The Alternative WP apps

I was listening to an excellent interview of one of the creators of Scrivener, a word processing app, by Your Mac Life’s Shawn King and became very enthusiastic about using a word processing app that’s specifically designed for longer text like a thesis, dissertation or novel. I’ve been looking for the word processing promised land since I first started working with micro computers in the early 80s. Most, if not all, early word processing apps were designed for office memos and have pretty much struck to that model, at least that was my experience beginning with Word Star to Word Perfect to MS Word. When I switched to the mac full-time I was delighted to find that there were some creative outline/notetaking apps that really addressed my need to design and compose longer threads of creativity. I eventually settled on Notebook from Circus Ponies. I used it to design my media course for Full Sail and couldn’t imagine managing the continuous flow of course changes and updates without it. I laugh when I think that I used to use sticky-notes for information that didn’t fit into full blown documents. Yikes. Notebook is so much better than using just a file and folder cluttered desktop system and I’ve made at least one convert of the EMDT staff. Anyway, after listening to Keith Blount from Scrivener I became curious if anyone else has gone on a similar journey, looking for the perfect WP app. Shawn King’s interview follows immediate. After listening to the interview please take the poll listed below and share your thoughts on alternative WP apps.

Shawn King, Your Mac Life, Interviews Keith Blount from Scrivener, July 22, 2009

Sources:
Image: Apple III Keyboard Refinements by Ballistik Coffee Boy, http://www.flickr.com/photos/spaceageboy/3131550267/ retrieved 8/01/2009 – (cc)(by:) 2008

mp3: Shawn King, Your Mac Life, Interviews Keith Blount from Scrivener, July 22, 2009, http://www.yourmaclifeshow.com/archives/2009/07/22/apple-earnings-pan-mass-challenge-and-scrivener retrieved 8/01/2009

APP Highlight:
Scrivener by Literature & Latte

Notebook by Circus Ponies

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After 3 Year They Still Line up for Their iPhones

… But not nearly as crazy as the previous two years. To recap, last year Apple released a faster iPhone to take advantage of AT&T’s faster network (3g) and mega-podcaster, Leo Laporte did a 24-hour marathon run-up to the phone’s release. Before that, in year one, it seemed like the whole world was lining up three or more days early to get what some were calling the “Jesus phone.” And even though I’d sworn myself to wait until version two I couldn’t resist the gravitational pull, walked in after the lines died down that night and bought my iPhone (see my iPhone Unbox! Pls Sign Me Up for a 12-Step Gadget Program blog post. Good times. Funny, I miss hanging out in the lines of happy apple-fanboys, even when I wasn’t intending on buying anything. It was just fun to be there, catching the happy vibe. Sigh.
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Circles Within Circles – Running into FS Ads

Went looking for information about local Macintosh user groups and thought to begin by visiting the website of one of my favorite mac-macs, Lesa Snyder King. She had several user groups listed but none within striking distance from my domicile. Damn. So while I cruising about the website looking for info I stumble upon the ad list here to the right. Yeah. My school Full Sail has an ad on Lesa’s site. I was jazzed and jealous. It was in her Google ad-sense so there’s no “making it happen.” Anyway, it felt like seein’ a friend on TV. You point, make a funny sound and then move on when no one thinks it’s as cool as you do. Oh well, I guess I’m too easily amused. [sigh] Share this Post[?]

SilentKeynote

Check out http://SilentKeynote.com to protest Apple’s decision 2 treat the apple community so poorly.

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I Can’t Keep Up – Another Way to Put XP on a Mac!

I have to be a bit of a nut-case to even be spending any brain-cell activity on this one. On a recent “Your Mac Life“ a program called “CrossOver“ (by a company called CodeWeavers, was introduced that boasts of letting the user run Windows applications on a mac without having any trace of the actual Windows operating system anywhere to be seen. What does all of this mean? It’s a bit geeky but the thing is with either Apple’s Bootcamp or the program Parallels a copy of Windows is is started up (with Bootcamp on a separate partition when you start the computer up and with Parallels in a separate “memory” space). Then inside of Windows one can use whatever Windows app that’s needed. With CrossOver one launches the Windows app and CrossOver tricks the app into thinking it’s on a PC and Mac OS into thinking it’s running a Mac program. I don’t know, I’m sure that there are some performance hits and that it probably would choke on anything that tries to write directly to hardware (some high level games and video editing software comes to mind). But the makers say that they have taken a proven Open-Source technology and are putting the effort to get a lot of apps that run under Windows to run on the Mac without have to boot-up or start up a virtual copy of Windows. Friggin’ amazing! I can’t keep up! JBB

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