After more than 2 years, quite a few posts, dozens of themes and a lot of fun, this blog is leaving wordpress.com. The blog’s URL (www.acrossthepod.com) will remain the same, but you will now get sent to our new wordpress installation over at dreamhost. Our feed shall also remain the same (feeds.feedburner.com/acrossthepod). Thanks to the wordpress guys, i have only seen features grow while i was here, not once was this site down, and overall this was the best experience possible to teach me how to use wordpress. See ya!
Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
21
Mar
08
Scribbling with Scrivener
Word processing is a traditionally utterly mundane task. Just lay out your document exactly the way it will appear on paper, write it, and print it. Microsoft word is the titan of this area, dominating well over 70% of the market. However, a few growing niche alternatives exist, such as Apple’s Pages (’08), which i switched to recently in order to leave MS word behind. It was an easy transition, and the prowess of pages at its job astounded me. Pages is still fundamentally a “word processor” though, and after i discovered a piece of software called “Scrivener”, i have left pages behind too, in favor of Scrivener.
There is something fundamentally different about Scrivener compared to other software products in its class- Scrivener is designed to write content. In many cases, the finished product is not what you see, as i write this, i don’t need to write it in the exact same fashion that it will appear on the site (something which effectively, all word processors do), i just need to have good writing tools. Scrivener offers a variety of templates for novels, radio drama’s and plays, as well as the obligatory “blank”. The key to the operation is the one-window nature of the application. Within one window (and quite importantly, one application) i can store an entire project, its chapters, notes, and even research i have done for the article. This is what sets scrivener apart, scrivener is not a word processor, it is a content processor. Later, when you want your work exported to the required format, scrivener’s export function takes care of producing an exported file to the users specifications. Regrettably, Scrivener can not handle files from Apple’s Pages directly when importing. What is most frustrating is seeing the potential scrivener has, but only being able to access what it has now, to really complete the package, Scrivener could really do with some templates for other types of contents such as columns and online articles, as well as an additional plug-in to directly post Scrivener articles to web-sites (such as wordpress and moveable type) via the XML-RPC standard. Overall, Scrivener is a revolution in content creation, but could do with just a tad more work.
09
Jan
08
Newsgator goes free!
Newsgator, the company that produces a myriad of RSS based products announced that as of today all of it’s products for individuals are now: free! Every single one of them. Did i mention that also includes their cross-service synchronisation? So now you can have your feeds where you want them, how you want them, when you want them. Crucially, this means that Newsgator’s critically acclaimed RSS reader for the Mac-Newnewswire, is available free-of-charge. This is excellent news, and when you add in the free syncing, Newsgator is now putting on an offering that you simply can’t refuse to try. Newsgators free products for individuals are available here
29
Oct
07
Flock
Hi again, long time since my last post. Consider this the relaunch of across-the-pod. This post was written in flock, which is my new browser. To be frank: Using the newest release candidate for flock has been the best browsing experience i’ve ever had. Within minutes, i was able to integrate into my browsing experience my Flickr, del.icio.us and of course, my wordpress account. You can also integrate, youtube, facebook, twiiter and so much more. Honestly, i was very sceptical about flock, i had heard so many bad stories about “flock being overloaded with yahoo” but it wasn’t, because del.icio.us and flickr, while owned by yahoo, are genuine services that many people use. The only possible “yahoo-ification” was the default search box, which offers cool “inquisitor” type results-as-you-type, but if you want, and i did, change the search box into a normal google search box. I’ve never had a smoother, refined browing experience, so give a flock a go, if you don’t like it, you can always switch back…
Blogged with Flock
It’s been a well known fact for some time know that Yahoo! will soon role out UNLIMITED free storage for yahoo mail users, and since there is already a program to hack gmail into a hard drive, how long is it going to be before someone realises, and writes, a program to turn your yahoo email account into an online hard drive, if, and when that happens, i suppose companies like Xdrive from AOL can just wave goodbye to their “pay-for” storage plans. Although 2 storage companies i have used myself, box.net and Omnidrive, are probably safe. On the one hand, a simple server connection turns Box.net into a slick little 1GB .mac replacement, and Omnidrive does the same except you have to install a small app to make it do this, better still, omnidrive is slick even on an old Windows XP computer which is bogged down in registry items. Both of these companies offer solutions WAY slicker and user friendly than what any hacker will probably write, so the lesson for companies whose business model relies on people paying for storage (after upgrading from a free storage plan) then those companies to make their solutions, slicker, more user friendly, lighter on system resources and definetly offer more storage per buck because if they don’t, as far as they are concerned, if this hack comes out the upper “uber-geek” end of their market is GONE.
04
Apr
07
Acrossthepod 1: The Debut
In our first episode we interview Scott Bourne of http://www.ilifezone.com and http://www.podcastingtricks.com about what is web 2.0 in his opinion, we look at why the adobe lightroom beta (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/) will NOT kill Apples aperture Scott also gives us the scoop on his new podcast as part of the TWiT network: Gear+Media+Tech!You can download it here…unless you did the smart thing and used a podcatcher, in which case, these shownotes are right here, right now.
04
Apr
07
The album artwork
Here it is album artwork….
03
Apr
07
The First Episode, it’s coming.
It’s under wraps at the moment, but soon, the first episode will arrive…prepare for touchdown.
Across the Pod 