New tools

“Don’t blame the car­pen­ter. Blame the tool.” –Howie Long in a new Chevy commercial

Am I the only one who thinks he’s call­ing that guy a tool? Any­way, I’m not going to com­plain about my tools today, so much as doc­u­ment one more step in my never-​ending quest to find bet­ter tools for writing.

My grand Google Docs exper­i­ment lasted all of two chap­ters into Cru­sade, the sec­ond book in the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles series. It’s entirely pos­si­ble that this has noth­ing to do with Google Docs, but when I hit a slump one of my first impulses is to mix up how I do things. As it hap­pens, a major improve­ment to an old friend hap­pened along at just the right time.

Ever­note

Two days before Christ­mas, Ever­note gave us iPhone users an early gift. Ever­note for the iPhone ver­sion 3.2 fixes most of the prob­lems I had with the iPhone ver­sion. Sync­ing is no longer modal, mean­ing you can search and do other things while sync­ing to your data­base, and you can store selected note­books locally on the device, mean­ing you can always access them offline even if you’ve never opened that par­tic­u­lar note on your iPhone before. While Ever­note for the iPhone still doesn’t allow you to edit rich text notes directly, ver­sion 3.2 does allow you to make a plain text copy and edit that rather than just append­ing to the rich text note. This allows for revi­sions I couldn’t do before.

These changes make Ever­note vastly more use­ful to me for writ­ing on the go. And of course it doesn’t hurt that the lat­est build of the 3.5 beta — yes, I know I said I wasn’t upgrad­ing, I have a sick­ness — is pretty solid as well. These changes are so impres­sive, in fact, that I’ve gone back to Ever­note for my actual draft­ing. I keep each chap­ter in a sep­a­rate note, tagged as “draft” and in the Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles note­book. I really like hav­ing all my stuff in one place again.

BTstack Key­board Driver

Of course, writ­ing on the go with just the on-​screen key­board on my iPhone only works for rel­a­tively short pas­sages. For any kind of speed, I’d still need my net­book, with the addi­tional five pounds — 3 for the net­book, 2 for the AC adap­tor and cables — to lug around that this would entail, right? Not so much. The BTstack Key­board Dri­ver also appeared on Cydia last week. This is part of the over­all BTstack project, intended to pro­vide an alter­na­tive Blue­tooth stack for the iPhone that han­dles pro­files Apple chooses not to sup­port. The key­board dri­ver, as you might expect, allows the iPhone to use exter­nal Blue­tooth key­boards using the Blue­tooth HID (Human Inter­face Devices) profile.

I still have my Think­Out­side Blue­tooth Stow­away from my Win­dows Mobile days, so I paid my five bucks, down­loaded and installed the dri­ver and set about test­ing it. It’s def­i­nitely still a work in progress, but it’s very promis­ing. Not all of the ancil­lary keys work, and some­times I get a string of garbage char­ac­ters, but over­all, it works for get­ting text into the iPhone fast and easy on a full-​size key­board (my Stow­away is actu­ally mar­gin­ally more com­fort­able than my 92% full size key­board on my net­book). So add this to Ever­note and now I don’t have to take my net­book with me to Chipo­tle for lunch. My back and shoul­ders already thank me.

Enso Words

Writ­ing in Ever­note has a few dis­ad­van­tages, chief among them that Ever­note has no word count func­tion. How do I track my progress with­out work count? Enter Enso Words. This is a small util­ity pro­gram that runs all the time in your Win­dows sys­tem tray and waits to be called either by hold­ing down the Cap­slock key like a sec­ond shift key, or as I pre­fer, tap­ping the Cap­slock key and enter­ing a com­mand and enter, or esc to go back to what you were doing. When you have Enso Words acti­vated, you can have it per­form a vari­ety of func­tions on what­ever text you have selected in vir­tu­ally any application.

So to get a word count on my cur­rent note in Ever­note, I:

1. Hit Ctrl-​A to select all text
2. Tap Cap­slock to invoke Enso Words
3. Type “wo” to nar­row down the com­mand selec­tion to “word count”
4. Hit Enter

Enso words then pops up a lit­tle box on screen with my cur­rent word count, and that box fades away auto­mat­i­cally as soon as I type some­thing or move the mouse. With a lit­tle prac­tice, this becomes sec­ond nature. I could even shave off a key­stroke if I used Enso in “qua­si­modal” mode and just released Cap­slock after typ­ing “wo”, no longer hav­ing to hit enter to send the com­mand. Enso is also great for look­ing up def­i­n­i­tions and syn­onyms, spell check­ing in any appli­ca­tion, chang­ing case, search­ing Google and more. It’s free, and takes up very lit­tle sys­tem resources, even on my netbook.

Write­Mon­key

When I want to get hard­core, though, I break out the mon­key. Write­Mon­key. This is a text proces­sor for Win­dows inspired by the pop­u­lar Write­Room on the Mac. While it works win­dowed — and that’s how I use it at the office — it’s really intended to run full screen. In full screen mode, Write­Mon­key takes up your entire mon­i­tor, hid­ing even your Win­dows taskbar and shows you just what you need to see to write. It’s small, fast, portable and keeps a run­ning word count at the top or bot­tom of the screen so you can see how you’re doing. The idea here is to remove all the dis­trac­tions and just write.

Write­Mon­key doesn’t inte­grate auto­mat­i­cally with Ever­note, but it’s not all that hard to get them to play together. I select all the text in a note like I would with Enso, but then copy it, fire up Write­Mon­key, paste and start writ­ing. When I’m done, I select all and copy from Write­Mon­key and then paste back into the note in Ever­note. Pretty simple.

Google Docs

I still use Google Docs for one thing: spread­sheets. I keep my word counts there in a sim­ple sheet that holds the word count for each chap­ter and then sums them to tell me the word count for the over­all novel. And hey, I can even update Google Docs spread­sheets on my iPhone! (Now I just need Enso Words for the iPhone.)

So that’s it, my new sys­tem, designed to be the sim­plest I’ve come up with yet (since it can’t really han­dle for­mat­ting, there’s no temp­ta­tion to spend time mak­ing it pretty). How do you take your writ­ing on the go?