Changes!
In one month we:
- downsized to a condo.
- became empty nesters.
- I had rotator cuff surgery.
One of the perks has been “letting go” of my office and Mac G4 for the nook and iMac (pictured.) My only regret is that we didn’t do this sooner!
Learning Curve
I wear a sling 24/7, and since I’m not left-handed, life has slowed down. Add to that trying to learn new software and there are days I feel I’m not progressing at all. But I am, just at a snail’s pace. Too bad I’m a hare!
Writing
I’ve always been a Microsoft Word guy but I’m rethinking this choice. I’m not about to shell out huge bucks for Office when all I want is Word so I may just opt to use Pages that comes on the Mac. From dabbling with it, I think it will do everything I need. Which gets me to my question…
What do you use?
J.E. Lowder 
I have always used office on my Mac(s) and love it – it is nice to be able to switch back and forth from most computers – and the reality is office is just used more. Right now I am using one of my Office 365 licenses from work on my home computer so I can still do work stuff at home. However, I recommend hitting up one of your kiddos in school to see if they can buy it at the student’s price for you? We bought most of our software back when Ben was in grad school because of the discount. (His big graduation gift was the Adobe suite – even at the discount it was still expensive!)
I can’t really speak to the usefulness of Pages – never have really used it myself. Ben has only used it briefly – he compares it to a mix of Word and Publisher, but I know it is not his preference. Hope this helps!
LikeLike
Hey Jay – I have always used office on my Mac(s) and I love it – mainly because I enjoy the ability to switch back and forth between computers if need be and the reality is most devices I am around have Office. Currently I am using one of the Office 365 licenses from work so I can still do work stuff at home, but before that we always used the student software from college and grad school because we got it at such a great discount. I recommend hitting up one of your kiddos in college to see if they can buy the software for you at the discount! (We even bought the Adobe suite for Ben at the student price – still expensive, but waaaaaay discounted!)
I can’t speak much to pages because I have never really used it, but I hope this helps!
LikeLike
Hey, you hip young parents! Thanks for the feedback. We’re trying the 365 route but have hit some snags. Just looking for other options in case “the Man” won’t play nicely.
Blessings!
LikeLike
I use them all for different things:
Pages for independent, small projects like class assignments. It gets the job done and exporting to Word or PDF is simple enough if you need to send it to someone in another format. Also, the sharing function is a nice touch if you’re well connected in Apple’s iCloud universe.
Evernote for collaborative projects. I’m trying to get the Athentikos team to collaborate on workshops and writing through this.
OmmWriter and TextEdit for personal works like poetry and short fiction. They are great at providing a distraction free work environment. I like to zen out in OmmWriter. Good for poetry, but extremely limited in functionality.
Scrivener for huge projects like novels or manuscripts. All my incompleted novels are organized in Scrivener. It has some great features where you can set word count goals for your chapters or sections as well as downloading web pages to view later (which is really helpful whenever doing research). There are also some great character and setting templates to help get all of your story elements organized, which I can only imagine is valuable to a world-building fantasy author like yourself.
TL;DR – Just stick with Pages, it does what you need it to do and won’t crash.
LikeLike
Really considering Scrivener…but most of what I’ve written has been old school: just write, edit, paste, do over. Which might explain some continuity issues 🙂
LikeLike
Scrivener is boss.
LikeLike
It just has a bit of a learning curve to it. But it looks more complicated than it really is.
LikeLike
Read that in the reviews…but complicated is subjective 🙂 May look into it. It would help me remember who did what and who can’t do that now kinda thing.
LikeLike
Hi mate, am tapping this quick reply on my MBAir, in Spain, having penned about 20k words over the last fortnight (most of them, likely, rubbish) … but all fully backed up to the cloud and available on my iPad, Mac or iPhone if I ever feel the need to tinker. In other words: welcome to the most powerful writing tool on the planet: Pages. I just wish Amazon would catch up and allow proper ePub uploads which maintain accurate typesetting! My advice: make the change and persevere with it. Hugs AB 🙂
LikeLike
Good to hear from you, Anthony. Glad you’re still alive and writing 🙂
I’m also tinkering around with Scrivener.
LikeLiked by 1 person