The Thesis Whisperer

Dr. Inger Mewburn runs a blog titled The Thesis Whisperer. Recently Inger provided 5 key reasons why she finds Scrivener better than MS Word for writing research papers. She is currently using the Scrivener for Windows beta version. If you do research-type writing I think you'll find Dr. Mewburn's observations very useful. Check it out:

Is your computer domesticating you?

List of Educational iPad apps

Acalanes High School district has put together a very comprehensive list of apps people might want to use for educational purposes. There's a lot of suggestions here, but they are organized well by curricular discipline. Thanks to Lara for suggesting this resource!

acalanes ipad educational apps web page

MacWorld Review

In early February, MacWorld posted a review of Scrivener 2. Bottom line: they gave it 4.5 out of 5 stars. Their evaluation seems very fair to me in terms of pointing out strengths and weaknesses. This review can be helpful for both Mac and Windows users. Check it out:

macworld review of scrivener

Taking Rehearsal Notes

People use Scrivener in very inventive ways by taking advantage of its core features. Obviously the main use is for writing longer documents, but I recently ran across a post by a stage director who uses Scrivener for rehearsal notes. His/her technique may be useful (with some obvious tweaks) for educators as well. Kaydot writes:

I'm a stage director and have switched from paper to scrivener for taking notes during rehearsal.

Before the run, I create a new folder in the binder titled with date. Then while the actors are running I keep my MBA in my lap, hands on the keys. Without taking my eyes from the stage I can hit cmd-N to create a new note, tab into the new note, type the first few letters of the character name (which I've entered as cast so scrivener autocompletes and switches to caps), hit return for a new line and type out the note in typical theatre shorthand. Scrivener automatically titles the note with the character name.

To check out the full description follow the link below. Perhaps you have your own innovated way of using Scrivener?

scrivener for rehearsal notes

Zotero for Citing the Web

About a month ago Jason Fitzpatrick wrote an article for Lifehacker titled: How to Clip, Sort, and Cite the Entire Web with Zotero. It provides a short overview of Zotero, the free and ever improving reference citation software program. Jason looks at some ways to extend the usefulness of Zotero beyond the obvious use of typical academic references. Check it out:

cite the entire web with zotero

The Story Behind the Software

Recently James Fallows of the Atlantic Mobile asked Keith Blount, founder of Scrivener, to write a piece about starting a software company. Keith's wonderful story was posted yesterday. Check it out:

keith on starting a software company

iPad 2 Rant

On March 4 Jeff Lamarche posted a very interesting piece about the iPad 2, Zoom, and other tablet devices. He creates software products for both the Mac iOS and Android mobile platforms. Here's a short quote from early in his piece:

Think about this: yesterday when I checked, the Android Marketplace had sixteen Honeycomb tablet-resolution apps. Sixteen. And you know what's not included in that sixteen? That space game that they show the guy playing in the Xoom commercials. In other words, they had to put a fake game in the commercial. Would they have done that if they had even one compelling application that could make the Xoom look better than the iPad?

As a tablet platform, Android has two big challenges.

First, it has a chicken-and-egg problem with software. Developers are waiting for people to buy Android tablets in sufficient quantity to support the platform, and many consumers are waiting for good apps to buy Android. In the phone world, Android seems to be past that hump. While the app situation is nowhere near as good as on iOS yet, there are apps — including some good ones — for the platform.

But, even if the Xoom were every bit as amazing of a piece of hardware as the iPad 2, it would still have the problem that it does less cool things. There's nothing comparable to Garage Band or iMovies, or any of the hundreds of jaw-dropping iPad apps that have been created in the last year like Infinity Blade, The Elements, or Alice. There's just no "wow" app you can put on your Xoom and show people that's going to make them want to run out and buy one. There's nothing you can do and confidently say "your iPad can't do that shit right there, bitch".

The second, and much larger problem is simply one of price. I see people constantly comparing the Android/iOS situation to the Windows/Mac situation of the eighties and nineties. I usually see this claim by people laughably arguing that Apple's failure is imminent.

