But what if you took the simple but powerful platform of Notational Velocity, and started adding some amazing features like Markdown, Textile and MultiMarkdown support (with a preview window to see your formatting), a widescreen layout, the ability to hide the notes panel, and some very nice stylistic improvements? The result is a fork of Notational Velocity by Brett Terpstra called Notational Velocity ALT, and it's a thing of beauty.

At this point I have to tell you that I've been lucky enough to use Brett's software for years now. In addition to writing software, Brett's a blogger for TUAW, a sister site of Download Squad, and when I was writing for TUAW I was lucky enough to get involved with using the Mac text editor TextMate with a bundle Brett wrote. He built it to allow writers to write for Blogsmith -- the CMS that runs TUAW and Download Squad -- using Markdown, but with a bunch of added features to make the writer more efficient, and their life easier. It's brilliant software, and it's what I'm using to compose this post.

I'm sharing this because it illustrates that Brett's role of writer puts him in a position to really understand the headaches writers run into, but his role as a coder empowers him to solve those headaches.

Notational Velocity ALT is already the best note taking app I've ever used, but what excites me even more is that Brett's plan is to make it not just a fantastic note taking app, but a fantastic text editor optimized for people who write online. I'm looking forward to the day when I write everything I intend to post online in Notational Velocity ALT, and that day may not be terribly far away.

Based on what Brett has already done with Notational Velocity ALT, and what he's done writing software for writers, this software's future is very, very bright.

Notational Velocity ALT, the supremo Mac note-taking tool, goes 1.0 originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 12 Dec 2010 14:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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 course, I'm not talking about myself! Consider this a general comment on the human condition. I just found something that might come in handy if you ever find yourself in a similar situation: it's a neat little Web service called oneword.

As you might expect, oneword gives you just a single word, and then it has you write about it. What's not implied in the name is that you get just 60 seconds to do this. One word, 60 seconds, go!

It is a pretty invigorating experience. I couldn't not write, really. Once your time is up, a small form pops up where you can email your text to yourself.

The service is free, and you can also open an account so that you don't have to keep filling in your email and can access a few other features, such as "word ups" - a way to give and receive feedback for pieces of writing.

Oneword.com helps get your creative juices flowing originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 19 Nov 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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 have its own Web page, and it's just a lowly script (not even an application). However, if you do any sort of writing, you really owe it to yourself to try it out.

The script corrects about 4,700 common misspellings (including the word "mispelling") based on lists from Wikipedia, MS Word, and other sources. Correction is very fast - it is done via AutoHotkey's "hotstring" mechanism, which means that it often happens before you even notice you've made a mistake.

Adding new words is easy: simply highlight the word you've just misspelled and hit Win+H. A small window will pop up that shows the word and asks for the correct spelling. Once you enter the correct spelling and hit OK, that's it - you will never make that typo again.

The script is lightweight, free, fast, and easily configurable. What more could you want?

AutoCorrect for English harnesses the power of AutoHotkey for typo-free text originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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 Dictionaries. It lays out a large canvas of endangered words in front of your eyes, and when you click a word, a dialog pops up with its meaning. The definitions are simple (perhaps a tad too simple) and very easy to understand.

Once you find a word that strikes you as original, interesting, or worthy in some other way, you can "adopt" it. When you adopt a word, you're supposed to receive an email with a certificate of adoption, but mine never came. Still, the important thing is that by adopting the word, you promise that you're going to use it and, thus, bring it back to life. That's not such a vappous goal after all!

Save The Words lets you adopt a dying word, feel smarter originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 11 Nov 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Bluefire Reader for iPhone and iPad lets you read public library e-books originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 11 Nov 2010 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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 "inverted", i.e, use the background color for the text of the bar, and the text color for the background of the bar. This is really simpler than it sounds.
• New Text Statistics: When you hit F12, you can see a whole bunch of data about your text. How many characters, words, sentences, etc. Version 2 also lets you see how many unique words you've used, how many hard words (3 or more syllables), lexical density, Gunning fog index, and even approximately how long it would take to read your text.
• File-based attributes: When you set a writing target ('I will write 500 words this session') it now gets saved to the specific file you're working with, as an NTFS attribute. So you can set different targets for different files.

