Technology Updates
Of which there are several:
- While I was on my last trip (to New Orleans), I discovered that the 12-inch Powerbook G4 that I’ve been attached to for the last three years suddenly had a battery life of about 20 minutes. I’d been planning on replacing it before this summer’s travels anyhow, so I stepped up the timeline a bit, and this Sunday came home from the Apple store with one of these. I’m almost completely, perfectly in love.
- I’m running a bit of an experiment on that machine, trying to see how long I can go before I’m forced to install anything related to this. I’ve left instructions for those files to open in this; we’ll see how long that works.
- This weekend, I’m in San Francisco. Yesterday, Bryan Alexander actually managed to convince me to start doing this. I’m as surprised as anyone; I was convinced that this was one of the two recent technologies that I’d never see the value in. (I’ll save the other one for another time.)
- This morning, I upgraded my system to the new version of this. So far, I really like the look and feel of it, though I’ve got the sense that it’s going to take me a while to find everything.
I think that’s all of them, for now, at least…
5 April 2008, 10.07 am
As you know, I bought iWork this week, mainly in order to preserve my PowerPoint virginity and still give a talk with digital slides.
I have played around with Pages and have run up against one thing that may vault me back into the odious lap of MS-Word: No autocorrect. I use autocorrect as a way to use all my funky medieval abbreviations (”x-” for “trans-,” “baytap” for “the Bayeux Tapestry,” etc.) and have them expand perfectly. I guess I could live without it, but it would probably slow me down by 30%.
5 April 2008, 10.11 am
God, there’s a reason it never would have occurred to me to miss MS Word. Have you managed some super-secret way to make the stupid thing only correct your FMAs, without “fixing” stuff that’s perfectly well right, thanx? Or is this a bad-with-the-good type thing?
5 April 2008, 10.41 am
Actually, if you’re careful with the syntax of your FMAs, it works perfectly. I had to make a few adjustments at the start (”h2,” not “H2,” for Henry II, so as to allow me to write H2O should the need arise), but now it’s smooth as silk.
I know other medievalists who do this too — dunno about non-medievalists.
6 April 2008, 6.13 pm
Great glimpsing you this weekend, Kfitz. Looking forward to (among a zillion other things) your Twitter reflections.
9 April 2008, 11.16 am
Hey — I would have liked to see your SF talk but I was at Notre Dame for the weekend. Hope it went well!