An Interface of One’s Own … Bye-Bye Word !

Microsoft Word. Light of my mind, fire of my frustration. My sin, my soul. Mi-cro-soft-word. The mouth contorts with anti-poetry. My. Crow. Soft. Word.

Oh, Word. For 20 years, you have supported and tyrannized me. You have given me a skimpy Etch A Sketch on which to compose, a cramped spot on the sentence-assembly line — and then harangued me with orders to save or reformat as you stall and splutter and assert points of ludicrous corporate chauvinism (“Invalid product key”! “Unrecognized database format”!).

And just when I need to be alone with my thoughts and my Mac, you detain me by emphasizing my utter dependence on you, melodramatically “recovering” documents lost in your recreational crashes.

After lo this lifetime of servitude, I intend to break free. I seek a writing program that understands me. Goodbye to Word’s prim rulers, its officious yardsticks, its self-serious formatting toolbar with cryptic abbreviations (ComicSansMS?) and trinkety icons. Goodbye to glitches, bipolar paragraph breaks and 400 options for making overly colorful charts.

Goodbye, especially, to the mean, white and narrow page — which is hardly the intoxicating mental expanse Kerouac and Cather must have enjoyed. With Word, I always feel as if I’m taking an essay test.

So I have come to admire Steven Poole, author of books on video games and language, who trumpets a new radicalism on stevenpoole.net. He has purged his life of Word entirely, and he says he feels great. He had nothing to lose but his chains.

Our redeemer is Scrivener, the independently produced word-processing program of the aspiring novelist Keith Blount, a Londoner who taught himself code and graphic design and marketing, just to create a software that jibes with the way writers think. As its name makes plain, Scrivener takes our side; it roots for the writer and not for the final product — the stubborn Word. The happy, broad-minded, process-friendly Scrivener software encourages note-taking and outlining and restructuring and promises all the exhilaration of a productive desk: “a ring-binder, a scrapbook, a corkboard, an outliner and text editor all rolled into one.”

Ring, scrap and cork sound like fun, a Montessori playroom. But read on — and download the free trial — and being a Scrivener-empowered scrivener comes to seem like life’s greatest role. Scriveners, unlike Word-slaves, have florid psychologies, esoteric requirements and arcane desires. They’re artists. They’re historians. With needs. Scrivener is “aimed at writers of all kinds — novelists, journalists, academics, screenwriters, playwrights — who need to refer to various research documents and have access to different organizational tools whilst aiming to create a finished piece of text.”

That “whilst”! It alone makes me feel like writing.

Scrivener, then, is one of us, at home in the writer’s jumpy emotional and procedural universe. Consider its desktop icon. It greets you without Word’s back-slanted, subliterate “W” — speeding nervously to the finish line — but with an open-minded yin-yang adorned with quotation marks. Unlike so many twerpy little applications, the Scrivener icon eschews that ubiquitous Curaçao blue. Neither is it slightly rounded like some squishy teething toy. Instead, it shines and stands upright like a domino, which makes you think of a brisk “click” instead of a software “blurp.” It’s also black and white, like words on a page.

To create art, you need peace and quiet. Not only does Scrivener save like a maniac so you needn’t bother, you also get to drop the curtain on life’s prosaic demands with a feature that makes its users swoon: full screen. When you’re working on a Scrivener opus, you’re not surrounded by teetering stacks of Firefox windows showing old Google searches or Citibank reports of suspicious activity. Life’s daily cares slip into the shadows. What emerges instead is one pristine and welcoming scroll: Your clean and focused mind.

Full screen is not a Scrivener invention; Scrivener credits Ulysses, another excellent Word alternative for Mac. But full screen has been refined by Nisus Writer, which Michael Chabon used to write “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” as well as the seminal program CopyWrite. For PCs, programs like NewNovelist, StoryView and Liquid Story Binder get raves.

But if, when it comes right down to it, full screen is your holy grail, and the ultimate antidote to the bric-a-brac of Word, then you must enter the WriteRoom, the ultimate spartan writing utopia. Where Scrivener calls itself a “writer’s shed,” which suggests implements like duct tape and hoes, WriteRoom pitches itself as the way to “distraction-free writing” for “people who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world.” With WriteRoom, you don’t compose on anything so confining as paper or its facsimile. Instead, you rocket out into the unknown, into profound solitude, and every word of yours becomes the kind of outer-space skywriting that opens “Star Wars.” What I mean is this: Black screen. Green letters. Or another color combination of your discerning choice. But nothing else.

