JeffKirvin.net

As many of you know, I’ve recently upgraded my PC to Vista Ultimate. In the process, I’ve also upgraded to Office 2007 Ultimate, as well as replacing XP’s ActiveSync with Vista’s Windows Mobile Device Center. I’ll get into the details below, but I’ve almost completely stopped syncing my PC with my Windows Mobile phone.

That’s right. I keep no documents at all, none of my current drafts of anything, on my mobile device. I’ve become 100%—well more like 99.8%, see below—desk-bound as a writer. Does this mean I’ve given up on mobile technology in general, or the idea of mobile writing? Not really, but I have made some adjustments.

I want to say up front I didn’t stop for any one particular reason. It’s more a confluence of factors that all ganged up me at the same time. I upgraded to Vista, and for as much as ActiveSync is maligned by Windows Mobile users, Windows Mobile Device Center is far worse. But I’m an old hand at troubleshooting mobile tech and could have gotten WMDC to behave if I’d really wanted to.

I also started using Microsoft OneNote, which I’d tinkered with but never really committed to before. I’ll have a full-length article on OneNote later, but for now let me just say that it will completely change how you collect, organize and refer to the kinds of information under which a writer is typically buried. I’m more in control of my PC and my data than I have been in a long, long time. And while OneNote does include a Windows Mobile client application, it doesn’t really do me a lot of good. Usually the conceit that annoys me about Microsoft’s mobile products is that they assume you do the bulk of the work on your PC and will use your mobile device mostly for reference, not new data entry. That would have been fine in this case, so of course they went the other way. OneNote Mobile is almost useless for keeping reference material on your device, intended instead to give you a quick way to capture new notes “in the field” and then import them into OneNote 2007 when you sync up with your PC.

I’ve been so impressed with Vista’s instant system-wide search—which seems far faster to me than either Google Desktop Search or Microsoft’s own Windows Desktop Search on XP—that I’ve taken to using that to find data on my PC, and I’m less concerned about keeping things carefully segregated on my hard drive, with all my goofy little shortcuts so that I can get to my writing from either my “Writing” folder or my “Documents on Jeff’s Smartphone” folder. Instead I generally just open the Start menu by tapping the Windows key on my keyboard, type a word or two from what I’m looking for—the search results automatically replace the program list in the Start menu—arrow down to it and press enter. Quick, easy and pretty much brainless.

Next, I decided I really liked the new file formats in Office 2007. If you haven’t really looked into this yet, Office 2007—while still supporting the old binary formats—introduces new formats that are entirely XML-based. If you take a new whatever.docx Word file and rename it whatever.zip, you can unzip it into a collection of folders containing plain text XML documents, a different file for each aspect of the overall Word document (formatting in one file, content in another, etc.). This new structure makes the new files much smaller than the old binary formats and more importantly, much, much more resistant to file corruption. The new files are, if not bullet-proof, far more salvageable after a disc crash or a bad sector than the old files were. So I decided I’d convert everything to the new formats and use those. For sending stuff out for critique, Word 2007 has an excellent save to PDF feature. The problem was that Word Mobile doesn’t yet support .docx files.

I also realized that the important stuff, the stuff I have to sync no matter what, I wasn’t syncing between the device and the PC anyway. I use 4smartphone.net as a hosted Exchange server, and instead of syncing my phone and my PC with each other, I sync them both to the same server. All of my email, calendar data, tasks and contacts are synced live with Exchange, and if I make a change on the phone, even away from the PC, the change will show up in Outlook within seconds. So if I’m syncing both devices with Exchange, I don’t have to sync them to each other.

Lastly I realized that even though I’ve taken it as a personal given that I have to have my writing material with me on my mobile device whenever I’m out and about, that doesn’t necessarily make sense anymore. Not because I can’t make use of random downtime throughout the day to write, but that I don’t use random downtime throughout the day to write. Instead, I use my mobile device to listen to podcasts, listen to music, make calls, send and receive emails and text messages or read ebooks. I don’t actually write on the go the way I used to. I have too many other distractions to ever get around to writing when I’m not sitting at my PC.

So I quit maintaining the pretense of writing on the go. I write at home, on my desktop Vista PC with my beautiful and supremely comfortable Microsoft Natural 4000 keyboard. I do all my actual writing in Word 2007, my note-taking and research in OneNote 2007 and my blogging in either Word or Windows Live Writer (which is better than Word 2007’s otherwise excellent blogging engine for commenting on other web pages; original articles are in Word). I don’t even have the mostly useless OneNote Mobile installed on my device. My Windows Mobile phone is a communications and entertainment device, not a writing tool. And now that I’m not trying to cram a round peg into an oval hole—it almost fits, dammit—I’m a lot more comfortable. I still connect my device to my PC, but mostly because I’m using my phone as my PC’s internet connection. The only thing I really sync is mobile favorites, and I could get around that by using any number of web-based bookmark services on both platforms. I’ll likely look into that soon.

What if inspiration strikes at the grocery store? I’ve got that covered, too, and along with email/SMS it’s the reason I have to stick with a QWERTY-based device like the Q or the upcoming Sprint Mogul. If inspiration strikes and I just have to write something down, I still don’t have to sync it. Syncing is a mindset I got stuck in with my original Palm Pilot days and have been slow to break out of. I have a smartphone now. If I have to write something down, I’ll just email it to myself.