antipopper

I kinda painted myself into a corner with this blog — there’s been such a backlog of interesting stuff (which I haven’t been in the mood to write about) that I seriously considered giving the whole thing up earlier this week. So perhaps a change of pace is in order.

+  +  +

I’ve lately been in the throes of a total Veronica Mars addiction, and am geeky enough to be thoroughly enjoying the prominence that Mac OS X enjoys in the show, down to the girl called “Mac” who has arguments at school about why she prefers OS X over Ubuntu — a couple of years before that rivalry became truly prominent in the blogosphere.

My dream job: doing all the on-screen design for Veronica Mars. Mmmm…

+  +  +

I noticed that NeoOffice 2.0 beta 3 is out, so I gave it a whirl and am suitably impressed — it’s a workable OpenOffice port for the Mac that feels native enough. Now, I follow these things because I help with Mac administration at a community Mac lab that has been trying to get away with not buying Microsoft Office; I’d never actually use NeoOffice myself. Why not? Because the whole classical office suite paradigm is completely irrelevant to me.

I might have touched on my preference for lightweight tools over office bloatware a couple of years ago when I was looking for alternatives to Microsoft Word, but now I don’t even use a word processor that much. For writing, I’m using the latest beta of Scrivener, which emphatically isn’t a word processor (in the contemporary sense) — it’s more closely related to apps like Ulysses, which doesn’t even display italics, let alone fancy formatting. Being a blogger and advocate of structural standards, I’m familiar with using different kinds of plain-text markup syntax for writing, but I’m also a typographic nerd with an occasional hankering to see properly rendered italics, so this is where Scrivener comes in — it’s another minimalist, distraction-free, full-screen capable writing app, but with rich text support.

The features Scrivener does have are fantastic: concatenated editing of multiple, arbitrary fragments, the sexiest full-screen mode ever, integrated outlining, version control, etc. It suits a methodology of growing stuff from fragments, in an environment that’s somehow both lush (making writing a pleasure) and austere (without too many bells and whistles, thus encouraging focus). I don’t think I can do it justice, so if you use a Mac and do a lot of writing, download the latest beta and give it a go.

[ tags: macintosh, osx, pop-culture, software, veronica-mars ]