I lost my job last week. Or, to quote Bob­cat Goldth­wait, “well, I didn’t actu­ally lose my job, I mean I know where my job is still. It’s just when I go there, there’s this new guy doing it.” I won’t go into the details, other than to say a lot of peo­ple got let go at the same time, and I’m not sure it was a coin­ci­dence that nearly all of them made more than the aver­age salary for their job title. #justsayin

Even though I know it had noth­ing to do with me per­son­ally, it still threw me. I was already down in the dumps over look­ing back at the last decade (it wasn’t the best time of my life), and even though my peo­ple (I have peo­ple) are already work­ing on get­ting me on board some­where else, I let the accu­mu­lated self doubt knock me off my stride and didn’t write for days.

Part of it was that I’d already stalled out on Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles. I was bored with revi­sions on Rev­e­la­tion, and scared of con­tin­u­ing with Cru­sade. I’m start­ing to think I’m still too close to the story to revise it prop­erly, and yet burned out on it after writ­ing the whole first novel. I need a change of pace. Maybe I should start work on some­thing really dif­fer­ent, like Ghost Ronin, Titanus or Home­world.

Or maybe I’m just wuss­ing out again. I’m mak­ing it up as I go along here. Now that the “seven books in ten months” marathon is out the win­dow, I’m try­ing dif­fer­ent things.

On a sim­i­lar note, I’m back to writ­ing every­thing in one mono­lithic Word file rather than indi­vid­ual chap­ter doc­u­ments in Ever­note or Google Docs. Just feels more nat­ural. Maybe I’m old fash­ioned. I am still keep­ing the Word doc­u­ments in Ever­note to keep them synced any­where, and if I need to write a lit­tle extra, I have a new jail­break exten­sion for my iPhone that lets me quickly scroll down to the bot­tom of the Word doc­u­ments to see where I left off before typ­ing in the new stuff in Evernote.

On the tech front, I’m work­ing on a review of the new Blue­tooth key­board dri­ver for the iPhone, which allows me to use my Stow­away in sit­u­a­tions where I’d rather not carry my net­book. Some­times that three pounds mat­ters. What?

“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?

Nuance released Dragon Dic­ta­tion for the iPhone yes­ter­day, and they made it free. By all accounts, it works pretty well, and should make using an iPhone much more intu­itive for lots of people.

So it should come as no sur­prise that peo­ple are already whining.

See, Dragon uploads your con­tacts to their servers the first time you run it. It does this because all the recog­ni­tion is done in the cloud — you didn’t think it could really do nearly flaw­less voice recog­ni­tion with the iPhone’s RAM and CPU, did you? — and Nuance fig­ures that if they pre-​recognize all your con­tacts, it will save time when you, like, use them. You’re prob­a­bly going to be men­tion­ing at least a few of your con­tacts a lot.

So what’s wrong with this? It’s an inva­sion of pri­vacy, of course! How dare Nuance upload your dic­ta­tion to their servers, tak­ing it lit­er­ally out of your hands, just so that they process it via a free ser­vice you opted into by down­load­ing and installing the gor­ram app in the first place? The nerve! And they keep the record­ings — so that they can con­tin­u­ally refine their recog­ni­tion, the same way Google keeps all your search queries — mean­ing that if you were to use their free ser­vice to dic­tate your plans to over­throw the gov­ern­ment, and if they didn’t anonymize the results — they do — and if said gov­ern­ment went sniff­ing around in those record­ings because the NSA clearly doesn’t already have enough data to sift through, well, that would be pretty bad, wouldn’t it?

Get over it, people.

Look, cloud com­put­ing isn’t the devil, and it isn’t here to take all your pre­cious bod­ily flu­ids. But a cer­tain degree of trust/​sphincter-​loosening is required if you’re going to join us here in the brave new world. Peo­ple need to get over this idea that they even have pri­vacy in the dig­i­tal age. Hey, you, in the shack up in Mon­tana. Yeah, I’m talk­ing to you. If you pos­sess any­thing in dig­i­tal form, guess what? You ain’t the only one with access to it. Deal. Or go back to keep­ing your man­i­festo scrawled in pen­cil on toi­let paper.

Relax, peo­ple, it’s okay. Just lie back, close your eyes and think of Eng­land. Or bet­ter yet, here’s a rad­i­cal idea. If you don’t agree with the terms of ser­vice, DON’T USE THE GORRAM SERVICE! Vote with your dol­lars, all zero of them! Nuance is giv­ing you some­thing valu­able for FREE. If you don’t like the fact that, hey, they’re going to use your anonymized data to improve said ser­vice, set your boots a-​walkin’, mis­ter. It’s the price of admis­sion, and guess what? You’re not enti­tled to any­thing. Keep bang­ing those rocks together, you’ll make fire some­day. But if you want to sit at the grownups table, act like you’ve been there.

I’ve writ­ten a lot about ebooks over the years, but very lit­tle on what makes them read­able. That’s unfor­tu­nate, since the defaults you get with almost every ebook reader pro­vide a sub-​optimal expe­ri­ence. Every time I hear some­one say, “I tried read­ing a book on my iPhone, but I just couldn’t do it,” and I look at their phone, I real­ize that with those set­tings I couldn’t do it either. So let’s go over what makes books read­able in the first place and how to mimic that on your reader of choice.

