Some of you may remember me claiming some time ago that pretty soon you would be able to create an ebook by pushing the save button on your word-processor. Little did I know that it was close to possible even as I was writing that. Of course, it depends on what word-processor you use. It would probably be too much to hope that Microsoft would make creating an ebook possible from within Word any time soon. Apple does allow you to create EPUB documents from Pages but to use that you need a Mac. Scrivener makes it easy to create both Kindle files and EPUB files but in order to get your book edited, the chances are your going to have to send it to the editor in a more conventional format and then reimport it into Scrivener which is a lot of … [Read more...]
For the Age of Wonders Fans Among You
There's a very nice article about the new Age of Wonders game here. I am so looking forward to this game -- a mashup of the old Age of Wonders turn-based grand strategy fantasy gaming and Total War style combat sounds awesome. … [Read more...]
Strategy Games Sale at Good Old Games
Good Old Games is having a sale of strategy games over this weekend. All of the Age of Wonders games and several of the Heroes of Might and Magic games along with many good city management games and King of Dragon Pass are available at 50% off. None of them cost more than a few dollars. Just thought some of you might like to know! … [Read more...]
In Praise of Good Old Games
It all started a few years back when I bought a new notebook computer, one without a disk drive, as is becoming more and more the fashion these days. I had a sudden hankering to play Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic, my favourite ever turn-based computer strategy game. I did not fancy carrying around an external disk drive just so I could play a very old game that used its disk as a security measure. (You could not play at all without the CD in your computer’s drive.) I can’t remember how I found myself at Good Old Games but I found a copy of AoW: SM there for download and at a very reasonable price. The basic idea of the site was a bit like Steam, except without the DRM and mostly concentrating on good, old fashioned games. (I know -- … [Read more...]
Evernote Clearly
As long-term readers of this blog will know I use Evernote a lot. It is my go-to program for storing ideas and web clippings. I also keep travel documents such as e-tickets in it and maps of places I am visiting and all sorts of other stuff. It has many advantages – it is cloud-based and it synchronises all of your notes and clippings to any computer or phone that you have the Evernote app installed upon. This makes it an invaluable notebook-substitute for any writer. It is free an it runs on most PC and mobile phone operating systems. I just discovered an addition to the Evernote stable that I really like. It is called Evernote Clearly and it does one very simple thing very well. When you use Evernote Clearly it provides an overlay … [Read more...]
Notational Velocity
Notational Velocity is a very simple-looking but surprisingly sophisticated little program for the Mac. It is intended to allow you to make and track notes very, very quickly. You just open it and start typing, rather like you would type in the search box in Google or Spotlight in OSX. What you type will bring up a list of the notes you have already written containing what you've typed. If you hit enter, it will turn what you have typed in the search box into the title for your new note, and move your focus down into the note body section where you can type the rest of your note. That's it and I have probably made it sound a lot more complicated than it is. Notational Velocity constantly auto-saves your work so you don't have to remember … [Read more...]
Folding Text
Recently I paid £28 on the Apple app store for a copy of Mellel 3, a word processor I don't intend to use. This is more than just an example of my relentless addiction to acquiring software (honest!). I recently came across a cache of files from way back in 2006 when I used to use Mellel as my word processor of choice-- for the record, it is excellent for handling long documents. At the time, Word on the Mac was more or less unusable for me-- it kept slowing down and crashing and Scrivener was not even a blip on my radar. I found Mellel through David Hewson's excellent blog and I settled down to use it for around a year, until I found Scrivener which I have been using ever since. My old copy of Mellel was for the PowerPC and simply … [Read more...]
MacHeist 4
While I am talking about software I may as well recommend the MacHeist Bundle. At $29 this is a real bargain, a bundle of 17 apps that includes Scrivener and a 15 month sub to Evernote Premium-- two of the most useful programs ever for writers. (As ever, I shall just take a moment to plug Scrivener-- the best app ever for the working writer.) Either one of these things alone cost more than 29 bucks. The rest of the bundle has some nice software-- I particularly like Radium, a really cute internet Radio App, and Mariner Software's MacGourmet-- a recipe collection program which scans the internet for recipes you want and imports them into its own rather attractive database. As a bonus, 25% of the money you pay goes to charity. What's not to … [Read more...]