In the nineties, Apple kept insane profit margins on their products while dozens of manufacturers created inexpensive commodity PCs running Windows. There was a margin war on the PC side, and PCs became noticeably cheaper (despite paying hefty licensing fees to Microsoft), and that price difference, combined with Microsoft closing some of the usability gap with the Mac, is what lead to the dominance of Wintel machines. In the nineties, Macs simply cost more. You could argue that Macs were cheaper based on TOC or employee efficiency, but in the quantifiable terms that bean counters understand, the Mac was a lot more expensive and didn't do noticeably more, especially once Adobe jumped ship and become cross-platform.

That's not where things are now, however. For typical consumers - people who don't have a dog in the technology race, so to speak, are going to buy based largely on price, Apple's mobile "post-PC devices" aren't just better than their competitors, they're cheaper than comparable competitors.

Check out the full article, plus several comments, at:

the ipad 2 rant post

Scrivener for Windows 1.9 beta

Scrivener for Windows is moving along and making great progress in its beta development. I believe the best estimate for the full release is sometime in April or May. The current beta expires on March 21. You can read all about the latest beta release here:

scrivener for windows 1.9 beta

The official page describing Scrivener for Windows has some valuable information plus an introductory video! Check it out:

scrivener for windows website

My Ruby Slippers

One of my colleagues, Tracy Seeley, at the University of San Francisco has just unleashed her newest book My Ruby Slippers: The Road Back to Kansas. I've already got my copy, but won't be reading it until those wonderful summer days in Paris in June. I highly suggest taking a look at the book. Here's the cover description:

Sure, there’s no place like home—but what if you can’t really pinpoint where home is? By the time she was nine, Tracy Seeley had lived in seven towns and thirteen different houses. Her father’s dreams of movie stardom, stoked by a series of affairs, kept the family on edge, and on the move, until he up and left. Thirty years later, settled in what seems like a charmed life in San Francisco, a diagnosis of cancer and the betrayal of a lover shake Seeley to her roots—roots she is suddenly determined to search out. My Ruby Slippers tells the story of that search, the tale of a woman with an impassioned if vague sense of mission: to find the meaning of home.

Seeley finds herself in a Kansas that defies memory, a place far more complex and elusive than the sum of its cultural myths. On back roads and in her many back years, Seeley also finds unexpected forgiveness for her errant father, and, in the face of mortality, a sense of what it means to be rooted in place, to dwell deeply in the only life we have.

Alternatively check out this book trailer:

Mind Mapping for Note Taking

Recently Toni Krasnic wrote a post titled: Mind Mapping to Replace Pen and Paper Note Taking in Classrooms. It's an interesting read, with several very useful links (including some mind maps he made of presentations at the conference he just attended). His mind mapping software of choice: iThoughts HD for the iPad. Check it out:

krasnic on mind mapping replacing note taking

Getting to Know OPML

David Sparks, creator of the Macsparky website and author of the book Mac at Work, posted a blog entry about three weeks ago titled: Dancing with OPML. If you don't speak geek, OPML stands for Outliner Processor Markup Language.

If you work with mind maps, visual organizers, outliners, or Scrivener then you most likely want to become acquainted with the OPML format. Put simply it will allow you to share information across different programs: such as starting an article structure in MindNode Pro mind mapping software, exporting as OPML, then bringing into Scrivener with your writing structure intact!

There's lots of good things about OPML, and David did a great job of explaining the benefits of this format. I highly advise reading his article titled:

dancing with opml

Note: This post has also been published at the Scrivener blog since going from iPad to Scrivener is one of the great benefits of OPML.

Zotero Growing Up!

There's been murmurs for awhile that Zotero was going to develop a standalone software program version. For those of you who've been watching too much t.v. or simply not into library stuff, Zotero is a fantastic integrated reference manager. What does that mean? Up until now it meant that if you did a research database search (think using a university library's research databases), saved the interesting articles in the database (typically easy to do), then you could save all of that reference information to Zotero—as long as your web browser was Firefox and you had the Zotero plug-in installed.

While Zotero works very nicely, and is free, there's a few key limitations. First, it only works with Firefox. Today an alpha version of Safari and Chrome extensions were provided! These are early versions, and I found my Safari extension didn't work in a lot of real world situations, but . . . it's great to see that somewhere this year we will have versions of Zotero that work smoothly in Safari and Chrome browsers.