The first and most obvi­ous aspect of read­abil­ity is of course the type­face you use. The right font can make or break your read­ing expe­ri­ence. Fonts come in two main styles, serif and sans serif. Serif fonts have small orna­men­tal lines, called ser­ifs, that give them a more styl­ized look and more impor­tantly, guide the eye along the line of text. It’s for this rea­son that serif fonts have tra­di­tion­ally been favored by typog­ra­phers for long stretches of nar­ra­tive. Com­mon serif fonts are Times Roman, Geor­gia and even the mono­spaced Courier.

Sans serif fonts tend to be much sim­pler let­ter shapes, as they lack the ser­ifs. This makes them look cleaner on the page or screen, but in the­ory less read­able over time in bulk para­graphs. Sans serif fonts have tra­di­tion­ally been pre­ferred for on screen use because they’re sim­pler to ren­der. Com­mon sans serif fonts include Hel­vetica or Arial, the Verdana/​Tahoma/​Nina fam­ily and the handwriting-​like Comic Sans.

So what’s best for ebook read­abil­ity? That’s not an easy ques­tion. It’s worth not­ing that most peo­ple don’t actu­ally read one let­ter at a time. Instead adult read­ers take in whole words, phrases and even sen­tences at a time. The pat­tern recog­ni­tion on the brain is absolutely cru­cial, and any­thing that dis­turbs or alters the expected pat­terns will dra­mat­i­cally impede the read­ing process. For any­thing longer than a few lines, I pre­fer serif fonts. On a good serif font, the ser­ifs really do guide the eye along the line and make read­ing more com­fort­able. If I’m on a lower res­o­lu­tion device and have to go with a sans serif font, I pre­fer some­thing like Tre­buchet MS, which at least has pseudo-​serifs to dif­fer­en­ti­ate let­ter shapes. Ver­dana, which was also designed expressly for on-​screen read­abil­ity, as well as it’s com­pressed sib­ling Tahoma — and the even fur­ther com­pressed Nina — is another good choice if you need to go sans serif.

So now that we know what kind of font to use, which fonts in par­tic­u­lar are best? While there’s a cer­tain appeal to Times or Times New Roman, the “default” pro­por­tion­ally spaced serif font, it was designed to be printed, and doesn’t always trans­late well on screen. It’s a very nar­row font with com­par­a­tively lit­tle white space between lines, to allow news papers to cram the max­i­mum num­ber of words on the fewest pos­si­ble pieces of paper.

If it’s avail­able, I pre­fer Geor­gia, which was designed for on screen read­abil­ity. It has a taller x-​height than Times, which means the lower case let­ters are taller — and gen­er­ally wider — for a spe­cific point size than Times.It also has lovely ser­ifs that evoke the type­set­ting on vin­tage hard­cov­ers and a clear, script-​like ital­ics version.

If you’re using a newer device with True­Type turned on, Microsoft’s new Cam­bria or Con­stan­tia fonts look even bet­ter than Geor­gia, because they’re designed not only for on screen read­abil­ity, but also to take full advan­tage of sub­pixel font ren­der­ing. Basi­cally, these fonts make it appear that you have three times num­ber of pix­els that you actu­ally have. Cam­bria has a more “infor­mal” feel to it, with rounder let­ter shapes. Con­stan­tia is closer to Times with a lot of straight, ver­ti­cal lines.

Okay, you’ve got the right font, now how big should it be? This is bal­anc­ing act and frankly the hard­est deci­sion to make. It’s depen­dent on sev­eral factors.

First is line length. A good rule of thumb is that you should have on aver­age about six to eight words per line. So if you pick a font that’s too big, you won’t get as many words per line as you should and read­ing will feel very “choppy” as your eye keeps dart­ing back and forth very quickly. (Con­versely, this is why it’s impor­tant to use giant mar­gins or split text into columns on wide mon­i­tors. If the line length is too long, your eye tends to wan­der up or down to other lines before you get to the end and reset.)

But you also need to have a rea­son­able amount of white space. A lot of reader soft­ware will allow you to set your mar­gins. Believe it or not, there’s actu­ally an advan­tage to hav­ing healthy mar­gins around the text. It helps the brain com­part­men­tal­ize the text and keeps the page from look­ing too busy and over­whelm­ing. Try it. You’ll be more com­fort­able with a rea­son­able mar­gin than with text that goes right up to the edges of the screen.

White space is also a func­tion of font choice, as your font will tend to define, at least at first, your ver­ti­cal line spac­ing. One of the rea­sons I like Tre­buchet MS so much is that in addi­tion to being a serif-​like sans serif font, it also defaults to wider than aver­age line spac­ing, with more white space between lines of text. This makes it eas­ier for the eye to fol­low long each line with­out jump­ing above or below and con­fus­ing things. This is also why the lat­est ver­sions of Word default to 1.15x line spac­ing. That lit­tle extra white space really makes a dif­fer­ence in read­abil­ity on screen.

