Using The Eee PC

• Writing on the Eee PC is do-able, but impractical when it comes to longer pieces. When writing anything over a few hundred words, I tend to have two text files open and visible on screen, one full of notes, half-formed paragraphs jotted down as they pop into my head and a rough outline, the other for the actual business of writing the piece. This is impossible on the Eee PC’s little screen, and I found it very hard to adapt to flitting between two fullscreen documents, rather than having both available for reading and writing simultaneously. When it comes to the final pass, which for me tends to involve a fair bit of cutting, pasting and rewriting of the first draft, the Eee PC’s small display is even more bothersome: I had no idea how important it is for me to be able to read large chunks of text in their entirety on screen, but it turns out that all the to and fro of scrolling required, even when using AbiWord in fullscreen mode with a display font set at the limits of legibility, really gets in the way of finishing a piece of work.

• That said, it’s amazing how quickly one can adapt to writing on the Eee PC: I now type almost as quickly on the dinky keyboard as I do on my MacBook Pro, though with many more errors, and have absorbed a huge number of keyboard commands. This is a problem as much as a positive, though - every time I switch between the Mac and the Eee PC I spend five minutes or so adrift, stumbling over the Command and Control keys, and some things are so ingrained (triggering Textexpander macros or launching Quicksilver for example) that I suspect my brain will never override my muscle memory.

• Web browsing is just fine. The overwhelming majority of sites I visit render perfectly on the dinky display, and the scrolling side of the trackpad makes navigating pages a cinch. I have noticed one big difference in my browsing habits, though. On the Eee PC, if I come across a page of interest, I’ll print it to a PDF file for later reading, rather than leave the tab open. On the Mac, I would routinely have 20 or more tabs open, something the underpowered Eee just can’t handle, but I’ve now ported the habit over: it’s better to have an easily searchable folder of PDF print-outs than grub around for that tab I opened last Tuesday. Flash-heavy sites, and too many open tabs bearing YouTube videos will cause Firefox to choke on the Eee PC, but since I avoid the former, and could do with watching less of the latter, this hasn’t proved to be a problem.

• Managing images is tricky. I had thought that the Eee PC would be ideal as a photographer’s companion, so to speak, but the small screen makes even light editing - croppping, resizing, etc. - a chore, and the tendency of Firefox to have a fit when uploading more than a couple of full-size images to Flickr is frustrating. Still, for dumping images off your camera’s SD card for later processing or quick uploading, the Eee PC is a lot easier to lug around than your average laptop (it fits in the front pocket of my camera bag, with room to spare).

• Everything else is on the web. As I mentioned before, using the Eee PC often feels like using a client to Google’s various services (or other web services and hosted applications, like Backpack and its sister apps). This feels like the realisation of a long-predicted trend: the iPhone, the Eee PC, the Newton and the better UMPC type things really are a new class of networked portable device, I think, capable of changing the way we use computers and the web. If only the network was ubiquitous, and if only I were willing to trust all my data to third parties.

Hardware

• Wireless networking is solid, but not perfect. When out and about, the Eee PC picks up more available networks than my MacBook Pro, but sometimes has trouble connecting and maintaining connections, especially to those with a weak signal. (After an annoying afternoon in windswept Leeds trying to get online, getting the Eee PC to dial up via my Nokia N95, or even investing in one of those pay-as-you-go USB 3G modem thingys has become a priority.)

• Storage is a big problem. There’s just no room on the Eee PC for many media files, unless you want to muck about removing applications and files the Eee would rather you left alone. The answer? Get a for a 16GB SD card for Christmas!

• Battery life is nothing to be sniffed at, especially if you turn off WiFi and dim the backlight as much as you can stand. I got the train from Liverpool to Glasgow on Monday, and watched two and a half hours of downloaded telly, listened to a bunch of Radio 4 stuff gleaned from Speechification, and read a week’s worth of RSS feeds in Google Reader’s offline mode. The Eee PC had enough juice left for me to check my mail and footle about on the web for half an hour when I got home.

