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October 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

MindManager 9 for the Mac: A worthwhile update

I’ve used MindManager on both the Mac and the PC from its earliest versions. (The story of how it was developed by Mike and Bettina Jetter while Mike was undergoing leukemia treatments is amazing; read the book.) It is the most popular mindmapping software on the market today.

Mindmapping in Wikipedia: “A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea.”

This is not a complete generic review of MindManager; I am not interested in its extensive task- and project-management capabilities, for example, or in its ability to generate a slideshow. My interest in mindmapping stems from my use of clustering. (Here’s a short video on how to cluster.) Clustering is a way–perhaps the best way–to get stuff out of your head and onto paper, in front of you. It’s how to find out what you know–and what you don’t know–about a subject.

Mindmapping is typically used for presentation, or for gradual and deliberate planning. Clustering is much more streamlined. It is a mining tool, to let you get at the riches you have stored in your mind. Gabriele Rico devotes an entire book to it:Writing the Natural Way.

How do you cluster? Here’s a description from the blog of writer Dustin Wax.

Here’s the basic idea:
1.    Write a word in the middle of a sheet of paper.
2.    Circle it.
3.    Write down the first word or phrase that comes to mind and circle it.
4.    Draw a line connecting the second circle to the first.
5.    Repeat. As you write and circle new words and phrases, draw lines back to the last word, the central word, or other words that seem connected. Don’t worry about how they’re connected — the goal is to let your right-brain do its thing, which is to see patterns; later, the left-brain will take over and put the nature of those relationships into words.
6.    When you’ve filled the page, or just feel like you’ve done enough (a sign of what Rico calls a “felt-shift”), go back through what you’ve written down. Cross out words and phrases that seem irrelevant, and begin to impose some order by numbering individual bubbles or clusters. Here is where your right-brain is working in tandem with your left-brain, producing what is essentially an outline. At this point, you can either transfer your numbered clusters to a proper outline or simply begin writing in the order you’ve numbered the clusters.

I am a geek. I love using computers for anything–and often have difficulty admitting when I’d probably be better served by pen and paper. But years ago, when I first started to cluster, and I tried to do it on early versions of MindManager, it just didn’t work. I couldn’t get access to the stuff in my head that just came pouring out when I used pen and paper.

I think I know why. At the time, mindmapping on the computer was very much a left-brain activity. Even though the results were graphical, the process of producing a mind map involved lots of keyboarding and menuing. So I couldn’t cluster productively with a computer.

But over time, computers became more powerful; graphics became higher in resolution, and far smoother; and MindManager grew up.

Today, I cluster on my Mac, using MindManager 9. The process of creating a new “topic” or “subtopic” is so simple that I don’t have to stop to think about it. I can quickly create a cluster without planning or cogitation; it just flows out from my fingers, little engaging my left brain. So my right brain can “dump” its contents onto the screen.

By using MM9, I don’t have to worry about running out of room. MM9 unobtrusively reconfigures the layout of the cluster or mind map according to preferences I can set.

So my most favorite aspect of MM9 for the Mac is that it is unobtrusive enough for me to cluster with. For me–and I believe, for any author–that is a biggie.

But there is a lot more to this highly polished product. It integrates well with both Microsoft Office and Apple software, interoperating with word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation documents. It links to URLs on the Web, as well as to other mind maps. It comes with a large list of templates, giving you a starting place for any mindmapping project you might have in mind. Here’s a full list of MM9′s features.

Although it is not quite as rich as some dedicated outliners, MM9′s outlining facility is respectable. You can switch back and forth between map and outline view very easily.

As an update, MM9 for Mac is a big step ahead of MM8. Its user interface has been simplified; its esthetics have been refined; its presentation, printing, importing, and exporting capabilities have been improved; and it works under Lion. (For a full list of upgraded features, click here.) All the improvements make it an incredibly useful tool for the aspiring author.

 

Filed Under: book love, book writing, tech, write a book
September 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment

After the book

Read this from Bob Stein, of the Institute for the Future of the Book:

the future of the appPost date 08.02.2010, 10:37 AM

posted by bob stein

Assuming that whatever replaces the book in the futurist landscape to come will not be called “a book,” people often ask me why I named our group The Institute for the Future of the Book. My answer has consistently been a variant of the following: while it’s true that whatever replaces the book as a crucial mechanism for moving ideas around time and space is not likely to be called “a book,” since we don’t have that word yet, “book” works better than “institute for the future of discourse” or “institute for thinking about what comes after the book.” I end my answer by suggesting that one day we’ll realize that a word describing a new-fangled object, or perhaps a word referring to a range of behaviors has come to signify the dominant media form which has in fact supplanted the book.

