The Next Book, iPad at Work

I’m thrilled to announce I’m hard at work on a new book.

It’s called “iPad at Work.”

People liked the first book so Wiley asked, “may I have another?” and I said, “Yes.” This book is a natural sequel to Mac at Work and I’ve been talking to Wiley about it since I agreed to do the first one. Because Mac at Work was such a unique book, I had to keep it secret. With this one, I get to blab about it from the beginning.

iPad at Work will have some of the same structure as Mac at Work. I intend for the chapters to be self-contained bits of productivity bliss based upon specific work tasks. The outline is still fluid as I sort through all the ways you can use an iPad to get work done. Overall, I’m looking forward to the second book even more than the first. This time there is no fear, just joy.

To do it right is going to take some time. (I still have a day job, this site, and a podcast after all.) If the stars line up, it looks like this book will get released some time around October.

There are a few things I plan on not doing in relation to iPad at Work:

  • I do not intend to slow down MacSparky.com this time. I’m having more fun than ever writing for the site;
  • I do not intend to endlessly bore you fine readers with the minutia of the writing process and the toils of the tortured author;
  • I do not intend to drop out of the Mac community while I dig in.

Finally, I want to thank everyone who provided so much encouragement and support with Mac at Work. While writing a book can be vexing, hearing from readers all over the world who tell me how the book helped improve their lives makes it all worth it and gives me the motivation to kick ass on iPad at Work. So gang, mark your calendars and hold me accountable.

Notational Velocity’s Relevance

I’m getting lots of e-mail questioning the necessity of Notational Velocity and Simplenote. I still have a big place in my heart for both apps. Here’s why.

The Case for Notational Velocity and Simplenote

Notational Velocity started out as the best way to sync text to iOS. That was the big selling point and the reason a lot of us jumped on it a year or two ago when they hooked up with Simplenote. It was truly one of those “your chocolate in my peanut butter” moments for mobile writers. However, that reason is not as important now as it was. Back then, the Notational Velocity / SimpleNote Tango was the only game in town for syncing text to iOS devices. Not anymore. Now that Dropbox has become the ubiquitous language of syncing to iOS, many text editors sport the ability to easily sync text to Dropbox making it available anywhere from any platform. I get e-mails from readers all the time explaining how they get by just fine without Simplenote. On some levels, this makes sense. While Simplenote is pretty awesome, it doesn’t have the feature list of other iOS based text editors like PlainText, with its gorgeous layout, or Nebulous Notes, nerdgasm inducing macros.

So syncing got easier and Simplenote a bit less essential. For me, however, what continues to make Notational Velocity and Simplenote awesome is the search. All of these text snippets are in one place, easily searchable, and always available.

How I use Notational Velocity

So I use Notational Velocity in three contexts:

  1. my go-anywhere text bank;
  2. my ghetto database, and;
  3. as my hopper of working text.

The Text Bank

I’ve got lots of bits of re-usable text. Maybe it’s the html code for the Mac Power Users logo or maybe it is the perfect jury instruction for fraud. Either way, it is stuff I will use again and want to access from anywhere. Notational Velocity is perfect for this with its quick search.

Ghetto Database

Whether it is a work project or vacation plans, I love having a note dedicated to it with key information like contacts, reservation numbers, communication logs, and essential details. It is always in sync, available on all my devices, and oh-so-malleable with text. Also, when talking to someone and you can immediately get access to these details, it scares the hell out of them.

Working Text

Finally, I use it for bits of text that need love and attention. This includes pieces out of Scrivener projects, half-baked posts, pieces of legal briefs, and just about any other text I’m working on.

So I see a lot of relevance to using Simplenote and Notational Velocity, giving me access to 700 snippets of pure gold and several more full of amusing drivel, like my favorite latin sayings. Later this week I’ll post on how I name these notes to bring order from chaos but for now I’ll leave you with this thought: Lex clavatoris designati rescindenda est. (The designated hitter rule has got to go.)

Steve’s Blank Slide

While watching the iPad 2 event, I noticed a few times where Steve advanced to a blank slide and just talked. It allowed the audience to focus on him as he built up to the next image and it was pretty smart. Maybe this is a simple trick but it never occurred to me before. Expect a few blank slides in my next presentation.

