📝 A quick Markdown roundup

Since my compadres at work have brought Macs into their lives, they were asking about note taking apps, and which worked with Markdown. Ironically, in the Mac space, pretty much every editor supports Markdown. There are so many it can be a little overwhelming. I originally wasn’t on board the Markdown train, I didn’t see the point since it came across as a subset of HTML. I am not a fan of HTML and its 1990 style Wordperfect tags. But, I’ve been schooled and now see Markdown is much easier to understand and use. It’s also in dozens of other web based apps like Jira, GitHub, Slack, WordPress, etc. Oddly, Microsoft doesn’t seem to be on board with Markdown. The number of Markdown editors for Windows? In the days of yore, you would write a document in Microsoft Word (which is a horror unto itself) or the archaic tags of HTML, then run it through a converter or hope the […]

💻 Using AI for Content Creation

People are absolutely wetting themselves over the concept of AI content creation with AI-powered tools revolutionizing the way we write. The idea of being able to fill a blog with dozens of articles per day or to have students generate papers with just a few keystrokes is all the rage, and fear. Now you can procrastinate until 5 minutes before the deadline, bash out some ideas, then poof, AI saves the day. Pretty sure that’s not the reality, so I decided to try it out and run a bit of an experiment. I had AI generate a few articles to see what it made. First, I wrote out a list of topics in an outline. I fed that list into the AI and asked it to use a couple of different styles and tones. The generated content was interesting, and not too bad. It wasn’t amazing, but it wasn’t terrible. It was certainly readable, but it wasn’t something turn in […]

📕A quick look at note taking on Mac and Windows

This is an interesting turn of events, two developers I work with bought Macs during Black Friday sales, and wanted to know some of the software I use, including note taking. Another developer, no Mac yet, wanted to know what I used for note taking on Windows because Notepad++ is unruly with too many tabs. Through sharing my screen, they saw some interesting apps, and figured I was the person to ask. I have an answer for both, so let’s have a look. For me, there are two kinds of notes, short and long term. Short term: Notes that are meaningful for a day, week, or maybe the length of a sprint. They are related to the ticket I’m working on, such as test data, user details, or something that won’t matter a few weeks from now. These notes will be committed to the ticket, so I don’t need to keep them. Long term: Notes I want to archive and […]

Using an iPad Pro with Scrivener for NaNoWriMo 2021

November is known for many things including NaNoWriMo. This year, I actually have a story idea I want to pursue, so I’ve decide to play along using a two pronged attack, the Mac Pro and the iPad Pro.The main work will be done on the Mac, using the following tools: Scrivener for writing DevonThink Office Pro for research TaskPaper for outlining, tracking and task management For the iPad Pro 12.9, I’m going with the following: Scrivener for iOS DevonThink ToGo (synched with the Mac) Story Planner (May not be needed Although I’ve used Scrivener on the Mac for 5 years, I’ve never tried it for the iPad. I’m going the cheap route and using a standard Bluetooth keyboard and a simple stand. The Magic Keyboard would be a festive touch, but who has that kind of money? The iPad Pro will be my laptop and give me a chance to step away and really focus when I need to hit […]