DragonDictate 3
I suffer from RSI. When it gets really bad I switch to a speech recognition software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking or DragonDictate. Over the years I have tested a lot of speech recognition systems on OS X. To tell the truth I have never been that impressed by any of them. It is the one area in which the Macintosh has lagged behind Windows in terms of software for writers. I started with MacSpeech's iListen back in the days of the PowerPC iBook. A number of people reported getting good results with it but I'm afraid for me it was a pretty terrible program. It could never do anything I wanted it to do. This was certainly not true of its Windows counterpart Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 at that time. Since then MacSpeech has been bought … [Read more...]
Guild Wars Third Impressions
I am a couple of weeks into Guild Wars 2 and have had time to poke around a bit, get over the initial glitz of the launch and see a bit more of the world. What do I think now? I am still impressed. If anything I am more impressed now than when I started. An incredible amount of work has gone into this game, giving it a level of polish in the world-building that I don’t think I have seen in an MMO before. It’s not just that the game is beautiful; it is clearly a labour of love. Look at the way your characters head turns to follow your target in combat. Listen to the children chatter away in the background in the city. It’s also that the game is very much itself-- the lore is its own, the world is its own, it does not remind me very … [Read more...]
Computer Migration
Last week I upgraded my PC computer. Since my games machine often doubles as my work machine, it normally being the most powerful computer I own, I had to migrate my work stuff to the new machine this week. Back in the bad old days, I used to dread this. I would needed to have locate a large number of disks and activation codes and installed my software onto the new computer. I would have had to burn CDs, DVDs or used an external hard-drive to shift my data. There would have been a lot of fumbling as I tried to locate various essential items, failed and had to find a workaround. One of the great appeals of Apple’s Macintosh machines is the ease of migrating to a new one. Once upon a time this was done with firewire cables and … [Read more...]
Guild Wars 2: Second Impressions
On Friday, I upgraded my computer just so I could play Guild Wars 2 and I am glad I did. As the owner of one of Asus’s Republic of Gamers laptops I am now in a position to really appreciate all the work that has gone into this game. The world now looks like all the screenshots on blog posts and magazines. It’s jaw-dropping. The special effects when you use a spell or skill are lavish. When you get a group of people fighting together it’s like an explosion in a fireworks factory, and I mean that in a good way. Graphically GW2 is stunning but that’s not what excites me. It’s that the world is so damnably well done. This is the first game in a very long time where I have sunk serious amounts of time into simply exploring, walking … [Read more...]
Lion Thoughts
So I finally got round to installing Lion a couple of weeks back and now I am going to give you my belated review. Everybody else upgraded about six months ago but what the hell-- I am not much of an early adopter. In case you want the edited highlights-- I basically like it, I find most of it an improvement and some of it just a little weird. Of necessity this will be quite limited since I don't use all of the new OS's features and am in no way qualified to comment on them. This is the first OS upgrade I have ever bought directly over the net. I bought it through the App Store and I have to say it all went impressively smoothly. There were no problems with the download and installation. For the price you get to upgrade on all of your … [Read more...]
Freedom
I have mentioned before how I waste a lot of time wilfing (What am I Looking For) on the net. It is a constant temptation. What starts out as a simple look at my sales figures on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing can turn into a multi-click odyssey in which I scrabble around the whole Amazon site chasing up things that interest me just because they appeared on the also bought list of Death’s Angels. A fact check for my current project can turn into a trail of breadcrumbs which leads to articles on 80’s role-playing games. Sometimes I am not even aware of how these things start. One link simply leads to another and before you know it you’ve gone from the front page of the Guardian to the home page of some obscure Norwegian … [Read more...]
How To Write 10000 Words a Day and Other Recommendations
I am finally tying up Angel of Fire. I've had one of those rewrites where changing one thing led to changing another which led to changing another and on and on. I've simply not had time to keep up to date with the blog over the past couple of weeks. In a pitiful attempt to actually post something this week, here are a few things I can recommend. First up is Rachel Aaron's guide to writing 10,000 words a day. Yes, you read that right, that's how to write 10K a day, not a week, which is what I aim for. I've looked at this and I have to say that it all seems sound and sensible. I have written 10K a day in my time before old age and RSI took their toll and I recognise the good sense in what Rachel is saying. I don't see myself writing 10K a … [Read more...]
