The Independent Stitch

On trial versions of software

This is an aside to another post that I'm working on, but it's gotten long enough that I'm just going to put it out there while I continue writing about the main topic.

I've been working on learning several new pieces of software. I've had to figure out how to do new things with Adobe Acrobat 9, and I am actively (if slowly) learning DevonThink and experimenting with MarsEdit. My list for the future includes improving my HTML knowledge in what we jokingly call my spare time. And so on.

I truly appreciate software trials that are based on a certain number of hours (or noncontiguous days) of usage, rather than a calendar-limited span. My time is so divided between various responsibilities that months can go by between when I download and install a program, when I open it for the first time, and when I start figuring out how to use it.

With a generous but limited number of hours of access to the fully functioning program, I can spread my learning over the long time it takes me to thoroughly evaluate.

The "fully functioning" aspect is important. If I can only input six records, I can play around but I can't tell whether the system will work for me. Same goes for printing. I don't care if there's a watermark across every printout that says "TRIAL VERSION," but I do need to print.

If I have an allotment of time that I can use in convenient increments and complete access to the program, I can put the program (and myself) through enough paces to do a real evaluation. I can either find out that it won't work for me or get so hooked on it that the licensing fee seems trivial.

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Scrivener was the first program I evaluated on this model.

"Download Scrivener and try it for yourself. The trial runs for 30 days of actual use: if you use it every day it lasts 30 days; if you use it only two days a week, it lasts fifteen weeks. Once the trial expires, you can export all of your work or buy a licence to continue using Scrivener."

Well into, but not at the end of, the test period, I happily purchased my license. I began recommending it to everyone I come across who writes, plans courses, or otherwise needs to organize a lot of material. Later I bought my daughter a copy that she used to write her master's thesis. I upgrade without hesitation, and I can't imagine living without it. (Although Scrivener was Mac-only for a long time, there is now a PC version in beta.)

All software should be so good that it's a joy to pay the developer for the privilege of using it.

Scrivener was pretty easy to move into. I was running with it almost immediately, although it still has a lot of functions I'm not using yet. Ramping up my skills with that program is also on my to-do list.

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With a heavy-duty program with a forbidding threshold, it takes time to figure out first how to make it work and then whether it will earn its keep by handling tasks that need to get done by this person working in this environment.

That's where I am with DevonThink. It's really powerful. I think I'm going to love it. I'm not there yet, even though I am working (as time permits) with both the program's own help system and with Take Control of Getting Started with DevonThink 2, by Joe Kissell. I'm still, thankfully, in the trial period, after several months: most of my time is spent reading about the program, dipping into it to look at something, then going back to thinking about how it will fit my needs. I'm throwing URLs into an inbox. I haven't begun sorting them yet, nor have I imported my PDF collection. Thank heaven, I have

"150 hours of non-continuous runtime free trial, 200 email messages and 20 OCR runs per day."

If I'd already paid for the program, I'd be trying to learn all its aspects while feeling guilty for having spent the money on something I wasn't able to put to use immediately, and while feeling anxiously compelled to master the program faster than current reality permits. As a result, I might end up writing it off as a bad decision on my part, shelving it (with a tinge of lasting resentment), and shifting my time investment to a search for an easier solution. That's bad all around.

As it is, if I find the program as invaluable as I think it will prove, I may purchase the most extended version of the program, possibly bundled with DevonAgent and maybe also a fast scanner model that is well integrated to facilitate a (near-) paperless office, which is something I need to work toward, since fiber has taken over every spare inch (and then some). I wouldn't ever consider this much investment without a thorough trial.

Thanks to the extended and functionally unlimited trial, I'll be completely comfortable with my final decision (whatever it is) and I'll turn into a vocal advocate of (i.e., part of the marketing effort for) the software.

Generous and flexible software trial periods: very, very smart policies for everyone involved.

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Post written with a trial version of MarsEdit. I have other offline blog composition software that hasn't quite worked for me, and I had to buy it to find that out. MarsEdit is being very promising so far.

dancepulse and PranaMamma: two brand new blogs

I just learned that my sister recently started a blog (and has been having computer problems), and then I got a note from a friend I've known for at least a dozen years (but have never met in person) who began her blog today.

They are both smart, wise women who know how to write. I can think of a number of people who read this blog who would very much enjoy their perspectives.

dancepulse: Dance education in particular, and arts education in general

Meg Mahoney, my sister, is a full-time dance educator in an inner-city public school. She didn't get to this place in life overnight. She knows a lot, and I'm so glad she's sharing her hard-earned knowledge: on how she moved from dancer to independent instructor to classroom teacher to full-time movement specialist, and on how she does what she does with the kids.

