences – it failed to keep track of position and scrolling was often an issue. Both of which were solved by switching to the paid instapaper app: it keeps track of my position in the text between sessions and tilt scrolling works awesomely. And since I switched to Instapaper I actually stopped using firefox tabs to keep track of what I had to read – even things that I can’t/don’t want to read on the iPhone (stuff containing videos, lots of images, …) and stuff that I want to blog. There was never that big of a reason to to that before and I hadn’t forced myself into that system with read it later.

So far it’s working. I’m reading all those articles that would normally linger in my firefox session until I finally gave up on ever reading them or accidentally closed them or whatever.

PS: The iPhone is the best invention since electricity

Episode VI: Return of The Blog

The 4th major iteration of this blog is now online.

The previous was named Episode III: Revenge of the blog so it’s only fair that this becomes Episode VI: Return of The Blog since it also marks my intention (yeah…) to return to blogging. Neverming episodes IV and V.

The 2 biggest changes are a change in theme (which I don’t yet consider final) and a move to tags, away from categories. They are just a pain to manage.