Pining for iSkitch; Penning for Publish...ing

WHEN is Skitch coming to the iPhone? According to their site, it's "coming soon"... According to their blog, they're hiring people as of September who are good with iOS, so... safe to say it won't be, like, tomorrow. Sigh. The ONE thing Android has going for it... the ONE thing. As far as I'm concerned.

I want to do THIS:

on my phone! (I did that on my Mac—thank HEAVENS there's at least a Mac App for it)

Blarg.

My novel editing is going... very slowly. What was a blast to write and a thrill to finish is becoming a huge task to refine. I'm too close to it. I think it's brilliant. It cracks me up. It's hilarious. The problem is, there are huge plot holes! Things just don't make sense beginning to end! They all make sense on a micro scale, but overall they need to be shifted around. I need to break them off into sections and rearrange them without looking at the individual paragraphs... I'm just too attached to my own perceived hilarity. It's a real problem.

Here's some great writing advice from David Oglivy:

 “If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy. The next morning I get up early and edit the gush… I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor.”

So wise.

I'll temporarily shift my writing to the 10-sentence story inspired by my Story Cubes. Here's what I was cast in the last Creative Writing Group meeting:

Ten sentences... 

...and I'm off!

How The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Changed the Way I Use my Computer

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a phenomenal movie in many entertainment-related ways (I'm referring here to the recent, US-made, Rooney Mara/Daniel Craig version). But aside from the intriguing plot, awesome action, and an opening credits scene reminiscent of old James Bond movies, there was also a hefty amount of Mac usage. Lisbeth Salander uses one, and Mikael Blomkvist "uses" one, ever so clunkily (though his proficiency quickly increases after Salander enters his life). Being a Mac person myself, I liked the role my MacBookPro's brethren played on screen, and I was instantly very impressed with the speed with which Salander blasted through programs and views, nearly matching the speed of her mind. I noted that she was using the Command+Tab method of application switching. Interesting.

At work, I usually have at least ten programs open for the majority of the day, and up until I saw this movie, I had been using Expose to quickly view all my open windows and choose the one I needed.

One mild drawback was the accidental Expose when the cursor neared a corner, although this didn't bother me so much as it did any colleague who would hop on to work on something and be super confused when this happened, not knowing they could cursor back to the corner again to undo the view. Another, larger, drawback was the legibility of various programs when the number of windows climbed up, and of course I had trouble distinguishing between emails when several drafts were open simultaneously.

The day after seeing the film, I switched my Expose settings off and started using the Command+Tab. It took a LITTLE getting used to, but only a little. Once the neuropathways were fused that mentally connected the program icons to the window to which I wanted to switch, it was a short hop into the pool of productivity. And the water was fine. Within one day I was working MUCH faster.

I don't know if the books, or the Swedish films, get into anything that specific with programs, so I'm not sure who to thank here, Larsson, Oplev, or Fincher, but thank you, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I may not be hunting down serial murderers, but the work I do is now more efficient.

Boom.

Ahh, l'amour!

Le sigh. I am in love. Who says money can't buy it? The Beatles? Pfft.

Behold:

Oh yeah. It's gettin' real. I gots me an iPhone!

Please, tell me all the things I need to know. I have downloaded all the rudimentary apps: Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, GooglePlus, Instagram, Foursquare, Evernote, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Goodreads, Tweetdeck, Netflix, Fandango, Amazon, eBay, Yelp, IMDb, BBC News, ESPN ScoreCenter, etc. (Huh. Looks like I use quite a few social networking sites... Suddenly I'm impressed that I know all those passwords!), plus a few just-for-funsies, like Shazam, Hoccer and Bump. Just updated and tested my Square by charging myself a dollar on my credit card to see what sort of things I can expect when people pay me via my phone for ... I dunno, photogging, copywriting, and perhaps winning random bets?

I believe I shall post mini-reviews on apps, etc. Mayhaps I shall add a whole new page to this site just for that! I shall, however, post here one very rad iPhone case that, were it not for the hefty pricetag, would be mine:

From: Gizmodo

No, really, that's a phone!

I also feel moved by the Spirit to share this:

All The Songs Of Phoebe

It really does totally brighten your day. So many classics.

—Stay thirsty, my friends.