Building a Writing Environment with Notebooks, RightNote and Scrivener

As we hit the end of the year, I think I have all my writing tools sorted out. I’ve been going out trying all sorts of different things, but I think I have it locked down now. As it stands I’ll be using Notebooks for Windows, RightNote and Scrivener. Most of the writing I do will start life in Notebooks. It’s a simple but very effective text editor that gives me a hierarchy to organize my topics, but doesn’t get bogged down with formatting and styles. When I’m trying to put an idea together there’s no point in worrying about how it looks, that is the final step. It also gives me the ability to work across platforms – Windows, Mac and iPad. Notebooks is also a great way to take notes on the iPad and then sync them up to the desktop where I can expand and refine them. More complicated, multi-part or sensitive documents will be handled in […]

Getting the hang of Scrivener

Now that I’ve completed the tutorial for Scrivener, I’m starting to get the hang of how this application works. In some ways it’s like OneNote as well as AllMyNotes Organizer and RightNote. In fact, it seems to pull in bits and pieces from a lot of familiar apps. In simple terms, there is a tree/folder structure and an editor. And unlike other tools, like Word for example, the focus is on writing, not formatting. That’s one thing I really like, there’s not some over powering, all encompassing, ever intrusive ribbon of formatting and view options that just gets in the way. The first order of business was to build a structure and import some old writing into it. That was actually quite easy now that my articles have been copied out of OneNote and turned into .TXT files. That was actually done with the help of Notebooks for Windows. Since these are all older works, my goal was to basically […]

Posts by Pico – A quick review of the blog editing tool

I’ve worked with Posts for a little while now, enough to form an opinion of how it works. And overall it’s a pretty nice little program that has a lot of features going for it. With a couple of simple feature fixes, it could rise to the top of the blog editing software pile and hold it’s own against the likes of Blogsy and Poster. Here are several of the features I really like: The thumbnail view of articles is pretty nice. The titles show up in large print like a slew of newspaper headlines. It supports multiple blogs both from WordPress and Blogger. You can edit and post comments from within Posts itself. The editor is very efficient. You can use formatting such as H1, Blockquote or Pre tags. You can insert links, indent, add images, select the publicating date, set the Category and Tags as well as jump into the HTML editor to fine tune the formatting. You […]