Author: wg

Quick: get Keyboard Maestro (Mac) for 44% off

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Why 44%? It’s a funny discount to have but it’s a discount and it’s big, so as long as you are very speedy, go take a look:

https://deals.macupdate.com/affil/14840

Keyboard Maestro lets you automate huge long sequences of things that you do on your Mac all the time. I’d tell you more but I’ve never used it. Not even with all the recommendations I’ve heard and the fact that I used to be addicted to a thing called QuickKeys that did much the same thing. But with this sale, it costs £12.20 and it’s worth the punt. 

So I’ve just bought it on this offer and I’ll let you know what I think of it in action. However, I found out about this from an email which insists the offer is valid for today only. When you go through the checkout it suggests there are (currently) six days remaining on the offer so either something’s wrong or, more likely, I’ve misunderstood something. Go take a look at it today, just in case.

 

Evernote CEO speaks

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Interesting interview with Phil Libin, Evernote’s CEO, on AllThingsD:
http://allthingsd.com/20131201/seven-questions-for-evernote-ceo-phil-libin/

I have some niggles with Evernote yet it’s so very good so much of the time that I am a fan. Not sure I’d buy an Evernote-branded wallet – they do now exist and this interview is in part about such things – but next time I’m looking for a scanner, the odds are it will be the one mentioned in here.

That is, if it’s available in the UK by whenever that is. Currently Evernote Market, as their new shop is called, is US-only.

But Evernote itself is available everywhere and there’s a lot in this interview about its aims and uses.

New project coming: “Learn Omnifocus” with Tim Stringer

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This is so new it isn’t here yet. But Tim Stringer of technicallysimple.com is launching a Learn OmniFocus project which will be a mix of videos and tutorials about this software. I’m actually in two minds about this because I’m the type that prefers to learn on the job, to find out how to do things because I need to do them. And it works: I now feel I know OmniFocus very well. But partly because the promise of video tutorials is a good one and partly because I want you to know I’m not the only nut for OmniFocus software, I wanted to show you this link: http://technicallysimple.com/announcements/coming-soon-learn-omnifocus/

That’s an announcement about the new programme and it includes a sign-up form. I’ve signed up.

But it’s an interesting time to be doing this. I’ve mentioned OmniFocus before and doubtlessly will again but there are three versions of it and at this specific moment they are in a bit of flux. The iPhone one was only recently updated so that’s done, if you like, but the iPad and the Mac have a ways to go.

Less so the iPad one. That is by far the best version of OmniFocus and if you can buy only one, that’s the one to only buy. Except the iPhone version was dramatically improved by its being updated for iOS 7 and you have to expect that the iPad one will get the same or a better update too.

The Mac one is harder to explain. OmniFocus has been on the Mac for years and it shows. It just feels old. Looks old. And it is comparatively hard to use: it’s very powerful and I’m glad I got into it right alongside the iPhone and iPad ones, but it’s unquestionably harder to learn. So early this year I was very glad to sign up for the beta test of OmniFocus 2 for Mac and eventually along came a beta version. I liked it very much. Found lots of problems, as you’d expect and presume from a beta, reported them all back, saw at least most of them fixed. And then it stopped. I assumed the firm was done with the beta testing and the final product would be out presently.

No.

What really happened is that Apple had unveiled its drastically reworked iOS 7and The Omni Group paused the Mac development and instead focused on getting a new iPhone app out in time for, and to exploit the features of, iOS 7. They did it, they did it well, and the very first thing I did after updating my iPhone to iOS 7 was to buy the new OmniFocus.

But it was a purchase. It wasn’t a free update. And I am fine with that, I am more than fine with that because OmniFocus has saved, my bacon, kept my sanity and even – yes – lifted my heart. Of course I’ll buy the new one.

Except, the way the Apple App Store works, there can’t be any free or reduced upgrades for even new users. If you bought OmniFocus for iPad today and a new one came out tomorrow, you wouldn’t be happy. I think you’d be happier than you expected because the iPad one is so good. But you wouldn’t be happiest.