I know first-hand what a good teacher she is. When we lived in the same small town and were both in our 20s, she taught dance classes and I was one of her students. Those experiences have made a profound, ongoing difference in my life.

Here's a video prepared by KCTS-TV in Seattle when Meg won a Golden Apple Award, which recognizes extraordinary teachers. It's a little over 5 minutes long.

PranaMamma: Helping people keep breathing

Although PranaMamma—Respiratory Therapy: A Second Career in Mid-Life is presented anonymously, I know exactly who this is and how much life experience and richness she brings to her mid-life drastic career change. She's a fiber person who understands a number of elemental processes. She's taking on breath now. Everything she does is infused with spirit.

I'm looking forward to hearing more of her stories.

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Computer update

I plan to limp along for a while, because I don't have the heart (or time) to—again—format the hard drive and reinstall the operating system and all of the software and documents. I have tasks to complete and deadlines to meet. Everything's backed up, redundantly, so the amount of damage that can be done through software malfunction is limited.

Computer-geek friends have suggested ways to prevent future problems by creating drive partitions (which require rebooting when changing programs) or operating virtual machines. I'd have to set up networking to get files from one program to another, if the programs were operating on different partitions or virtual machines.

This does not sound like a comfortable, fluid working environment. In fact, it sounds less convenient than occasional blue-screen forced shutdowns.

I'll be looking into ways to dock the MacBook in the main office and hook it up to the printer and monitor without completely disabling the PC (which still runs several essential programs for which I have not found Mac equivalents).

From PC to Mac, continued

It's been quiet around here, except for occasional exclamations of wonder and some muttering. If this post is semi-coherent, forgive me and chalk it up to too much time in training mode.

Getting a Mac through its initial paces turns out to be exceptionally easy. Attempting to leap across the chasm to full professional functionality resembles landing in a foreign country with a language related to, but completely different from, one's native tongue.

The overall take is good.

Long-term plans

My goals are shifting as I explore the possibilities. I decided to obtain the machine to hopefully sidestep the massive problems I've been having with the layout software. Adobe tech support has not been able to solve them. I suspect at this point that they are resulting from resource allocation conflicts occurring because I've been running under Windows. They have not been solved by multiple, repeated drastic measures, like installing and uninstalling software so many times I lost count months ago, wiping the hard drive and starting over (several times), or purchasing a new PC and going through all of that again.

I acquired a minimal Mac (though not a miniMac) as a desperation move to get my small publishing company out of a total and dangerous stall. The plan has been to put some sort of layout software on the new platform and keep moving, seeing whether I can get past the logjams and back into business.

Adobe appears to have revised its previous policy of not permitting cross-platform upgrades. The information that this can now be accomplished is hidden several layers deep in the company's site, but it exists. At least for the moment. Ah, yes, the service note that can be found by digging into and reading many pages almost randomly is dated 11/17/2008. Sometimes I feel like I'm wasting my time going and looking at these companies' sites in such detail, but sometimes it pays off.

I'd been thinking I would go back to QuarkXPress, which this year has more liberal upgrade and cross-platform use policies than Adobe does (and than Quark has had in the past). And built-in support for Asian languages, which could be handy at any moment. I may still get Quark in the foreseeable future. However, my brain already feels like it's being put through a food processor because of the change in operating systems and it's going to be challenging enough to cope with an upgrade to a familiar program. Yes, I used to be moderately fluent in Quark, but it's been five years. . . .

Right now I'm thinking I'll stick with the Adobe software for which I already have reflexes in place, and figure out a way to make the layout tasks easier by hooking up the Mac laptop to the larger monitor (which is Mac-compatible) and the Wacom tablet (essential) and maybe the keyboard I'm familiar with.

But that's all future work.

Back to some surprises that have arisen during the PC-to-Mac change:

Easter eggs

In computer lingo, an "Easter egg" is an "intentional hidden message or feature" in software or a book or the like (mostly but not all electronic objects). Having gotten a Mac in order to run publishing software, I feel like I'm already discovering Easter eggs galore in the universe of this machine: capacities that would have been worth the shift all on their own, if I'd known.

Friends have been suggesting software that runs only on Mac and looks nearly magical, if it does what it says it will.

Scrivener has been built to handle long, complex documents. Almost every writing project I engage in is long and complex. This software looks like it will become my new favorite. The only thing it won't be good for is projects that I'm editing for outside clients where I need to keep track electronically of the changes I'm making. Over the years, I have learned how to keep a massive project in my head while moving parts of it around and rewriting as I go—simultaneous awareness of both macro and micro levels (as I think of this, I'm usually carrying around a dozen or so such projects at a time). It's a good set of skills to have, but one that sometimes requires Excedrin. Scrivener looks like it will do a bunch of the heavy lifting at the macro level, leaving large portions of my brain under less stress. It can keep track of drafts, notes, completed chapters, research, images. . . . I have several big projects to load into it already. They're large enough that I may get them all there by some time next spring. One at a time. Thanks, Jenny G. in Ireland, for the tip.

