{"id":495,"date":"2003-01-01T12:23:27","date_gmt":"2003-01-01T16:23:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=495"},"modified":"2003-01-01T12:23:27","modified_gmt":"2003-01-01T16:23:27","slug":"pompous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=495","title":{"rendered":"Pompous"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Whaddya mean, I missed the deadline? Here is my technology review of the year: stuff that was actually useful to a writer.<\/p>\n\n<!--more--><br \/>\n<UL><br \/>\n<li>For all its frustrations,\n<A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.openoffice.org\/\">OpenOffice<\/A> is actually the<br \/>\nbest book-writing software I have come across. In many ways, it is<br \/>\nstill horribly frustrating. it&rsquo;s slow; and it is not nearly as<br \/>\ngood for journalism as Word, which lets me much more easily run two<br \/>\nfiles, of notes and the completed work, side by side. The bloody<br \/>\nsearch and replace still isn&rsquo;t fixed properly. The outline<br \/>\nview is a mess. The spellchecker has 70,000 bad words in it. But the<br \/>\nfiles are almost entirely interchangable with Word, the bookmarks,<br \/>\nnotes, and annotations are all fine; the ease with which a long<br \/>\nmanuscript can be paginated and printed and chapter headings placed<br \/>\nright, far surpasses anything I have used before &ndash; and my<br \/>\npolice book, for example, has a whole chapter break three pages out<br \/>\nof order because of a screw-up in the software. Still, I&rsquo;m<br \/>\ngoing back to Word for journalism this year, I think. Next year, Santa, can I have some bibliography software that works?<br \/>\n<\/li>\n<li>This was the year when I\nrediscovered <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.scaevola.com\/eccobasics\/\">Ecco<\/A>.<br \/>\nIt is immensely frustrating that it was never upgraded to cope with<br \/>\nWindows NT\/2000 properly. For one thing, you can&rsquo;t dial the<br \/>\nphone unless running as an administrator, which is a huge security<br \/>\nhole. But I have found nothing to match it  for organising large<br \/>\nprojects. I did the whole of my analysis programme with it,<br \/>\nincluding the last-minute desperate script rewrite where we threw<br \/>\nwhole chunks of the outline around; it was perfect for that.<br \/>\n<\/li>\n<li><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.bradsoft.com\/topstyle\/\">TopStyle<\/A>.\nIf you need another reason to have nothing to do with Linux, here it<br \/>\nis. The perfect example of how commercial software can produce<br \/>\nreally beautiful and elegant niche products. It&rsquo;s impossible<br \/>\nto imagine that any piece of open source software, aimed at end<br \/>\nusers, could possibly be as slick and thoughtful. It&rsquo;s built<br \/>\nby the man who invented <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.macromedia.com\/software\/homesite\/\">Homesite<\/A>,<br \/>\nbut that doesn&rsquo;t count as new technology any more. I hope this makes him rich all over again.<\/li>\n<li><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.centered.com\/\">Second\nCopy<\/A>. I don&rsquo;t use it myself, since everything I care about<br \/>\nis automatically synched across to the laptop in shared folders. But<br \/>\nit copies my wife&rsquo;s stuff over the network entirely painlessly<br \/>\nand without her ever noticing or needing to be nagged.<\/li>\n<li><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.kaylon.com\/mp3rat\/\"><span class=\"caps\">MP3R<\/span>at<\/A>.\nI seem to have accumulated 20GB of <span class=\"caps\">MP3 <\/span>files this year (the<br \/>\noverwhelming majority either from my CD collection or from Emusic).<br \/>\nThis means that I don&rsquo;t even notice that they need organising.<br \/>\nA wonderful example of useful and unobtrusive technology.<\/li>\n<li><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.movabletype.org\/\">MT<\/A>.\nI&rsquo;m not sure that this isn&rsquo;t unproductivity software.<br \/>\nApart from that, it&rsquo;s been enormous fun and very reliable.<\/li>\n<li><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.smartboardxp.com\/\">SmartboardXP<\/A>.\nThis is a clipboard extender which lurks on the cusp of productivity<br \/>\nand unproductivity software. The point, so far as I am concerned, is<br \/>\nthat it lets me work around one of the more annoying limitations of <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.opera.com\/\">Opera<\/A>,<br \/>\nby automagically turning clipboard <span class=\"caps\">URL<\/span>s into proper anchor tags,<br \/>\nwith all the bits filled out. I keep trying <span class=\"caps\">IE, <\/span>and being driven back by a blizzard of popups.<br \/>\n<\/li>\n<li>My <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.pc.ibm.com\/support?lang=en_US&amp;doctype=&amp;subtype=All&amp;page=brand&amp;up=%25%25q7X9J7ZCXQ7XnbYnGf-b&amp;ut=loginCount=14&amp;productCount=0&amp;returnCode=0&amp;requestType=Verify+Answer&amp;lastLoginDate=2002-02-13-10.37.32.602367&amp;type1=&amp;userID&amp;menu=model&amp;brand=IBM+ThinkPad&amp;family=IBM+ThinkPad|ThinkPad+X23&amp;machineType=IBM+ThinkPad|ThinkPad+X23|2662&amp;model=IBM+ThinkPad|ThinkPad+X23|2662|E5G\">nice\nnew laptop<\/A> with a wireless card, which means I can write this<br \/>\nfrom an armchair, listening to a <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/B00000E3HL\/qid=1041360184\/sr=1-4\/ref=sr_1_0_4\/026-7740522-4344466\">Chopin<br \/>\ncello sonata<\/A>; and which let me go off for three weeks to a truly<br \/>\ninaccessible place with all the research notes and the music I<br \/>\nneeded for a <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0743207165\/qid=1041360272\/sr=1-7\/ref=sr_1_2_7\/026-7740522-4344466\">book<\/A>,<br \/>\nall tucked up on the hard disk. On the other hand, it has made me<br \/>\nrealise that my desktop needs upgrading once again.<br \/>\n<\/li>\n<li>Still, the winner of my\nproductivity award for 2002 is without doubt <A HREF=\"http:\/\/products.3m.com\/usenglish\/office\/postit.jhtml?powurl=GS5MCS3LTCbeF376ZV1HQVgeGST1T4S9TCgvC5BMLPS6C2gl\">these Post-it notes<\/A>.<br \/>\nI don&rsquo;t know how I ever reviewed a book without them.<\/li>\n<\/UL>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whaddya mean, I missed the deadline? Here is my technology review of the year: stuff that was actually useful to a writer. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=495\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/495\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}