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
Fraser Speirs – Blog – Future Shock: “The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.
The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.”
(…)
If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people’s perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn’t a price worth paying to have a computer that isn’t frightening anymore.
In the meantime, Adobe and Microsoft will continue to stamp their feet and whine.
Hmmm… while I agree that computers are too complicated and often hinder “real work” I don’t really what loss of background processing or lack of flash support has to do with it. And there is no good reason not to safeguard the ability to tinker.
Nevertheless, Speirs is correct: the iPhone and the iPad are devices that have the potential to allow people to focus on doing the “real work” instead of “managing” their computers. Just think of how many blog posts there are dedicated to making your computer work (e.g. how to defragment your drive, repair filesystem, remove virus, …). There is also a lot of complexity at the application-level: even keynote is not easy to use! Not enough anyway. I’ll have to try the iPad version for myself before I can comment on it.
(PS: I don’t use Pages & Numbers. I usually have no need for spreadsheets and Pages is just really bad)
Even in spite of the problems I’ve mentioned before. Ideally I will wait for at least the inclusion of the camera which will be there in the next version and a 128GB drive so I can actually carry around my photos as well as have enough space for movies. I still don’t understand the choice of a 4:3 1024×768 display instead of a 16:9 720p display but I don’t know if that will get “fixed” anytime soon (as opposed to 3yrs+ from now or never).
Great hands-on via slashgear – just look at them play with the giraffe:
Ironically, you will need flash to see it…
Going from irony to hypocrisy, it’s funny that the same blogs that applauded Google for listening to its users and providing an alternative to flash in youtube now post about how it’s a tragedy the iPad doesn’t support the plugin they professed to hate just days earlier.
And let’s not forget that this was the most requested feature for youtube. People’s hate for flash was greater than their love for Freedom of Speech (or copyright infringement) with better handling of DMCA takedowns coming in at second place on the request list.
But when Apple takes steps to rid the net of the garbage that is flash, however self-serving you might think it, it is suddenly tragic.
Than there’s the fuss surrounding “multitasking”. So ummm you want to split the screen in two and read on safari while you write to Pages… so you now have pages, safari and a huge virtual keyboard on scream… doesn’t seem very appealing but it’s a valid request. Allow me not to care though. It’s just too much of a minor issue for there to be such a big fuss. I think it’s mostly FUD being spread around by parrots and people suffering from reverse-fanboyism which is a lot more disfunctional than fanboyism.
Update: Apple customers don’t want flash on the iPad - Flash will become one the textbook example of why alienating a relatively small (in this case, mac & linux) customer base can be fatal.
Adobe are you surprised that he people you mistreated for years now want flash gone?
I wonder if internal pressure played a part in the speed with which google introduced HTML5-video into youtube. After all many of their engineers are mac users and open source types who probably use/used linux.
2010 will be an interesting year for tablet/slates/ebook readers. I can’t wait to see if Apple drops the iPad like it did Apple TV, if it makes one hell of an iPad 2 or just incrementally updates it. But one thing is for sure: it’s going to face a lot more competition than the iPhone.
The evolution of HP’s slate – users wanted a rich media experience not just ebooks.
This is my obligatory iPad post. All throughout the many years since we began hearing Apple Tablet rumors every time an Apple announcement/conference was imminent I’ve have constantly been against it. I don’t like tablets and I thought (and still think) that the introduction of one by Apple would stop them from making other, better products to prevent cannibalization of their tablet.
Obviously, Apple can’t make a netbook. It would be just as unreasonable to expect Ferrari to introduce an actual Ferrari-branded car below the $2000 price line. But Apple could’ve made an ultra portable – think 10-11″ Macbook Air. Now I doubt that will happen.
There is certainly a product gap between the phone and the laptop but neither the netbook or this ipad are going to fully fill it in my opinion.
From an OS perspective, the iPhone OS was the natural choice and the only one that made any sense. The lack of Multitasking in non-native apps is not the biggest limitation of the OS currently. In fact, that’s mostly a non-issue. It’s also temporary. The original iPhones, before the 3GS, simply didn’t have the power to handle multitasking properly so Apple disabled it. They will no doubt enable it in a year or so. For now it’s not a priority (since it is a MINOR issue) and they probably don’t want to anger everyone that doesn’t own a 3GS yet. I would like to see Multitasking in an instant messaging app. The hack that apps like IM+ use (having the connection to IM networks established in their servers) is nice but it’s slightly inconvenient since it takes some time to “restore” the connection to the iphone.