So what’s the answer? It’s going to be dif­fer­ent for every­one. Find a serif font you like and then try dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of mar­gins, font sizes and if you can, line spac­ing until you find some­thing com­fort­able at six to eight words per line. In eReader on my iPhone, that comes to Geor­gia at Medium font size, nor­mal line spac­ing and wide mar­gins. On the iPhone Kin­dle app my options are more lim­ited, so I just go with the sec­ond of the five font sizes. In Stanza, my reader of choice, you can tweak almost every­thing and I have it set up with nearly ideal font, font size, line length and line spacing.

Let’s talk about para­graphs. Most of time, you’ll take what you get. Some books and some read­ers will give you indented para­graphs, like you see in most printed fic­tion, where the line spac­ing doesn’t change but the first line of each para­graph is indented slightly. Oth­ers will give you block para­graphs, where the first line of a para­graph is not indented, but there is a blank line between every para­graph and the next. If you have the option, go with indented para­graphs. They’re no eas­ier nor harder to read than block para­graphs, and they let you fit more on each page, so you turn pages less frequently.

Another point to con­sider at the para­graph level is jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. Here I dif­fer with the con­ven­tional wis­dom. All the stud­ies I’ve read say to go with unjus­ti­fied, or “ragged” right mar­gins, where the let­ter spac­ing is uni­form and each line ends where you run out of words and have no room to fit the next word in the sen­tence. The uni­form let­ter spac­ing makes it eas­ier for your brain to read each word.

In jus­ti­fied para­graphs, the spac­ing between each let­ter or each word is tweaked just enough so that the end of the line makes a straight ver­ti­cal line down the right side of the screen just as the left mar­gin does. Per­son­ally, I like this bet­ter, even if it makes things just a bit harder to read. It looks more like a real book that way. I find ragged mar­gins dis­tract­ing, so for my money, jus­ti­fied is actu­ally eas­ier to read. It helps if your reader pro­gram sup­ports auto­matic hyphen­ation, break­ing big words across lines if they fall at the line end. This means you have vir­tu­ally no instances of the big honk­ing gaps that can occa­sion­ally hap­pen with full jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, big words and shorter line lengths.

Okay, you’ve got all the typog­ra­phy down. What about color? On a lot of phones, you aren’t lim­ited to just black and white. Oddly enough, though, you’re prob­a­bly best off stick­ing with black text on a white back­ground any­way. It offers the best con­trast, which is going to lead to less eye strain. If you want to mimic the warmer feel of a paper book, you can change the back­ground to an off-​white or cream color with­out los­ing much in the way of con­trast. A lot of read­ers allow for inverted col­ors for night read­ing with the lights off, but I find that you’re prob­a­bly bet­ter off just dim­ming the bright­ness to a black on gray that you find com­fort­able. Light text on black doesn’t look very good with font smooth­ing enabled. In gen­eral, I would stay away from other color com­bi­na­tions, and please, never, ever use a graphic tex­ture as your back­ground. A lot of read­ers allow for this, and even make it the default, but it’s just going to dis­tract your eye from the actual text. Yes, it’s very cool that you can make the back­ground look like parch­ment, but don’t do this if you actu­ally want to read the book.

A lot of books will scroll the text for you, like a teleprompter. While this seems like a good idea, in that you can read not actu­ally need­ing to turn the page, I’ve never made it work. My read­ing speed changes depend­ing on the text. Pages with a lot of dia­logue I’ll get too much ahead of the scrolling and get frus­trated because I have to wait, and pages with a lot of descrip­tion or inte­rior mono­logue I’ll have to start skim­ming just to keep up. Stick with turn­ing each page one at a time for max­i­mum readability.

And lastly, we come to all the other stuff your reader pro­gram can dis­play that isn’t the book. Things like title, page num­ber, time, but­tons for all kinds of func­tions: find, anno­tate, book­mark, etc. If you can, keep these to a bare min­i­mum. Every addi­tional thing on the page is some­thing your brain has to rule out every time you see it. On Stanza on my iPhone, I have just the progress bar — a thin line at the very bot­tom of the screen show­ing how much of the book you’ve read rel­a­tive to the total length — and the stan­dard iPhone sta­tus bar at the top. I could even hide the sta­tus bar, but I usu­ally read in bed, and I need to be able to see the time so I know when it’s time to put the book aside and go the heck to sleep if I want to avoid being a zom­bie the next day. Sim­pler is bet­ter, in general.

And that’s it! Now you know enough about typog­ra­phy and how the brain actu­ally reads text to make your ebook read­ing expe­ri­ence as close to or even bet­ter than read­ing a paper book.

I was going to talk about my new sooper seekrit plan to release and mar­ket Uni­fi­ca­tion Chron­i­cles today, but I expe­ri­enced some tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties recently that I just have to rant about. We’ll get to the busi­ness plan stuff, I promise. Eventually.

