The Toolkit16 February 2004 The first thing a writer needs is a good way to enter text into the device. I am actually addicted to FitalyStamp. I can do a solid 30 words per minute with Fitaly, and I'm getting faster all the time. This is fast enough for most writing I do, though I still break out the Palm Wireless Keyboard when I'm really in the groove. A writer also needs a good word processor. I actually use two, depending on what I'm writing and why. If I'm working on business documents or anything else I May have to email to others or print out, I use DataViz's Documents To Go 6. I've covered this one in an in-depth review before, so I won't go into nauseating detail, but I still think this is the best word processor available on the PalmOS platform. The ability to save a Word document to my SD card, pop that card into my Lexar JumpDrive Trio and bring the same file up in Word on any USB-equipped desktop for printing is invaluable for business writing. That said, I don't use Documents To Go for writing columns or my fiction. For that, I'm using pedit, from Paul Computing (which, as far as I know, consists of Paul Nevai). I've also covered pedit before, but it was a long time ago, and it's worth pointing out why I've returned to it for writing after all this time. First though, I'll recap the basics for new readers that have never heard of pedit. In many ways, pedit is the Palm Memo Pad on steroids. It's the only text editor I've seen for mobile platforms that rivals Unix heavyweights vi and emacs for sophistication. You can do just about anything imaginable to text in pedit, making it a dream for working on long documents where you May have to do extensive and complicated editing (for example, the find and replace function in pedit supports Unix-style regular expressions). While the user interface May be intimidating to new users (there's something on the order of a thousand buttons on the bottom of the screen... well, not that many, but more than "Done" and "Details"), the program is nicely discoverable and offers many kick-butt features to writers without much of a learning curve. The biggest reason I switched was that the latest version of pedit (7.04 as of this writing, but that will probably change before this column is posted; Paul has been known to release new versions hourly) fully supports the 32k memos used by palmOne's Tungsten E and T3. While 4k was a bit constraining, 32k is nicely roomy for anything but a book-length work, especially if working with plain ASCII text. Each of my columns is now written as a memo in pedit, synced to Palm Desktop and then just copy-and-pasted into my HTML editor on the desktop for posting. (And for long-time readers that remember my pledge to keep these columns short by limiting them to the space allowed in a Palm memo, I found a loophole!) pedit has other advantages, too. For book-length works, it allows you to break the work into 32k chapters. These chapters are tracked by a five-line header pedit inserts into memo, and you can string as many together as you need. Find and replace and word count work across the entire document or just the current memo, your choice. When you're done with the work, you can export the entire document (all the chapters) to a single PalmDoc file (pedit can also import PalmDocs). This is great for adding final touch-ups in Documents To Go, which can open PalmDocs and re-save them as Word documents. Chapter handling and the ubiquity of memos aside, pedit is most useful because of its power as a text editor (note the difference between "text editor" and "word processor"). Among the myriad buttons at the bottom of the screen is on labeled WC, for word count. As mentioned above, this works across chapters and tells you not only the number of characters, words and lines in the document, but also how many are selected, prior and post selection. There are also L, T and K buttons that turn the selected text lower case, title case and capitalized, respectively. The top row of buttons gives convenient, one-tap access to Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Select, Jump To, Find and Replace. I might be a little biased since these buttons are about two millimeters above the Fitaly keyboard, making it ridiculously fast to tap them along with whatever I'm typing. Lastly, pedit has a nifty little feature called MagiPad. This gives you up to sixteen permanent clipboards to store frequently used phrases, letterhead, templates, whatever you want to quickly copy and paste into your document. This is similar in many ways to PalmOS's shortcut function, but the nearly unlimited size of the pasted text gives you far more flexibility. I've found the MagiPad particularly useful in writing the screenplay I'm working on. Every time I write a new slugline (INT. HOUSE - DAY) I copy it into the MagiPad so I don't have to write it again later. I keep all these sluglines in a MagiPad called "Screenplay" to keep them separate from other stuff. And getting to the MagiPad is a simple tap on the M button on pedit's toolbar and switching from one MagiPad to another is as simple as tapping the ^ button right next to the M. Another nifty program I'm still figuring out is pToolset, also from Paul Computing. This brings a lot of the cooler features from pedit to any text field system-wide, and duplicates the functionality of many of the hacks I missed from PalmOS 4. I'll get into some of the specific uses for pToolset later, but of general interest is the ability to map just about anything (backlight control, Palm preference settings, a system-wide 32k clipboard) to any mix of screen taps, Graffiti area strokes or button presses. It's also nifty to be able to get a word count in DayNotez (see below). Slap is great for more than just writing down