Yes, I do want a MacBook Air
A couple of months ago I went to the Apple Store at the Mall of America with one purpose in mind: to spend some significant time with the iPad to see if it would be a useful writing device. I typed on it for at least five minutes. I held it in a couple of positions. I typed some more. The verdict: no, it’s not really good for serious, in-the-zone, crank-it-out writing. And no, even with a keyboard, it’s too awkward to use for serious writing sessions.
So I wandered around the store and eventually found myself fondling the MacBook Air on display and hefting it and clacking away on its keyboard and the thought came: this would be the perfect device for writers if it was smaller and cheaper. So what does Apple do today? They come out with a cheaper, lighter MacBook Air.
Of course, I’m not going to actually buy one. But only because I’m a cheap son of a gun. And a lazy writer (outside of work — at work I do just fine with my MacBook Pro). And a short-form writer. And ambivalent about being tied in to Apple’s ecosystem. But if I were serious about cranking out a novel or a screenplay and could come up with the cash? Totally.
Now here’s the thing: I know all about the Apple premium and the underpowered specs and the lack of this and that and the other thing. I get that. I’m rocking Linux on my home box and do my own hardware and software upgrades on it. I run OSX with Parallels and Windows 7 at work on an older MacBook Pro that still has better specs than the new Air models. But if we’re talking about just a machine for writing, for being productive at getting the butt in the chair and the words on the page, all you really need is a document editor, a music player (I’m one of those writers who sometimes likes listening to music while working), and an internet browser (with maybe some light photo editing tossed in and the ability to video chat).
What’s more, what writers really need in a computer is:
- A really good keyboard — I know there are chiclet haters out there, but I test keyboards on laptops whenever I’m in Costco or Best Buy, and the ones on the Apple laptops have good feel and spacing, in my opinion.
- For it to be truly portable — the lighter the better, especially when you are travelling or commuting by public transportation or home early from work or at a coffee shop, etc. Being able to have something there that gets you in to writing mode right away but isn’t a pain to lug around is really helpful. Lately, I’ve been tucking a mini legal pad or two in my messenger bag with an outline pasted to the front page, and it is helping me write more fiction, but the problem there is that I don’t have every project and every draft at hand. There has to be no hesitation about, well, I might have some free time at some point during the day to write, but I don’t really want to drag my laptop around. That’s the case with those that are in the 5-6 pound range. In fact, I have small hands and slim fingers — I’d prefer an even lighter, more compact 10-inch version.
- For it to be durable and solid and aesthetically pleasing — I don’t know about other writers, but with me, an aesthetically pleasing, solid-feeling tool for writing with helps; it’s why good paper and a good pen are a must when writing by longhand.
- For it to have excellent battery life — the Air doesn’t have quite the lengthy between charge times as some netbooks, but 5 hours is enough for most situations.
- For it to come instantly on and do fast, automatic saving and backups — anything that reduces the amount of time between when things start to coalesce and flow in your head and when you are actually typing words on the page is good. In addition, depending on how Lion works, if you could have a writing app that is right there where you last were as soon as you open up the laptop and that autosaves both to local storage and the cloud (maybe via Dropbox), that’d be awesome.
All those attributes fit the MacBook Air. They are why it’s not stupid for some consumers to want one. It’s why it may be worth paying the Apple premium. And it’s why I wish the netbook manufacturers hadn’t gone away from the original SSD devices running Linux. I probably will end up buying a cheap netbook at some point. But I would love for Lenovo and HP to come out with their own netbook/laptop/notebook that is lower-powered, but comes with fast boot times and a slim OS, an SSD, more than 4 hours of battery life, a great keyboard, and a solid but lightweight body. Especially if they can bring it in at $500-600. Heck, drop the SSD to 32 GB if that brings the price way down. All I need to store on it is text/document files and music.
So yes, I do want a MacBook Air. Or something very similar. Because I’m a writer.
What I, as a writer/editor, want from a tablet computer
I like the idea of tablet computing because as a writer, editor and reader, anything that’s conceptually akin to a book or a (paper) notebook has an inherent appeal. However, I’m unlikely to commit to a device unless I am convinced that it will work well for me as a writer and editor and work in a wide variety of situations and for all stages of writing and editing a work. As I think about what that means in relation to a tablet, I run in to several barriers — not all of which can be overcome by interface (even a multi-touch one) alone.
Now, this may simply may be my own idiosyncratic needs. And certainly they are informed by the fact of my daily bus commute and the fact that I live in an apartment with a wife and daughter (and so have no “room of my own” so-to-speak). But here are the two things that I would require of a serious writing device:
A. Easy, quick data input for when ideas are flowing (brainstorming) and/or I’m in the zone (writing) that can happen in a variety of environments and even without the need for a flat surface.