I’ve always assumed that day would be years or even decades off. But recently, while listening to the Flux Quartet play Morton Feldman’s First Quartet on a gently swaying barge in the east river, i suddenly recognized our first candidate — “app.” It’s not the pretty or expressive word I was hoping for, but it feels right.

The aha moment went like this . . . . while zoning in and out of the Feldman piece I started to think about the iPad that I’d been using for the past six weeks — not only for most of my reading, but for playing expressive games like my current favorite, SoundDrop, answering email, surfing the web, watching videos, and listening to music. The iPad has become the center of my media universe, much more than my computer, iPod, or iPhone have ever been. My text used to come in an object we called a book; movies came on tapes, laserdisc, and DVDs, music on records and CDs and games on cartridges and CDs. Now they are all appearing as apps of one sort or another on my iPad.

The distinction between media types was a lot more important during the analog era of the mid-twentieth cenury. In 1950 no one would confuse a novel with a movie or a song with a TV show. But today we have e-books with video sequences, and movies published with extensive text-based supplements. Is Lady Gaga a music star or video star? More

What do you think? And if you’re in the neighborhood on September 13, come to my Meetup here in Mountain View, CA, to discuss it.

Filed Under: book love, book writing, inspiration, publishing, tech, write a book Tagged With: , , , ,
August 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Useful interviewing tools

Non-fiction authors often need to interview people. Of course you should record the interview, and electronic recorders are so inexpensive that they are commodities. Besides, most smart phones will record full interviews and let them be downloaded to your computer, where you can play them back.

Microsoft Office OneNote Icon
Image via Wikipedia

What used to frustrate me was finding my way around long recordings. An hour or two of talking takes a long time to skim.

One of the few applications I regretted giving up in my last PC-to-Mac transition, about four years ago, was Microsoft OneNote. And my very favorite thing about OneNote was this: You can tell it to record audio while you take notes. Then, the audio is indexed by your notes.

So you can go back to your notes and click anywhere, and OneNote will play the portion of the audio that was being spoken at the moment you made that note. Very, very, very powerful.

Circus Ponies’ Notebook on the Mac did this, but it also crashed, lost stuff, and corrupted several months worth of notes irretrievable. I don’t trust that product, even though that miserable experience was three years ago.

I just discovered Pear Note from Useful Fruit software, a wonderful audio- and video-note taking app that focuses on this issue. It is beautifully designed and works. I haven’t been using it long enough to remark on its robustness, but it feels very good to me.

Another useful tool–at least for shorter interviews–is the LiveScribe Echo. It’s a pen with a built-in recorder. You take notes on special paper. The pen records (excellent quality) what’s being said, and also captures your writing or drawing. Dock the pen with your PC or Mac, and both the audio and the writing/drawing are now accessible.

Touch the pen to your writing, and it plays back what was being said at the time of that particular piece of writing. That also works on the computer, without the pen.

Image representing Livescribe as depicted in ...

Image via CrunchBase

The recording is optionally binaural. When you record binaurally in a noisy environment, you can pull every softly spoke word out of the background with ease (when you also listen binaurally, of course).

My only complain about the pen: Battery life. I never get more than just over two hours. I’d carry a second pen for long meetings, but the syncing scheme makes that complicated.

EDIT: Just learned that Word 2004 and 2008 on the Mac, in “Notebook” mode, also do this!

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Filed Under: book writing, steps to write a book, tech, write a book Tagged With: , , ,
June 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Produce book video trailer for next to nothing

I’ve been working with my new friend Bill Quain on a variety of projects. (Check out our FastPencil Pointers podcast, or download it from iTunes.) Now we are preparing a teleseminar on producing a compelling video trailer for your book–at almost no cost.

The secret is Animoto.com, a website that uses artificial intelligence to create a fabulous video from still, video clips, and audio that you create or choose. Here’s what Bill wrote to his subscribers:

This message goes out to all of my newsletter subscribers. I have some very exciting news.

You can create fantastic, high-quality video Book Trailers for FREE! I did a couple, and they took me about 40 minutes each.

Now realize this – I am legally blind, 57 years old, and not that bright. Imagine what you can do! Just click here to sign up for your free account .

As a free account holder, you may create as many 30-second videos as you like. But, get this – for just $30/year you can upgrade to an account that lets you create as many full-length videos as you like!

Animoto provides all the music, and an incredible editor that allows you to upload images, create text, and even upload video clips. Then, their fantastic software mixes the music and creates a tempo, with many interesting transition techniques to make your video a really cool experience.

