Home Screens – Yuvi Zalkow

I first discovered Yuvi Zalkow (Twitter) when he made a remarkable screencast about writing tools on the Mac. Yuvi has a unique take on writing and technology at YuviZalkow.com. Yuvi is also a novelist with his first book, Not in My Lifetime, coming out next year. Yuvi explains the book was rejected by 29 literary agents before he got a publisher. And that, ladies and gentlemen, makes Yuvi awesome.

So Yuvi, show us your home screen.

What are your most interesting home screen apps?

Well lately I’ve been fascinated by apps that take advantage of useful iPhone gestures. iCatcher and Tweetbot are two apps that I love and have good gestures. With iCatcher, I can swipe in various ways to go backward/forward five seconds, 30 seconds, and two minutes. With Tweetbot, I can hold my finger on a link in a tweet for a second and then tap on a button to quickly send it to Instapaper. (mmm… Instapaper.)

What is your favorite app?

Wow. Tough one. I think my writing app is my most critical app. Two essential qualities in a writing app for me are TextExpander support and Dropbox support. I honestly, really, truly work on my novel on my iPhone via Dropox (syncing it to the fabulous Mac app, Scrivener). I’ve used many cool writing apps (e.g. Notesy, Elements), but my current favorite is WriteRoom. I like WriteRoom’s customizability. I try not to be too fiddly about these things, but every few months I like to tweak the look & feel to get a fresh perspective on my writing. Even just a small color tweak can help me see a difficult scene in a fresh way.

And if I can cheat and name another app, I would mention OmniFocus. I love it. Very smart design that makes it easy for me to enter new actions and quickly check off existing actions.

What app is your guilty pleasure?

I don’t play games these days — just too strung out between family life, day job life, novel writing life, and presentation-making life. So my guilty pleasure is dipping too deeply into either Twitter (via Tweetbot) or into my RSS feed (via Reeder).

What is the app you are still missing?

I do long for text-to-speech inside my text editor. I know that functionality already exists, but I’d love it seamlessly embedded inside a great text editor. I use text-to-speech as a critical tool when editing my writing — there’s nothing like a detached, unemotional, computer voice to test whether the writing stands on its own.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone?

How many times a day do you breathe? Divide that number by 3.25. And that’s about my iPhone usage.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone?

It may not seem so shocking these days, but I’m still amazed by the coolness of syncing text files between all my computers and devices. I can no longer fathom how I wrote before this era.

Anything else you’d like to share?

Well I’m currently experiencing a calendar-related dilemma. Which one should I use? You’ll see two of them on my home screen!… I love that continuous week view of Agenda and I love how quickly you can enter events in Calvetica. Help!

Thanks so much for letting me participate in your home screen series! I’ve been a fan for a while.

Thanks Yuvi

Want to see more home screens? Clicky here.

MCE in Petaluma this Weekend

If you’re in northern California, it’s not too late to make plans to visit the Macintosh Computer Expo. Where else can you go and learn from people like Jason Snell, Chris Breen, Derrick Story, Ted Landau, and more for free? I’m going to participate in the 9:00 a.m. opening session, iFuture, along with several speakers (including Adam Christianson) and give a session called Mac at Work at 10:30 where I plan to cover some of my favorite workflows. If you do come, please make a point of introducing yourself. Making new friends is the best parts of these events.

Today’s Web Gems

Things are nutty for me today but there are a few posts of note:

MacSparky.com is sponsored by Bee Docs Timeline 3D. Make a timeline presentation with your Mac.

Key Bindings

A few weeks ago, Brett Terpstra posted about Key Bindings. I finally got around to installing Brett’s bindings over the weekend and can tell you I am already loving it. There is a lot to absorb with all of these new shortcuts but there are already a few I’ve internalized:

  • Opt-y – Copy paragraph
  • Opt-+ – Uppercase word
  • Control-Command-W, Return – Force line break

Between Brett’s snippets, services, and keybindings, he is nearly singlehandedly revolutionizing the way we can write on our Macs. That makes Brett pretty swell in my book.

