There is also Ulysses to consider. Ulysses 2.0 was released in recent months as an upgrade to an already worthy writing program. I’ve been putting Ulysses 2.0 through the paces and it offers a great user experience. Read on…and don’t miss the Ulysses 2.0 license giveaway at the end.

A screenshot of a Ulysses project is below. Each project consists of as many documents as you would like. Each document is defined by the main text of that document (pictured in the center window), and any notes related to the document (on the upper right). Of course, a large project might have many documents, so they can manually be sorted into collections, or automatically filtered using whatever criteria you use. For further organization, groups can contain collections, filters, or even other groups.

Visually, the interface is very simple to allow you to focus on getting thoughts formed. And it can get simpler by collapsing all the sidebars so all you see is a text editor. Ulysses offers a full screen mode which fills the screen and removes the menubar, and a console mode which is similar to WriteRoom or Full Screen mode in Scrivener.

There are five screencasts available from the developer which offer a good run through of the featureset of Ulysses. A few of my favorites:

• Text Trash – When deleting text, you can use shift-backspace to tuck anything you delete into the Text Trash where it can be easily retrieve if you decide you need it back.
• Automatic Backups – Ulysses can keep a document history should you decide you want to go back and use an original draft instead of your uninspired revision.
• Semantic Editing – Ulysses is a straight text editor to allow you to focus on writing only. But it offers tagging formats which can be converted to formatted text when the document is exported.
• iPhone Version – It’s indevelopment!

If you are familiar with Scrivener, you will find Ulysses is similar in concept and function. You may or may not like the way that notes are connected to each individual text document. Project wide notes are also available, but cannot be organized as well as in Scrivener. You might miss the ability to edit multiple Scrivenings and the corkboard viewer as a way of organizing thoughts and structure.

If you are familiar with StoryMill, you will find that Ulysses is more diverse as it is designed for writing more than fiction. You might miss the Timeline, but appreciate the added flexibility of sorting notes and characters, plot, and research as unique documents.

Ulysses 2.0 is reviewed here and sells for 45 Euros (approximately $67). Ulysses Core has a reduced featureset and is available for 25 Euros (approximately $37).

TheSoulmen have been kind enough to make a license of Ulysses 2.0 available for a giveaway. There are three ways you can enter:

1. Leave a comment on this post.
2. Email me with “Ulysses giveaway” in the subject line.
3. Retweet this.

All entries must be received by 12:01am CST on Monday, November 2. The winner will be contacted that day via email and/or the @creativityist Twitter account.

a

This is certainly true when creating websites where there are many details to manage. So, I’m tackling that in this continuation of my webdesign workflow series. I posted a few weeks ago about The Inspiration Archive. This time around, I’ll be talking about the project binder I’ve created to keep all those little details at hand.

The project binder isn’t a task list. Any tasks for a new website get laid out in OmniFocus, of course, from the very beginning. Instead, the project binder is a place to store all of the extra information I have related to a design project. It includes any emails where the client talks about what they want, notes I jot down during phone or face to face meetings, or thoughts or relevant links for the direction I want to take the site. I also have potential clients fill out a questionnaire and I capture that information in the project binder as well.

I used to have this information scattered all over the place. About six months ago, I realized that Curio would be perfect for this. It gives me one place to store all of my projects, the ability to capture different kinds of information, and the means to organize the particulars within each project.

Here’s a peek at how it looks:

Each project is color coded for easy reference. Red is a project where I’m waiting for information from the client. Green means active, orange is a potential project, and grey is complete. This simple color coding helps me take quick stock of my current projects on a grey Monday morning where I’m slow to get going…like today!

a

I’ve been building websites for about 15 years, mostly for personal projects like this one. There have been some side jobs here and there, but it’s been in the last year that I’m doing significant freelance work to put food in my family’s mouths. Looking back at some of the sites I made even a year ago, I’m happy with how much I’ve improved. But most of the credit for that progress comes from keeping my eyes open for designs I like and learning from others.

At the center of this has been an inspiration archive I’ve created in Yojimbo. This is an archive of tutorials, font samples, galleries, or single sites that have a striking design. When I’m getting started on a new site, I often scan through these archived pages, and without fail, I come away with one or two ideas to get me started.

I’ve considered doing something like this in Voila or Little Snapper, both of which are great apps that can easily capture an entire webpage. However, they store the webpages as a giant image. Yojimbo fully archives the page with all the graphics and text so I can see the layout and search for specific text if I’m trying to find a certain page, style, or topic.

You might not be a designer, but this archive feature can be helpful for you too. Yojimbo can serve as your own mini-Google of sites you find helpful and want to have immediate access to at a later time. If you are a photographer, it could be tips or images of photo shoots from your “wanna be like” list. If you are a writer, you could collect an archive of writing tips or short stories to get you going.