The operating system

• Linux is ugly, and hard to use. I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable with the inconsistencies of the user interface. On a Mac, I know where certain menu items will be found, and can count on standard command key combos doing what I expect, regardless of the application I’m using. Under Xandros, there are no such certainties, and you have to learn a distinct set of commands, and a new menu layout for pretty much every application you run. Even something as basic as quitting an app is completely inconsistent across applications - Control + Q will work a lot of the time, admittedly, but you can’t count on it. Talking of which, who thought it was a good idea to have applications up and quit when you close a window? That’s just incredibly stupid behaviour (if you’ve been using Macs exclusively for more than a decade). I’ve even found myself abandoning the GUI of some applications in favour of the command line, which is fine by me, but pretty bloody ridiculous.

• Linux also has its strengths, of course! Package management is just the absolute business, a brilliant model for installing, updating and uninstalling applications. Updating all my applications on the Mac to the latest version would take a good deal of Googling, downloading, deleting and installing. Typing apt-get upgrade is a cinch in comparison.

• The twin OS that ships with the Eee PC is a good thing. Kate, James and I got my Dad an Eee PC for Christmas: he’s sticking with the default Easy Mode interface and, so far, the default applications. Admittedly, he’s a geeky pensioner, sorry Silver Surfer — Flickr account, nascent weblog and all — but I’d guess that someone with next to no computing experience would be comfortable with it. In other words, Asus have made a desktop Linux distro that anyone can use out of the box, without even having to look at a terminal window. This does not match my experience with other Linux distros, and that’s putting it mildly. (Of course, they have the ‘Apple advantage’ here, matching their hardware with a bespoke OS.)

So, is it any good?

Yup! In the end, the Eee PC has far exceeded my expectations. Sure, it has its flaws - small screen and keyboard, the lack of polish and limitations of Xandros when compared to a ‘proper’ OS - but it’s a more than capable laptop, ultra-portable and eminently usable. It has completely replaced my MacBook Pro as a laptop, which is now installed in the office as a desktop replacement. At a push, I could even see someone with relatively modest computing needs making the Eee PC their main machine: add an external DVD drive, full-size keyboard and monitor, and it would more than meet the needs of anyone who uses a PC primarily to write, surf the web and manage mail.

See also: Eee PC Setup.

Diamond is a quirky little app that, roughly speaking, works like a cross between Stickies and ‘distraction free’ editors like Write Room (which I gushed about a year ago), blocking out your desktop, other applications and the Menu Bar.

The most unconventional feature is the one I like the best: as you can see in the screenshot above, text is automatically broken up into columns, and so you scroll horizontally through a document, not vertically. Writing a review this morning, I used a near-fullscreen Diamond window, and found that having what you might call a holistic view of the piece helpful—re-ordering paragraphs was easier, repeated words leapt out, and proof-reading generally felt a lot quicker. It also has the only feature I really need in a text editor, a running word count, which floats unobtrusively at the bottom of the editing window.

Sure, there’s a certain lack of polish—you have to relaunch after changing a preference setting, for example—but Diamond is well worth checking out. It’s simple to use, customisable to suit your needs, and, best of all, lets you concentrate on writing without distractions.

WriteRoom’s key feature is that it doesn’t really have any features¹, it just turns your computer into a screen for writing on, with no distractions². You don’t have to think about anything but writing. Not even saving: WriteRoom automatically saves your work whenever you stop typing for five seconds, and when you open the applications all your ‘rooms’ appear just as they were when you last quit. (That’s not to say that all your data is trapped inside the application: you can export to plain text files when a piece of writing is finished.)

Managing multiple ‘rooms’ is simple too, with each open document assigned a command key—Command+1, Command+2, and so on depending on the order the documents were opened—which means you can quickly switch between notes and a draft. You can also, of course, cycle between documents with the standard Command+`.

In it’s raw state, WriteRoom is great for getting down ideas quickly, or using in place of cramped text fields on the web, but with the help of a few of Services and utilities, I’m so taken with this full-screen, distraction-free writing environment that I’ve been using it for everything—reviews and features, longer emails, weblog entries and comments, the lot.

If you want to do the same, the following will come in handy:

• WordServices will give you a word count, among other things.
• Following this tip switches the spellling checker to English (as opposed to American English).
• HumaneText converts text written with the Markdown syntax to XHTML.
• ServiceScrubber lets you assign command key combinations to the above Services, as well as WriteRoom’s inbuilt ‘Send Selected Text To WriteRoom’ Service.
• Jumpcut gives you control over the Clipboard.