For those of us who learned Basic on a Zenith Z19 and started word processing on a Kaypro (anyone?), the retro green-and-black now takes the breath away. It’s not just the vintage features available on WriteRoom, it’s also that the whole experience is a throwback to a time before user-friendly interfaces came to protect us from technology’s dark places. In those days, the mystery of the human mind and the mystery of computation seemed both to illuminate and to deepen each other.

Yes, with WriteRoom, your sentences unfurl in prehistoric murk. Yes, your green letters seem like civilization’s feeble stand against entropy. Yes, when you write, you have lighted a candle instead of cursing the darkness. Yes, you can and should also curse the darkness.

The new writing programs encourage a writerly restart. You may even relearn the green-lighted alphabet, adjust your preference for long or short sentences, opt afresh for action over description. Renewal becomes heady: in WriteRoom’s gloom is man’s power to create something from nothing, to wrest form from formlessness. Let’s just say it: It’s biblical. And come on, ye writers, do you want to be a little Word drip writing 603 words in Palatino with regulation margins? Or do you want to be a Creator?

SHAKE TO DELETE: The Etch A Sketch was the typewriter generation’s introduction to a screen that could make words simply vanish. The Web is filled with Etch A Sketch art, preserved as it could never be on the original shakable and protean palette. Find examples at gvetchedintime.com, etchasketchist.blogspot.com and ohioart.com/etch.

DON’T WRITE, SCRIVE!: Scrivener at literatureandlatte.com lets you keep your notes and ego while you write. Kick out the jams — and invigorate your style? — with other Word alternatives like WriteRoom, CopyWrite, Avenir, Jer’s Novel Writer and Ulysses.

LET THERE BE LIGHT: For fans of fanaticism, here’s an Internet pathology worth cultivating: flashaholism. Read dazzling disquisitions by connoisseurs of hand-held light on Flashlight News (flashlightnews.net/forum) and Candlepower Forums (candlepowerforums.com). Check out the paeans to palm-size LED beauties. It’s day-for-night at the flick of a switch.

Microsoft Live Labs Announce Volta

Microsoft has announced the Volta technology preview, a developer toolset for building multi-tier web applications using existing and familiar tools, techniques and patterns. Volta’s declarative tier-splitting enables developers to postpone architectural decisions about distribution until the last possible responsible moment. Also, thanks to a shared programming model across multiple-tiers, Volta enables new end-to-end profiling and testing for higher levels of application performance, robustness, and reliability. Using the declarative tier-splitting, developers can refine architectural decisions based on this profiling data. This saves time and costs associated with manual refactoring. In effect, Volta extends the .NET platform to further enable the development of software+services applications, using existing and familiar tools and techniques.

You architect and build your application as a .NET client application, assigning the portions of the application that run on the server tier and client tier late in the development process. You can target either web browsers or the CLR as clients and Volta handles the complexities of tier-splitting. The compiler creates cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier, web services for the server tier, and all communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code to tie the tiers together. In effect, Volta offers a best-effort experience in multiple environments without requiring tailoring of the application.

Office 2007 Service Pack 1

Microsoft has released Office 2007 Service Pack 1. The download link is broken as I write this, but it shall be fixed soon. Here’s what’s new:

” The 2007 Microsoft Office system Service Pack 1 (SP1) reflects unceasing efforts at Microsoft to address customer concerns. Nearly all of the improvements included in the 2007 Office system SP1 are in response to direct feedback from power users at large organizations or indirect feedback from home and office users through the Dr. Watson bug-reporting system. By tapping these extensive customer-feedback channels, Microsoft targeted the issues that customers care about most. As a result, the 2007 Office system SP1 delivers significant stability and performance improvements to the applications that home and office workers rely on every day.

By deploying the 2007 Office system SP1, home users and businesses can quickly reap benefits in the following areas:

Stability. Using data from the Dr. Watson bug-reporting system, Microsoft fixed, at minimum, the five software bugs that most frequently caused each application in the 2007 Office system to crash. The 2007 Office system SP1 also improves the stability of server components in the 2007 Office system and compatibility with Windows Server 2008, so companies can more confidently move forward with upgrade plans.

Performance. The 2007 Office system SP1 improves performance in applications that are pervasive in modern offices, most notably: Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Security. By incorporating incremental advances in security and results from application testing, the 2007 Office system SP1 offers home and office users better protection against malicious software and potential threats to privacy. “