It’s easy to capture websites to Yojimbo using a simple bookmarklet you can add to your browser. I used the app for a year or two before I even realized this feature was in there, but now it’s the most important feature for me. In the Yojimbo menubar, select Help, and then choose Bookmarklet. This will take you to the instructions to add a bookmarklet for whatever browser you are using. Once the bookmarklet is in place, a single click dumps whatever website you are viewing into Yojimbo.

a

Today, our seven month, irregularly recurring series on The Creative Habit comes to an end. But, in the interest of being trite, last certainly does not mean least. I think I’ve saved the best for last. And since this one is really about getting started, perhaps the last should have been first.

Okay…I’m done, I promise.

The box, as Twyla Tharp describes it, is the starting point for a creative project. In her case, it is a literal box. As she begins a new project, she begins to toss fragments of inspiration in the box. Notes, images, videos — anything that will fit. As her collection grows, the interplay between these items begin to form the inspiration. As she describes it:

The drawer, in effect, contains the editor’s pre-ideas — those intriguing little tickles at the corners of your brain that tell you when something is interesting to you without your quite knowing why.

I’ve long seen the value of collecting ideas. But all these ideas I’ve collected over the years are not the same as a box. They are more of a pre-box, a repository of interesting notions and thoughts waiting to be rooted through — (almost) always with me and readily available.

But the box serves as inspiration for a project that already has some direction. When a project begins to form, then the box specific to that project comes in to play. In my case, I can sort through the quotes, images and ideas I’ve stored with a simple search through Yojimbo. The ones that stand out get dumped into Scrivener or tagged in Yojimbo for a non-writing project. This is the box.

The beauty of the box is that what you need is right there waiting for you as you create:

A writer with a good storage and retrieval system can write faster. He isn’t spending a lot of time looking things up, scouring his papers, and patrolling other rooms at home wondering where he left that perfect quote. It’s in the box.

This is what I appreciate about Scrivener with the Research and Clippings folders. What I need is right there. If I steal away to Safari or Email to look something up, the chances of being distracted are about 98.74% (give or take 1.26%). But if I don’t even have to leave the app I’m in, my work can continue.

Of course, the box is an easy way to get started, with the keyword being easy! And it gives you one small step toward the work of actual creating. But that next step is still a doozy. And Tharp reminds us that while the box is a start, it is only a start:

The box is not a substitute for creating.

Sadly, some people never get beyond the box stage in their creative life.

I hate how important those two sentences are for me to hear. I love to collect. And I love to have created. But it’s that step from pulling ideas and inspiration together to doing the creative work where I always find resistance. And that brings me to the drawn-out, irregularly recurring series I’ll be starting next: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.

Look for that sometime soon…ish. I’m collecting ideas for it now.

a

Voila serves two functions. It offers a robust screen capture utility, and it helps organize the images you do capture for future reference. The organizer includes the ability to drop the images in collections, or create smart collections — these are standard features we’ve come to expect, and they are implemented well. Along with that, there is built in functionality to publish any image to the web via FTP or Flickr.

But it’s the screen capture features that make Voila worth a look. There are six different ways images can be captured:

A few of these do just what you would expect, but a couple deserve extra attention. The Selection capture tool will let you create custom shapes to capture, which can then be exported as a .png image with a transparent background. (This is helpful if you want to use an image on your blog with a colored background, and you don’t want a white box around it.) The Web capture tool lets you capture an entire webpage, beyond what you can see on the screen. You can see an example of this in the image of the application window above.

Once an image is captured, there are a few handy tools and effects you can use to modify the image. My favorite is the blur tool that lets you hide information that might be personal before posting the image to a blog.

Voila is $39.95 (or $63.95 for a family pack) and is available directly from the Global Delight website. However, we are giving away a free license, courtesy of Global Delight. Here are three ways you can enter the giveaway:

• Leave a comment on this post.
• Email me with “Voila giveaway” in the subject line.
• Retweet this.

All entries must be received by 12:01am on Monday, September 21. The winner will be contacted that day via email and/or the @creativityist Twitter account.

a

Yes.

I like tinkering with my workflow, and I do revisit it from time to time. But I don’t want it to become a time trap, always being reworked and altered. I want my workflow to get out of my way. I want a system I can rely on so I don’t have to think about it, and so I can get on with making and creating things.

Now for a longer answer, here’s why most of my workflow is still in place:

Capturing Tasks: OmniFocus is still my app of choice for tasks — items with a specific end goal that can be checked off. My thoughts about OmniFocus vs. Things still hold true for me. I know plenty of people who use Things, and I don’t know anyone who has been disappointed with it. The Hit List also looks promising. But it will take a catastrophic event to pull me away from OmniFocus. It works and it’s reliable. When I do have an issue, OmniGroup’s support is fantastic. Any time I contact them with an issue, it’s clear to me that they understand their own product, and took the time to read my request enough to understand my issue. I know that sounds like how all software support should be, but it isn’t.

