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 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 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 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 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 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 Read more…
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