So reluctantly, I’m saying hold off buying the iPad one for just a while yet if you can.

The Mac version is different: so long as you buy it directly from the company, The Omni Group, instead of via Apple’s Mac App Store, you’ll be fine: buy version 1 now, get version 2 free (I believe) when it comes out – whenever it comes out. The Omni Group store is here: https://store.omnigroup.com

But there wouldn’t be a need for OmniFocus 2 for Mac if the first one weren’t hard to use so it’s tricky to recommend you buy something that’s difficult, that you may get very frustrated by and which will be replaced at some unknown but soon time. 

You might be best off buying the iPhone version and just enjoying that for now. But oh, the iPad one is a treat to use.

If you only buy one productivity aid this Christmas, make it…

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…an iPad Air.

I used to think I relied on my old, original iPad but it was a toy compared to the new iPad Air. Mind you, I did give my old one to my mother about two months before the new model came out so I had a lot of time to notice how much I was missing having one. Actually, my OmniFocus work fell off badly: if you don’t know OmniFocus, I should tell you that it’s a kind of bionic To Do manager that pretty much completely runs my life. If you are now intrigued by OmniFocus, I have to warn you that it only runs on Apple gear. It’s also comparatively expensive – well, it’s expensive when you compare it to all the free To Do apps; it is not in the slightest bit expensive when you contrast it to how much use it has been for me.

One of the things it does is let you focus only on what has to be done right now and what can be done right now. It does that by hiding away everything else but that only works, that can only be allowed to work, if you periodically review everything on your list. There’s a thing called Review. It’s not wonderful on the Mac version of OmniFocus, it doesn’t exist at all on the iPhone version, but it is gorgeousness incarnate on the iPad one. So good that you are fooled into thinking it’s an easy thing to look at all your tasks and then as you go through everything, it’s so remarkably easy to see what you’ve got to do that you tend to just go get it done. I timed myself once for The Blank Screen book, just finding out how long a typical review took me and I was astonished that it was two hours.

In those two hours, I reviewed about fifty different projects with a total of, I don’t know, a couple of hundred tasks. I found I’d already done a lot of them – I want to say thirty, I’m not sure now – and as I went through them all and saw ones like “Email Bert to ask for your spanner back” I’d email Bert to ask for my spanner back. By the end of the two hours, I’d marked off many more tasks as done. And most importantly of all, I knew where I was with every project.

And could immediately forget it all. Forget it, knowing that it was all in hand and that it was all in OmniFocus. Knowing that if it wasn’t something that would come up in the next couple of days, I would at least see it during the next review. I could concentrate on now. The fact that you can park the thinking and churning and worrying about things you can’t do yet and instead put all that engine effort into what you can, it’s life-changing.

Except it fell over completely when I gave away my iPad.

So the first thing I installed on my new iPad Air last month was OmniFocus. I swear to you that I breathed out. And I thought that would be something to tell you, I thought that would be enough to tell you, all by itself.

Except you may already know that iPad Airs have a ten-hour battery life. What I did not expect is that I would use up that battery life almost every day. The ten hours is true, actually the ten hours is conservative, but I use the iPad so much that I have had to charge it up again nearly every night. Don’t take that as a criticism of the battery, take it as a gulping assessment of how very, very much I use this machine.

Most of what you may have read on The Blank Screen blog was written on that iPad Air. I’ve written thousands of words on it in just the three or four weeks I’ve had it. 

And yesterday, Angela needed my bag as a prop for a play and that meant I couldn’t carry my iPad around with me all day. (As sturdy as it is, it’s also so light you can’t believe it’s strong so I’m looking for a case but haven’t found one I like yet.) I swear to you I got itchy. 

And that’s when I realised I am now life-support-dependent on my iPad Air. 

Have a look at them yourself. If you happened to choose to go through this Amazon link and then bought an iPad Air or maybe a car, I’d see some cash coming my way. But check it out on Apple’s own store instead: they have a lot more detail and some particularly well-made videos about the product.

