Use the Hemingway word processor in earnest

Posted by William Gallagher

Hemingway was an online-only app for word processing which would let you type away and then wince at you. Give a sharp intake of breath at you. And mark up your text thisaway:

Red highlighting means ouch.

I have never used it and wouldn’t rush to write anything online, said William typing this directly into a WordPress page on Safari. Hmm. That changes my mind. I have actually just changed my own mind.

Still, I’m writing where I know I have a steady wifi connection. And this news story is currently only 92 words long. You could live with me losing these 92 words, I could live with it too. But a novel, say, that would be harder to shrug off after one lost wifi connection.

Now, however, Hemingway brings all its vicious accusations to the desktop: you can buy Hemingway for PC or Mac at $4.99 each from the official site.

Just beautiful: cities from space

Posted by William Gallagher

New York City at night.

The Atlantic magazine has a new feature about collections of shots like these, including various official NASA ones but also photos shot by astronauts in space.

Just fascinates me and I wanted you to see it too.

10 PRINT “HELLO, WORLD” GOTO 10

Posted by William Gallagher

It’s fifty years since the computer language BASIC was invented and probably thirty since I could’ve told you unprompted that it stands for Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. I’m not sure how many years it is since this was the startup screen I saw for most hours of most days:

It’s hard to conceive how we got from that to what I now see every day:

But we got there in part, in a very big part, through the impact of BASIC and the generation it sent into programming computers. I was one of them, I just got in trouble for always wanting to add in plot twists.

Read the origins and history of BASIC in Time magazine. Told you Time was good for a read, when it isn’t running royal videos.