There are lots of other improvements. This is a preview release, so I haven't upgraded my "main" version yet (the one with which I'm writing this post), but when the stable version comes out, I definitely plan on upgrading.

WriteMonkey Version 2 Preview 1 is now out, with added pizzazz originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 10 Nov 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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 crowdsource the selection process: lots of authors upload their works to the site (minimum 10,000 words). There's an active community of readers and reviewers that go over the texts, read, comment or "back" (support) the book.

Then, at the end of each month, the top five works from the site are reviewed by a panel of HarperCollins editors. They read at least 10,000 words of the work, and deliver feedback right on the site itself. Meaning you can read what they have to say - not just the author's text.

Feedback is frank, but very professional. For example, a work called Evil UnLtd "won" the Editor's Review award and garnered a positive review, but the HarperCollins reviewer also wrote "As a publisher I worry that the market for this would be too small to make it a viable proposal for me."

The bottom line here is that HarperCollins are using this site to mine for new talent - and other publishers can do the same. If you're serious about your writing, this could be a great way to get noticed.

Authonomy is a creative community for budding authors, backed by HarperCollins originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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 books, but downloading requires "tokens" - it's not exactly free.

So for the rest of us who don't have an unlimited Safari Books subscription or who like to read offline every now and then, here are four excellent places for daily deals on computer e-books:

• Apress.com Daily Deal - Apress offers a single computer book for $10 every day. Each deal is valid for 24 hours, and the $10 price is an incredible discount. For example, as I write this, they're offering Pro .NET 4 Parallel Programming in C# for $10. The MSRP for that book is $59.99 - so that's a $50 discount. That's not too shabby! (By the time this post is published, this deal might have expired. It's just an example, though - there's a new book every day.)
• InformIT $9.99 eBook Deal of the Day - This is similar to Apress, but it offers different books. You can get a single book for $10, and it changes daily. Today's offering is Presentation Patterns, which apparently isn't out in dead-tree form yet. So you get a great price and early availability.
• Que Publishing - You'll find much the same deal here: one book per day, $10 per book. Today's offering is Microsoft Windows 7 In Depth, which was published in August 2009.
• O'Reilly's One Day Only - Of course, O'Reilly offers a similar service of its own, and it's excellent. In fact, it's the only one out of the four listed options that has an RSS feed! O'Reilly features all sorts of daily deals, not just "one book for $10." Today, the offer is for 8 Microsoft-related books, each for 50% off, in celebration of Microsoft's PDC10.

Do you know of any other great sources for cheap, legit computer e-books? Let me know in the comments!

Four places to find great online deals for computer e-books originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 04 Nov 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

How to Instapaper an entire multi-page article in just two clicks originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 04 Nov 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

LittleIpsum is a Latin Lorem Ipsum generator for Mac OS X originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 30 Oct 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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 servers. Each item copied remains saved for 30 days, or until you clear the clipboard contents through the extension's drop-down menu.

The extension just released today, but Google warns of two major known issues: Gmail isn't yet supported, and neither are pages which contain frames. I've also run into a spot of trouble in getting items copied with the extension to paste inside Google Docs.

On the bright side, text copied using Docs' built-in clipboard will be instantly available in the extension for pasting elsewhere. Last but not least, the extension is currently only able to paste inside form elements. Despite these early obstacles, this is probably one of the more useful extensions in the gallery for people who use more than one computer. Since this is an official Google extension, I would think the bugs will get worked out fairly quickly.

One thing I'm hoping for in subsequent updates is for the extension to work inside the Omnibar, which could make quickly copying a URL and switching computers a much smoother process than it is today. One thing's for certain, Chrome OS was definitely on the minds of Google's extension team when they cooked this one up.

Google Web Clipboard feeds Chrome freshly synced copypasta originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 29 Oct 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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 free, portable, and -- at just 964KB of RAM on my system -- very lightweight.

All it does is give you 10 text fields that you can copy and paste text into. When you close the application, the content of each field is automatically saved, and will show up the next time you run Pasteboard. It's stored as plain text, too -- so if you need to strip links or formatting off of text that you copied from a website, you can just paste it into Pasteboard.

This is nothing you couldn't do with Stickies or with a ton of other applications, but Pasteboard is simple, lightweight, and it does what it says on the tin.

