Software Review: VoodooPad

We’ve discussed some different ways of taking notes before, here and here. When you’re taking notes in a digital form, using the right software to keep them together is very important. One application that is particularly suitable for this is VoodooPad by Flying Meat. Here’s a review.

You can use VoodooPad for taking notes, brainstorming and jotting down your ideas, but how does it work? For people familiar with wikis on the internet (click for a definition on Wikipedia), VoodooPad will have a very familiar interface: you write down some text and create links which automatically point to new, blank pages. So actually you’re creating a web consisting of different pages, linked to each other. Read more

Book Review: The War Of Art

Sometimes a book can give you just what you need at that specific moment. It’s great to read a book and discover how you seem to recognize a lot of the information. It’s like you already know it but you never really thought about it. For me, Steven Pressfield accomplishes this with his book The War of Art - Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles.

Clear And Concise
It’s a small book containing a lot of short and easy-to-read chapters. This is good. The book is about winning your inner creative battles, and it’s good to see the writer doesn’t need 500 pages to explain this. It’s about starting, so the sooner we are done reading the book, the sooner we can start. Start what? Start creating!

There are negative forces inside each one of us that holds us back from doing what we know we should be doing. Pressfield calls those forces Resistance. Read more

A Smart System To Process Your Paperwork

As much as we want to have everything organized inside our computers, there is still a lot of real paperwork sent and given to us. What are we going to do with it?

I’ve been searching for the best way to organize my digital documents for a while now, tried different systems and found great new ways of doing so. Very interesting indeed, but what if too much attention is going to organizing our virtual documents and while inventing and tinkering our best digital file system to date, the papers, letters, presentation or lesson handouts and other printed documents pile up around the computer cluttering our desk.

During a conversation I had with a colleague he described how he organizes his paperwork using a smart and simple system. It goes like this: Read more

Speed Up Your Writing: Typing Utilities Compared

Sometimes you stumble upon a piece of software that’s just wonderful, and you wish you knew it before. Software that really enhances the computer interface. The most important piece of software in that category is Quicksilver (also read my recent post about Quicksilver).
Another thing I discovered about a year ago was a tool that finishes your sentences. It’s like a fully customizable version of predictive text input for your computer.

What do those little tools do? They help you type. By setting up a list of sentences you use a lot and connecting those sentences to an abbreviation that is easy to remember, you create ’shortcuts’ for your text. This is great when you get a lot of email and a lot of people are asking you the same thing over and over again. You can also use it for URL’s email addresses, and signatures.
While writing code or inserting html tags this can also save you a lot of time, as you can imagine. Read more