Filed under: Text

Here's a nice way to give your ego a little boost and waste 30 seconds: take a chunk of something you've written, making sure that it's at least a few paragraphs long, and paste it into the text box at I Write Like. Hit the Analyze button, then wait for it to spit out the name of a famous author that your writing is somehow statistically similar to. It's fun, and it makes you feel good in that "really, I write like Stephen King?!" kind of way. Unfortunately, while I wouldn't want to call the method that it uses into question, the results are ... questionable.

I took a piece of writing of mine that I consider to be just garbage, and it told me that I write like Neil Gaiman. Now, I don't know much about his writing, but based on reputation alone, I'm certain that it's far better than the rubbish I plugged into this thing.

On the other hand, if you're a struggling author and you need to justify to your spouse that following your writing passion is going to pay off, you might consider giving them a look at I Write Like. Just be careful not to believe it yourself.

I mean, apparently this very post is similar to Dan Brown.

nice entity is a slick, clean website that does just one thing and does it well. It's a large, interactive table that shows all HTML entities and it lists each with its Unicode character and entity text.

To the uninitiated, HTML entities are little pieces of text that you may use instead of punctuation that would otherwise be "confusing" for the computer or break the page. For example, a "greater than" sign is used on every HTML (or XML, for that matter) tag. So, the safest way to display such a sign (when you really do want just the sign and want to make sure that no computer will mistake it for part of a tag) is to use its entity. For "greater than," this is "gt." All entities start with an ampersand and end with a semicolon – so, "greater than" is actually >.

There are a ton of these, and "nice entity" provides one of the most usable, aesthetically pleasing, and easily searchable lists that I have seen so far. It's also completely devoid of any sort of advertising (as far as I could see). Very nice!

Weighing in at a massive 13 kilobytes, PureText is a classic freeware utility; it's tiny, portable (single file), straightforward, does one thing, and it does it well. It lets you copy rich text from a Web page, Word document, or any other source and paste it, clean and devoid of any formatting. It also makes a cute "bong!" sound when it does its job, but you can switch that off.

I can't begin to count the number of times when I wanted to paste a snippet from a Web page into an email, and the formatting completely screwed the rest of my email. You know, it changes the font, and then you have to copy the beginning of the email again, paste it after the Web page snippet, and edit over it (so that the formatting matches the beginning of the email); the whole thing gets pretty messy.

With PureText, just hit Win-V, and you're done. It's really handy!

Squad (no connection to us) is an interesting collaborative text editor for coders. There are several things I like about it, and several things I don't. Let me count them off real quick:

I like:

• The general look and feel. Stylish!
• Real-time collaboration a-la Etherpad, but with proper syntax highlighting for JavaScript, HTML, and a bunch of other languages.
• The product has Pro versions, so hopefully it's making some money and will stick around for a while.
• The name, of course!

I don't like:

• The fact that there is no Word Wrap.
• That it's pretty slow with collaborative real-time editing.
• No Ruby syntax highlighting!
• No auto-completion.
• Banners for the Free version are huge, and very little screen space is left.
• Free version is extremely limited.

Bottom line: Squad has some great potential, and maybe the paid version is awesome. The free version doesn't quite make the cut, but with a few minor changes it could be a huge hit for collaborative development. [Oh, what happened to Google Wave... -Ed]

To use a cliche, the best just got a bit better. WriteMonkey, one of the very best full-screen freeware text editors for Windows, has now been released as 0.9.9 Final. This final version was preceded by no less than three release preview versions, so I expect it to be quite bug-free (also, I have been writing all of my posts using WriteMonkey for the past few months, and it has yet to crash once).

Besides the usual soothing full-screen text-only view, 0.9.9 introduces several new features. Here are just two:

• Export templates: You can now write your texts with Markdown or Textile, and define export templates using CSS. You can then easily export your documents into DOC or HTML files, formatted for users to view. This means you can write a novel on WriteMonkey and easily print it in wide-margin, double-space format for proofreading/reviewing, or create web pages, or do anything else CSS lets you do.

• Typewriter scrolling is a feature dubbed "experimental" which keeps your current writing position constant. This means you don't have to keep looking down towards the bottom of the screen while you write: you can just place your cursor somewhere near the middle of the screen, and that line will always be the last line. I am using this feature right now, and it's pretty nice!

There have been quite a few other additions, all of which you can see on the release notes. If you haven't tried WriteMonkey yet and you do any sort of writing (heck, even emails), you should definitely grab it for a spin!