But first, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

For quite some time now, my writ­ing sys­tem has been rel­a­tively sim­ple and has served me well. I have a note­book in Ever­note for each of my major projects. In each, I have var­i­ous sup­port mate­ri­als along with a note for the man­u­script itself. In this note, I have the out­line for the book in plain text and a .docx file attach­ment for the man­u­script. When it comes time to edit, I open the note, dou­ble click on the attach­ment and edit the doc­u­ment. Ever­note is smart enough to update the note/​attachment every time the file I’m work­ing on is saved (it’s in a temp folder on my hard drive, but that doesn’t usu­ally mat­ter). I also keep my progress spread­sheets in sim­i­lar notes and work on them in a sim­i­lar way.

Until yes­ter­day, this sys­tem worked flaw­lessly. I have Ever­note on every PC I use: my work desk­top and lap­top, my per­sonal net­book, my iPhone. It all works great. Right up until it doesn’t.

A while back, I upgraded my net­book to use the new Ever­note 3.5 beta. Keep in mind, here, that I used to be a pro­fes­sional soft­ware devel­oper. I would never trust my writ­ing to some­thing in the alpha stage of devel­op­ment, but a beta is sup­posed to be rel­a­tively sta­ble, just not fea­ture com­plete (see the Win­dows 7 beta as an exam­ple). Ever­note has made it clear that they will not be sup­port­ing 3.1 very long after 3.5 is offi­cially released, so I fig­ured I may as well start get­ting used to it. So I installed 3.5 Beta 4(!) and set about my work.

Yes­ter­day, the unthink­able hap­pened. Some­how, as I was open­ing the note con­tain­ing my man­u­script, the attach­ment for my man­u­script com­pletely dis­ap­peared! I wasn’t able to undo, and the desk­top synced the change back to the server, so I wasn’t able to pull the attach­ment from any of my other Ever­note clients. It was just gone. Noth­ing in the trash in Ever­note, just gone. 57,000 words of fic­tion, nearly 60 hours of work.

I scoured my hard drive look­ing for a backup or copy of the file. In the third place I looked, I found some­thing that looked promis­ing, and was able to get the file back. If that hadn’t worked, I would have been forced to recon­struct it from emails sent each day to my beta readers.

Psst, pro­gram­mers. Yeah, you. C’mere. You NEVER, EVER screw with the user’s data! A friend of mine pointed out that I was using beta soft­ware, but ANY bug that can irre­triev­ably destroy a user’s data should never have made it past alpha stage! I’ll accept a beta pro­gram crash­ing, but I will NEVER be okay with it trash­ing my data!

/​whacks Dave Eng­berg in the head

So I decided to take my data else­where. If I can’t trust Ever­note to never, ever lose my data, I can’t trust it at all. What else is out there?

A lot of peo­ple rec­om­mend Drop­box. So if fig­ured, sure, I’ll give it a go. I installed it on my net­book, and hey, so far, so good. The UI is clean and effi­cient, and it doesn’t seem to kill my Via CPU net­book (it pre­dates the Atom, we’re talk­ing stone age net­book). Doc­u­ments saved to fold­ers inside the “drop­box” folder on my desk­top are auto­mat­i­cally synced both to the cloud and any other PCs I have linked to my Drop­box account. Feels a lot like Microsoft’s Live Mesh, only about a kajil­lion times faster.

And it worked great until I got to work this morn­ing and tried to install it on my office PC. Ever­note works fine over my cor­po­rate proxy server. It uses the same proxy set­tings as Inter­net Explorer, set up in the Con­trol Panel, so it never even asked. It just worked. And while Drop­box claims to do the same, it doesn’t work. Nor does it work if I man­u­ally set up the proxy set­tings in Drop­box itself, which it does allow for (Seesmic for Win­dows doesn’t, which is why I can’t use it at the office). No mat­ter what I do, I can’t get Drop­box to con­nect to the cloud through our cor­po­rate net­work gob­lins. Stu­pid goblins.

So that’s two highly regarded file sync solu­tions blown out of the water by my par­tic­u­lar cir­cum­stances. I don’t trust Ever­note any­more — even after down­grad­ing it back to 3.1, because I know I can’t keep 3.1 indef­i­nitely — and I can’t use Drop­box on the PC where I spend half my wak­ing hours. So what’s left?

Sadly, the only thing that comes to mind is good old Sneak­er­net. I have a 2GB thumb­drive on my key­chain, and for now, I’m just going to put every­thing on there, and peri­od­i­cally use Microsoft’s Sync­Toy to back it up to the Drop­box folder on my net­book. That way I can access my files on any PC — well, any PC that uses Microsoft Office 2007, because I’m not giv­ing up Word; I’ve tried Google Docs and found it lack­ing — and as long as I remem­ber to run Sync­Toy every so often, they’ll get backed up to both my net­book hard drive and the cloud. It’s an inel­e­gant solu­tion, because it relies on my markedly unde­pend­able wet­ware to remem­ber to back it up, but that’s all I’ve got. Every other solu­tion I know of doesn’t meet my require­ments: sup­port my cor­po­rate net­work, run on both the iPhone and Win­dows, and be safe and dependable.

How do you store your work­ing manuscripts?

Yes­ter­day I was floun­der­ing a bit in my writ­ing. I still really had no firm vision of act 2 and all I did know — that Batarel was try­ing to kill Daniel and Jack was try­ing to catch Daniel and Daniel was try­ing to be nei­ther killed nor caught — didn’t seem like it was much to go on. The more I thought about it, the more it sounded like a Benny Hill skit. And that wasn’t what I wanted.

