(2012-04-27) Uses This Robin Sloan

Uses This / Robin Sloan

First, there's the popular combination of Simplenote synced to Dropbox and accessed via Notational Velocity. (NoteBook)

Google Reader is my idea-sieve

There's a solid OCR app for the iPhone called Prizmo that makes it easy to grab blocks of text from books and magazines.

I spend a possibly-unusual amount of time simply scrolling back through old notes in Notational Velocity, remembering things that resonated months or years ago, recombining them with new fascinations. This is important work, even if it doesn't have the easy clamor of, say, a crowded inbox

Next, when I'm ready to start making something, I plop notes into TextMate.

When something looks like it might grow into a bigger deal - whether it's a story, a novel, or even something like an iOS story app (?!) - I'll start a Scrivener project, usually by just pasting in a bunch of those notes and text files. I appreciate Scrivener's ability to keep a lot of text organized without insisting on too much structure. For me, Scrivener is the cauldron: the ingredients meet there for the first time, and it's there that they start to bubble and blend.