Go to a real-life Apple Store too: just walk in and pick one of these up. I was working in Paris the day they came out and I tried one in a store there but wasn’t all that impressed with the apparent lightness. I was by the speed and the gorgeous display. Now that I have one, I’m very impressed with the display, the speed and the lightness too. Maybe I was wearing thick gloves that first time. I don’t kow.

Write this down, it helps

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Tomorrow is the first of December and at some point during the day, I will email a report of all I've done throughout November. Nobody has asked me to do this, nobody is waiting for it, nobody will do anything with the report. But it helps me enormously to write it down and to have someone to send it to.

Earlier this year I earned a place on Room 204, a programme run by Writing West Midlands for up to 15 writers who are of a certain standard, who are based in the area, and who need something for their careers. It's a very deliberately formless kind of year that you get with this scheme: it's not like there are lessons or there are, I don't know, tests. Instead, you get a year connected to this group and can make of it what you need.

I've made a lot of it. It's done a huge amount for me, it's given me a new career in presenting and two of my books this year came out of chats I had with them.

But this isn't about me, it's about you. And I want you to have the thing that I got from Room 204 which particularly helped me, which I think may particularly help you.

It's this. Right at the end of my first meeting with the Room 204 folk, we talked about the rest of the year and it was mentioned that if a month goes by without us happening to work on something together, I should just keep them up to date with what I've been doing.

That's quite clear, quite easy, and I deliberately took it the wrong way. There hasn't been a month, I don't think there's been a week, that I haven't been doing something with Room 204, for them, or ignited by their work, but still at the end of every month, I tell them what I've been doing.

I also tell them now that there's no need for them to read the emails. I'm sending it to you, I say, but I'm writing it for me.

Because simply writing down in a clear, coherent and sometimes very long email what I've done in the month makes me realise what I've done in the month. Written these articles, been published here, pitched that, got filmed for this, sometimes it's a giant list of things. There's no question but that it reads like I'm boasting.

But that's fantastic. What have I got to boast about? Apparently, monthly, quite a bit. It's nice to safely boast to good people because it's great and unusual and wild to realise that you have something you could boast about.

Only, if I have – so far – sent each of those monthly report emails off with a certain satisfaction – that is only one of the three huge, huge benefits to me of doing them.

The second is that I look at the email as I'm compiling it and I remember what I've done. You do this, I know you do: you finish something and you're off away on to the next. We don't look back much, do we? Being a productive kind of person means always rushing on to the next thing, getting stuff done and out, getting on with what we so long to get on with.

Stopping to look back across the last month is a waste of time but it is an extremely useful waste of time. I'll start to write to Room 204 that it wasn't a good month because my mind will be on the failures, the rejections, the various and many problems that come up. But then I'll write something like “Made chair of the West Midlands Screenwriters' Forum” and think, okay, that wasn't bad. Unexpected. And I thnk it'll be a lot of work, but it wasn't bad. And then I'll remember that a pitch worked out. I'll remember that this is the month I finally got paid for that thing I did.

By the end of the email, I've changed my mind about the month. I'm feeling vastly better. So far, anyway. Some months are better than others but I've still yet to have a really bad one. I'll let you know how that goes.

So there's the little bit of boasting, just enough to feel a teeny bit good, and then there's the other psychological thing of changing my mind about how it had been a bad month.

The third thing is that I can't do this monthly email in one go: I forget too much, far too much, of what I've been doing. So as I do things, I add a swift line to an OmniFocus To Do task. Just jot down two words, enough to remind me, anything.

And that always prompts me to find something else to add to the list. All the way through the month, this drive to have something else to add is with me. I wince to tell you this but I have made calls solely so that I could say something like “Pitched to British Council” on my monthly list.

And, sometimes or even quite often, that call works out.

So tomorrow I will be writing my unasked-for, unneeded yet boastingly boosting and useful monthly report about myself and my work to Room 204.

