Quick tip for Scrivener users

I'm writing my Master of Arts thesis at the moment. This involves a lot of copying and pasting (HA!) of bits of text from various sources. It also means that I have to deal with many different layouts and text formats.
In order not to have to change the style of everything I paste into a document manually, I use the "Paste and Match Style" shortcut, which is bound to the key combination "⌘+⌥+⇧+V" by default.

Often enough I find myself hitting "⌘+V" instead, ending up with text that's formatted differently than my document. As Scrivener doesn't offer a way to change the default behaviour, I simply set two keyboard shortcut overrides for Scrivener in the keyboard shortcuts section of the System Preferences:

  • "Paste and Match Style" is now bound to "⌘+V"
  • and the regular "Paste" is now bound to "⌘+⌃+V"

Of course, this works for almost all applications as well, but make sure to type the menu item name exactly as it appears in the application's menu.

Masochistic Chinese learners

I'm currently translating two scientific texts that I need for my Master's Thesis from Chinese to German. It's difficult stuff, because both texts deal with concepts about internet memes and often feature fairly new words that haven't yet found their way into dictionaries and sometimes aren't even used widely enough to have reliable translations in user generated online dictionaries.

At times like this I sit here hugging my iPhone or iPad because they run Pleco. It's an application for learners and users of Chinese that I've been using since I started studying sinology (back then on a Palm Treo 650).
This piece of software has made my life so much easier, I really don't want to imagine studying Chinese without it. Lately the built-in document reader and the plethora of paid and free dictionaries have become the main reasons for my love of this application.

It's worth every cent and available for both iOS devices and a number of Android devices.
If you're a student of Chinese and don't use this software I consider you a masochist.

Software customers are stakeholders

Peter Cohen of The Loop has a few comments on the whole "Google has bought Sparrow" situation, referring to a smart article by  Marco Tabini. Unfortunately there's one point in Tabini's piece that I believe ignores the reality of buying software licences.

I encourage you to read both posts. My take on the situation can be found below and in the comments of the article on The Loop.

I can get behind most of what Tabini wrote in his article, but not the quoted passage. In it he warps what he calls "the simple reality of commerce". By definition customers who buy your products are stakeholders, they take a chance with your product and thus a stake in your business. This especially holds true for licensable goods like software as they are durables and not consumables like, say, toilet paper (here your business relationship and expectation ends once you've wiped you butt with it).
Tabini says that you should buy software that suits your needs, not because you have some hopes about its future, yet when a person invests in software by form of a licence, they expect to get a certain use out of it that extends beyond using it once or twice. Buying and using software is more akin to a service relationship than to buying physical goods.
Now to be perfectly clear: I don't expect developers to support a piece of software indefinitely — not for free at least. The question of "How long is long enough?" leads to a wholly different world of pain, but as JimD has correctly pointed out, OS updates do tend to break software and Sparrow for the Mac and iOS haven't been on the market for very long.
The same holds true for Pulp for the iPad by Acrylic Software, an app that hasn't been around very long either and that I bought — yup, my fucking luck — three hours before the announcement of the acquisition by Facebook. After purchasing the app, I found out that certain essential aspects of the software didn't work as advertised, something I'd expect the developer to improve on. Now that they've been purchased none of this will happen and I basically have a dud sitting on my iPad.

We really can't have nice things

On my way home from work I witnessed the hubbub surrounding Google's acquisition of the fairly popular email client Sparrow, thinking to myself how much this must suck for people that have bought a licence for Sparrow on iOS or OS X.

Well, a few minutes ago I stumbled on this post by John Moltz: Why can't we have nice things?

In it he quotes from this TNW piece:

The Mac development house Acrylic has announced that they have been acqui-hired by Facebook.

[…] Acrylic says that Pulp and Wallet have not themselves been acquired by Facebook, but there are no plans to keep developing them.

I purchased Pulp for the iPad today. Sigh.

Fever and Reeder 3.0

Reeder 3.0 for the iPhone was released a few days ago, heralded by Federico Viticci's review on MacStories.net.

Reeder has been my main RSS feed reader since it was released. Actually since each separate version was released — I own licences for the iPhone, iPad and OS X version.
Despite some minor annoyances the UI of all apps is second to none and it's easily one of the most heavily used apps on all my devices.

The UI of the new iPhone version is nothing short of spectacular and works very well, even though it's a bit laggy at times (I'm sure this is something that will be improved in a future release).

I'm not going to review the entire application, Mr. Viticci has done a thoroughly good job with that. What I want to mention is the integration of Fever as the first true alternative to Google Reader since the demise of Newsgator as a publicly available RSS aggregator.

Shaun Inman's service might be a bit more difficult to set up for the average user and it requires a web server (you buy a licence for the Fever software which then has to be hosted on your server), but for me it has three advantages:

  1. It works perfectly fine as a regular feed catching service,
  2. it's marquee feature ranks posts by importance and popularity based on several criteria, presenting the user with a "you don't have time to read all entries, but these you shouldn't miss" listing (more on this here),
  3. and using Fever is going to eliminate the last reason for me to have a Google account.

The one thing keeping me from buying some web space, a Fever licence and setting it up right this second, is the absence of a good Fever client for the iPad. As of now it's also unclear when Reeder's developer Silvio Rizzi will release Reeder for iPad 3.0.

I also hope that by the time Mr. Ricci has Reeder 3.0 for iPad ready to go, the app will also support in-app feed management for Fever accounts, which it currently doesn't and receive a better visual implementation of Fever's ranking feature (both are things the MacStories review criticises).

For the time being I'm going to enjoy reading my RSS in Reeder 3.0 for the iPhone, and I somehow get the feeling that it's going to be used more often than the iPad app.

Red Sweater Blog – Open Source Obligations

The problems that result from a false sense of entitlement.
I don’t want to give people the “holier than thou” feeling, but my opinion is that when someone gives the fruit of their labour away for free, the things you say to them should consist of constructive criticism and lots of ‘Thank you!’s, nothing more.

(via Instapaper)