J. Eddie Smith, IV

David Sparks:

I just spent several hours playing with iBook Author’s media tools inserting movies, keynote animations, and interactive pictures into my new secret project and it ruined me. There is no turning back. As an author and a reader, I will never look at a static page e-book the same. While for some types of books, like novels, words on a page are fine, for a lot of books the failure to include media just became inexcusable.

I’m now considering outsourcing all of my thinking to David because his entire post sums up my own impressions of Apple’s Education Event.

When I first saw iBooks Author, I went through the usual initial emotional paralysis experienced by any geek as I virtually elbow-checked my way to the front of the Mac App Store line.

But then I started thinking bigger picture. If it succeeds, iBooks Author represents the first layman’s tool for creating a kind of new composite media that’s likely to become a dominant artform this century.

The marketing emphasis with iBooks Author is clearly on textbooks, but more generally, iBooks Author is a tool for blending previously siloed media into a single thing.

The “open” internet today is rich with media, but they mostly stand alone. And e-books are honestly just glorified pictures of their paper ancestors locked behind glass. iBooks Author may change all of that.

Want to quote something someone said on a podcast? Don’t transcribe it—losing tone and inflection. Drop in an audio snippet.

Trying to describe a highly technical workflow or build a software manual? Why not put a screencast on the page instead bloating the book with unnecessary words?

Would pictures and screenshots tell a story better? Embed a gallery.

Books, particularly technical and educational books, are going to get both shorter and richer at the same time. And anyone will be able to make them.

What do you do when a guy like Steven Frank hands you his tech tip notebook? You go read it of course.

… there has always been a subset of my notes that I’ve wanted to share with the public — those little techie one-liners that take hours to figure out or find on the web. The ones where I’ve had to look up the same thing over and over so many times, I finally said to myself, “I should really write this down somewhere.”

Before the rise of technology culture, knowing when to capitalize a noun was pretty intuitive. Proper nouns were capitalized, while common nouns generally were not.

Things aren’t so simple now. The last twenty years have seen an explosion in the use of mixed case nouns. To complicate matters, the neologisms spouting from technology culture often take the form of compound and hyphenated words, which are sometimes mashups of abbreviations, too.

Some common mistakes I see almost daily:

• Wi-Fi often appears as “wifi” or “wi-fi”
• E Ink is commonly written “e-ink”
• LaTeX is lazily scrawled “latex” or “Latex”
• Macworld is often written incorrectly as “MacWorld”
• MacBook is often written incorrectly as “Macbook”

Just remember: Capitalize B after C except after…

Sorry, no such luck. These things don’t make any sense. They aren’t supposed to. In most cases (sorry again), the original creator of the thing described by the noun decided—probably on a whim—to do it one way, and that was that.

Sigh. So how am I supposed to remember the right way?

Better question: How can I avoid the need to remember? Answer to better question: Use TextExpander.

I like avoiding the shift key whenever possible (especially mid-word), so I’ve set up a number of TextExpander snippets that simply transform all-lower-case words into the proper capitalization.

When I type ‘iphone’, TextExpander turns it into ‘iPhone’. ‘wifi’ always becomes ‘Wi-Fi’. And so forth.

Maybe I’m being persnickety, but think about this: Unless you’re a podcaster or you regularly publish videos, your online presence is defined entirely by what you type. It’s never been more important to be grammatically correct and precise.

In real life, whether you like it or not, you are judged by how you dress and speak. Online, you are judged by your words. Make them right as much as you can.

General life lesson: If everyone else is doing Thing A, there’s probably an advantage to be gained doing something other than Thing A.

I’ve seen at least one study [PDF] that shows that we’re reading significantly more thanks to the internet, and we’re spending a lot more time doing it. That’s not to say we’re consuming better information; we’re just consuming more of it.

In this case, Thing A represents reading current web-based words. It’s never been more important for you to think about what you’re reading.

For the last couple of years or so, I’ve tried to follow a very rough rule of thumb: for every minute I spend reading current, web-based content, I’d like to spend at least a minute reading book-bound content (incidentally, mostly stuff written before the 1960s). It’s not something I’m completely successful at. I don’t even track it. I just think it’s a useful awareness-oriented goal.

Great writers who lived before the internet could afford to take longer to get to the point. They weren’t restricted by arbitrary character count limitations—implicit or explicit.

And they were forced to paint pictures in words alone. As such, they reached descriptive depths rarely seen online. And from those depths emerge characters that teach us more about ourselves than we could learn in any other medium.

Understanding people—the fundamental ingredient in any personal or professional pursuit—is probably the most practical knowledge you can have. And there’s probably no better place to read detailed descriptions of people than fictional stores.

Anne Kreamer writes about several studies that build a business case for reading novels.

For instance, in fMRI studies of people reading fiction, neuroscientists detect activity in the pre-frontal cortex — a part of the brain involved with setting goals — when the participants read about characters setting a new goal. It turns out that when Henry James, more than a century ago, defended the value of fiction by saying that “a novel is a direct impression of life,” he was more right than he knew.