Give it a go, would you? It will help you too.

Weekly self-distraction: It’s your fault

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This is cross-posted from my personal Self Distract blog. Each week I cover what we write and what we write with, when we get around to writing. It's sometimes about productivity but it's also about drama and the issues of writing. You can read it every Friday here. This one is also specifically about Doctor Who and you can read a collection of Self Distract Doctor Who blogs plus new journalism including a detailed interview with the Restoration Team and the history of Who in Radio Times in my book, Self Distract.

Here be spoilers. Well, there be spoilers: down there, a lot of spoilers a bit of the way down the screen. If you haven't seen the 50th anniversary special of Doctor Who, please do. Go watch it. It's very good.

All I ever want from a story is to be caught up in it to the exclusion of anything else. That's all. Analysis and whathaveyou, that can come later if it must. Just scoop me up, please. And Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor did exactly that. Job done.

Only, I'm surprised that it did because at its core is something that goes against a thing. I was going to say it goes against a drama principle of mine, but nuts to drama principles: if it works, that's your principle right there. But we tend to have issues that colour our writing, things that we come back to because we're trying to find them in ourselves, beacuse we're trying to mine them for others or maybe just because we're good at them.

And I have one thing that is guaranteed to appeal to me, utterly certain to get me obsessed, and which you break at your peril. Yet Doctor Who broke it and worked. I don't know how. Let me tell you that right up front, if you can call this the front when I've already rambled on at you a ways. I want to explore this and see if I can figure it out because it matters to me.

Here's what it is. If you wanted to get all academic about it, drama is about obstacles. I seriously do not know why you would want to get academic if that means boiling down the richness of drama into a checklist with only one thing to check, but it's not unreasonable to say drama equals obstacles. Fine. Someone is faced with something, that is or at least that can be drama.

But for me, it's really only drama when the thing they face is their own fault. Having something done to you, that's awful. It's powerful. Having something done to you and it is entirely your own fault, though, that's wonderful. It's not that I'm especially in to my characters being punished for something and it's only a little bit that I am in to the genuine meaning of tragedy: a tale that ends badly because of something within the lead character. It's specifically the point that if this terrible thing is your own fault, you could have prevented it – and now there is absolutely not one single thing you can do to put it right. You can't undo the past. This is the real reason I am forever coming back to the issue of time in my writing: the regret, the permanent regret for things lost and things done badly. You can't rewrite history, not one line.

Except in Doctor Who. This is where the spoilers start.

The day in The Day of the Doctor is the one where the fella ended the Time War. This was a huge and so far never seen portion of Doctor Who history: immediately before we saw Christopher Eccleston's Doctor, there was this war, right. War between the Daleks and the Time Lords. And it was ended by the Doctor. We slowly came to learn that though he ended it – so far, so Doctor-heroic-like – there was something of a cost. The war was ended only by the complete and total destruction of both sides. Time Lords and Daleks, all killed. All killed by the Doctor.

Cor.

The Day of the Doctor undoes this and if you'd told me that before I saw it, I'd have thought again about going to the cinema. I read an interview with Steven Moffat on DigitalSpy this week that ran in part:

It was about a year ago. I remember thinking, 'What occasion in the Doctor's life is the most important?' Well, it's the day he blew up Gallfirey. Then I tried to imagine what writing that scene would be like and I thought, 'There's kids on Gallifrey and he's going to push the button? He wouldn't!' I don't care what's at stake, he's not going to do it. So that was the story – of course he never did that, he couldn't. He's the Doctor – he's the man who doesn't do that. He's defined by the fact that he doesn't do that. Whatever the cost, he will find another way. So it had to be the story of what really happened, that he's forgotten.

I see his point and he wrote it superbly in the show, but I'm mithered. I detest beyond measure the way that a soap, for instance, will get a character into a dramatic situation and then pull back at the last moment to say it's all right, really. It wasn't him. It isn't her. They're dreaming, whatever. Go away. I'm never watching again. So having this thing in Doctor Who that we know was big and then showing us it being even bigger but then taking it away, it shouldn't have worked for me.

