David Hockney on Painting

I ran across a recent article about David Hockney using the iPad for his recent drawings. In fact, at a new exhibition in Paris all the drawings are displayed on a series of iPads. Check out the full story:

david hockney and the ipad

Writers on Scrivener

Not sure if Scrivener is a useful writing tool? Then check out the Scrivener webpage that contains only testimonials from published authors. It's a long, impressive, and passionate set of praise.

When reading these short pithy testimonials keep in mind that the writers are referring to first version of Scrivener. The second version of Scrivener is a major upgrade and insanely more impressive.

writers praising scrivener

Scrivener and Meta-Data

One of the very powerful and enhanced features in Scrivener 2.0 is how it handles meta-data. There are actually two categories of "meta-data" in Scrivener: ordinary meta-data (such as keywords, labels, and much more) plus custom meta-data. The link below provides a very short introduction to custom meta-data in the Scrivener writing environment:

scrivener custom meta-data tutorial

Three Reviews of Scrivener

I'm posting links to three reviews of Scrivener. Two of these reviews are specifically aimed at people doing non-fiction or research writing. The first link looks at Scrivener for academic writing.

my new love: scrivener link

This second post is a review of Scrivener published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It was written in March 2010 so it does not address the new features included in the 2.0 release.

scrivener, scrivening, scriverastic link

The third post is simply titled, "Scrivener might Change Your Life." Check it out:

scrivener might change your life link

Scrivener 2 Preview

Scrivener, the wonderful writing software program, had the very big 2.0 release yesterday. To be fair, it wasn't a final release but a pre-release so those participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) have a version to use now through December 7th.

The final version, with a full set of project templates, will be released on November 1st.

Just as exciting as this pre-release of version 2, is that there is now a early beta version available for Windows users!

I've only played around with version 2 for about an hour, but the improvements are really fantastic. This was already first class software, but the new enhancements make this an amazing writing environment for storytellers or researchers or teachers. Check it out:

NaNoWriMo Scrivener release link

OmniFocus: 2 More Reviews

OmniFocus is a great software product for getting things done. I've posted about OmniFocus previously (see earlier posts). However, I wanted to share two recent, and very thorough, reviews of the OmniFocus product. This product is available for Mac computers, iPhones, and iPads.

The first post is titled: How I Use OmniFocus to Organize My Life. Check out the post here:

omnifocus to organize link

The second post is titled: A Sledgehammer Called OmniFocus. The author, Shawn Blanc, nicely covers alternatives to OmniFocus as well in his article. Check out the post here:

sledgehammer called omnifocus link

OmniGraffle for the iPad

OmniGraffle is a great Mac-only software program for creating visual models. In the recent past OmniGroup released OmniGraffle for the iPad, and just a few days ago Wired Educator published a review of this app. This is a short, but important, read for those of you potentially interested in creating visual models or graphic organizers. Since OmniGraffle for the iPad has VGA support, it can be used not just for creating or showing visual models, but also to create ones live in the moment. Here's the link to their review:

omnigraffle for the ipad review