Whaddya mean, I missed the deadline? Here is my technology review of the year: stuff that was actually useful to a writer.
- For all its frustrations,
OpenOffice is actually the
best book-writing software I have come across. In many ways, it is
still horribly frustrating. it’s slow; and it is not nearly as
good for journalism as Word, which lets me much more easily run two
files, of notes and the completed work, side by side. The bloody
search and replace still isn’t fixed properly. The outline
view is a mess. The spellchecker has 70,000 bad words in it. But the
files are almost entirely interchangable with Word, the bookmarks,
notes, and annotations are all fine; the ease with which a long
manuscript can be paginated and printed and chapter headings placed
right, far surpasses anything I have used before – and my
police book, for example, has a whole chapter break three pages out
of order because of a screw-up in the software. Still, I’m
going back to Word for journalism this year, I think. Next year, Santa, can I have some bibliography software that works?
- This was the year when I
rediscovered Ecco.
It is immensely frustrating that it was never upgraded to cope with
Windows NT/2000 properly. For one thing, you can’t dial the
phone unless running as an administrator, which is a huge security
hole. But I have found nothing to match it for organising large
projects. I did the whole of my analysis programme with it,
including the last-minute desperate script rewrite where we threw
whole chunks of the outline around; it was perfect for that.
- TopStyle.
If you need another reason to have nothing to do with Linux, here it
is. The perfect example of how commercial software can produce
really beautiful and elegant niche products. It’s impossible
to imagine that any piece of open source software, aimed at end
users, could possibly be as slick and thoughtful. It’s built
by the man who invented Homesite,
but that doesn’t count as new technology any more. I hope this makes him rich all over again. - Second
Copy. I don’t use it myself, since everything I care about
is automatically synched across to the laptop in shared folders. But
it copies my wife’s stuff over the network entirely painlessly
and without her ever noticing or needing to be nagged. - MP3Rat.
I seem to have accumulated 20GB of MP3 files this year (the
overwhelming majority either from my CD collection or from Emusic).
This means that I don’t even notice that they need organising.
A wonderful example of useful and unobtrusive technology. - MT.
I’m not sure that this isn’t unproductivity software.
Apart from that, it’s been enormous fun and very reliable. - SmartboardXP.
This is a clipboard extender which lurks on the cusp of productivity
and unproductivity software. The point, so far as I am concerned, is
that it lets me work around one of the more annoying limitations of Opera,
by automagically turning clipboard URLs into proper anchor tags,
with all the bits filled out. I keep trying IE, and being driven back by a blizzard of popups.
- My nice
new laptop with a wireless card, which means I can write this
from an armchair, listening to a Chopin
cello sonata; and which let me go off for three weeks to a truly
inaccessible place with all the research notes and the music I
needed for a book,
all tucked up on the hard disk. On the other hand, it has made me
realise that my desktop needs upgrading once again.
- Still, the winner of my
productivity award for 2002 is without doubt these Post-it notes.
I don’t know how I ever reviewed a book without them.