I think it's that bit about 'I don't care what's at stake'. For me, the drama was in how there were these stakes that required him to do this. Now, actually, I have to play this both sides because a huge amount of the drama – can you quantify drama like this? a good 43% was angst, 12% personal torture and so on – was to do with how he had no choice. But if the Doctor has no choice, that is big and huge and enormous but it isn't the same as him having a choice and making the decision anyway. If the Doctor presses the big red button, everyone dies on Gallifrey. If he doesn't press it, everyone dies on Gallifrey anyway because the Daleks are attacking very thoroughly.

There is the fact that they're attacking because presumably they're seriously hacked off at the Doctor so nearly efficiently destroying all their plans, ever, so the whole attack is his fault. I'll have that.

So with this storm of issues going on, it does all come down to the small moment, the huge yet tiny moment where he has to do this or not do it. The fact that he does speaks to me about the stakes of the story but it also completely engages me in this Doctor character. The fact that he doesn't do it, that takes most things away. It reduces the stakes, because somehow he's now got a choice, and that reduces the character for me.

Except, maybe it worked for me, worked in this one story, because Moffat could undo the destruction of Gallifrey, he could rewrite one very big line of history, yet do it in such a way that the Doctor was left with the same burden we thought he had.

Doctor Who often reunites various different Doctors and there is always the issue of why a later one doesn't remember all this from when he was the earlier guy. The Day of the Doctor makes many little nods to this and does explicitly state that the Doctors' time streams are out of sync and that neither David Tennant's Tenth Doctor nor John Hurt's Nth Doctor can possibly retain the memory of what has happened. It's plot convenience and it's what has always happened before, but this time the lack of memory means that John Hurt's Doctor and David Tennant's and up to a point Matt Smith's one all believe they destroyed Gallifrey. They carry that burden for four hundred years.

Four hundred years. That's enough carrying of blame and regret and fault even for me.

Good people doing bad things. That's what chimes with me. Making irrevocable choices. That's me. But I thought it was a rule, an inviolate rule of drama that you do not ever undo a character's bad choices, you do not give them a reprieve, you do not give them an escape. The drama is in living with the things you cannot live with. And The Day of the Doctor says bollocks, William.

Quite right too.

 

Thanksgiving bargain: get TextExpander (Mac) for 50% off

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I actually enjoy typing, I seriously do. I can’t handwrite, I can’t think with a pen, I can only work and fashion words or thoughts with a keyboard. So I resisted TextExpander for years: it’s a Mac utility that lets you type, say, “;em” and if you do it without the speech marks, it types out your email address.

It’s up to you what those letters are, it’s up to you what text gets expanded. Since I started writing Doctor Who stories, for instance, some fans made a Wikipedia entry for me and I am chuffed about that. I chuff about it enough that it’s handy to be able to type “;wiki” and have TextExpander change that to the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gallagher_(writer)

That probably happened too quickly for you to see.

I use TextExpander instead of email signatures: I’m not really a fan of signatures but since I write for so many different people in so many different forms, it’s really handy to be able to sign off with a link to my books if I’m writing to a publisher, to my journalism if I’m emailing a magazine. So I do that. And I do the wiki thing and I do the email address. I do my bank details too: because I keep forgetting them and you don’t want to get a digit wrong in that.

I also have a rather complicated TextExpander snippet – they’re called snippets – which I run when I’ve started a particular email. Two keys and it’s filled out the recipient, the subject, the body copy of the message and has thrown up a form asking me for the bits that change. It’s a financial thing so it asks me about this account and that invoicing amount and then it pops all that into the message, signs it off and I just hit send.

So I still love typing but I use TextExpander more and more to do more and more of the repetitive, ordinary typing. I installed it back in June and its internal look-at-me statistics panel stays it has saved me 78.88 hours of typing. I am highly suspicious of the maths behind that, but there is no question that it works very well for me and that I’ve come to lean on it a lot. There’s definitely no question because I routinely find it a right pain that you can’t do the same thing on iOS.

