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 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!

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By JENNA WORTHAM, NYT (click for full article)

After months of wild speculation, Steven P. Jobs has finally given Apple fans exactly what they have been asking for — a new iPhone-like tablet computer called the iPad starting at $499.”We want to kick off 2010 by introducing a magical and revolutionary product today,” said Mr. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive.

* * *

Should someone who writes books–or even just wants to write A book–plan to get an iPad? Well, on the “shiny things” side: It’s gorgeous, and if indeed its battery lasts 10 hours–what’s not to like?

Simply put–the lack of a keyboard. My main way to interact with my computer is via the keyboard. I type fast. I express myself easily.

I don’t need a lot of computation power. I do fiddle with pictures and videos, so I need some graphics power. But on most trips, I’d be happy with an iPhone and a keyboard.

Now the fact that one cannot connect a bluetooth keyboard to the iPhone is clearly a strategic marketing decision, not a programming challenge. I find it regrettable.

If the iPad has a similar limitation, it’ll be a while before I get one. I hope it doesn’t.

Update: Just watched the Apple iPad video. If it works as well as it does on the video, I may be ok with the on-screen keyboard. We’ll see.

The service is called BookPrep, and it enables any publisher “to digitize any existing book and turn it into a virtual asset that can be sold over the Internet and printed on demand — either as is, or personalized by the consumer. … BookPrep automatically aligns and flattens scanned texts of current and out-of-print-books, cleans and brightens the fold and corners of the pages for consistent coloration, and outputs a professional and print-ready PDF eMaster. … BookPrep makes it possible to give consumers access to every book ever published as a high quality replica of the original that they can even personalize.” The appeal here is in the long tail, all the fodder for those with passionate niche interests residing in the estimated 90 million books that are out of print, millions of them out of copyright. The latest addition to the books available for on-demand printing is a collection of 500,000 rare or out-of-print titles from the University of Michigan Library. And while the cost of a custom run was once prohibitive, new technology will let HP price a 250-page book around $15.