She also recommends several books. If I had to recommend one, it would be The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky lived more than 100 years ago, but he knew the same people we know.

I’ve not had great success finding non-Apple USB ports that supply enough power to charge my iPhone and iPad. Until recently.

The PowerCurve Mobile Surge Protector works really well. As far as I can tell, it charges my iPhone and iPad just as fast as the wall charger that Apple ships with new iOS devices.

The PowerCurve is very compact. It’ll fit in any travel bag. I even keep one plugged in behind my night stand so that I can easily charge my iPhone and iPad in the same spot.

At $20, it’s cheaper (and more practical) than loading up on Apple wall chargers.

The number of iOS devices in my extended family has grown geometrically in the last year. There’s no such thing as too many USB ports.

Continuing the semi-theme of data visualization around here, Charlie Park just wrote a detailed follow-up to his original slopegraphs piece.

Whether you’re a data viz junkie or just curious about trends in everything from economic indicators to infant mortality to tablet markets, you won’t be disappointed in Charlie’s follow-up.

It’s possible—likely even—that Steve Jobs could have picked someone better than Walter Isaacson to write a biography. Isaacson is just one man after all. One writer. One lens. One shot in a game devoid of do-overs.

I picked up my copy of Steve Jobs with low expectations. I’d heard some pretty scathing criticism of Isaacson from people I consider more scholarly in their knowledge of Apple history than I.

And maybe that’s the reason I couldn’t put the book down. The bar was so low it could’ve been walked over. Or maybe Jobs did get it right. Maybe Isaacson was the right guy. Or at the very least, the most right given the circumstances.

I really enjoyed Steve Jobs, the book. It meant a lot to me, in some very complex ways. I am, in most respects, not like Steve Jobs in my way with people, but I deeply identify with many of his personality traits.

I think there’s a lot of reason to be inspired by the man. Inspired to be more like him, and to be very different from him—both for what he did and for what he often did not do in his business and personal life.

Maybe I’ll say more one day, but for now, I just wanted to share the two quotes, which, more than any others in Steve Jobs, have stayed with me weeks after finishing the book.

The 1983 Mac team

Steve Jobs moved people. He moved people to action, to glory, and sometimes, to tears. He moved low value, attention-sapping projects out of the way. He moved entire industries forward. He moved competitors to action, and to failure.

He also created a world-class team of movers. In Isaacson’s words:

Veterans of the Mac team had learned that they could stand up to Jobs. If they knew what they were talking about, he would tolerate the pushback, even admire it. By 1983 those most familiar with his reality distortion field had discovered something further: They could, if necessary, just quietly disregard what he decreed. If they turned out to be right, he would appreciate their renegade attitude and willingness to ignore authority. After all, that’s what he did.

Jobs acted with intense conviction, and he forced others to do the same.

Jony Ive

One day Jony Ive will have his own biography, but I hope it stays unwritten for a long, long time. I think Ive has a lot left to do, if not with Apple, then with a company that lets him continue intersecting art and technology.

Ive’s deeply da Vincian design philosophies are evident in every major Apple product released since he joined Apple. Ive explains the value of simplicity:

Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep.

The world desperately needs more people like Jony Ive.

Some apps, though beyond-words useful, are just too niche for the developer to have any chance of winning a yelling match with the thunderous white noise of the internet.

That’s where the Mac App Store has helped the software economy. It facilitates the creation, marketing, and distribution of low-priced apps that we’d probably never see otherwise.

Today I’d like to raise a glass of ‘nog to the Mac App Store, as well as a few developers that’ve put some really great products there. Here are a handful of stocking-stuffer-priced apps that I use every week.

Moom ($5)

Moom is my favorite window manager. It lets you quickly resize and re-position windows anywhere on your screen. I use it nearly every day to get the most out of my 13” MacBook Air screen. It’s intuitive and fast. It’s also highly customizable for you fiddly types.

Caffeine (Free)

Caffeine, like its xanthine namesake, keeps your Mac from sleeping, only without side effects like rapid heart rate and diuresis. Very useful during presentations or any time you’re using your Mac but not touching the keys too often. I also use it when I’m running a remote desktop client; it prevents a sleep-induced connection loss.

Byword ($10)

Byword is a beautifully designed plain text writing application that’s ideally suited for Markdown fans. Honestly I did not take to Byword immediately after downloading it earlier this year, but my use of it has really crescendoed the last few months. Now, I almost always end up in Byword when writing anything more than a couple of paragraphs.

Marked ($4)

Marked watches Markdown files and displays them in HTML. It’s the perfect companion for any plain text writing tool you use. If you’ve been reading PE for more than a few weeks, you know I’m a big fan of Marked.

ScreenFloat ($8)

ScreenFloat is a screenshot app with a super handy feature: It lets you “float” screenshots above other windows. In other words, you can keep your screenshot in the foreground at all times. I use it nearly every day to hover a grid card over my web browser so that I can enter coordinates without flipping between windows.

Sven Fechner uses TextExpander to quickly create lean, focused meeting agendas. Whether or not you emulate his approach, it’s a great reminder of how useful TextExpander’s fill-in snippets can be.