planning notes or meeting agendas. I actually use it for nearly any significant text entry. I'll write down what I need, then figure out where to put it. If it's a column idea, it goes into pedit. If it's a journal entry, it goes into DayNotez. Speaking of DayNotez, this is the best journaling application I've ever seen. Journal entries can be categorized, assigned keywords and contacts and viewed in both list and calendar modes. You can mine journal entries for tasks and create new To Do items directly from selected text (although this is something you could do with pToolset anyway) and it even links with Life Balance so all of your checked off tasks show up as journal entries (an automatic Daily Record of Events, for you Franklin planner folks). Slap is fully DayNotez-aware, so I only actually run DayNotez when I'm doing a review (and even this is usually via Palm's Find feature rather than manually browsing). I've taken to reading AvantGo again. I bounce back and forth between AvantGo and iSilo for reading offline web content. I'm using AvantGo right now because it's easier to set up and maintain (on my resource-constrained system, iSiloX just about grinds the PC to a halt while updating channels), easier to navigate, and tends to sync a lot faster. I also like that AvantGo makes it easy to select and copy the text of an entire article, for reasons I'll get to shortly. For longer reading (anything not in AvantGo or too big to fit into a 32k memo), I use Palm Reader. The latest version is a huge leap over the previous PalmOS editions, equal in many ways to the Pocket PC and deskop versions of Palm Reader. I particularly like the optional margins (white space around text really does help readability) and quick one-tap dictionary lookup. I spend as much time reading in Palm Reader as anything else on my Palm (well, maybe I spend more total time in pedit), and I still spend way too much money at Palm Digital Media. For the first time in years, I'm actively using Palm Desktop. Part of this is that I really got royally fed up with Outlook and flensed it from my system (I'm using the lighter and in some ways more powerful Outlook Express for email). More than that, though, is the fact that palmOne's modifications to Palm Desktop really make this much cooler to use. When I do write on the desktop, I write directly into Palm Desktop's memos. I love the Calendar views (much easier to use than Outlook's calendar) and the icon bar on the left of the screen gives me fast access to DayNotez, Documents To Go and Palm Quick Install. Back on the Palm, I've also gotten into SpellCheck by Thomas Chapman. This is a system-wide spell checker that integrates itself with the Palm Command Bar. When I'm typing in pedit, DayNotez or Slap, I can tap the Command key in Fitaly, tap the icon of "ABC" and a checkmark in my Command Bar and SpellCheck's window pops up to check the spelling of any selected text, or the entire text field absent a selection. This is just as good and just as fast as Documents To Go's spell checker, and it works anywhere. It's even customizable to skip capitalized or mixed case words if you choose. Now that you know what I'm using, how do I put it all together? Let's look at a typical writing day (I'll leave out all the planning and recreational stuff) with my Tungsten E... First, I'll check my email on the desktop, using Outlook Express. I have this set up to show the preview pane on the right rather than under the message list, which does provide a longer, narrower column of text that is much easier to read (or at least scan quickly). This is a feature that eventually made it into the full Outlook with the 2003 edition, but who wants to put up with the DRM foolishness that goes along with Office 2003? If I see anything I want to save for future reference, I'll copy the text, then switch over to Palm Desktop and paste it into a memo. This is usually left in the Unfiled category if I know I want to read it in detail later, but if I've already read it and I'm just saving it for reference I'll file it into one of my reference categories. Taking advantage of a feature in pedit that allows you to treat any memo in a category beginning with an exclamation point as read-only, I have four reference categories in Memo Pad. These are !Ref.Fiction, !Ref.General, !Ref.Humor and !Ref.Nonfiction. The first and last are things that I think might be relevant to stories or articles, respectively, and the middle two are more free form, the difference being whether or not they're funny. Next I'll hit the web forums at Brighthand, PalmInfoCenter and Pocket PC Thoughts. Most threads get scanned online in CrazyBrowser, but any particularly juicy discussions I want to savor later or informative stuff I want to keep for reference get archived. I bring up the printable version of the thread, copy the text, then paste into, you guessed it, a memo. Once I've harvested email and web forums, it's time to sync. I just plug in the Palm and walk away. I'm using a freeware program called CradleSnd that automatically runs HotSync and initiates a sync whenever it detects a cradle connection, bringing to the Palm one of the few things I missed about the Pocket PC. A good sync will take anywhere from five to ten minutes, so I can go microwave a potato or something during this time (I do love potatoes). Once I hear the characteristic "tweedle-doop" ending the sync, I can disconnect the Palm and go about my business. The first thing I usually do is fire up AvantGo and catch up on the news. The usual suspects are AccuWeather (gotta know what kind of coat, if any, to wear today), c|net, Palm InfoCenter, SciFi.com and Wired News. I'll read the New York Times Technology page and the Washington Post every few days or so, just scanning the