Smena Cosmic Symbol

February 4, 2012 – 10:14 pm

At some point I will probably do a post just listing the small collection of cameras that I currently have – which will hopefully not grow at the same rate as the fountain one did – but this post is about a cheap camera that I recently picked up on eBay for around six quid, mostly because of the name and the look of the lens.

It is, fairly obviously, called a Cosmic Symbol, and it is some variety of Russian Smena camera. It is suggested that it is the UK export version of the USSR Smena Symbol, manufactured potentially between 1971 and 1991, though from the look of it it has been around quite a while. I think I will try to match the colour of the front panels and tidy up the scratches on the silverish parts.

I have taken it out with me a couple of times and even developed one roll of film, so clearly am qualified to write a comprehensive review.

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Ilfosol and shutter speed: a note on new interests

January 23, 2012 – 10:18 pm

Anyone following me on Twitter or G+ might have noticed an increasing number of references to black and white photography. This is not unrepresentative of my current interests – while obviously I still love fountain pens and ink (who doesn’t? those without souls, is the answer) I am starting to take an interest in film cameras as well, particularly “vintage” ones1.

This isn’t a strange progression really – it is all part of some sort of “analogue lifestyle” I suppose. I understand that other people who live quite technical, digital lives in general have moved in this direction, but this doesn’t matter to me in either direction.

I started near the end of last year with the purchase of a Holga 120N, mostly for novelty purposes but also with similar motivations to those that I had when restarting with pens – being able to do something that I have always enjoyed (writing vs photography) but have not done so much as an adult in a more personal, physical way, with a more intimate connection between me and the final outcome. Both require skill in and knowledge of technique that isn’t purely artistic, but part of the intermediate stages between idea and result. Writing by hand legibly requires some skill. Taking photographs on film requires significantly more to even reliably get something close to what one is seeing. Both of them can produce unique results where the details are connected quite directly to decisions that one has made, and things that one has done. Every detail has a consequence.

I’m not a snob about all this, at least I like to think – typing is wonderful, and digital photography is terrific. I still type incessantly and take hundreds of digital pictures. I take black and white photos which I develop myself, but that’s mostly because (a) it is cheaper and (b) I like the intimacy of being involved in the whole process2 – I am not going to join the chorus of people who claim that black and white is somehow superior to colour.

Cameras, however, are terrific gadgets, and the whole film process is wonderfully crunchily technical, so I think this is a very appropriate subject for this blog, and will be writing about it a lot in the near future. I don’t plan to stop writing about iPad apps and any nice ink or notebooks that I may come across, but I haven’t been all that active on that front recently anyway.

  1. It surprises me that vintage cameras and accessories are generally much cheaper on eBay than fountain pens of the same or more recent vintage are. A highly functional camera from the 50s in good condition will cost me half that of a similar fountain pen. Film is definitely more expensive than ink, though. ↩

  2. Also, living in London, the light is often so poor and filtered through so many clouds that using colour film is a bit of a waste of time. ↩

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Expired Kodak Tri-X Pan film packaging

January 20, 2012 – 9:53 pm

Expired Kodak Tri-X Pan film packaging, a set on Flickr.

Before the recent announcement on Kodak and bankruptcy, I had already ordered these two packs of expired Kodak film on eBay – two rolls of 35mm and five of 120, influenced to a great degree by the terrific box that the 120 comes in. The latter film expired in 1972. I look forward to shooting some with the Lubitel 2 that I also ordered, when that arrives.

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Two broad nibs – Platinum #3776 music, Lamy 2000 B

December 4, 2011 – 5:19 pm

Platinum #3776 with music nib

One of the few types of nib that I don’t – or didn’t – own and might actually want to use is a music nib. I can’t even read music, let alone write it, but to summarise, a music nib is a type of stub designed to have a particularly regular flow and be usable at odd angles to the paper. Given that these are three qualities I that I am very fond of in nibs, I thought that it was worth buying myself one for my birthday, or at least excusable.

There are a few different companies that make music nibs – looking around at reviews I judged that the Platinum #3776 received the best marks for nib quality, which was after all why I was buying it, so I ordered one from Andy’s Pens.

It is a medium-sized cartridge/convertor pen, traditionally decorated – black with gold trim, pleasant-looking but not particularly unusual when capped. The nib, though, is different enough to surprise even a casual onlooker, mostly because it has three tines. Or two slits. Or in fact both. I have no idea whether this actually makes any real difference over one, well-tuned slit (two tines etc) but it’s certainly good when used at all sorts of angles to the page. I tend to hold pens at a very high angle, and often, italic-ish ones will complain about this and refuse to respond properly unless aligned very carefully with the paper – I’ve had none of this sort of insubordination from the Platinum. It’s also extremely smooth, the ink flow is regular and it’s not too wet. I should try it with some of my “dryer” inks, like the iron galls.