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

Home Screens – Keith Blount

This week’s home screen post features one of my favorite Mac developers, Keith Blount, who very quietly revolutionized word processing with his outstanding application, Scrivener (also, see Scrivener on twitter). In addition to being a top notch Mac developer, I can report with first hand knowledge that Keith is very patient, especially when dealing with nerdy zealots who pepper him with requests to sync Scrivener text files to the iPad.

So Keith, show us your iPad home screen.

What are your most interesting home screen apps?

Everything there is fairly well-known, but Kineo is one of the apps I had the most fun with when I first got my iPad. It’s a really simple concept but stupidly fun. It’s just a flip-book app – you draw a stick man or whatever with your finger, then create a new page, and your last image is still faintly visible so that you can draw the next one over it, moving it slightly, and so doing gradually build up an animation. It’s full of blood and violence since my kids got at it, but it provides a great wind-down activity while you’re waiting for something.

In terms of my day job, there are several apps there that are interesting. Simplenote, Notebooks and PlainText are all great note-taking tools and Index Card provides a really nice corkboard similar to the one in Scrivener, so they are all there in part because I spent a lot of time implementing sync features in Scrivener 2.0 that works with these programs, enabling users to sync text between Scrivener and any one of these apps. So they are there partly for testing purposes and partly because I use them for note-taking occasionally myself. Likewise iBooks and Kindle – these are there for testing Scrivener’s .epub and .mobi export, but I don’t use them much beyond that, to be honest, as I prefer my actual Kindle (or a real, analogue book of course) for extended reading.

What is your favorite app?

Probably IMDb, simply because I’m addicted to it. I can’t remember the last time I watched a TV program or movie without pausing it to look up an actor. I still tend to reach for my MacBook Air and look up things on there for speed of typing, but IMDb on the iPad is beautifully designed and a perfect coffee-table app.

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

At the moment it’s Angry Birds. I finally cracked and downloaded it for the first time the other day, and since then the house has been full of the sound of grunting, whooping, kamikaze birds. You know you’ve been playing it too much when you start calculating the angle of your hand when you go to throw something to somebody and then wonder why there’s nothing to tap to make it go faster when it’s in midair. Before that I was addicted for a short while to Bed Bugs – I got my mother addicted to that, too; I probably won’t hear from her for months after I introduce her to Angry Birds.

What is the app you are still missing?

I don’t think I’m missing anything – there are a gazillion apps already out there and I don’t use my iPad enough to feel it wanting anything, really. The obvious answer, of course, would be Scrivener, as we do get a good few requests for an iPad version, but I still much prefer writing on my MacBook Air or other Macs so I can’t get as excited about the prospect as I probably should.

How many times a day do you use your iPad?

My current addiction to Angry Birds notwithstanding, in general I have to admit I don’t use my iPad very much at all. By day I do my development work on a Mac Pro and in the evenings I have my MacBook Air at hand, so I haven’t found an obvious place for the iPad in my daily life as many people have. My kids, on the other hand – I can’t keep them off the thing.

What is your favorite feature of the Pad?

It keeps the kids quiet. (Actually that’s not even true; they fight over it.)

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

That one’s easy – I’d add a rich text system that developers could utilize, an equivalent of the NSText system on the Mac. At the moment most writing apps on the iPad are plain text only, and this is because there is no easy way to create rich text editing apps (Apple rolled their own text system with Pages that isn’t available to third-party developers). I have seen some apps roll their own basic rich text systems – Docs2Go for instance – but if there was a standard one as there is on the Mac, there would be a lot more powerful writing tools on there – and, from a completely biased point of view, it would make it easier to sync Scrivener with apps on the iPad. It would also make it a little easier for us to design a stripped-down version of Scrivener for the iPad off in one potential future, too, of course. But that’s my day-job speaking again, as I’m probably unlikely to use the iPad for writing much myself; I just know a lot of our customers use it for note-taking and that this would be useful to them.

Anything else you’d like to share?