This is not just for book trailers! Many of my clients are coaches who would love to have a great, professional quality video on their websites. One friend of mine, who does a lot of workshops, takes pictures of the people in the workshop, inserts some text with points from the workshop, uploads some Animoto audio tracks with music, then shows the video at the workshop. He then emails it to each participant (Animoto actually does it for you) so they have a great reminder of the workshop, along with some major points.

Now, here is a special announcement for all the MEMBERS of The Anatomy of a Best-Selling Book membership site. I am going to give you a FREE tutorial on using Animoto. It will be coming up in the next two weeks, so sign up for your free acount, and upgrade to All Access status ($30/year) if you like. I will teach you exactly how to produce a video.

For those of you who are not MEMBERS of my site, the workshop will cost $39.77. Even if you have to pay, it is a very valuable tool. It will FLATTEN THE LEARNING CURVE!

(If you want to see a sample of one of my videos, just send me an email to request a link.)

Watch this space for the announcement of the workshop.

Filed Under: book writing, marketing, people & ideas, steps to write a book, tech Tagged With: , , , , ,
June 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment

How about a typewriter for input to your iPad?

Much has been written about writing on the iPad. Those tapping out more than a few lines often opt for a Bluetooth keyboard. But the cool kids get one of these:

The USB Typewriter.

You can star in your own personal film noir fantasy with this USB-powered input device that works with any USB-capable computer, including the iPad. When mounted in back and connected, the iPad rides the carriage* from right to left as you type. It even registers a carriage return automatically and places the cursor beneath the previous line.

The best part is that there are several models to choose from, ranging in price from US$400-500. DIY types can order a $200 kit to convert their own typewriter. We love it.

*Youngn’s: The “carriage” is where the “paper” used to go and get struck by the “ink ribbon.” Ask an old person. He’ll tell you all about it.

(From TUAW.com)

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May 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

“Perfect Pages”–a guide to producing books with Microsoft Word

Perfect Pages by Aaron Shepard is an indispensable aid to someone who wants to produce a fully formatted book manuscript in Microsoft Word. Get it for about $12.60 at Amazon.com and read its 150+ pages, and you will save yourself a lot of grief.

Microsoft Word 2010 Icon
Image via Wikipedia
Word Mac 2008 icon
Image via Wikipedia

Now you may think, “I’ve used Word forever. I don’t need additional tips.” You may be right, but I doubt it. Book formatting requires different

things than article or report formatting.

Word is a powerful program, and it can also be maddeningly cranky. This book helps you avoid the cranky parts.

The few pages on styles are so lucid that you will get your money’s worth from the book if you just absorb them. Styles are the blessing and the bane of Word, and the five pages Shepard devotes to them are spot on.

Partial contents:

  • Managing Word–Options; preferences; workspace; features; safety; memory
  • Formatting your document
  • Typesetting your text
  • Formatting your text
  • Perfecting your text
  • Handling special text
  • Handling graphics
  • Enhancing your layout
  • Preparing for print
  • Creating a cover
  • Resources–a good long list of websites

This book will save you time and energy if you write in Word. Highly recommended.

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Filed Under: book love, book printing, book writing, inspiration, planning, steps to write a book, tech, write a book Tagged With: , , , , , ,
May 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

An old warning

Yikes! My hard drive crashed today.

Joy! I use the Mac’s built-in Time Machine functionality, so that I’m continually backing up to a 1T hard drive. I lost–nothing. Took my MacBook Pro (unlike most laptops, it’s not a do-it-yourself hard-drive machine) to the techs; 3 hours later, voila! The Mac’s ready to bring home. I turn it on, plug in my backup drive–and 3 hands-off hours later, all 350 gigs of applications and data are back–and even the tabs I had open in my browser are open.

Backup was not this easy in years past. And for many PC users it still is not. I haven’t done the research, but I use MirrorFolder on my PC; every action I take on the PC is mirrored on my backup drive. If the PC drive crashes, I’m completely up-to-date.

If you are serious about writing a book, you should either keep all of your writing (and other important files) in a secure online service, like FastPencil.com, or get a good backup system. Otherwise, you are betting against entropy–the proven tendency of the universe to go from order to disorder. Right here, on your hard drive.

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May 10, 2010 By Leave a Comment

A “magic pocket”

The tools of the author’s trade used to be simple and few–something to write with, something to write on. Today we have a lot more help–or distraction, depending on your proclivities.

The computer, with its keyboard, spell-checker, dictation software, gorgeous printing, great organizing abilities, has become indispensable for me. I love to type, and have always hated to write. Typing is liberating for me.