Amy Editor is an interesting find; it is an advanced online programmer's editor, which apparently has not been touched since April 2008 (current build is 080401, dubbed version 1.0). But it's still online, and it is very, very impressive.

My need was simple: I need to collaborate on a Ruby project with someone in real-time, working on the same file while discussing it on Skype. And I wanted syntax highlighting and some other niceties to make the process easier. I came across several advanced editors, but none of them had Ruby support -- which is interesting, since Ruby (and Ruby on Rails) appears to be all the rage these days.

While very advanced, Amy Editor still feels half-baked in some ways. For example, I could not figure out how to save my file online or how to start a project. The editor does have a notion of "projects", but you can only "open" a project – I really couldn't figure out how to create one, even after reading the online help (which does exist, and is well-written).

Another thing you should know is that it is not fast; I mean, if you're both going to be working on the same exact spot in code (within one function, for example), the lack of speed might get in the way. But if you just want to collaborate on one Ruby file and are willing to put up with its quirks, Amy Editor is the best solution I could find.

Does anybody know of a better one?

Bend is a Windows text editor that is currently under development. It's far from ready (it doesn't really have a proper homepage, and its status is listed as Alpha on CodePlex), but it shows great promise.

The whole thing is based on WPF and XAML, which are two hot, new Microsoft technologies that are used for making interfaces look nice. The screenshot shows the basic interface, which is currently quite raw. It seems as though text is rendered on a very low level; it feels sluggish on my system. It's not just a common text control.

On the flip side, this gives Bend a great deal of flexibility. For example, when you click the Bend button to get to the Settings page, the whole window "flips" in a really interesting way, and you suddenly find yourself in the settings. There are just three settings for now, but one of them is an Update Check, which is sure to be handy for the future.

While Bend is a far cry from WriteMonkey (my current favorite), it does look intriguing, and I am curious to see where the developer takes it. I'm also happy that it's open source. Perhaps there's a DLS reader who feels like pitching in?

Side View Generator is a clever little Web application that turns words into other words. So, ... what's so clever about that?

You feed it with a word or two (up to ten letters), and it does its magic by taking your text and creating it in 3D. This is the tricky part, really: each letter is composed of multiple voxels, and each voxel is located at a certain point in 3D space.

Viewed from one angle, you see your word exactly as you entered it. Turn the view around, and suddenly you see a jumble of points. Keep turning it, and a completely new word morphs into view. DLS becomes SLY, and Ezuk becomes Nude. (I am not making this up; I didn't put it in the screenshot because I wanted to keep it all SFW.)

The word is always a real word, and as you can see, it doesn't just shift the letters around. You could say it's a 3D anagram of sorts.

Also, you gotta love the Engrish. As they say, "The 'DLS' that saw from side might be a 'SLY'."

Email can feel very impersonal at times. I don't mean just business-related email. In fact, when I want to write a personal message to a friend, business-related email (and spam) becomes part of the problem. The friend I'm writing to has read so many email messages, what could possibly make my current message special?

Sure, I can add a cute picture or something tacky like that. But, ... come on, unless I'm writing to my grandmother, that's really not the message I'm trying to send.

In actuality, though, the mere act of typing can be personal. The corrections that I make, my typos, whether I type quickly or slowly, or if I go back and add something to a previous paragraph are all part of my own unique process.

If the recipient of my message could see all of these actions, it would be almost as if they were peeking over my shoulder while I was busy composing the message and contemplating exactly what I wanted to say. This is a much more raw and personal experience than just looking at the complete message.

That's pretty much what fuzzmail provides. You type your message into a normal textarea, and the site records your keystrokes as you go along. It then "plays back" the message to your recipient, exactly as you typed it, with deletions and edits included. This can certainly add a touch of intimacy to an otherwise generic email, with no cute pictures of cats involved.

Google Font Preview is a new way to play with Google's Web Fonts API. The API is already dead-easy to use: you just include a single line of text in your Web page source code, and you can use fonts in your CSS.

But that's "ease of use" defined in web developer terms... What about the designer types who don't always feel like messing around with code just to see what stuff looks like on the screen? While they can always go for something fancy like Type Folly (which I really do like), sometimes that can be a bit of an overkill. Type Folly pulls fonts from paid services as well as Google's free one, and gives you a ton of options.

