Programs you said goodbye to

[Diane]

Re: Password keepers: I’m quite fond of Password Wallet (and the developer is a friend of my hubby’s), which does sync to my Palm, so I have access to my passwords everywhere. As soon as PW can get a client on the iPhone, I will no longer need my Palm. Well, okay, my Palm has lots of games too. So strike that.

Apps I’ve given up on: MarsEdit, which went into limbo there for awhile – it’s being worked on again, but I’m out of the habit. Ulysses, which I wanted to love but it never loved me back. And I haven’t opened Jer’s Novel Writer for a while now, which makes me feel very guilty (because I think it’s a great app and Jer is a great guy with awesome response time), but Scrivener seems to be working for me much better at the moment.

[Gordon]

I’m still using Group Organizer, from the SOHO Notes folks, but I’m gritting my teeth and cursing every time I have to launch it. It’s painful that the company didn’t provide a suitable upgrade path for customers.

I’m slowly weaning myself from Webstractor, too, which seems to have been abandoned. Yojimbo and Scriv. are helping to ease the pain on this one.

[Timotheus]

Yesterday I finally said goodbye to Word. For my own work, I haven’t used it anymore since the spring of 2004, when I started working with Mellel. But I still needed it in order to be able to read and correct all the stuff my students and colleagues sent me. But since I own the latest version of Pages, which opens perfectly Word-documents, and which has a track-changes feature with which I can correct them, Word has become absolutely superfluous. So I trashed it.

From now on, I’ll do all my wordprocessing in Mellel, Scrivener and Pages. And I hope to keep it that way.

[Lauram]

Hey Timotheus,

So have you had success in translating tracked changes from Pages to Word? Could you say, edit a Word document in Pages, save it, and then have the changes you made saved as tracked changes in the resulting Word doc?

[Timotheus]

Yes; or so it seems. My students send me their Word documents, I open them in Pages, correct them with Pages’ track changes, then export them as Word documents and send them back to my students. And they never complained that they couldn’t read my corrections. So I must conclude that the track changes corrections made in Pages are perfectly readable as track changes corrections in Word.

[antony]

Wow, I missed this thread the first time around. Like others in this thread, I’m always trying stuff out and then deleting it, but that doesn’t really count. In terms of apps I used for prolonged periods and then said goodbye to, there are just three I can think of off the top of my head:

FreeHand. Originally when it was Aldus FreeHand, then through Macromedia FreeHand, until finally Adobe swallowed it up and killed it I loved FreeHand. I always found it much more intuitive and easier to use than Illustrator, and frankly, more accurate - when I positioned something in FreeHand, it bloody well stayed there. And its guides/grid usage was sublime. I’ve been using Illustrator (because FreeHand is dead) for years, now, and I still can’t seem to “click” with it the way I did with FreeHand. Alas

OmniOutliner Pro. I realised the other day that I haven’t actually used it for about six months. I mainly used to use it formalise complex outlines, after working them out on paper, and I’d still recommend it for that - it does it very well, and is a lovely, intuitive app. But I’ve just stopped needing it because of Scriv. Now I just do the paper stage, then go straight to index cards and folders in Scriv… because I can use those same index cards as the actual documents to work in when it’s time to script.

QuarkXPress. This was the hardest one. To understand just how hard, you have to know that before I became a full-time writer, I was a professional graphic designer for ten years, specialising in magazines and periodicals. I literally used QXP every single day of those ten years, and it was glorious. QXP 3.3 remains, imho, the high point of page layout on the Mac. It was blindingly fast, very stable, required tiny amounts of RAM, and did exactly what you expected it to every time. It Just Worked, to coin a phrase, and there was nothing I (and every other designer/art director I knew) couldn’t do with Quark 3.3, Photoshop and FreeHand on tap.

Then two things happened: the Web, and OSX. First Quark became obsessed with being able to create multilingual web pages (!) in XPress. Then they took an absurd amount of time - I don’t know exactly, but it felt like about three years - to release an OSX-native version. And when they did… it was utterly, unusably awful. An incredible number of bugs, unusably slow, bloated, massive memory requirement… and somehow they managed to do all this while adding absolutely no useful functionality. Unless you wanted to create multilingual web pages, perhaps.

Every pro I know now uses InDesign. Which, frankly, I don’t like, and I don’t know many people who do. But it works, and makes a sort of sense, which is more than can be said for QXP these days. They literally had an entire global multibillion-dollar market in their hands, and just threw it away. So, so sad.

[antony]

@Timotheus

So I must conclude that the track changes corrections made in Pages are perfectly readable as track changes corrections in Word.

Wow. I know many of us have been wary of relying on Pages to do this with PC Word users in case something goes wrong. If it really does work, that could be huge.

[Jaysen]

[size=200]Windows[/size]

the only install now is for “work” and they are beginning to relent. My personal life is now Microsnot winblows free.

[exegete77]

Two very old programs that were just perfect for the time:

WriteNow - simple but elegant and fast word processor. I began using it in 1990 on a Mac Classic.

Personal Press - originally Silicon Beach, then Aldus, then Adobe (and you know what happens to Adobe product purchases). Anyway, PP was light years ahead for inexpensive ($99 US in 1990) page layout that had many features not incorporated in other packages for a long time. It was simple, intuitive, and powerful.

[hendrix]

@exegete77

Two very old programs that were just perfect for the time:

WriteNow - simple but elegant and fast word processor. I began using it in 1990 on a Mac Classic.

It was really great for its time. By the way, what is left of it (quite stripped down) still lives in our macs under the name of TextEdit.

[howarth]

@hendrix

[By the way, what is left of it (quite stripped down) still lives in our macs under the name of TextEdit.