I don’t use spelling and grammar checking features, usually–although I am grateful for it catching my rare spelling mistakes. But I love being able to move things around, to search-and-replace, to change typefaces–like a carpenter who loves her hammer and saw, I love the computer-based tools of my trade.

And then there’s the Internet. Wikipedia. Google. I have to force myself to get up and move around, to focus my eyes on objects at different distances, because I get so engrossed with the almost-infinite wealth of information at my fingertips.

So when I come across a truly useful innovation, I get excited. Dropbox.com is one such.

At first it seems like another “hard drive in the cloud”–a site that lets you store your stuff and access it at your convenience.  They’ve been around for years.

What makes Dropbox special? Like so many other amazingly popular developments–think iPod, Facebook, iPad–it’s not the originality of the functionality that makes the wonderfulness. It’s the overall feeling that gears, buttons, levers, and waiting time are out of the way. It bring me back to something Nicholas Negroponte said years ago, when asked what’s the next step beyond personal computing: “Intimacy” was his response.

I think a lot of Apple’s magic, a lot of why the simple Google search screen instantly became more popular than AltaVista, Yahoo!, and others, can be explained by that word, “intimacy.” These engaging experiences feel disintermediated. We feel as if we are in direct contact with what we’re trying to do, with nothing in the way.

That’s how Dropbox feels. You download a program to your Mac, PC, or Linux box. It sets up a special folder on your computer. Anything you put in that folder is automatically, invisibly synced with a secure storage location in the cloud. Any other computer from which you access your Dropbox account–and even your iPhone, with some limitations–can then access the same information. Dropbox makes sure everything is all in sync, all the time.

It’s free for up to 2 gigs. (You can get additional increments of 250 megs for each person you refer, up to 8 gigs; that’s why the link above is my affiliate link.) For 50 gigs, it’s $9.99/month or $99.99/year.

What would you use it for? Well, backups, for one–painless, unattended backups. Sharing large files, for another.

Dropbox says it’s like a magic pocket–put stuff in it from any computer, retrieve it from any other. I like that image.

Filed Under: book love, book writing, inspiration, tech, write a book Tagged With: , , , , , ,
April 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Can you dictate to your iPhone?

I downloaded Dragon Dictate for the iPhone a few weeks ago, tried it for a few minutes–then wrote it off as fatally flawed. First, I spoke into it, and it understood me fairly well. I tried it again, and was further impressed. But the third time, I spoke 3 or 4 sentences–and after a while, it came back and said something like, “Sorry, couldn’t understand you.” I looked around to see where the voice file was. It wasn’t to be found.

So I thought, I get this great idea; click on Dragon Dictate; speak it into the phone; go back to paying attention to whatever I was doing (hopefully not driving). Then when I look at the phone again–it’s gone without a trace.

I didn’t delete the app, but I went back to using one of the many voice recorder apps for that purpose. Yeah, I have to type it if I want it typed–but at least I have it. (Actually, I speak directly into Evernote, because that syncs with my other computers without me having to do anything. And I can easily tag the recording, too.)

I had some downtime while waiting somewhere yesterday, so I tried Dragon Dictate on my iPhone again. It had been updated a couple of times.

While it still doesn’t save the recording, its speech-to-text seems to have been sped up and significantly improved. Just to test its boundaries, I said:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithey toves
Did gyre and gimbal in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son–
The jaws that bite, the claws that snatch–
Beware the jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

Here’s what Dragon Dictate yielded:

What’s really, and the sleeping toll
good guy here and getting pulled in the way.
I’ll miss see where the parables
and the mobile rats out great.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son;
the jaws that bite the clause that snatch.
Beware the chuck chuck burn and shut
the from you spend your snatch.

When you’re done giggling–I chortled for quite a while–you’ll probably be as amazed as I am. This app did an incredible job of making sense out of nonsense.

It’s far from perfect. But did I mention that it is free? So when you are in the ZipWriting part of my book-writing process, you might try dictating pieces into your iPhone.

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January 28, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Write a book with it? Yes. Plus all the emotion around the iPad announcement

I think it’s a cool device; so do most commentators. But this morning’s “day after” batch of stuff in the online press is full of whining, griping, nitpicking, sour-grapes-ing–it’s downright mean-spirited. (Including the puerile humor about the product name.) Best I’ve found so far is Engadget’s.

Apple’s ability to inspire awe, admiration, loyalty–and sneery nastiness–is clearly closely related to its business success.

I was happy to learn–see my post from yesterday–that there is an optional keyboard dock, as well as support for Bluetooth keyboards.

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