headlines to see if I can find anything interesting. When I do find something interesting or archive-worthy (my memo database is nearly 2MB and growing), I spring into action with pToolset. I select the relevant text in AvantGo, then copy it to the system clipboard (pToolset doesn't see AvantGo as copyable for its 32k clipboard), then press and hold the Contacts button. I have this mapped to pMemoTool, a module of pToolset that brings up a pop-up window for creating new memos on the fly. Then I press and hold the Calendar button, which I have mapped to a paste function in pToolset. This dumps all the text selected in AvantGo into a new memo, which I can then tweak and/or categorize before adding it to the database and dismissing pMemoTool and going on to the next article. When I'm done with AvantGo, I fire up pedit, go to the Unfiled category and start pouring over the stuff I'd archived earlier. I end up deleting a lot of these, but the ones really worth keeping get categorized accordingly. It took me a while to figure out that while pedit scrolls up and down a line at a time using up and down on the Tungsten's directional pad, it scrolls a full page at a time when pushing left or right on the d-pad. This makes reading in pedit much more enjoyable. Done with that, I'm pretty much done reading for the day, not counting Palm Reader or new emails that come in while I'm out (currently read on my Microsoft Smartphone, but eventually to be handled by Inbox To Go via a Bluetooth-to-phone connection). At this point I'm usually on the go, using my Palm sporadically. Anything that needs to be jotted down (anything at pops into my brain and can't be done immediately) gets scribbled into either DiddleBug or Slap, each just a button-press away. Most of these captures end up as tasks to be imported into the Life Balance mill, but some end up as memos or DayNotez journal entries. When I have some time to write, I fire up pedit. (This happens more often than you might think. Waiting in line, walking, eating, and even while at the bar for a drink with friends. My best friend recenty bought a digital camera and has taken many pictures of me already. Almost all of them show me with my head down, PDA out, stylus at the ready.) Sometimes I'll browse in pedit to find the memo I want to edit, but more often than not it's just a tap or two away via pedit's recent memo list. I'll blast way on Fitaly Stamp or if I'm really in the mood to churn through some words, I'll break out the Wireless Keyboard and start typing. I'll periodically tap the [WC] button to check my word count progress (this column's at 2,583 words so far) but mostly I just write for all I'm worth while I can. I tend to write in short bursts unless I'm in a stable, interruption-free environment like a restaurant where I can just type with abandon. Columns usually begin life as an idea harvested from a news article or a discussion either in a forum or the Writing On Your Palm Yahoo Group. Sometimes the inspiration is direct, like last week's column, which was a response to the people that couldn't believe I actually did the stuff I described in the Life Balance column. Other times it's more indirect. These columns usually start in DiddleBug as little questions that suddenly occur to me as I go about my day. These become memos in the WOYP.Ideas category until they're ready to move to the WOYP.Columns category and I actually write them (Example: "Can freedom of speech and ideas co-exist with an information 'economy' where wealth is based on the centrol and distribution of information?"). Some of these ideas never get used, but eventually I get around to most of them. Columns and my forthcoming serial fiction fit easily into the 32k limitation of memos (32 I can live with, but what was Palm thinking with the original 4k limit?) For novels, I use pedit's segmentation feature to break each chapter into its own memo. This works alarmingly well, and finding any string of text anywhere in anything is blazingly fast via the Palm Find button. When I finish a first draft, I turn SpellCheck loose on it. When I run across an unknown word, I can correct it, add to the dictionary, ignore it, pretty much what you'd expect from a spell checker. Once I'm sure the spelling is correct, I have two options. One, I can leave it as a memo, for further harvesting on the desktop. This is what I generally do with columns. It's easier to copy and paste the text from Palm Desktop into my HTML editor's column template than anything else I could do to get it online. Two, I can export the memo from pedit to PalmDoc format, then open that PalmDoc file in Documents To Go and re-save it as a Word Document. This is what I do to fiction, as I'll want to go in an add italics and other minor formatting as well as keep the text in a more accessible format than a Palm memo. Memos are a very personal, internal eyes-only kind of document storage. They're hard to share a collaborate with others. Word documents, on the other hand, are nearly universal. So there you have it, the process from research to brainstorming (okay, brain tripping over ideas) to writing to publication, and the tools I use to do it all. What makes this system better than what I was using before? Basically, it comes down to unity. All my reference materials, all my writing and all my ideas are in one place, easily accessible in a single application. Using memos also works well in that many other Palm applications tie into the memo database and the Palm system find function works particularly fast with memos. The end result is that I can focus in tighter on my data without thinking as much about what application I need for anything in particular. Jeff Kirvin
Jeff Kirvin is available for consulting on mobile technology. Email me today! |