Capturing Ideas: I’m still using Yojimbo to build a catalog of notes and ideas. To be honest, I gave Evernote another good look this week. After months of silence, I was disappointed that the Yojimbo 2.0 release still didn’t have any kind of iPhone accessibility. After trying 2.0, I’ve found that some of the additions don’t sound like a lot, but they add significant usability. It’s simply a great app. If I were starting today I would give Evernote a good look just because of the sync. But in terms of usability day to day on my MacBook Pro, Yojimbo is a better choice for me.

This isn’t all there is to my workflow. As I’ve expanded my freelance design work over the last year, there have been a few additions to complement that. I’ll do a post or two about those in the coming weeks.

a

Inspiration doesn’t always strike while you sit at your computer. (Come to think of it, inspiration rarely strikes while I sit at my computer.) But when it does strike, a quick launch of WriteRoom lets you capture that perfectly crafted sentence or idea you want to chase down.

WriteRoom can then sync with it’s companion website: WriteRoom.ws. WriteRoom uses your Google login, so everyone except for 1 or 2 of you probably won’t even need to set up an account to sync. When you are back at your computer, you can use the File | Import command in Scrivener to connect to WriteRoom.ws. Your list of documents will appear, and you can select any or all of them to import. My only teensy weensy very small gripe is that the documents are imported into the Drafts folder, and I would prefer for them to drop in the Research folder. Yes I know…it’s not a major issue.

Oh, and in case you missed it, Jesse Grosjean, the developer of WriteRoom, announced his intent to include TextExpander support in a future WriteRoom for iPhone release. Looks like WriteRoom is going to be moving it’s way into the first or second screen of apps on my iPhone.

a

I don’t want to take all the credit for this happening (a significant portion will do), but TextExpander Touch has arrived! If you’re not familiar with TextExpander, see this post. Go on…we’ll wait.

I installed TextExpander Touch last night and started putting it through the paces. It feels like TextExpander on my Mac and includes the ability to sync all of your snippets from your Mac. (This didn’t work for me at first, but I was successful after rebooting my computer.) And a small but important feature — TextExpander Touch includes the satisfying ‘bubble’ sound when text expands.

There is one important difference between TextExpander and TextExpander Touch. Because the iPhone won’t let TextExpander run in the background, your snippets won’t work in any app except for TextExpander. (Not yet anyway…read on!) If you are typing in Mail, you won’t be able to type “ssig” and have your signature pop in. That would be nice, of course, but it’s not possible with the limits that Apple has set for third party app developers.

Knowing that limitation, TextExpander Touch is a good implementation of what is possible. The app is divided into two screens: Compose and Groups. The Compose Screen is a blank, but magic, screen to compose and edit text. Any snippets typed will expand. The text can then be copied to paste in another app. But you can also tap a send icon at the bottom which will copy your text, launch another app, and drop it in there. It can either launch a compose email screen, or your Twitter app; it supports Tweetie, Twitterific, and Twittelator Pro according to SmileOnMyMac.

The Groups screen allows you to browse and edit your snippets, or create new ones. But there is one other thoughtful implementation here. You can tap an icon next to each snippet, which presents you with the option to send that snippet, expanded of course, to a new email, the clipboard, or your Twitter app. A small feature, but one that will save a lot of tapping.

I think the most exciting feature is one that has yet to play out. SmileOnMyMac is making the TextExpander engine available to other developers. So, while TextExpander might not work in Tweetie for iPhone, Tweetie could release a new version with TextExpander built in. (Ahem, hint, hint.)

TextExpander is now available in the app store (iTunes link) for an introductory price of $1.99 through September 9. After that, the price will go up to $4.99. By the way, if you haven’t yet purchased TextExpander, it is currently on sale for $14.98, which is half price.

I’m already thinking about the new snippets I’ll create to take advantage of TextExpander Touch. If you have ideas on how to use it too, please leave a comment and share them with the rest of us.

a

I’ve added a new context to OmniFocus. This one seems kind of obvious, but it’s not one I’ve thought to use before. In fact, some of you GTD’ers might already use this one. If you do, then I’m holding you responsible for not passing the idea along.

You may know that I split my time as a freelance designer and a pastor. You can see why I try to stay organized — these two aspects of my life bring a lot a variety…and a lot of meetings. I don’t like meetings so much, but the good news is that most of these meetings are about projects I’m engaged in. And therefore fun.

Often, when a meeting is coming up, I make a few notes in the iCal notes section about topics to cover. This works pretty well…I have access to them on my laptop or iPhone, so I can easily add notes prior to a meeting, or refer to them during the meeting. The problem is, sometimes I’m thinking ahead about a meeting with someone that isn’t scheduled yet. So…I don’t have a spot in iCal to make notes.

So I’ve scrapped that system, and created a Meetings context. When I need to meet with someone, scheduled or not, I add them into this context. Any topics for the meeting get added as notes. This offers the same flexibility to refer and add to the notes on my iPhone or laptop, and gives me a space for unscheduled meetings. Bonus tip: sometimes this task will begin as “Set up a meeting with…” in a different context. I can make the notes in that task, and once it is scheduled, just copy it over to the Meetings context with all my notes intact.

What kind of system do you use for this?

a