Just a thank you for inviting me to share my home screen.

Thanks Keith!

Thoughts on The Post PC World

I watched the Apple Keynote tonight and was struck by how often I heard the term “Post PC.” When Steve Jobs and Apple start using these catch phrases, it is no accident. Apple has its own lexicon that starts internally but, at some point, often finds its way into Keynote speeches and product descriptions.

I believe “Post PC” is the newest of these phrases. We’ve all speculated about the future of technology in light of the explosive growth of iOS and the growing legions of mobile competitors. To the people at Apple, I don’t believe this dialogue is anything new. Internally, I think they’ve been planning this for years.

Looking back, I suspect Apple first started contemplating the Post PC world when iPods were selling like hotcakes. I’m certain that by the time the iPhone showed up, Apple’s Post PC plans were already in full swing. When the iPad appeared, the shoe dropped for the rest of us. Steve Jobs confirmed this last year at the AllThingsD conference when he talked of trucks and cars and how the PCs we all know and love are going to become the trucks of technology: still useful, but not necessary for most.

This all culminates today with Apple’s repeated mantra about the “Post PC” world. Why are we just hearing about this now? Because Apple is already sitting on top of the mountain in this new order.

I’ve written before about Mac user’s fear of returning to those dark days. I suspect there is a certain degree of that also ingrained in the Apple corporate culture. I’m not sure I’d call it fear so much as resolve with this second chance. Never again.

Never again will Apple blow its lead. Never again will Apple seize defeat from the jaws of victory. Never again in this new Post PC World.

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

Kensington Presenter Pro Review

My beloved remote has failed me. I’ve been using it for at least 6 years without a hitch and suddenly (despite new batteries, cleaning the contacts, and a few kindly whacks) it has stopped advancing slides. So time for a new one and I took advantage of Macworld Expo to do some shopping.

For me the perfect remote has four buttons: advance, backward, dark screen, and laser. I don’t want extra bells and whistles that I will start pressing in nervous fits. So that was my shopping list, a Mac friendly remote with just the right number of buttons. I found my new remote on the expo floor, the Kensington Presenter Pro with Green Laser and Memory.

The Kensington Presenter Pro ($99) (find the manual here) fits nicely in my hand and features four buttons: slide advance, slide back, laser, and dark screen. It includes a dongle that stores inside the remote. The device works on a 2.4 GHz wireless signal that worked for me up to about 100 feet. Everything just works on the Mac. What really makes this remote shine however are the little details

The Laser

The Kensington Presenter Pro uses a green laser. While green lasers aren’t as unique as they used to be, they are still a lot more rare than red lasers, which is great. When I’m speaking, my green laser looks different, and that’s good. People know when I point.
There is also some science involved. Green light is right in the middle of the visible spectrum where red light is on the edge (meaning less visible). So it has a bright shiny laser with a different color. That’s a plus.

The Thumb Drive

The USB key does more than talk to the remote. It also has 2 GB of onboard storage and a micro SD slot supporting cards up to 32 GB. That means you can put a copy of your Keynote right on the thumb stick as a last ditch back up in case everything else goes wrong. It also means you could conceivably walk in a room with a remote only, plug it in to a Mac and start talking.

The Power Switch

Another nice touch is the inclusion of a sliding power switch. My old remote didn’t have one and it made me crazy. You never knew when the laser might get accidentally pressed in my bag and I’d get to my location to find the batteries dead. As a result, I still have this manic desire to carry extra AAAs whenever I speak.

The Case

The Presenter Pro also includes a zippered case form fitted to hold your remote. It fits nicely in my bag without a big footprint.

Overall, the new remote is a winner.

TechShow 2011 Discount Still Available

It’s not too late to take advantage of the early bird discount at the American Bar Association’s TechShow. If you are a legal professional and want to use technology to the detriment of opposing counsel, get yourself to Chicago. This will be my third year speaking and every time I learn new tricks. This year I’ll be giving sessions on alternatives to Microsoft Word and collaboration tools for litigators. Check it out.

Also, I’ll be hosting a dinner with my friend, Victor Medina, for fellow Mac legal professionals. I’ll see you there.