(There is a TextExpander for iOS but it’s handicapped by Apple’s app rules and actually right now the firm is nattering with Apple because it’s going to have to change how it does what little it does there.)

But.

The whole point of this is by way of telling you first that there is this thing called TextExpander which is as good as advertised, and second that it is currently on sale.

From about now until Monday 2 December, 2013, it’s 50% off. That makes it £13.47 and just typing those digits makes me wince: I paid twice that. I know it’s worth it. But when it was the full price it was just expensive enough to make me hesitate; at £13.47 I’d have bought it in a bilnk. Let me recommend that you buy it in a blink.

To get the offer, you need to follow this link: http://sites.fastspring.com/smile/product/te?coupon=TE2013BFF

I don’t get any kickback for that, I just get the kick out of knowing that you’re going to have a good time with it.

Try this to get dabbling in RSS

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Previously… I mentioned the update to Reeder yesterday and how it is spectacularly good for catching up with news all the live-long day. Since that came out, I’ve been sent a link to an alternative which has the big advantage that it’s free.

I’m fine with paying money. Paying for something I use forty times a day? Of course it’s worth cash to me.

But RSS has always struggled to catch on because it is just technical enough to make you go away. The only thing you can do is try it out. Once you do, you’re hooked. I guarantee it. Once you’re hooked, you’ll be looking to upgrade to Reeder. I expect.

So try this new RSS newsreader app for yourself and see what you think. It’s called My Paper – Feed Reader and is here for iPhone and iPad:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-paper-feed-reader/id737568901?mt=8

Me and NYT on Microsoft Word vs Apple Pages

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Last Friday, I went to open a Microsoft Word document someone had sent me and found that I didn't have Word on my machine. It was a true shock: I've had Word on everything since the 1980s when I began writing about word processors in various computer magazines.

What's more, I realised why I didn't have it. When I'd installed OS X Mavericks on my MacBook Pro it had found some problems with the hard disc. Serious, creaking, get out fast problems. So I had it reformat the whole drive and sort things out. I'd backed up everything, I backed it all up again just in case, fine. But apparently I hadn't remembered to put Word back on afterwards.

And here was the reason that the shock was the slap it was: it must be a month, it could be six weeks since I installed OS X Mavericks. So I'd not needed Word in all that time, not needed it or wanted it or assumed I should use it, for at least a month.

What's more, I looked at this document and it was open. My MacBook had seen that I'd didn't have Word and so it had just opened the document in the word processor I did have, Apple's own Pages. I now had the choice of schlepping off to find my Word installer or just getting on with my work so I just got on with my work.

Now, this was one Word document in a project that had involved slightly over fifty of them and I'd done the giant part of the work on my iMac which does have Word and I did use Word. This was just one last document that came through late and I was going to have to send it back as Word; if there had been all fifty left to do this way, I'd have installed Word. I think. But for one job, I just accepted that there would be a final convert-to-Word step when I was done.

I like Pages. I've always liked it. I was on a bus when I got the idea for writing a book about productivity for writers and I wrote the first thousand words of it right there on my iPad in Pages. Perhaps because I'd started it there, I carried on. There was also the fact that mentally I was associating my iMac with the 150,000-word book I was writing about Blake's 7 and I was associating my MacBook with a Doctor Who audio script that was due at the same time. But whatever my psychological reasoning, it was still that I'd pick up the iPad to carry on writing The Blank Screen and that meant it was still the case that I'd write it in Pages.

At that stage, the project was chiefly about getting the ideas down and exploring how to convey it. I later moved all the text to Word to send to my proofreaders, I then moved it to Apple's iBooks Author to do one version. I moved it all to Adobe InDesign to make the paperback and the Kindle versions. But for bashing in the words, Pages on my iPad was perfect. The best word processor is the one you've got now but Pages did that Apple thing of staying out of my way while I concentrated on my writing.