Journler looks like it's fantastic for recording random thoughts that I won't want to lose, and helping coalesce ideas, and assembling smaller projects. I have a lot of random thoughts. It would be good to be able to find them again more easily.

And Quicksilver is a utility that will save a lot of keystrokes. For example, it can be used to launch programs . . . or to group-resize photographs for the blog. And lots more. I won't learn how much more very fast, but it will be put to use soon and I'll learn its capacities gradually.

Thanks to Corey in Seattle for both of those leads.

Now, I haven't actually used any of this software yet, although I have downloaded and (more or less) installed the programs, and have provisionally opened them, and have gone through the tutorial for Scrivener, eyes wider with amazement at each screen.

Within the operating system itself (Mac OS X v. 10.5, known as Leopard) there is a feature called Spaces, that's like the separate desktops I had in the Linux build on my other laptop. Very nice for preventing operator overload on a system that's used for several different purposes. Open the space for writing Book A and all you see there are the tools you need to write that book. Shift to the space for mail and browsing and general computing work, and Book A is neatly out of sight, yet still easy to access, in its own space. And so on.

Another feature of OS X is called Exposé, a sort of simple little program that helps the operator deal with a gazillion open windows and find exactly the one that's needed.

There's a whole lot here. I've removed a bunch of things from the dock (combination start menu and task bar) to remind myself I don't have to master it all at once. Just enough to get the work done. Which means quite a lot of it.

The foundations

I'm still learning the Mac's basic operating processes. I've learned a bit about installing programs from the three above. It's easier on a Mac than on a PC, although it's apparently so easy that many resources don't describe how to do it. And so easy that someone coming from the world of Windows and Linux needs a little help to figure it out.

The Mac comes with an impressive array of software already installed for the fun stuff a person can do with computers: music, photos, movies, address book, browser, and the like.

iWork, which is Apple's own suite of office applications, has to be bought separately, but is a cinch to install. Now I have a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program. I'm told they open and save to MS Office formats. I'm not sure they'll handle my Open Office documents directly, but I can save those as other formats before I bring them in. It'll just take some conversion time. (I remember when word processors could not read each other's formats at all.)

Programs discovered on the web apparently get downloaded as what are called DMG files, which are disk images, a concept I'm familiar with from Linux, but there the similarity ends. The DMG file gets "mounted" on the computer, as if it were a separate drive, and then you do something involving dragging it to the Applications folder, which should (and sometimes is) all you have to do . . . except sometimes it's a little more involved than that . . . and then you "eject" the disk image, and then, if you want to, also delete it from the computer, a point that's not remotely obvious unless you know it's obvious.  I'm not very good at this yet, which is why it probably sounds confusing. Yes, it's easier than PC installation and apparently doesn't usually require a reboot, or disabling and re-enabling the antivirus software. But it is NOT totally evident.

And I haven't figured out why there is now an alias (shortcut, to us PC types) of my entire Applications folder now located in a subfolder related to one of the new programs and I can't figure out how to get rid of it ("error 61" the last time I tried). Nor can a friend with many years of Mac experience.

I'll be visiting the Mac shop on Monday. It is sensibly closed for the holiday weekend.

Meanwhile, I have lots of other things to learn about this system.

Like, for example, user names and passwords. I've been having to carry my handwritten notebook full of this information around with me, which is hardly convenient. The Mac system is well thought out, and there's undoubtedly a miraculously easy solution to this problem. I've gotten as far as a niggling idea that it's called "keychain," but I haven't figured out how to implement it yet.

Then there is the built-in browser, Safari, which is in many ways like Firefox, the program I'm accustomed to and can install here if I like, although I'll give Safari a shot first. I can't figure out yet how to have Safari okay pop-ups for SOME web sites while leaving the pop-up blocker generally on, and I haven't located a TinyURL plug-in for it yet, although I have many of my frequently use sites bookmarked and I have my "sub with Bloglines" thingie installed. ("Thingie" is a technical term for "item that does what I want it to.")

Composing on the new Mac

I've just written this post entirely on the new MacBook. There aren't any pictures because I wanted to get a post up before I go digging into the next part of a help system or manual (leaning heavily on David Pogue's Switching to the Mac, Leopard Edition, and Mac OS X Leopard, both The Missing Manual series, and Robin Williams' Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard). I have great faith that the Mac will handle photos beautifully.