I didn’t know that at all. WriteNow was the word processor in NeXT, so it stands to reason that it survived in OSX.

I have hundreds of WN files that are now orphaned under Leopard. Can view the files with icWord, but often they are quite garbled. Do you know of any translator that will open and save them as RTF?

[hendrix]

I don’t have any docs left, so I don’t have the problem. But check here macease.com/writenow-latest_info.html

Regards

[Sebbi]

Since reinstalling Leopard from fresh, I decided to only port over applications from my backup as I need them.

I have discovered I am a Mac purist.

I no longer use:
iGTD - this is a fantastic application, but I decided that since most of life is spent well away from computers; relying on computers to organise myself is a bad idea. It did however, get me how of an organisational hole, and I’m grateful for that.

iWork - the only application I really used with that was Pages and since I have found my presentational needs in my written work is… non-existant, I literally ONLY use Scrivener for my written work. In fairness, there’s not a lot of it.

Limewire - it is bloated and sluggish and Poisoned (a Cocao client for it) works wonderfully.

Celtx - replaced by Scriv; though, I do think there are definately things that Celtx does much better than Scrivener. When I do make my film, I think I will definately use this again for more general pre-production stuff.

Anything microsoft - I live a completely microsoft free life at the moment. The main app I used to use was MSN Messenger, but the Mac version is buggy as an ants nest and has since been replaced by Adium.

[terceiro]

@antony

@Timotheus

So I must conclude that the track changes corrections made in Pages are perfectly readable as track changes corrections in Word.

Wow. I know many of us have been wary of relying on Pages to do this with PC Word users in case something goes wrong. If it really does work, that could be huge.

Just providing another (perhaps belated) note that this has worked fine for me. I’ve been working with student papers using Track Changes in Pages since iWork got that capability. No students have ever complained of any difficulty.

That said, my needs are simple: student writes paper and submits it. I make edits/suggestions/comments and send paper back. Student submits a new draft. There is no back-and-forth. Still, for my simple needs, Pages is actually quite a bit faster than Word.

[xiamenese]

@terceiro

@antony

@Timotheus

So I must conclude that the track changes corrections made in Pages are perfectly readable as track changes corrections in Word.

Wow. I know many of us have been wary of relying on Pages to do this with PC Word users in case something goes wrong. If it really does work, that could be huge.

Just providing another (perhaps belated) note that this has worked fine for me. I’ve been working with student papers using Track Changes in Pages since iWork got that capability. No students have ever complained of any difficulty.

That said, my needs are simple: student writes paper and submits it. I make edits/suggestions/comments and send paper back. Student submits a new draft. There is no back-and-forth. Still, for my simple needs, Pages is actually quite a bit faster than Word.

I’ve just posted on this one on another thread:

MS Office for Mac & Scrivener

I ran into the inevitable snag today - file compatibility and feature issues. I sent my crit partner two chapters of a new WIP. I compiled the MS in Scriv, saved it to a .doc file, and emailed it from mac mail. While she was able to open it on her PC, it gave her a message that the file couldn’t be saved. However, she found she could save it without issue. She made some comments in Word and sent it back to me. Of course, I don’t have anything other than text editor on the mac. I had to print o…

Actually, Pages was the only app I have … I don’t have Word … that would open a .doc with change-tracking properly. I think that if the student in question has had problems with the .doc version I exported from Pages, then I would have heard from her by now!

Mark

[ptram]

@kened

CircusPonies Notebook … i found the constant jumping back and forth between content page, tabs, dividers, sections, and pages annoying.

I don’t know if this is something they added only recently, but in NoteBook 3 you can display a side card with the content of the current notebook shown. You do not need to jump to the Content page if you do not want to.

@kened

but what killed it for me i think was the way it handled clippings - you have to set up a clipping service for individual pages which then get listed as seperate services in the services menus, which is not really in the spirit of clipping services.

As noted by others, I think having separate notebooks/clipping pages is handy when dealing with large amount of clips. In the “real life”, I used to have separate folders for my clippings, so that I could do a first ordering when clipping.

@kened

I ditched Inspiration for NovaMind, which is prettier, but i don’t do so much mind-mapping these days - i tend to just start writing.

This is why Tinderbox is so powerful: you can outline, mindmap, or just start writing inside the same project. I tend to do the same with a mix of MyMind, NoteBook and Scrivener. This combo may lack the integration of Tinderbox, but it works the way I’m working these days.

Paolo

[valente.mac]

I’m about to say goodbye to Together.

I love it, but I’m using more and more DEVONthink 2.0 (I had dropped the 1.X version, because it felt too dated) as the big organizer and ShoveBox (plus its iPhone companion) for little stuff.

I’m very sorry for Together, which I think is a great app — I simply don’t have the space on my workflow for it anymore. If I didn’t have the need for a big organizer (like DTP) I would surely continue to use Together (ideal for middle sized organizing, imo).

It will be missed, but not in a needy way.

[exegete77]

@druid

@hendrix

[By the way, what is left of it (quite stripped down) still lives in our macs under the name of TextEdit.

I didn’t know that at all. WriteNow was the word processor in NeXT, so it stands to reason that it survived in OSX.

Actually I think these are two different programs. The program I mentioned was WriteNow, which was strictly OS 6/7/8/9 program, never NeXT program. There must have been another WriteNow on the NeXT platform, completely separate.

[hendrix]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WriteNow

[AmberV]

The last time I tried NovaMind I found it got hideously slow with anything more than a few dozen nodes. I’m used to having a wild tangle of a hundred plus nodes in TinderBox and never worrying about it. I do agree that NovaMind looks quite nice, seems to be at the expense of performance though.