With all that in place, for my needs at least, WriteRoom is the perfect application for writing.

Update: Here’s a good piece on WriteRoom and stripped-down user interfaces

1. The preferences let you set font size and colour, background colour, and specify page width, height and margins. That’s it. ↩

2. Here’s a screengrab of this post being written in WriteRoom. (Please excuse the unholy admixture of XHTML and Markdown.)↩

Almost three years later, I’m kicking myself that I didn’t keep an eye on Ulysses’ progress. It is no longer lacking in the looks department, and on my second try-out, I got to grips with the rather esoteric multi-document interface very quickly.

If you click on the screenshot above, you’ll be able to see more clearly that, in its default mode, Ulysses is divided into three columns.

The leftmost column has a pane listing all the documents in your project, and a preview pane which lets you view the contents of any document—incredibly handy if, say you’ve written an outline of the document you’re currently working on, or need to cross-reference between your various documents. The rightmost column, meanwhile, has a pane for taking notes, and a pane for metadata, where you can give the current document a title, mark its status, label it and - joy of joys! - see a running word count². The middle column is, as you’d imagine, for the main business of writing and editing, with a handy addition: if you need to, you can double up the main view of your text, allowing for speedy cut and pasting inside a lengthy document, or simply checking something you’ve written in a document without losing your place.

Now, there’s quite a lot going on there, and the busy interface is distracting if all you need to do is write, rather than organise your documents and flit between them. Which is where full screen mode comes in: hit Command+Shift+F and Ulysses becomes a wonderful distraction-free writing machine, with noting visible but the text you’re working on. For all I know, this is a standard feature in all word processing applications, but since I only use the more stripped down text editors, it came as something of a revelation: on the first day I started using Ulysses, I finished work an hour earlier than I expected.

Aside from combining easy organisation and note-taking with distraction-free writing, the great strength of Ulysses is its flexibility.

The labels for documents (which default to creative writing-friendly tags like ‘Plot’ and ‘Characters’) can be edited on a per-project basis, as can the status indicators. Needless to say, all the columns and panes of the editing interface can be resized, but the look of the entire application can be extensively tweaked, too, in the Themes preference pane: everything from the font in each pane of the interface to the colours of the application chrome is left up to the user.

I still have a couple of quibbles with Ulysses, though.

First, if you’re working on more than a few documents, it would be nice to add a bit of hierarchy to the document list—I’ve been faking this with creative use of the labelling feature, but it would be nice to group texts together, either into collapsable folders, as in the Finder’s list view, or with indented sub-lists.

There is, too, the problem of Ulysses’ proprietary format, inevitable given the way it works. Fortunately, there are multiple export options, so, when I’ve finished work on a project, I can convert everything to plain text³ (and, thanks to the developer’s eye on flexibility, have a good deal of control over titling my exported texts, their encoding, &c., and can choose whether to export to one large file, or on a document-by-document basis). That said, exporting only applies to documents, not their associated notes and, as far as I can tell, there is no way to preserve status or label metadata.

Oh, and it’s not exactly dirt cheap: a standard license runs to €100.

Those problems aside, I can’t recommend Ulysses highly enough: if you’re a journalist or author, or just routinely work with multiple related text files, and can bear taking a little time to familiarise yourself with an unconventional interface, it’ll pay for itself in saved time within a month.

1. I try out pretty much every text editor released for OS X - the only two that have been installed on my computer for any length of time are TextWrangler, which I use occasionally, and SubEthaEdit, which I use every day, beefed up slightly with a couple of text-manipulating Services.↩

2. Quite why every text editor doesn’t include this feature as standard, switched on by default is a total mystery—it’s really the only feature any writer needs.↩

3. If you store your writing in any other format, you may be asking for trouble.↩

Here is one such line:

It is not clear whether they like neon, are amused by the idea of liking neon, or are amused by the possibility that others will find it amusing that they are amused by the idea of liking neon.

What was I thinking?

It’s mostly a list of examples of index wit. Here’s the entry for God in the index to Francis Wheen’s excellent How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World:

…accepted by Newton; angered by feminists and gays; appoints American coal-owners; approves of laissez-faire economics; arrives in America; asked by Khomeini to cut off foreigners’ hands; believed to have created humans 10,000 years ago; could have made intelligent sponges; doesn’t foresee Princess Diana’s death; helps vacuum-cleaner saleswoman; interested in diets; offers investment advice; praised by Enron chairman; produces first self-help manual.