I’d also rather see them overhaul the terrible notification system which is far inferior to Android’s notification system.
The biggest problem however comes from the fact that it so heavily sandboxed/compartmentalized. As a use case example, you can’t easily expect to browse the piratebay in safari download a .torrent, add it to the bittorrent client, pass the resulting downloaded file to the zip extractor app and proceed to add the resulting music folder to the ipod app music library.
And You can’t easily add a video to the iPad (or the iPhone) without having to go through iTunes. Or dealing with format conversion in (too) many cases.
As for Flash support, I finally understand how Zararthustra felt when he came down from the mountain and realized that people didn’t know god was dead. Flash is dead.
The three most positive surprises were the ePub format support, the ability to run the iPhone apps you already purchased for your iPhone and the 500USD price point. I have no interest in 3G since I already have it on my iPhone and I’m not going to pay for two data plans.
Unfortunately there were also three rather negative surprises: the non-widescreen non-720p display and the lack of a front camera (or any camera for that matter) and the low storage of the entry model (16GB, seriously?).
In conclusion, inadequate video support, lack of a front camera, the inability for apps to truly cooperate in a PC/Mac fashion, a bad notification system, a poor display and low storage in the entry model – all problems present in the iPhone but somehow made much more significant in a tablet make the iPad rather unappealing. The potential is there but will Apple be able to exploit it or will the iPad be another Apple TV? Only time will tell but I think at least some of these problems will remain for the foreseeable future.
If you use Firefox you are giving it a bigger market share and thus more power with content providers. After all, youtube would be worthless without viewers.
What if a video site is online but no one can view the videos in it? Is it still a video site? Would it have any traffic at all?
I was planning on switching to chrome – after all, it is open source and firefox is slower, uses more resources and I prefer chrome’s UI in many aspects (but not all). However none of those things is nearly as important to me as keeping the web an open place and I believe in the importance of sites like youtube (we’ve all heard about videos on youtube documenting things like police abuse for example).
I’m no Richard Stallman and I not trying to turn anyone into Stallman but the choice between Firefox and Chrome is a close one to begin with. It’s not like I’m going to start promoting Linux (gNewSense at that) over OSX.
Posted: March 3rd, 2009 | Author:lrei | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags:browser, phone, Software, Tech, Ui | Comments Off
Editorial: Ten reasons why Windows Mobile 6.5 misses the mark 1: It’s exactly the same as Windows Mobile 6… er, 5. 2: The interface improvements are still way behind the curve. 3: The UI tweaks are mostly just skin deep, and third-parties have already gone way deeper. 4: It doesn’t support capacitive touchscreens. 5: It’s not due out until “later this year.” 6: You probably can’t upgrade your phone. 7: No Zune integration. Not even a new Windows Media Player. 8: Where’s the keyboard? 9: The browser is still weak. 10: It doesn’t innovate in any way.
Asustek May Use Google’s Android in Netbooks, in Challenge for Microsoft‘ —’ Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) — Asustek Computer Inc., which pioneered the market for sub-$500 laptops, may install Google Inc.’s free Android operating system on its low-cost notebooks, challenging the dominance of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows software.
“A few days’ testing of Windows 7 has already disclosed some draconian DRM, some of it unrelated to media files. A legitimate copy of Photoshop CS4 stopped functioning after we clobbered a nagging registration screen by replacing a DLL with a hacked version. With regard to media files, the days of capturing an audio program on your PC seem to be over (if the program originated on that PC). The inputs of your sound card are severely degraded in software if the card is also playing an audio program (tested here with Grooveshark). This may be the tip of the iceberg. Being in bed with the RIAA is bad enough, but locking your own files away from you is a tactic so outrageous it may kill the OS for many persons. Many users will not want to experiment with a second sound card or computer just to record from online sources, or boot up under a Linux that supports ntfs-3g just to control their files.”
I’ve found it strange how (almost) all media around the intertubes has been “in love” with Windows 7 which is just Windows Vista slightly decrapified and slightly optimized – coming out 3 years after Vista first came out. The whole thing seems to be a success story in lowering expectations.
This whole DRM thing is the first big mainstream negative piece about Windows 7. Hopefully, the first of many.
And in case you missed it when it first went around the blogosphere: Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4?
In this video, we take to Sydney’s streets to find out what people think of what they think is a Windows 7 demonstration. The net result? Mainly, people just didn’t like Vista.