So I did go from liking it to being quite the fan and I was aware of this. I didn't notice that it had supplanted Word on my MacBook. I'm trying to think how much else I must have written in Pages on that machine without thinking about it. Certainly a few radio reviews for Radio Times magazine. Definitely several invoices. Must be a lot, but I just can't remember the word processor I used for what.

All of which is nice for me and I could just recommend Pages to you in the certain knowledge that you already have a word processor and have no need to move to a new one.

But Pages just went through a big change. It became free for new users, for one thing. I've said before that I find the free Google Docs a bit clunky and ugly yet I like it more every time I see that price. I do wonder at the decision to make it free: it's obviously very nice for new users and I've no problem with the fact that I bought my copies because I've had a huge amount of use out of it. Yet if you make something free, you do devalue it.

I remember a friend complaining that Word, at the time, cost several hundred pounds and saying why on a Earth would it? “It's only a word processor!” I suggested that she try making one and she'd then see what an enormous job it was. She didn't appreciate the brilliance of the work that had gone in to just a word processor that cost hundreds of pounds. She didn't believe me when I reported that Microsoft had up to then spent a billion dollars developing it. (True.) How much less would she now regard a free word processor?

Curiously, the word free gets people buying, so to speak, and I'm sure it gets people devaluing the word processor, but it doesn't stop anyone bitching about problems. In this case they're right: the new, free version of Pages for Mac in particular has issues.

The key aim of Apple for this release has been to make Pages on the Mac work the same and work with the same documents as Pages on iPad and iPhone. Fine. It also has this thing now where I can send anyone a pages document and they can open it – not through conversions, not through any fiddling and actually not just opening the document either. They can open Pages. Whether they've got it or not. Whether they're on a Mac or a PC. Click on the document I send you and, if you want, you're reading and editing it in Pages in your Web browser.

Apparently it is startlingly marvellous to all of us who get what is happening and can see how hard it is to do – but, infinitely more importantly, for those who do not happen to understand all that's happening, it is just a Pages document. They have no need to tell the difference between owning Pages the application and running Pages in their browser. That is a truly remarkable accomplishment and it is how computers should be: our work is what matters first. It's also a true sea change from the Microsoft approach which makes everything just difficult enough that you appreciate and you value all the company is doing for your money.

But I say it's apparently this good because this is what I keep hearing – and I have yet to have the slightest need to use the feature myself.

And the problem many people have is that in order to get this new feature, to get the ability to work across platforms, Apple has stripped Pages down and lost key features. That's what it feels like: really it's more that they started again and haven't built it back up to all it was.

The only thing is, I've no idea what the missing features are. For me in my current work, the only thing I've hit is that it's slightly more of a pain switching on the word count. (The same cross-platform good stuff and missing features bad stuff has happened to Pages' stablemates Numbers and Keynote. I've seen the difference in Numbers and that's more annoying to me.)

Apple promises that it is bringing all this stuff back and, actually, I believe them. This is what they did with the video editing software, Final Cut Pro X. And since it's not causing me problems at the moment, it's easy for me to carry on believing them.

Plus, I like the new look and feel of Pages. I like how I get on with my writing and then if I need something, if I need some tool, I look up and find that tool just about exactly where you'd think it should be. Contrast that to Word where you have a thousand icons and have to hover over them all to see what they do.

When I started writing this to you, I didn't realise how much I wanted to say. I'd found an interesting article in the New York Times that compared Pages and Word and I wanted you to see it. So I wrote the headline “NYT on Microsoft Word vs Apple Pages”. Having now blathered on at you at this length, I've just gone to change that headline to “Me and NYT” on it. And I'm mithered over whether that now sounds as if I wrote the Times article. Sorry for any confusion there.

And if you haven't had enough of musings about Pages vs Word, do take a look at the NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/28/technology/personaltech/pages-scores-technical-knockout-over-word.html?_r=0