Sadly, Hensher confirms that the following entry in the index of a Catholic encyclopaedia is apocryphal:

Woman: see Sin

As is usually the case with this sort of pseudo-intellectual broadsheet fluff, the author is writing thinly-veiled advertorial, shilling his new novel, The Fit. For once, I’m glad of the heads up: Hensher has his protaganist dream of compiling an Index To The History of The World, one ‘so beautiful and complete that there would be no reason whatever to write the book itself.’ Not knowing Hensher’s past novels, I haven’t a clue whether this will make for sub-Borgesian pap or the sort of wilfully arcane intertextual mucking about that makes me weak at the knees (arguably the same thing) but I can’t wait for it to hit the shelves so I can find out.

That’s what I felt when I first launched Jumpcut.

It’s one of those wonderfully simple-but-powerful utilities, like Launchbar or LiteSwitch X, that within seconds becomes absolutely essential, to the point that you can’t quite believe it isn’t part of the operating system.

All Jumpcut does is enhance the Clipboard by remembering a history of items you copy, making them available for pasting via a command key combination.

Whack Ctrl-Alt-V (or whatever combination you like) and a translucent window pops up displaying an excerpt of the last item you copied. With the key combination held down, tap the Shift key, and you can scroll through recently copied items. Release the keys, and the currently displayed item is pasted.

That’s it: simple to use, unobtrusive, incredibly useful.

There are some limitations: it only works with copied text, not images, and you can only scroll backwards through your clipboard history, not forwards - rather annoying when you tab too hastily and go past the item you wanted to paste. And it’s a bit buggy, too: from time to time it seems to forget, or muddles up the order of, recently copied items. (I say ‘seems to’ because the frazzled state of my short term memory makes me suspect it is me, not Jumpcut, doing the forgetting). But, for something that’s still beta, is billed as ‘experimental’ and comes with the proviso that the developer ‘cannot promise that Jumpcut will not wreck holy hell with your system’ it works well enough.

If you’re after something a bit more stable, there’s quite a few clipboard-enhancers and replacements out there; most offer much more than Jumpcut in terms of features, but most lack its simple interface.

For those still running OS 10.2.x or willing to tweak the app to work with Panther, PTHPasteboard is the inspiration for Jumpcut and offers similar functionality, but is no longer available through official channels. The dizzyingly clever Quicksilver launching and file manipulation utility has a Clipboard history function, but I never quite got to grips with it - as you can see from the documentation, it’s not the app’s most immediately accessible feature. The shareware utility iClip is somewhere between a scrapbook and a clipboard, letting you store everything from URLs to movies in a floating window that’s a little too obtrusive (on a laptop at least). YouControl is shareware that offers multiple clipboard functionality, but its primary purpose is creating custom menus (for launching applications, controlling iTunes and the like) that sit in the Menu Bar or on the Desktop and at $69.99 it doesn’t come cheap. Finally, Spike is a Rendezvous-aware application for both Mac and Windows that lets users share multiple clipboards over a network. It’s bloody brilliant - I use it a lot in combination with Apple Remote Desktop when tinkering with the old iBook that lives in my wardrobe - but, since you have to switch to Spike and re-copy a stored clipping to the Clipboard before pasting, it can’t match the speed and ease of use that Jumpcut’s command key combinations allow. (And those are just the one’s I’ve tried out - at the time of writing there’s 40-odd clipboard-related tools listed on Versiontracker.)

Where was I? Oh yes: download Jumpcut now. It’s essential, even in its current unfinished, mildly buggy form.

It is, of course, my friend Donna’s birthday today, too. Happy Birthday! Our new tradition of eating vegan food on the 25th of March is a good one.

It certainly beats that other tradition - one that thankfully never caught on - the collapsed lung. This was such a nasty way to turn 25 that for the last two years I’ve had pre-anniversary pneumothorax superstition nightmares that would put David Cronenburg to shame.

Anyway, back to the grindstone for me. A profile of Gospel queen and disco diva Gwen McCrae beckons, with a little bluesy piece on the excellent Fat Possum artist Model T. Ford, and Andre Williams, to follow.

Did I say grindstone? Sorry, I meant funstone.