For the times when you just want to play around with a couple of sliders and be sure you're working with freely available fonts only, Google Font Preview is just what the doctor ordered. As you can see, you can set whatever text you want to play with since your playing field is just a Firefox text area (spell check works, and apparently "Hmm" is not a real word). You get sliders for playing with letter, word and line spacing, you can transform the text (capitalize, uppercase, lowercase), see what it looks like with a shadow, and apply most other CSS3 options. The tool is decidedly newbie-friendly, so you won't see terms like "kerning" or "leading" but only "letter spacing" or "line spacing".

The code you've generated is always at the bottom of the window, so once you're happy with the results you can just copy and paste it into your own page.

[Google Operating System via tobestobs]

Type Folly is a tour de force, showing how far JavaScript and CSS have come. When I first openend the page I got a canvas with all sorts of text, which looks like an image. But then I clicked it, and discovered I can drag stuff around.

Then I noticed the tool panes on the sides; they look like Photoshop tool panes, but are implemented in JavaScript and are fully functional. There are layers, and type properties, and containers sizes and whatnot.

You play around with the canvas just like you would with Adobe Illustrator (including font effects, etc). But the shocker comes at the end, when you get a fully valid CSS3 + HTML code which is the exact canvas you created. It's all done with JavaScript, CSS and HTML.

I'm pretty sure the fonts come from Google, which is a case in point for me. But even if they use some paid service, the point here is the tool itself, which you really have to play with to understand.

In a huge leap forward for Google Docs, your docs are now viewable in mobile browsers. This is a pretty big deal, because it means there's now a way to view Docs, DocX files, PDFs and more on your iPhone, iPad or Android device without installing an app. A lot of people who didn't have a use for Google Docs before just found a reason to sign up for an account.

On iOS devices, you can pinch and zoom your docs, and all devices get quick navigation and panning/zooming within a page. You can also switch to the full desktop viewer if you really want to, although the mobile-optimized version is faster and easier to read on a small screen.

This is also a good step in Google's attempts to pitch Docs as a valuable enterprise tool. How many times have you gotten a work email with an attachment that you couldn't open on your phone? Well, if your business uses Google Docs, you can share files that way. They'll be viewable by everyone, without even downloading a file.

Audio and video on Amazon's Kindle? They'd have to launch a whole new device to do that, right?

Nah, they're doing it anyway, but only as part of the Kindle iPad app. That's right: Amazon's just introduced new features that can only be accessed on a competitor's reading device. What the heck are they thinking?

Well, they're probably thinking that there's more profit in selling books on every device than there is in trying to lock users down to Kindle hardware in an increasing competitive reader market. Still, do users want audio narration with their books? Wouldn't they just buy -- y'know, audiobooks? Also, I wonder what kind of video could enhance, rather than distract from, the reading experience. Exclusive author interviews, perhaps? One of the first books to get video is a travel guide, Rick Steves' London, which sounds like a smart use of multimedia.

The additional content will really be up to the publishers, so maybe Amazon is throwing them a bone here. Publishers could always use audio and video for marketing, adding in trailers for other books a reader might want to buy. I guess we'll have to wait and see, because only a handful of books are using these new features so far.

[via TechCrunch]

I jumped for joy when I saw a post at Lifehacker explaining how to read PDFs on your iPhone or iPad using Apple's new iBooks app. I figured someone would come up with a way to do it, and I should have known it would rely on the ultra-useful Dropbox. Dropbox is an amazing cloud storage app that works on several platforms, and one of them happens to be iOS, making it possible to transfer PDF files to your mobile device.

Once you've got the files uploaded to Dropbox, though, how do you get them into iBooks? Just find the PDF in Dropbox on your phone, hit "Open With" and choose iBooks. It's easy as pie, and your PDF files will automatically sync through Dropbox, too. You don't even have to bother plugging in your device or using iTunes. Brilliant!

Remember Smultron? The no-frills Mac text editor with the distinctive strawberry icon got left behind when Snow Leopard was released, and (as Lifehacker notes) everyone thought it was a goner. Well, fret not, because Fraise is here to pick up where Smultron left off. Same lightweight text-editing abilities, same strawberry-themed icon, same free price.

Fraise has the snippets and color-coding that coders rely on, along with a beefed-up find and replace feature. Also, if you needed a language that Smultron just didn't have, you'll be glad to know that Fraise also adds more localizations. It's a worthy successor to Smultron, and it's right up there with other powerful free options like Textwrangler.