Category: Text

It's no secret that Notational Velocity is my favorite Mac note-taking application. It synchronizes with the SimpleNote online service, which means you can access your notes on your Mac, iPhone, online, and, if you store your notes in a folder that is in your Dropbox account, on a plethora of iOS plain text editing applications. It's made for speed, letting you find what you need instantly, make ...

Writer's block is a drag. You just sit there staring at the full-screen, distraction-free editor that you spent forever tweaking so it would be just right. You're all set up to write, and ... nothing comes. Blank. The cursor blinks, the clock ticks by, and everything you can think of just seems trite and boring, like a stereotype of a story rather than the story you wish you could write. Of ...

There are certain words in English that are very easy to get wrong, like aggravate, exaggerate, and acquainted (as you see in the screenshot). AutoCorrect for English (ACE) is a fantastic script for correcting exactly those type of mistakes, and it does so seamlessly, quickly, and across your entire system. ACE is very easy to overlook it, because it hasn't been updated since 2007, it doesn't ...

Language is a living thing. As the world changes, new words are invented, and older ones fade away and go out of circulation. Some would say that's the nature of the Universe. But do all of these words really have to die? After all, it's fun to use a unique word every now and then – it keeps your text from becoming too vappous. Save The Words is a project that's related to Oxford ...

Bluefire Reader is an e-reader app for the iPhone and iPad that, along with letting you read e-books in EPUB and PDF formats, has a unique twist compared to its competitors -- support for Adobe DRM. Not only that, but starting today, it supports the unique DRM used by public libraries, so you can download free e-books from hundreds of public library websites, transfer them to your iDevice using ...

WriteMonkey is the best full-screen text editor available for Windows today. There, I said it. And now, the first preview for Version 2 has been released, with a whole bunch of enhancements and goodies: Info bar colors: WriteMonkey has a very handy infobar at the bottom (or top) of the screen, showing all sorts of text statistics, as well as the current time. You can now easily make this bar ...

It used to be that when you wrote a book, you just sent your manuscript off to a bunch of publishers, and waited. Or if you were lucky, rich, or connected, maybe you had an agent who could help you and pitch the publishers for you. Today, it no longer has to be like that. Authonomy is one website that aims to change the process -- and do it in style. HarperCollins is effectively using the site to ...

For programmers and other nerds, reading computer books is kind of like eating your greens: it's often no fun, but it is important. If you code for a living, you may already have a corporate subscription to Safari Books Online. But even with the incredible selection you can find on Safari Books, it's not always convenient to have to be online while reading. Granted, you can download some of the ...

Saving a multi-page article to Instapaper can be a pain. Caching each page individually takes several clicks, and some sites don't offer a single-page view of their articles. If you're using Safari 5, you can get around this problem with Safari Reader. When you activate Safari Reader, you'll get a highly readable text-only view that usually includes the entire article, all on one page. If you ...

It ain't no Lorizzle, but LittleIpsum is pretty cool nevertheless -- a Mac application that lives in your menu bar and generates actual Latin Lorem Ipsum. It can do words, sentences or paragraphs, depending on your mood and/or needs, can wrap the generated text into HTML tags, and it supports Growl notifications. It can be set to start each time you log in and automatically download updates if ...

Google's newest official Chrome extension is sure to get a lot of use in the coming months. Assuming you've got extension-syncing enabled in a capable version of the browser, Web Clipboard brings a fully synced clipboard to Chrome, and it's pretty nice for an initial -- though somewhat buggy -- release. It copies both plain text and HTML within any Chrome tab, and secures the data on Google ...

There's no dearth of clipboard management applications. These are usually tools that let you copy and paste multiple snippets of text, append text to your clipboard, or manage images and other rich content in all sorts of clever ways. Pasteboard doesn't even try to compete with that sort of functionality. It's a single-file application (if you don't count the readme and the PDF manual) that is ...

Amazon has announced that a Kindle application will be available for the Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system "later this year". This would be the first e-reader app to make it to Microsoft's new smartphone OS, and would continue Amazon's cross-platform strategy for the Kindle. Aside from the Kindle devices themselves, Kindle apps are already available for the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, ...

Aside from Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook, there's a third, often overlooked, e-reading device+service combo out there -- Kobo from Borders. And while it doesn't get in the news anywhere near as much as the other two, it's still a decent offering. One glaring omission so far has been lack of subscriptions to newspapers and magazines. Kobo now finally has newspaper and magazine ...

I love Markdown. If you write any sort of content for the Web, you really should try it; it's a simple notation system for making text bold or italic, creating headlines and bulleted lists, and more. To make text bold, for example, you just need to surround it with asterisks. Converting Markdown into valid HTML is a fairly common task, and there's no dearth of tools that do this. But Pandoc ...