It occurred to me that part of the prob­lem was that I didn’t know how Daniel was actu­ally going to kill Batarel. In the orig­i­nal book, the immor­tals could be killed by reduc­ing them to tiny pieces and then burn­ing the pieces. A run of the mill RPG could do this in one effi­cient step. But this time around, post-​9/​11, with grenade launch­ers so com­monly avail­able around the world, that seemed too easy. But because I was too close to the source mate­r­ial, I couldn’t think of another way to do it. So I asked Twitter.

jef­fkirvin
How would you kill some­thing that had nanites in its blood that repair dam­age (injuries, aging) almost as fast as they hap­pen? #research

kdaleau­thor
@jeffkirvin Pet­rify instead of kill… fig­ure out what the nanites use for fuel and dis­rupt it in a defin­i­tive, fast way… umm *runs out*

nlow­ell
@jeffkirvin suf­fo­ca­tion #research

Alli_​Flowers
@jeffkirvin Sim­ple. Watch Star­gate and see how they finally did it.

kdaleau­thor
@jeffkirvin Com­puter virus vs. nanites… oppos­ing nanites… remove all blood (if they’re only in the blood)

dmc­duck
@jeffkirvin Irra­di­ate the nanites? Large mag­netic force?

instan­te­ter­nity
@jeffkirvin Acid? Emp? Impact? Maybe dis­able the nanites before you can do any­thing else? Depends on how dras­tic an injury they can fix.

crimsonsky76
@jeffkirvin Try­ing to fig­ure out how to kill your immor­tals? I guess the whole “There can be only one” thing doesn’t work here, huh?

nick­o­laswriter
@jeffkirvin Seal them in a vac­uum and deny them access to raw materials.

dgawlik324
@jeffkirvin the the new Outer Lim­its addressed this once…shock ther­apy to fry the lit­tle bastards…

crimsonsky76
@jeffkirvin How about a virus — worked against the orig­i­nal Vis­i­tors in V and the Borg. Sounds like you’ve made them too pow­er­ful for less.

Small­medium
@jeffkirvin A wooden steak in its heart or a sil­ver bullet.

Not all of these sug­ges­tions were usable, but they got me think­ing. Some of them, like the EMP idea, were bril­liant, but won’t work in Rev­e­la­tion because our heroes don’t know why the immor­tals are immor­tal yet. They won’t learn about the nanites until they get to exam­ine some demon blood in Cru­sade, the next book in the series. But there were enough valid tac­tics and false pos­i­tives to give me some ideas on how Daniel could have sev­eral try/​fail cycles in Act 2.

Thomas Edi­son once said, “I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have suc­ceeded in prov­ing that those 700 ways will not work. When I have elim­i­nated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.” Daniel and com­pany will be doing the same in Act 2. They’ll be try­ing to find a suc­cess­ful way to kill a demon. And they’ll be try­ing not to get killed them­selves in the process. Add to that my real­iza­tion that they no longer have any rea­son why they have to stay in DC, and get an Act 2 that looks like this.

• Daniel and Co. go on the run
• Jack gets a lead that Daniel is still in the metro area, won­ders why
• Daniel and co find Batarel’s house emp­tied and for sale, seller is some anony­mous hold­ing company
• Batarel fol­lows the RV from his house
• Jack inves­ti­gates
• Batarel attacks, gets beheaded, puts head back on, heroes escape to Baltimore
• Jack inves­ti­gates
• Heroes try to drown Batarel
• Jack inves­ti­gates
• Elec­tro­cu­tion in Philadelphia
• Jack inves­ti­gates
• Radi­a­tion in New York
• Jack sees evi­dence that Batarel isn’t human
• Blow up, but not com­pletely, in Newark
• Jack finds Daniel just as Daniel attacks Batarel in a Beth­le­hem Penn­syl­va­nia steel mill
• Dissolve/​Melt/​Burn/​Vaporize
• Daniel, Jeff and Jack kill Batarel while Susan films it

There’s still a lot of stuff miss­ing from this. I know that Susan needs to play a big­ger part, and I’m think­ing she’ll be blog­ging about the entire expe­ri­ence as well as upload­ing videos to YouTube as soon as I can fig­ure out how she can do that with­out tip­ping off the FBI to their where­abouts (I think this is why they hop from one major metro area to another; it would be too easy to track her sig­nal in a rural envi­ron­ment). I’m also think­ing Jack needs to nearly catch Daniel at some point, shades of that scene in “The Fugi­tive” with Har­ri­son Ford and Tommy Lee Jones in the drainage pipe.

I also like a lot of the lit­tle touches, like try­ing to elec­tro­cute Batarel in the home town of Ben Franklin, and end­ing it and meet­ing the Archangel Uriel in a city called Beth­le­hem (not far from where I went to high school, as it turns out). Lit­tle things like that, which weren’t ini­tially intended, tell me that the story is tak­ing on a life of its own, that it’s an organic thing unto itself. A good out­line doesn’t pre­clude organic writ­ing, it just pro­vides a skele­ton on which to base it.