B. Easy mark up of drafts, including the ability to quickly move chunks of text around.
Now I know the whole point of the iPad is supposed to be that one only needs a finger and the device (with the addition of a bluetooth or docked keyboard when needed), but I think some extra hardware accessories would be very useful when paired with a tablet computer.
Here’s what they are:
- A thumb keyboard: yes, I know this sounds dumb and retrograde, but the problem with a blue tooth keyboard is that you need a flat space to put it down on. I don’t have that on the bus. A thumb keyboard, say similar to a Blackberry keyboard, but I’d be open to other configurations, connected via bluetooth to a tablet means that you could have the tablet nearby, but not need it be all the way out and still go to town with the writing. Heck, I’d be willing to give up QWERTY in a second and learn a new alphabet input system for the right device. For those late night flashes of inspiration. For when you want to stand and pace. For, as I mention, the bus or the plane, this would be a great, easy way to download what’s going on in your mind. One key wakes up the tablet and opens up a blank document. The rest is just sheer input.
- A pen/pencil stylus for editing. Yes, one could theoretically use a finger. But the ergonomics of that suck, imo. Plus you can’t get quite as fine tuned as you need. A stylus that felt in the hand like a good pen or pencil coupled with software that recognizes editor’s marks and has provisions for adding annotations/comments and selecting and moving around chunks of text would be awesome. Think about how much more efficient and clear you’d be as an editor if you could interact with drafts in this way instead of either using Word’s or Adobe Acrobat’s horrible mark up systems or (as many editors still do) printing the document out and going over it on paper (thus requiring duplicate data entry).
- A dictation device. Possibly a microphone you hold in your hand or even one of those silly bluetooth ear devices. I write well when I walk. If I could walk with while carrying something that’s easy to hold and that I could speak in to as thoughts came to me and that could record a half hour or more worth of data and then connect wirelessly to a tablet and transcribe and transcribe well, I’d be in heaven, especially if I can then use the pencil stylus to edit the results.
I’m open to other solutions. But really, although multi-touch on a tablet solves many UI issues (I’ve never been fond of using a computer mouse), I still don’t see a vast improvement for those of us who focus on writing and editing. Give me the above, however, and a tablet is all I would need.
The problem of the institutional “we”
The problem with the institutional we is that not only is it barely a step up from the use of the passive voice, but that just like the passive voice, it’s a way to diffuse agency. In addition, although it attempts to suggest timelessness, to sidestep the sticky issues of archives where names and titles can be found that no longer are part of the institution, it does not generally succeed. Rather it is a form of stasis.
More importantly, it raise all sorts of issues about community boundaries, institutional coercion and the agenda of the persons writing (or editing, or approving) copy with the use of the institutional we. For although it may be intended to appear inclusive, the we is always connected to a verb or a state of being and objects and noun and verb phrases and all those things that attempt to define who belongs or more often the actions and attitudes of those who do or don’t belong.
I don’t know for sure how to get around it. I personally rely much too heavily on “the College” in my writing for work and ‘I’ in my own writing. But it seems to me that that “we” needs to be made more explicit at times and/or that managers and administrators or going to need to be more willing to use first person singular and speak for themselves because in the world of social media everybody is speaking about the institution and speaking as themselves in relation to it.
A method for composing stories/pitches/releases (or: throwing off the shackles of Microsoft Word)
A few weeks ago I realized that the current system our office had for information management for our stories, pitches, news releases, event announcements, etc. just wasn’t working. I was tired of formatting issues cropping up as I moved content between platforms. I was worried about how much was stored in the e-mail in-boxes of me and my co-workers rather than on our share drive. And I was beginning to understand that engagement with social media — even on a straitlaced, low-frequency scale (which I’m not necessarily happy about, but we’re doing the best we can with a small shop) — meant that viewing content as A News Release or A Magazine Story wasn’t going to work.
Here’s the solution I came up with the help of one of my co-workers:
- Everything is now a story — we don’t think of content by what platform it’s going to be featured on/in.
- Any story, no matter how big or small or important or whatever other adjective you want to apply to it, gets a text file created about it (in Notepad) as soon as we know about it. This text file is placed in a Stories folder on our department’s shared rive. The filename consists of a status tag, key words, and a month. The status tags are a = active, t = tickler, z = archived e.g. a_NewStoryMethod_April09.txt. The idea here is that stories with the same status will group together.
- The text file is set up with three basic areas separated by a few hyphens as a visual divider. The areas are: Publishing , Story and Source.