Web Forms with TextExpander

I recently found myself repeatedly filling out the same web form on a work-related thingy. It is seven fields with the same data, every time. It was driving me nuts. I opened up TextExpander in desperation and found the %key:tab% command. It was really easy building a snippet that tabs between fields.

One caveat: Don’t use this feature for passwords. Snippets + passwords = bad. There are other apps for passwords.

See Me at the Petaluma MCE Next Weekend

While at Macworld, I met some very nice people who organize the annual Petaluma Macintosh Computer Expo on October 1. This year I agreed to speak about using the Mac and iPad for getting work done. If you are in the Northern California area next weekend, it looks like a lot of fun with some outstanding speakers including: Jason Snell, Chris Breen, Derrick Story, Ted Landau, and more. If you do attend, make sure to say hello to me.

BBEdit ♡ Automator

While I’m not sold on using BBEdit for my writing workflow, I’m really impressed with its Automator support. There are so many services I could cook up with these toys. Where to begin?

Home Screens – Jorge Pedroso

This week’s home screen features my newest friend from Portugal, Jorge Pedroso (Twitter). Jorge is one of the two developers that created my current favorite simple text editor, Byword. Jorge loves his iPhone and agreed to share. So Jorge, show us your home screen.

What are your most interesting home screen apps?

  • Instacast is filling my recent addiction to podcasts—thanks a lot, 5by5. It made the podcast subscribing+listening experience much more pleasant. Streaming is a killer feature and the iTunes and iPod apps simply don’t cut it.

  • Droplr I use to quickly share iPhone screenshots and video over-the-air with co-workers. It’s a great way to quickly show issues in the apps as we develop when one of us is working remotely.

  • RTP is how I keep up with portuguese news. These days, the news coming are mostly not that good but the app is pretty great.

  • Tiny Wings for casual gaming. Perfectly designed, relaxing, challenging and different every day.

What is your favorite app?

Mobile Safari. For me, it alone revolutionized the mobile internet and made it a first class experience on handheld devices. When I’m on the go, I find myself using it all the time, directly or indirectly through other app.

Mail and Twitter for iPhone deserve honorable mentions for being my most used apps.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

Ranky. I can’t help it. Having apps selling on the App Store puts one in constant desire of checking the App Store ranks. I hope this gets better with time.

What is the app you are still missing?

Not missing much but I’ve been looking for a simple, yet comprehensive, personal analytics app. A smart writing app with Markdown capabilities would be nice for the go too. Just saying.

How many times a day do you use your iPhone/iPad?

As many times as I hear it emitting a sound. I check Mail and Twitter on the iPhone and Metaclassy’s customer support comes through those channels. I’m not complaining (yet). I love my job.

What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?

I’ll pick two, if I may. One on software and another on hardware.

On software, it’s iOS in general and the App Store in particular. They destroyed so many barriers, both for users and developers. I thank iOS for the overall quality of most apps and the App Store for the simplicity of getting those same apps.

On hardware, it’s the Retina display of the iPhone 4. I still remember the wow moment when I first had it in my hands. For weeks, it made it really difficult for me to use an iPad frequently again (or any other mobile device for that matter). I got used to the differences but I eagerly wait for the day where pixels are no longer human-detectable squares in our screens.

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?

Well, I hate it when I’m laying down in bed/couch, reading or something, and the iPhone slips and falls on my face. So, I’d consider adding Velcro on the iPhone’s back and a glove. Skin magnets could work too. Needs research.

Other than that, giving high priority to all radars (issues and improvements) I submitted to bugreport.apple.com would be pretty cool.

Anything else you’d like to share?

I’m eagerly anticipating the next year, as a developer and as a user. After the mobile shift, it seems everyone is already undergoing another shift in personal computing where data is supposed to come full-circle seamlessly across all devices. MacSparky was spot on calling multi-platform as a feature at the center of it. Consequently, data portability and interoperability will increasingly become features/concerns to look out for. For me, it will be yet another busy year—in a good way.

Thanks Jorge.

To read more home screens, clicky here