We’ve all seen the new Bing com­mer­cials show­ing peo­ple suf­fer­ing from search engine over­load. I can iden­tify with those thus afflicted, since I go through that every day. Only it’s not hit­ting me when I search Google; it’s hit­ting me when I search Evernote.

Ear­lier this week I hit 6,000 notes in Ever­note. That’s a lot of notes. That’s a huge, thun­der­ing herd of notes, the likes of which used to roam hori­zon to hori­zon on the Col­orado plains. Wait, I think that was buf­falo. But even so, my notes were out of control.

This isn’t Evernote’s fault. It does a dandy job of col­lect­ing and keep­ing all my notes. Things, per­haps obvi­ously, go into the sys­tem rather eas­ily. Get­ting the par­tic­u­lar stuff I’m look­ing for back out at any par­tic­u­lar time can be a problem.

Like Google’s index of the entire inter­webs, once you hit a cer­tain crit­i­cal mass of notes, any search brings back too many matches. This forces you to browse through the list of matches to your search term when brows­ing a list and find­ing what you want with a Mark I eye­ball is exactly what you’d hoped to avoid. Ever­note pro­vides lots of ways to nar­row the search by con­tent, time and place cre­ated and all sorts of other meta­data, and allows you to save that com­bi­na­tion of search cri­te­ria if you need them again in the future. But even so, there’s lots and lots of stuff in my Ever­note data­base that doesn’t strictly need to be there. More to the point, there’s lots of stuff in my Ever­note data­base that I’ll never see again. So why lug it around, even digitally?

I think the source of my issue is that Ever­note is so free-​form that I’m inclined to use it for every­thing so that I have all of my data in one place, even though other solu­tions would work bet­ter for cer­tain kinds of con­tent. I should keep my image files in Picasa or Flickr instead of Ever­note. I should store my to-​read-​later arti­cles in Instapa­per instead of Ever­note. I should keep my drafts in Google Docs, Write­room or on a flash drive rather than in Ever­note. I should keep my tasks in Too­dleDo instead of Ever­note. I think if I put into Ever­note only what I knew I planned to keep so I could use it later, the data size would be man­age­able and it wouldn’t take nearly as long for the iPhone ver­sion to fin­ish sync­ing and let me look up what­ever I opened it for.

But before I go and do some­thing rash (I have an inner R2-​D2, and I’m not afraid to use it!), I thought I’d ask my read­ers (at least the ones that use Ever­note, and I know there are a few of you). What do you store in Ever­note and what do you store else­where? Why?

If I’m going to use Ever­note for GTD because of how amaz­ing it is as an uni­ver­sal inbox, I need to develop a sys­tem that actu­ally exploits Evernote’s strengths, rather than sim­ply trans­lat­ing the paper note­book GTD work­flow to it. Ever­note is dig­i­tal, and that gives me a dif­fer­ent set of assump­tions than a paper note­book. Specif­i­cally, the paper time man­age­ment law of “touch each piece of paper only once” doesn’t apply in the dig­i­tal world.

My GTD sys­tem in Ever­note is decep­tively sim­ple. Every­thing takes place in my default folder, and I only have tags for con­texts. At the note level, there is no dif­fer­ence between a one-​off task and a project. This is not a vio­la­tion of the GTD method, just a dif­fer­ent way of imple­ment­ing it. Let’s walk through the process to see what I mean.

Col­lect

This is where Ever­note really shines. Every­thing in my life even­tu­ally finds its way into Ever­note. Inter­est­ing links from Google Reader or Twit­ter get emailed to my Ever­note account (I need to start just retweet­ing cool stuff from Twit­ter with a @myen tacked on the to the end, which does the same thing, but also shares with my tweeps). I take pic­tures on my iPhone, and then dump them into the iPhone Ever­note client (includ­ing any­thing I get on paper that I want to “file”). Files, emails and memos per­ti­nent to my job get clipped into the Win­dows Ever­note client on my lap­top. And of course ideas, tasks, ran­dom things I hear… any­thing inter­est­ing at all, it goes in the soup. Ever­note is the best “uni­ver­sal cap­ture” inbox I’ve ever seen, and why I keep com­ing back to it for my GTD process instead of ser­vices like Too­dledo or Nozbe.

Process/​Organize

I have a saved search in Ever­note called !Inbox. This search is defined as –tag:* in all note­books. This shows me every untagged note in my entire data­base. I go down the list, start­ing at the top, and ask, “What is this? Is it actionable?”

If it’s not, it gets tagged with !Ref­er­ence and I move on. I used to have dozens, maybe even hun­dreds of tags, but I finally real­ized that such gran­u­lar­ity was slow­ing me down. Evernote’s search is so good that I don’t have to define key­words. If the word I’m likely to search for isn’t in the note itself, it’s prob­a­bly not as rel­e­vant as I think it is.

If it is action­able, I do a lit­tle more thought on the mat­ter. Is it a project? What’s the next action? If it’s a larger project I might do a lit­tle “back of the enve­lope” plan­ning at the top of the note, push­ing down what I’d already clipped, sketch­ing out mile­stones. Then I deter­mine the next action, and make that the title of the note. I assign one or more @contexts as tags, and then move on to the next item on the list.