- In the Publishing area we list the platforms we think this story should be published too. This includes News release, Web site, faculty/staff newsletter, student newsletter, alumni newsletter, alumni magazine, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and more. When we publish to those areas, it gets noted next to the platform. Sometimes that’s a date and URL. Sometimes it’s just a date posted. Sometimes it’s a reference to an edition. Whatever makes sense so we can look it up later if we need to. If we’re sure this story isn’t going to be represented in one of those areas, that tag gets deleted.
- In the Story area we have a bunch of different content fields. How many all depends on the story, but the possible fields so far are: Photos, Video, Headline, Subhed, Excerpt/Summary (1-2 paragraphs), Story (with a lead paragraph and as many paragraphs as the story demands — in some cases this may be Bullet Points or the Who/What/When/Where of an event listing rather than Story), Quotes (with notations about approvals or needs), and Boilerplate. For photos or video we copy and paste the file path to where those photos or videos are located. And these fields change depending on the nature of the story. Basically we dump them all in the template and then remove when we’re sure we don’t have to worry about that field.
- In the Source area we dump everything that we get as raw sources — the text of e-mails, resumes, the results of Q&As, transcripts of tape-recorded interviews — with a note on where that info came from.
- Obviously this is just the source product. If we need to create a formal news release in Microsoft Word complete with letterhead then we do that and it’s housed in the News Releases folder just like ones created before this new system. And created isn’t the right word — it’s assembled from the pieces — the quotes, the explanatory paragraphs, the lead, the boilerplate. And for our alumni magazine, we’ll use this as a source and plug in quotes, but probably rewrite the lead and headline so it’s more feature-like. In addition, for pitching the media, I may rewrite the excerpt/summary to make it more relevant to the targeted publication. And when translating the headline for posting to Twitter, I may make it more colloquial. But the point is this the story source from whence all other pitches, stories, news briefs, releases, Flickr set summaries, etc. etc. flow.
- This could all change and we could ditch the system next week and it really only works well if everybody who is generating and disseminating content buys in to it. One cool thing is that it allows me to outsource some of dissemination work to a co-worker. And conversely, if a co-worker has a Story that was featured in, say, the faculty/staff newsletter and we decide to elevate it to the alumni magazine or a pitch, I know where to go first to get up to speed on what info we already have.
Hopefully my explanation is fairly clear. If not, I’ve uploaded a sample content_template that may help.
We’ve used this process for three stories so far, and so far I think it’s fantastic. I love not having to worry about formatting issues when I copy and paste*. I like that when I go to post an affiliated Flickr set or a Facebook note, I can pick and choose the language and details I want to add (and then modify if needed for tone and length). I find it soothing to not compose in Word.
Now there are a couple of downsides to this method. First, there’s no spellcheck**. Second, you have to remember to turn off word wrap when you copy and paste from Notepad — otherwise you end up with weird line breaks. I’d love to use Gedit (which I use at home on my Ubuntu box), but we’re a Windows XP shop at work. At some point, I’ll check out other text editors for Windows (anybody have suggestions?). But for now, Notepad is working just fine. It’s pretty sweet how quickly files open and save and close — and how small they are even if I’ve dumped several pages of stuff in to the Source section.
Keep in mind that there’s only four of us in our department, and we don’t publish a ton of content so this may not work for other college pr and marketing offices, but so far it has been a very positive change. And really, the key message of this post is not the method, but rather this: with a million places to publish, you better have some way of storing all the bits and pieces of content you need to tell your stories. And e-mail isn’t it. And a formal news release archive with nicely formatted MS Word docs isn’t it, either.
* Seriously — have you ever seen the crazy html code that MS Word creates when you try to copy and paste in to a CMS like Dreamweaver, WordPress or an e-newsletter service? Or even just in to an e-mail. It’s so annoying.
** I believe there are text editors with spellcheck. I’m looking into it and will post a comment if I find anything interesting to report.
Wm’s Twitter stream- morriswm: RT @fakebaldur: This: http://t.co/NTaIPRJx “Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time” February 5, 2012
- morriswm: RT @Nobilis: I figured out why I don't like Tumblr: There's no room for conversation. It's a place to put up billboards. February 2, 2012
- morriswm: @ImaginaryZina @mel_leilani Yep. That's what I do. But I only do it on 1 out of the 4 times that I would normally click. So. Lost pageviews. February 2, 2012
- morriswm: @HeidiTighe 3/4 of the time I will just forget it. The other 1/4 I'll just Google the headline. February 2, 2012
- morriswm: RT @stacylwhitman: @morriswm The thing that drives me most nuts about it is that it *appears* to be a link to the newspaper itself. February 2, 2012
- morriswm: @stacylwhitman Exactly. February 2, 2012
