Tag: software

2221: Seeing the Final Product Forming

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I spent a chunk of time today porting the work I’ve already done on a story from Google Docs online to Scrivener on my Mac. Scrivener is a piece of software I picked up quite a while back and have used sporadically whenever I feel creative; it’s a lovely piece of software to keep written projects of any size manageable and organised.

For the unfamiliar, Scrivener allows you to organise your whole project into a single file, including the chapters and sections/scenes of your book, research material, front matter and general notes. Within the file, you have a tree structure of folders and items, with numerous templates available for various types of project. When you’re all done, you “compile” the project like a computer program, and Scrivener spits the finished product out in the format of your choice, be it double-spaced manuscript for sending to a publisher, attractively laid out pages ready for self-publishing, or various popular eBook formats. You can even export it to a word processor if you so desire, allowing you to format it further using tools beyond that which Scrivener offers.

I was surprised what a feeling of motivation I felt from porting the existing content over to Scrivener, and I attribute this primarily to the fact that what you bung into Scrivener looks remarkably like what the finished product will end up being. In fact, if you compile a project in progress to a PDF just to have a look at how things appear, it’s even more motivating, because you can imagine holding the finished book in your hands. That’s quite exciting.

Just the fact that Scrivener uses some very attractive, convincingly “book-like” default fonts helps with this feeling of seeing the final product coming together, though. Couple that with the fact that Scrivener’s interface is designed to be as clean and distraction-free as possible, and all in all you have a piece of software that is eminently suitable for creative types to realise their written ambitions — even if you barely use a fraction of the functionality the software has to offer, which I suspect is a category I will probably fall into unless I want to get really anal about page headers or something.

Anyway. This is a long-winded way of saying that I have been successfully motivating myself to continue with my creative writing project while I still don’t have any full time work. I’m under no illusions that I’ll be able to make money from this — at least initially — but the story I’m working on at present is a passion project that it will simply be satisfying to see completed at last, and released into the wild. If anyone ends up actually buying it, so much the better, of course, but if nothing else completing a project of this sort will 1) show me that I can do it, and hopefully inspire me to do more that take less than 15 years to complete and 2) stop my mother telling me every so often that I should “write that book”. (She hasn’t done that for a while, to be fair, which probably means it’s due a mention sometime soon… I know you’re reading, Mum, so take this as assurance that I’m doing it.)

So that’s that. Writer? Windows or OSX-equipped? Give Scrivener a go, and you might just be surprised how much you can get done.

#oneaday Day 546: Spot the Music

Hi, Americans. I hope you’re enjoying Spotify. As you may be aware, we lucky Brits have had it for some time and have been enjoying its considerable charms. It’s great to see you lot get the chance now, too.

Of course, you’ve had plenty of services like that already available, such as Grooveshark and RDIO. You also get to play with Turntable.fm while we don’t, which is a bit of a shame. As such, though, this means that Spotify is having to work a bit harder to impress you — it’s working in some cases, others not.

I have a Spotify Premium account — £10 a month for ad-free unlimited playback plus the ability to use the mobile app to stream over 3G (risky given the patchy coverage in most of the UK) and/or download playlists directly to the app for offline listening (much better). Since signing up for it, I don’t think I’ve bought a single thing from iTunes. I haven’t needed to. Most of the stuff I’d want to listen to — and plenty I don’t — is freely available for me to grab, stick in playlists and listen to at my leisure. There’s plenty of music to keep a continuous soundtrack spinning while I do my day’s work, and more than enough to set up some decent driving playlists for long journeys.

The service and its software isn’t without one or two flaws, of course — you can’t search playlists on the mobile apps and the interface is inexplicably the opposite way around to the native iPod app on iOS, meaning you’ll find yourself bringing up track information a lot when you actually mean to just close the player screen and get back to the menus. The desktop client’s habit of just disappearing and updating itself without telling you it’s updating is a little unnerving, too, but at least it keeps itself up to date. (I say that — it’s currently attempting to download the latest updater manually and claims that a 5MB file is going to take 16 hours to download.)

But all that aside, what Spotify provides for me has many benefits. Firstly, it’s a means of listening to music that I know and love without having to root through iTunes libraries or — in many cases — stacks of CDs that are buried in a cardboard box somewhere. Secondly, it’s a means of discovering new music — having listened to an album I like, taking a journey through the “Similar Artists” links is often quite eye-opening. Thirdly, and I can’t emphasise how nice this is, it makes having to manually sync an iOS device almost unnecessary, software updates notwithstanding. iOS syncs have a habit of taking at least three times as long as you think they will, particularly if you really need to be somewhere and you suddenly realise you don’t have any music on your iPod/have the “wrong” music on your iPod. Spotify’s offline sync system isn’t the quickest in the world, admittedly, but at least you can do it wirelessly without having to faff around with cables and USB ports and computers. Which is nice.

Spotify, then, is very much a Good Thing. And I’m delighted that I can now share links to tracks and albums with my friends in the US, as well as allow people to subscribe to my playlists. I already noticed that my “dungeon crawling” playlist where I just dumped a whole bunch of metal without really paying much attention to what it is has picked up a subscriber in the form of the fine Chris Whittington — guess I better be careful about what I publish from now on if people are watching! (Damn, no more Lazy Town?)