Review

I have saved searches for all of my con­texts, plus one for Someday/​Maybe. Whether I’m at my desk, at home or on the go, I fire up Ever­note on what­ever device is handy and check out the saved search for the con­text appro­pri­ate at the time. Cur­rently, my con­texts are:

• @Computer (things I can do any­where I have one of my com­put­ers, pretty much anywhere)
• @Home (things that require me to be in or around my house)
• @Internet (things that require an unfil­tered inter­net con­nec­tion, ie things I can’t do on the cor­po­rate net­work because of our strict con­tent fil­ter­ing like down­load­ing executables)
• @Office (things that require cor­po­rate resources)
• @Out (things I have to go to, rather than come to me)
• @Read/Review (read­ing mate­r­ial, by far the biggest list)
• @Shopping (things to buy, online or locally)

These are obvi­ously defined by loca­tion, or more gen­er­ally, resources avail­able. Given that some of these (@computer, @read/review, @shopping) can be done any­where I have my iPhone, which is pretty much every­where, I’m think­ing about adjust­ing my con­texts to be more about resources and energy avail­able. Like hav­ing a con­text for things that can be done in 5 min­utes, things that will take an hour, etc.

Do

Once I have the list up for the cur­rent con­text, I go down the list and do what­ever feels “right”. I bounce around, almost never going down the list in order. I also keep an eye out for things that repeat­edly get passed over, and try to fig­ure out if they’re really doable, if I’m skip­ping them because they have the wrong next action or if it’s some­thing I really have any inten­tion of doing at all. It’s okay to look at some projects and decide, “I’m just not going to do that. I accept the con­se­quences of it not being done.” These get re-​tagged with !Ref­er­ence and fall off the lists.

When I actu­ally do some­thing, I edit the note to change the title to the next action after what I just did, and if nec­es­sary change the con­text tag. I repeat as nec­es­sary so the project steams along until I run out of actions. Then it’s also tagged with !Ref­er­ence and fades into the search­able deep.

That’s it. If I’m look­ing for some­thing to do and noth­ing appeals to me, I can go into my Someday/​Maybe con­text and pro­mote a few things to active projects by putting them in con­texts titled by their next actions (although gen­er­ally, I’m more likely to take a nap). Once a week I sit down and do a brain dump, just typ­ing what­ever pops into my head sep­a­rated by CTRL-​N to put each in a new note. Then I process them as listed above.

This is the sim­plest way of imple­ment­ing GTD in Ever­note I can think of, but no sim­pler. I hits all the major points, but also is stream­lined enough that I’ll actu­ally do it. Every­thing else I’ve tried has had too many steps involved to main­tain the sys­tem, mean­ing I’ll inevitably get tired and wan­der off. This sys­tem looks like it’s easy enough to stick with, but if you have any sug­ges­tions on how to improve it, be sure to let me know in the comments.

As my Twit­ter fol­low­ers know, I’ve been pretty peeved with Ever­note recently. The iPhone client ver­sion has decided that it absolutely, pos­i­tively will not com­plete a sync with the Ever­note servers on my 3G. I’ve done every­thing I can, even sent my log files to the com­pany (no response as of yet), and all of my tou­bleshoot­ing comes down to the same thing. Even after a fresh reboot of my iPhone, with 30MB of RAM avail­able (the most a 128MB 3G ever gets after load­ing the mobile ver­sion of OS/​X), Ever­note will fight for a while and then either spit up the error mes­sage you see here or just crash com­pletely and dump be back to the home­screen, the typ­i­cal reac­tion when an iPhone app runs out of RAM. (The new iPhone 3GS seems to run Ever­note just fine, but then it would; it’s got 256MB of RAM, or five times the free RAM on boot as the 3G has, 150MB com­pared to 30MB.)

The prob­lem with this is that up until just a cou­ple days ago, the mobile web ver­sion of Ever­note wasn’t all that impressive.

This was a pain in the ass to use on my Win­dows Mobile devices, and it’s a pain in the ass to use on my iPhone. It’s a sim­ple WAP-​style page that doesn’t do much. But hey, it worked on my iPhone when the ded­i­cated client didn’t, so at least it was some­thing. I only used it for look­ing up notes, opt­ing to email new notes to my pri­vate Ever­note email address when I wanted to cre­ate some­thing new. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.

Well, now it’s pretty too.

The new ver­sion of the mobile web Ever­note uses some nice iPhone/​Androidish CSS to look far more pro­fes­sional, more like a real app than a web page. It even sports some slick new menus that are both touch friendly and easy to use.

It’s a webapp rather than a native app, but that really isn’t a prob­lem for me. I’m already using the Safari-​optimized Gmail instead of the iPhone’s Mail client for read­ing my Gmail, the Safari-​optimized Google Reader instead of Byline, and iPhone-​friendly ver­sions of Google News, AP News, GoodReads, Wikipedia, the list goes on and on. Using webapps instead of native clients is a way to mul­ti­task on the iPhone with­out jail­break­ing and run­ning Back­grounder since you can have up to eight pages open at a time. And the inter­face for man­ag­ing them even bears a strik­ing resem­blance to man­ag­ing cards on the Pre.