A second limitation, and a huge demand, was to have a standalone application. Today they also released an alpha version of this for both Mac and Windows. My guess is that I'll end up using Safari to identify and send new research references to Zotero with one button push. And I'll probably use the standalone version for all the organizing into groups, creating bibliographies, exporting work.

Check out the new alpha download (if you are brave and comfortable with computers) plus read all about this new step forward at:

zotero standalone news post

Kathryn Pope on Scrivener

I recently ran across a short review of Scrivener written by Kathryn Pope (a fiction writer). I love her paragraph that reads:

There’s an assumption that novelists and other big-project writers should start at the beginning of whatever it is they’re writing and write, straight and steady, to the end. Not everyone thinks and works this way, though. When I write, I’ve got to make a big, old mess. I start in the middle or off to one side, and I jump around. If you write like this, it can be tough to keep all the scraps and thoughts in a place where you can find them. It’s clunky to copy and paste chapters or sections or to try to wrangle all the pieces into some folder somewhere, with ten different Word files. And when you want to see all the pieces at once, it can be hard to get a look at what you’ve got. Scrivener works with that kind of craziness, rather than against it.

Check out the full review here:

kathryn pope on scrivener

750 Words and Scrivener

I recently heard about a blog post written by Jennifer Jones. The title of the post is: Additions to my PhD Toolbox (for writing and planning). She focuses on two writing tools: 750words.com and Scrivener. Read her post to learn about why she values both tools. I had never heard of 750words.com before, but I can easily imagine why it would be so useful. Beyond Jennifer's post, it's worth taking time to explore the 750words website.

jennifer jones on phd toolbox additions

Scrivener for Collaboration

David Hewson just wrote an article about using Scrivener when collaborating with multiple authors. He points out some nice tricks—especially good when the other authors use something like Word. Check it out:

david hewson on scrivener for collaboration

Tree Outliner

If you are a Mac-user then you may want to consider adding Tree, the outliner software program, to your toolkit. There are several outlining programs available, including the great OmniOutliner. Tree offers a lesser number of features than OmniOutliner, but the features it does offer are implemented spectacularly well.Tree is an outliner, but with three key twists.

First, you can easily set up the default fonts for outlines and nested notes, colors, and other options. Once this is done the whole look-and-feel of Tree is elegant and simple. It's a joy to use functionally and aesthetically.

Second, traditional outliners are vertical in nature: first level entries, second level entries, and so on. Tree can do that if you want, but the default behavior is horizontal. First level entries are all to the far left, second level entries indented to the right, and so on. I can't really explain why, but the resulting outlines are much easier for me to view and "see" the big picture. Literally to see the tree from the branches.

Third, Tree uses tabs. A small, but incredibly useful feature. This means in my main Tree window I can have three, five, seven outlines open all at the same time in an organized manner. Just click on the relevant tab to go to another outliner to work on. In my job I develop a few outlines that continually need to be updated or refined. This tab structure works beautifully. Typically I'll have no more than 4 or 5 outlines open in tabs. Fortunately Tree remembers what tabs you had open at your last usage of the software, so when you start Tree up it will automatically open all the previously opened tabs. This is very efficient and a great time saver.

Any disadvantages? A few. Tree does not offer as many options as OmniOutliner Pro, but instead offers different features. Cost: the program costs about $38. (You actually pay in Japanese Yen.) Third, the documentation is sufficient but probably could do with some additional examples and elaboration.

In a way the Tree outlines look something like mindmaps. This makes sense as mindmaps are essentially visual outliners. If all you were typing in were essentially "labels" (one or two word descriptors) then a mindmap might do as well or better. But for true outlining I find Tree to be the better choice.

Tree may be a revelation for you (as it was for me) or simply "who cares." But if you're a Mac user you owe it to yourself to check it out and take Tree for a test drive.

tree outliner website

10 out of 10

Today a new review of Scrivener came out in AppStorm. Rating: 10 out of 10! I'd like to say this happens once in a blue moon, but it's much more infrequent than that.