Wait, here's a photo. I just took it with the computer's built-in camera (which also does video). It took me about two minutes to figure out how to operate the program and the camera and to snap the picture.

It will take me quite a bit longer to figure out why it's a mirror image.

Emblematic of this whole process.

Acccomplishment: I've ALMOST quit hitting control-C and control-V for copy and paste. I've ALMOST got the hang of doing command-C and command-V instead.

Special thanks to Donna, Kris, Susan, and Kristi, as well as Jenny G. and Corey, for moral support and practical advice.

Abby Franquemont on "should everyone spin?"

If you haven't seen and read Abby Franquemont's recent post on whether everyone should spin, and why, you may want to check it out. Make sure you have a few minutes for reading and thinking before you click that link, then go have fun.

Yep. That's it.

Initially reluctant blogger reaches one-year mark

One year ago today, I uploaded my first blog post. That wasn't the first day I'd tried but the first day I succeeded. I'd been encouraged to start a blog by other participants in the ethnic knitting online group. I'd been extremely resistant to take on anything new because I was all too aware I didn't have time for one more thing (which has turned out to be true).

But after reading a couple of books on blogging, I started one. Leaning heavily on the perspective and guidance in Rebecca Blood's The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog, I decided to start slowly, find out what blogging was about for me, and see what happened.

(It turns out that Rebecca Blood is also a knitter. . . . )

My initial intention was to write two or three posts a week, of about 200 words each, which I'd learned was the "optimal" length. I borrowed, then traded some work for, an old digital camera. I signed up for a TypePad account and began figuring out how to post. I didn't do anything to attract readership (one of Rebecca's smart suggestions) other than add the blog URL to my e-mail signature and make up business cards with the address that I could hand to people if we happened to be talking face-to-face about blogging.

It's been a year and it's time to evaluate.

• I've written 100 posts, which over the year averages out to just about two posts a week. The intervals vary widely, but the overall goal has been met.
• The 200-word framework is a joke. If I could limit myself to shorter posts, blogging would take smaller chunks out of my days and readers would find it easier to skim the contents—but 200 words rarely gives me time to find out what I'm thinking, much less to shape those thoughts with any nuance. And nuance is how my mind works. I don't edit the posts much because they'd never get published. ("Don't edit much" for me is probably not the same as it would be for most people; I am an editor, after all. I edit reflexively. But the blog posts are not "finished" in the sense that an essay is "finished"—often after months of exploration and revision. I could do 200-word posts, but they would take five times as long to complete.)
• I get to talk about things that normally just rattle around in my head, and sometimes people comment on them. This is a huge plus for someone who generally works in solitude in a small home office in a basement.
• Blogging takes even more time than I thought it would, in part because I enjoy it. At the time I began considering the blog experiment, I was doing individual creativity coaching with Eric Maisel. Eric said, and I'm paraphrasing, "Watch out. A blog may consume time you could be spending on other projects," the implication being that those other projects would be more creatively and/or financially rewarding. Eric was 100 percent right. I've been spending time and energy on blogging that other projects could use. Those other projects would have had more creative mass, and might have helped pay the mortgage. What I need to do in the coming year is figure out how to do both the blog and the bigger projects (plus, of course, the independent publishing and the knitting and occasional housework, deadlines permitting).
• Digital photography is fun. I've even indulged in a smaller, more convenient camera that has opened up many possibilities for me.

The best thing is this:

• I've met new people I'm delighted to know . . . some only through the internet, and a few in person after making blog connections.

Conclusion: I'll keep posting, even though it's amazing how much time it takes! Yesterday's post began at about 9 a.m. and finally resolved about twelve hours later. I spent a chunk of time chasing down links through Google and then entered changes to update and revise some of them thanks to input by another of the High IQ Kids editors.

(1. I could have chosen not to include the links, which would have cut my time by two-thirds, but I thought they were interesting. 2. In the realm of regular work, I did get one medium-sized Cowichan knitting chart completed before bed, and probably kept a few other balls in the air that I don't remember because I take that kind of work for granted. As I recall, I did tasks related to shipping 3,000 books in the new printing of one title around the country and set in motion an order for more advance reading copies of another title, because the printer's going to be about ten days late with the real books and we have a blog tour starting October 1.)

On the positive side, by the end of the day I felt like I'd not only started a job but also finished it. Most of the work I do, including those other, more substantial personal creative projects, takes years to get from idea to completion.

Thanks to everyone who's visited my blog over this first year, whether you've commented or not. You folks who comment: thanks times a hundred. I appreciate our conversations a great deal.