I just set up Intense Debate to handle commenting on this blog—yay threaded comment capability!!!

That’s all I had to say. Back to work!

The much anticipated keynote speech at the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), which is when the new 3G iPhone is expected to be introduced, starts at 10:00 AM Pacific. I’m excited about this even though I spent all my iPhone money on a bike.

Speaking of the bike: my shoes are on the FedEx truck for delivery. Yes! This morning, then, will have been the last time I’ve had to ride Dresden’s bike.

I’ve been using Macs for about two months now, an iMac for work and a MacBook for play everything else. The MacBook is great—I not only have no complaints; I have not one thing that I miss from Windows…and a list of things I’d miss like crazy if I had to go back to Windows.

The iMac on the other hand…. It’s not the iMac’s fault. If I were using the iMac the same way I’m using the MacBook, I’d love it. But I use it for the day job, and there are some shortcomings there.

The biggest problem is that some of the things I do require IE 6 or later—Safari, Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0 beta, Opera: none of these handle what I’ve gotta do. So I have Windows (Vista!—what was I thinking?) running on VMFusion on the iMac, just so I can use IE for a half hour a day. (And there might actually be an issue with a site I need to work with once a month that won’t even work with that solution—it did the first time, but subsequent uses just didn’t happen; I ended up booting up the Compaq desktop to get it taken care of last month. We’ll see how it goes this month.)

Next biggest annoyance: in Windows, when using the lastest few versions of Dreamweaver, if you copy text from a webpage that includes a hyperlink, the link automatically comes along for the ride. I got really used to that highly time-saving feature. Combine Leopard with Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 and I feel like I’m back in the dark ages. So…I run Dreamweaver in Windows through VMFusion at least once a week, just for the convenience.

Then there’s Spaces. Awesome concept, buggy implementation. I ended up disabling it because it kept “disappearing” files I was working on. Say I’m using Word in Space 2 and I go over to InDesign in Space 3 for a few minutes. When I come back to Space 2, Word is still there, but my document isn’t. The document is still open; I just can’t see it. I found that there were two tricks I could use to bring it back: go to View|Full Screen (which wouldn’t actually implement full screen; it’d just bring my document back) or go to Window|New Window. This happened with Word, Dreamweaver, InDesign…anything that had a window that could be disappeared, disappeared it.

Last complaint: I used EditPad Pro on Windows as my text editor, and the best thing about that program was the mulitline find-and-replace. I’ll often receive a press release that has an unordered list in it. When I paste the release into the text editor, I need to remove whatever character they used in the press release as a bullet and insert a blank line between each item—this makes my life easier when I turn around and upload the release to the website. I reformat bulletted lists in EditPad Pro in seconds. I’m not seeing multiline find-and-replace in Smultron or xPad. So I have to use Word…. But I’d prefer to use a nice, small text editor.

There is a lot, however, about using the iMac for work that I do like. Connecting to my iMac using Screen Sharing over the Internet is the bomb. You’ll have to pry Time Machine from my cold, dead hands. Screen capping is love. Mail has a lot of great features. Both waking up from sleep and reconnecting to the network is superfast—I never find myself debating the pros of energy conservation against the cons of waiting for ages for the computer to wake up and connect (if it woke up at all).

I’m having one issue with both Macs that has nothing to do with the Macs. The Creative Zen Vision M Mark gave me isn’t Mac compatible, so I have to use this third-party software that sometimes takes several tries to connect and sometimes transfers multiple copies of songs onto the device. It’s irritating. I’m going to replace it with a Mac-compatible device eventually.

Spent much of the afternoon researching for a clearer idea of the location much of Too Dead takes place in. The Internet is such a big help. Afterward, I went back and fixed up some bits in the last chapter based on what I’d found. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on that, just pulled out stuff that didn’t fit and stuck some stuff in that did.

Also poked around at graphic novel/comic book script formats and possible titles for the Script Frenzy project. Which I’m not ready for. Can someone hold off April for a few more days? Danke!

I feel like a fair chunk of the day was also wasted. It wasn’t; it was time spent offloading a project onto someone else, which means one less thing on my plate, but it’s been time consuming, and I’m not yet finished.

[I installed OpenID capability on the blog today. Took about 30 seconds. I love Wordpress.]

Yesterday I grabbed some screenshots from Scrivener, now that I actually have content in it—click the images for larger.

I thought I’d use the supercool note cards on cork board to actually outline my shit for a change, but no—I fill them out as I’m writing the chapter or after it’s done. (Still a handy thing, though, when it comes to looking back through chapters for a specific detail.)

Each note card corresponds to an actual document (in this case, each document is a chapter, but they could be scenes or acts or parts—and chapters can have scenes under them, parts could have chapters under them—however you want to organize your work). It doesn’t seem like a bunch of separate documents, though, because they’re all right there; you just click from chapter to chapter. Or you can select some or all of the chapters and click “Edit Scrivenings” to work on them as (seemingly) one document.