Only one prob­lem remains, really. There is a JavaScript-​based clip­per avail­able for Safari Mobile that allows you to send what­ever you’re cur­rently look­ing at to Ever­note. The JavaScript looks like this:

javascript:location.href=‘http://www.evernote.com/clip.action?url=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+’&title=’+encodeURIComponent(document.title);

And it works.

The prob­lem, as you can see above, is that this script directs you to the full size ver­sion of Ever­note rather than a mobile page. This is espe­cially awk­ward when try­ing to tag what you just clipped.

I’ve tried every vari­a­tion I can think of to merge the JavaScript above with the URL of the new mobile site:

https://www.evernote.com/mobile/MobileSetup.action?noRedirect=true

And noth­ing seems to work. So for now, I’m deal­ing with the awk­ward clip­ping in Safari, but pretty happy with the rest of the Ever­note Mobile Web expe­ri­ence. So much so that I’m really not even all that wor­ried about the iPhone client. The mobile web ver­sion does almost every­thing I need, and for the rest — pho­tos and other mul­ti­me­dia — I can email stuff to Ever­note. All I’m really miss­ing is the iPhone client’s offline favorites, but I’ll live.

As I type this, there are less than 36 hours to go before the open­ing keynote of Apple’s 2009 World­wide Devel­oper Con­fer­ence. The inter­nets are buzzing with spec­u­la­tion as to what we are going to see. I’ve read all the rumors, spec­u­la­tion and pre­dic­tions, and run them through my sophis­ti­cated bull­shit detec­tor, and applied my years of expe­ri­ence ana­lyz­ing the mobile indus­try to suss out what I think we’re actu­ally going to see. I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before. But I really don’t think it’s likely.

(and for what it’s worth, I think this is not too far from how it might go down)

I don’t think Apple intended for this to be a release con­fer­ence. I think even as recently as a month ago, they expected to have Phil Schiller make some announce­ments about iPhone OS 3.0 and Snow Leop­ard, and maybe announce the third gen­er­a­tion iPhone, which I think was intended to be called the iPhone HD. The actual release of the 3.0 firmware and the new iPhone would be in mid-​July.

The events of May and the first week of June have, I believe, changed Apple’s plans, and forced them to accel­er­ate their time table. Microsoft’s announce­ment of the Zune HD and the incred­i­ble media hype sur­round­ing the release of the Palm Pre, not to men­tion Palm’s sur­prise announce­ment that the Pre accom­plishes media sync by pre­tend­ing to be an iPod and using Apple’s own iTunes soft­ware, has, shall we say, fired the com­pet­i­tive flames within Apple’s Tim Cook, Phil Schiller and yes, Steve Jobs.

Check your iTunes instal­la­tion. Does it say it will check for the next update on June 8? Even if you just installed 8.2? That’s because it knows some­thing we don’t, namely that the new iTunes firmware will be avail­able right after the keynote, rather than in July. If you have a jail­bro­ken iPhone, restore it now, because you’ll need a clean instal­la­tion to upgrade on Mon­day. The 3.0 firmware will be pretty much what we saw in beta 5, with no big new fea­tures like back­ground processes. AT&T will offer to add unlim­ited teth­er­ing for your lap­top to your account for an addi­tional $30 a month.

More than that, Schiller (and maybe Jobs) will unveil the new iPhone Video, a name which has already shown up in some behind the scenes code. This will be very sim­i­lar to the iPhone 3G in size and shape, but will have a slightly dif­fer­ent face. It will have a 320×570, 16×9 aspect screen. push­ing the ear­piece grill fur­ther towards the top of the device. In many ways it will look like a “stealth” 3G, with a gun­metal bezel and a matte fin­ish black back. The front glass will con­ceal a VGA front fac­ing video cam­era for iChat to go along with the 3.2 MP aut­o­fo­cus cam­era on the back.

The iPhone Video will be avail­able imme­di­ately via Apple.com, and at Apple stores either Mon­day or Tues­day. Not sure when AT&T retail out­lets will get it. It will come in three capac­i­ties: 8GB for $99 with a two year con­tract, 16GB for $199 and 32GB for $299.

That’s a lot, and I think they’ll stop there. I don’t expect them to announce the iTablet or iPad or what­ever they call the Kindle-​sized iPod Touch we all sus­pect them to be work­ing on. Steve’s a show­man and he knows the first rule of show­man­ship: always leave them want­ing more. We’ll hear a lit­tle about Snow Leop­ard in the open­ing com­ments, which I expect to be released sooner rather than later, prob­a­bly late July or August. And of course, judg­ing by the ban­ners already hang­ing at WWDC, they’ll be play­ing up the App Store, and will show­case a few big name appli­ca­tions that take advan­tage of fea­tures exclu­sive to 3.0. Look for Doc­u­ments to Go and Bee­jive to fig­ure prominently.

Am I off base? We have 36 hours to find out. Josh Curry and I are plan­ning to record our return to Max­i­mum Geek Mon­day night, so be sure to check in for our analy­sis and other tech news hijinks.