I have no idea, nor do I have the time to look into why the Sane mails have suddenly stopped.
I rewrote the mailer to move from nail to a python-based mailer, which *looks* like it’s doing the deed, but, umm, doesn’t.
So I’m thinking of moving to FeedBurner, if only to provide email subscription access to the feed updates.
What do other people use?
Big Bad Book Blog » Blog Archive » Chipping Away at Writer’s Block:
1) Free Write
One of the best ways to get your creative juices moving again is to write–about anything. It doesn’t even have to be good. Just sit down, pen in hand, and let the ideas flow. A great way to do this is by using “free association.” Psychologists sometimes use this exercise with their patients to determine the subconscious cause of a problem. It can be similarly used by writers to understand the basis of their writer’s block or just to generate ideas.
This one, in particular, is what Writer.app is all about. It’s the tool for getting you to think forward about your story, and not worry so much about what it is you’re writing. Just get something down, don’t interrupt your flow with the mental editor kicking in every couple seconds.
[Writing his new book, God Save the Fan] took him just five months, on a separate computer that isn’t connected to the Internet and only runs Word (and Minesweeper)
Sounds a bit like what Writer.app does, only without, you know, buying/having a separate computer part.
Okay, so most of these aren’t articles/reviews dedicated solely to Writer.app (for shame, for shame!), but we get a little mention (including… well, let’s see the commentary below, on a per article basis):
Not bad.
The True Drafting Tool Release
I nicknamed this one the true drafting tool release because this release puts Writer.app at the center (well, the center part towards the front, anyway) of a writer’s workflow.
What that means is that it’s even easier to get text into and out of Writer.app than ever before. (I resisted the urge to put an exclamation point there, I obviously need to hire some marketing staff.) Here’s what I mean:
Continue reading Writer.app 1.4 – The True Drafting Tool Release
A handy tool for testing services in your app is in the good old LaunchServices framework:
/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -f
Running it without flags will print out usage info… a great tool to save you time logging in and out.
After literally years in development, Writer.app has hit that all-important 1.3.2. 1.3.2!
In dog years, that’s a lotta years.
At any rate, there are a few handy new features in 1.3.2:
And here it is, a first peek at the absolute best feature of this release:
And thus ends the shortlived career of the desk L and I share (and some random papers with superimposed text) as an icon. Let the healing begin.
I don’t know if the Sane main issue writer is just really old (well, it is… 2001 or so, which is old, in software terms, I suppose), but this little Cocoa app that drives Sane Magazine each week (umm… except for the last two, since we’ve been on… hiatus/vacation), needed a little upgrade recently. But moving it to Leopard the other day I noticed that it still used Find By Content’s FBCSummarizeCFString() function… which was new as of 10.2 and deprecated as of 10.4 (doh). This was for the handy dandy summary of the latest issue we produce. A little known, little used feature, but there it is. At any rate, to get our summarization up to speed, it just took a little digging and a tiny little bit of work.
So I figured I’d write about the quick and easy fix, since it took me a few minutes of digging to find the replacement function to use: you need to look into Search Kit.
A combo of SKSummaryCreateWithString to get an SKSummaryRef and SKSummaryCopySentenceSummaryString on that with the number of sentences you want to limit it to gets you back to where we were with FBCSummarizeCFString.
CFStringRef myTextString = CFStringCreateCopy(NULL, (CFStringRef)[[self mainText] string]);
CFStringRef mySummaryString;
UInt32 numOfSentences = 2;
SKSummaryRef summaryRef = SKSummaryCreateWithString(myTextString);
mySummaryString = SKSummaryCopySentenceSummaryString(summaryRef, numOfSentences);
Enjoy.
Just a quick note while everyone naps (the other 3 in the house, now that the new one has finally arrived), Writer, ContactCreator, and CalendarCreator all appear to be fine with Leopard.
And the new data detectors in Mail.app look great at what Calendar and Contact Creator were intended to do… not that I’ll stop (or, ehm, re-start) developing them, but they are a pretty nice implementation, worth checking out.
While we’re all waiting around for the next baby to be born…
Q.I. Software‘s been busy, updating both useful services (ContactCreator and CalendarCreator) to Universal Binary, so they’ll run happily on your shiny Intel Macs to your crusty old PPC Macs.
And Writer.app 1.2.5 is out with a little bug fix for those recent items you’d been working on not opening. Opening it up to play with it and test yesterday reminded me what a great environment it is to write in… just the basics, ma’am… no distractions, just type. Make a mistake, just keep typing. It’s a great feeling. I think the next few Sane issues’ll be written back in Writer.app.