Pasteboard is a free and simple clipboard management tool originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 29 Oct 2010 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Amazon Kindle app for Windows Phone 7 will be out later this year originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 28 Oct 2010 15:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Kobo e-book reader gets newspaper and magazine content and subscriptions originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 27 Oct 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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 caught my eye because it can do this and a whole lot more. Plus it's free, open source, and cross-platform.

Pandoc understands Markdown, HTML, and several other formats, and it can output:

• plain text - i.e., strip all HTML and give you just the text
• Markdown - so you can convert HTML back into Markdown for editing
• And a whole list of other formats, including HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, PDF, RTF, DocBook XML, OpenDocument XML, ODT, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup, groff man pages, EPUB ebooks, and S5 and Slidy HTML slide shows

It even supports PDF output using a helper utility. So yes, it can convert Markdown to HTML (and vice versa), but it can do so much more, too. It's definitely one for the toolbox!

Pandoc is a Swiss Army knife text conversion utility originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 27 Oct 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Scrivener is a long-form writing application with a pretty strong fan-base on the Mac. And now there's finally a beta version for Windows, too!

This release of Scrivener comes just before NaNoWriMo, which is the National Novel Writing Month that's due to begin at the start of November. The Windows Beta is free to use (until the full version comes out), while the new Mac version (Scrivener 2.0 Public Preview) is free to use until December 7.

[Via: TUAW]

Scrivener writing application now available for Windows, just in time for NaNoWriMo originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 26 Oct 2010 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I love learning new words. However, when I just read what a word means, more often than not I soon forget the definition. If I use the word in a number of sentences, though, it's easier for me to retain it - especially if the sentences are meaningful.

Phrays is a nifty little Web application built on this exact principle. You're supposed to go there once a day and check out the word of the day. It's always a "special" word, but the definition appears right along with it. Then, you click in the text area right under the definition and make up a sentence with that word.

Don't just make up any sentence, though. People will later be able to vote for your sentence, and if it's good enough, it will then appear in the gallery of past winning sentences. Right now, the "winning sentences" are sentences that got just one or two votes, because the tool is in its infancy (and because voting requires an account - boo!). But as more people discover Phrays (and the requirement for an account is dropped, hint hint), I suspect that voting will become much more interesting. As it is, it's a fun way to learn a new word every day!

[Gracias, Falconer!]

Phrays is a great way to learn new words and use them in sentences originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 25 Oct 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Here's something that I do all the time: when I want to know how to use a certain word or phrase, I just google it. And when I'm trying to decide on one of two options, I just google them both and see which one is more common, or how it works in a sentence. I use it a lot when I translate ("do people really say that?"), but I also use it when I just write in English.

And now, Phras.in lets me do the exact same thing, but I can do it in style (or is it "with style"? Exactly!) and a great deal faster. So, I just type the words "in style" in the top text box, and then I type "with style" in the bottom text box. By the time I'm done typing, I can see that "in style" got 43.4 million hits, while "with style" has only 23.5 million hits. The search is live, and it's super-fast; there's no Enter required. And clearly, "in style" wins.

But maybe I'm not sure, or I want to see how they're really used. I just have to hit the big Contextualize 'em button, and I get a whole bunch of Google results that show the phrases in their natural habitat.

It even works in Hebrew, so I guess it can handle pretty much anything that you throw at it (anything Google can handle, that is). It's very, very useful!

Phras.in helps you decide which of two words you should use originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 24 Oct 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Peg.gd is a one-trick pony: go to the site, enter a title, type your text, and you're done. You now have a short URL with text that you can share and edit (or have others edit).

The whole thing has a zen garden, forced minimalism feel to it, the kind seen on a lot of Ruby-based projects (I bet this thing is a Rails app, but I may be wrong). I happen to like it, but that's really a matter of taste.

The text is formatted using Markdown, which happens to be my method of choice. No account is required, and the Peg.gd About page says it's because "you're a person, not a rich vein of data to mine." You can also embed videos and images, but I didn't test this because it's not readily accessible to the average user at this point.

Peg.gd uses HTML5 local storage for saving your text as you type; that means that on my aging Firefox 3.6.8, it was really slow. But as long as you use a bleeding-edge browser, you should be fine.

Peg.gd is a quick way to create and share single pages of text and more originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 21 Oct 2010 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Lorizzle generates gangsta Lorem Ipsum originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 21 Oct 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.