I like how I’m able to customize the “labels” for the cards. I’ve set mine up to track POV; that’s why there are alternating push-pin colors on the cards; purple pins are Derek’s POV, and red ones are Eddie’s.

I haven’t done a whole lot with the character section. There’s not much more on the info pages for the characters than you see on the note cards in the screen cap. Alan’s info page, for example, just has an extra detail about a pet rat. It is handy to have a place to stick that info; I just, well, like with the outline, I keep most of that information in my head. (It’s also nice to have a place to stick Sims Body Shop representations of the characters. I can do the same thing with locations—stick in a blueprint of the textile mill or a photo of a maintenance floor hatch on a bus, etc.)

On the right-hand side about halfway down in this screen grab you can see a “Document References” section. This is cool. You just drag stuff over from the left-hand side, any stuff that pertains to the scene or chapter. Then when you’re writing, you can quickly access that data without having to scroll for it. Even better: you can include website URLs, so your web research can be connected to your project.

If you click the little notepad icon at the bottom of the Document References section, the Document Notes section opens, which is also really handy. I’ve been in love with being able to add quick notes for something I’m writing since I first used Rough Draft four years ago, so it’s always nice to be using a program that allows that. (When I’ve used MS Word, Q10 and other word processors that don’t have that capability, I put notes right in the middle of everything, bracketed and in all caps. It’s not as neat a solution.)

I love Scrivener. Unfortunately this super awesome program is only available for Macs. Windows users can check out yWriter, though, which has the extra benefit of being free.

And now I’m gonna fire Scrivener up and pass the 30K mark on this book….

Screenplays, graphic novel scripts, teleplays…. If I write one of those for Script Frenzy, I’m sure it’ll be fun, but it’s never going to be anything more than a script. If I write a script for a text-based role-playing game (think “Zork“—god I loved that game), I can actually turn it into a final product. Drawing? Can’t do. Filming? OMGno. Programming? OK!

That’s what I’ma gonna do then.

I needed to move all my Firefox settings from the Windows desktop to my iMac, but the utility I usually use for that sort of thing—mozbackup—is Windows only. Cue panic, because I can never get the hang of poking around in the mysterious Firefox profile stuff (and at this point I probably never will). But Google to the rescue! Google Browser Sync is a Firefox extension that will sync all your Firefox settings between different computers. And it worked so well! (And so easily!)

This is going to be so boss when I need to travel with my Macbook—just a quick sync and bam! I’ve got everything I need for work, webwise. Awwwwwwesome.

(The PC’s going away just as soon as I can get everything up and running on the iMac. I’ll be glad to be back to one mouse!)

If all you need is a simple word processor to get your writing done on, here are some choices.

Q10 (Windows)
I used this for NaNoWriMo last year and loved it. Here’s why:

1. It goes full screen, blocking out all the other usual computer distractions.
2. You can set a timer–great for “word wars” with yourself.
3. It makes old-fashioned typewriter noises when you type (no “ding,” though, when you hit the “enter” key).
4. You can have it keep track of “partial counts,” which for my purposes meant that I could know how many words I’d written so far that day just by glancing at the status bar.

The downside is that it can be buggy. Three or four times during NaNoWriMo, it decided it wouldn’t let me save the file I was working on anymore unless I saved it under a new name. Every now and then the word count stats (including the one that told me how many words I’d written that day) would stop dead (but it only takes a keystroke to start it back up again). Finally, the alarm wasn’t all that reliable. It would just sometimes…forget that the alarm was set? I don’t know. I would still use the program again, though, for NaNoWriMo, and in fact I wrote the first draft of my xmas_rocks story with it late last month.

Like the other programs I’ve mentioned recently, Q10 can be run from a USB flash drive.

Writeroom (Mac) and Darkroom (Windows)
Like Q10, these programs (Darkroom is a clone of Writeroom) run full screen, getting rid of all other distractions. They’re word processors stripped down to the very basics.

RoughDraft 3.0 (Windows)
RoughDraft offers more features than any of the above, like rich text (RTF) capability, a sidebar “pad” for story notes, and the ability to have several documents open at once in tabs. It also has a “screenplay” mode for easy formatting of scripts. I’ve used this program a lot in the past, particularly because of the ability to make story notes alongside the story.

Zoho Writer and Google Docs and Writeboard
You don’t even have to carry a flash drive around if you use these online word processing applications (however at the moment you do need to be connected to the Internet if you want to work on your story via Google Docs or Writeboard; Zoho Writer, on the other hand (and ironically) uses Google Gears to allow you to work on your Zoho documents offline). All three of these systems are especially well suited for collaborations. And hey…now that I’m thinking of it…I bet these systems offer a great way to share stories, too. Like this!