What, after all, is a blog without some rants about technology? Or have we passed that point already?
I wrote one a couple of years ago, at the time that I had (finally, long overdue) acquired a shiny MacBook Pro. Alas, we have had to have some words abut performance and stability recently, and we have decided that installing a new hard drive could make us both happier. So in went an SSD, and dare I say: it rocks. Seriously. If you have an older MacBook, consider doing the same thing before buying a new one altogether. After all: they are build to last, just need a little tender care and affection now and then.
I also wrote something about apps and workflows at the time. Having used the thing for some 3 odd years, perhaps it is time to take a step back and think about it again.
First: cross-platformity has become a recurring issue. I am stuck with Windows at work, have had an Android phone, and now flash a newer Nokia.
To the rescue comes Evernote and Dropbox. That should not surprise you. I use nvAlt as my OS X client for Simplenote — but perhaps not as much as I used to (Evernote quietly taking over. But sometimes, for like a quick shopping list). The charm of this is that you can find reasonably nice Simplenote client for all my other platforms.
And, yes: Scrivener. When I wrote my previous techie post, I mentioned this fabulous app as something of a cult hit. It is hardly anymore. I believe that for a large array of tasks that involve writing and organizing, you would be a fool for not at least considering using Scrivener. And it is cross-platform, now.
But for certain things — such as writing this post — it is perhaps a bit of overkill. I have tried a number of lightweight editors and word processors. I tried out TextMate but thought it was a little but expensive — especially as the future development seemed to be stalled. So I used, happily, TextWrangler for a while. Free, nice, but too limited in the end.
To the rescue comes Sublime Text. In some ways almost a TextMate knockoff, but under rapid development, and having a large, active user base. And it is, guess what, both for OS X and Windows.
I have come to really, no: really, like writing in Markdown and both Sublime Text and Scrivener have excellent (but quite different) support for Markdown. When it comes to turning the marked down text into something else, I find that Pandoc rules supreme. And if that something else happens to be Latex, and you use a Mac, look no further than XeLaTex. Fonts without trouble. If you have been using Latex, you know why this is a blessing indeed.
At work, I often convert the Markdown into Word docx with Pandoc. That creates clean and useful documents. My home Macbook is a Microsoft Free Zone, so I occasionally convert to RTF in order to import into Nisus Writer Pro. A nice and affordable program that is everything MS Word should have been, but is no more. I must admit, though, that since I have “perfected” my Markdown-based workflows, I use Nisus less and less.
This reflects what I use my Macbook for mostly: writing stuff. I will add but one thing: Aperture sings with the SSD. With a largish libray (20,000+ files, many RAW) start-up time from clicking the icon to Aperture being responsive is no more than 5 seconds. I guess that we most conclude that Aperture is a very heavy disk user…