Beyond getting a high rating, the reviewer does a great job of describing the key features of Scrivener 2. Perhaps more importantly, the reviewer focuses on some key features of Scrivener that I haven't and that many other reviews haven't. Well written, complete, and very helpful. Check it out:

scrivener review at appstorm

iThoughts

About a month ago I discovered a mind-mapping app named iThoughtsHD. While I use visual models a lot, I'm not a particular fan of mind mapping software. However, iThoughts works beautifully with the iPad. Simple, intuitive, quick.

The only downside to the app is that it costs $9.99. However, it's worth every penny and more if you plan on using it as part of your workflow.

There are currently four ways that I use iThoughts. First, I sometimes use it just to create a visual model. I export my final product as a PDF—in turn this allows me to upsize the image (if necessary) in something like Keynote with no loss in quality. Second, more often I use it as a way to brainstorm an initial outline structure—after all, mindmaps are essentially visual outlines. iThoughts allows me to export in the OPML format (or Outline Processor Markup Language)—in turn this means I can import my work into almost any dedicated outliner program (such as OmniOutliner, Tree, and several others). Third, I export in the MindManager format (as you can see, there are lots of different formats you can export) and then import into Curio for the Mac. Curio will read this file as a mindmap which I can further develop in that software program. Finally, and most importantly for me, I also export as OPML and then bring into Scrivener (the writing software). When you bring an OPML file into Scrivener's binder area then it will create an automatic structure to your binder area complete with files, sub-files, and so on. Since you can add "notes" to any node in an iThoughts mindmap, these notes get imported into Scrivener as the regular "text" for a particular file in the binder area.

Put differently, a lot of the power of iThoughts isn't just in what it makes, but also in the many ways you can take advantage of its various export formats to further refine your work in a variety of different software applications on your computer.

Check it out for yourself at the iThoughts website. What will be particularly useful to many is the tutorial movie they provide:

iThoughts Tutorial Movie

RapidWeaver 5 Released

This past week RealMac software touted a major upgrade to RapidWeaver, their template driven website design software (Mac only). I love RapidWeaver and used it to design this website as well as all my course websites.

The big question for some is: Should I upgrade to version 5? In general my answer is "No." However, in some cases there are likely people who do want to upgrade right away. There are a few current problems with RapidWeaver 5: (1) the upgrade is $39, (2) there aren't a lot of obvious beneficial features, and (3) the various third-party plugins, themes, and stacks haven't all updated themselves to be version 5 compliant. In addition, version 5 is demonstrating a fair number of bugs (depending on your specific computer set up and plugins).

The second question is: Should I ever upgrade to version 5? In general my answer is "Yes." I'd suggest waiting until the various bugs have been squashed, and all third-party add-ons have been updated to work with the new version. In addition, the current version has paltry documentation, but proper documentation should come along in the next month or two. Perhaps around March or April would be a good time to update.

RapidWeaver 5 mainly has a lot of under the hood improvements that end-users won't benefit from until third-party add-ons take full advantage of them. So further down the road upgrading (and thus paying $39) may be worth it.

I think there may be an exception to the "wait to upgrade" approach. If your current version of RapidWeaver is unstable (i.e. it crashes a lot) then an upgrade may help. In my initial testing RapidWeaver 5 is a lot more stable than version 4. However, if you really have an unstable setup you'd want to first check that the problem doesn't lie elsewhere—typically old add-ons that are not at their most recent version or that have been discontinued.

All in all, version 5 is a bit of a disappointment for several reasons. However, I'm fairly confident that by the time spring rolls around we'll start to see the practical benefits of this change.

Windows Public Beta

On November 1 the first public beta of Scrivener for Windows was released. For the first couple of weeks there were lots of bugs in the releases. It seems the bugs have calmed down a lot. The official Windows release is estimated for February 1 (give or take a couple months).

As the public betas evolve they will exhibit fewer bugs, but also include more features. I suggest only downloading these betas if you are comfortable working with unfinished software that is susceptible to crashing.

You'll also want to re-check the Public Beta page for updates, as well as check the forums. Both links are provided below.

scrivener for windows public beta

scrivener for windows support forum