It’s certainly a noticeable stub – there is a writing sample at the end of the above photoset. I’d say that it was around 1.25mm on the downstroke, and, oh, 0.4mm on the side? Something like that anyway; I don’t have the tools to measure this exactly. My main problem in using it is that, while I’ve improved my handwriting recently, I haven’t trained myself with italics, and the broader nibs can be hard to write with in the first place if you’re used to finer pens (which I am). This means that everything I write looks clumsy and irregular. Oh well.

Lamy 2000, broad nib

Seeing as I’m writing about one pen with a broad nib, why not another one? I went through a phase of wanting every type of Lamy 2000 around – now I come to think about it, pretty much exactly a year previous to my buying the Platinum, perhaps it’s some sort of reaction to winter that I have – and one of the models I ended up with was the 2000 with a broad nib.

When I first tried this pen I was stunned, and really quite upset, by how vast the line was. It doesn’t look like a particularly huge nib to the eye but it really is – the line is about as broad as the Platinum on the downstroke but almost the same size horizontally, too. I wondered whether it had been given some sort of freak triple-broad nib by mistake, and considered sending it back as I would obviously be unable to use it for anything at all.

I kept using it though, and found that:

  • It is extremely smooth and responsive, and the nib has pleasant flex (this is generally true of Lamy 2000s);
  • The 2000 design is very nice in the hand for long periods of writing, though this is a matter of preference and there are people who disagree with me;
  • The amount of ink that comes out of the broad nib lubricates it against the paper making it even smoother;
  • Lamy 2000s hold a lot of ink, which is useful when they also put down a lot of ink;
  • Colourful, shading ink always looks nicer coming out of a broad nib – you can see the variations and even lighter colours are readable. This is as opposed to fine nibs, where you really have to use dark colours or black, or you’ll just find it hard to read what you wrote later on.

These things combined make it a terrific pen for writing, as long as you’re not limited by space or amount of paper. When I wrote my NaNoWriMo last year I used this pen at least 75% of the time; you don’t get as many words per page but it encourages you to keep going longer.

It is also good for the sort of scribbles and notes where you’re not limited by space and you’re mostly writing to sort out ideas in your own head. Particularly on A4 – I like using this pen with black ink on an A4 Rhodia pad. Not such a great pen for jotting things in a pocket notebook.

I can’t remember where I got it, now, but I think it was from The Writing Desk.

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Two very dark Diamine inks – Eclipse and Denim

November 16, 2011 – 12:35 am

Two months between posts is really not acceptable. It is not as if I have a shortage of un-remarked-on pieces of stationery. On the other hand it is a huge cliché of infrequent bloggers that they pop up to say how awful they are for not having made an entry, and then don’t make any entries for the next year, so I’d best not do that. Whoops!

…anyway, I got some ink recently. (“What ink did you get?”) I got four inks from Diamine, out of their new range. Diamine is a terrific company, by the way. They don’t make inks with extreme chemical qualities that allow them to stop bullets and raise the dead; they do, however, make nice inks in a huge range of delightful colours that behave well in any pen at reasonable prices, and they release new ones as well rather than sitting around with a traditional range. (They also make Diamine Registrars’ Ink, which is one of the best iron gall inks one can buy.)

Here are two of the inks. The other two were Graphite – a greyish green – and Wild Strawberry – yet another red. I have no idea why I keep buying red inks, but I think that I have more of them than I have blues, which is another colour that I pretty much never use.

I have made these scans at 300 DPI, but note that, on the page, in anything less than intense direct sunlight, the inks seem much darker than they do here. One of the frustrations of writing about ink, rather than with ink, is that photographs and scans just never properly demonstrate what the ink looks like. Photographs are mostly too dark, except in the best of light, and it is quite late here at the moment. Scans are always too bright. It’s a tragic injustice if you ask me.

Eclipse

DiamineEclipse

This is an extremely dark and muted violet. Regular readers may be aware that I am fond of purple inks, and am keen on the J Herbin “Poussiere De Lune”. If you liked that but thought “you know, it isn’t all that dark really, and perhaps it could be a little wetter because it feels very dry to the page” then you should immediately buy some Eclipse. It is a very nice writer, with excellent flow yet not being too wet, and works well on even fairly rubbish paper. This would, I think, be a good ink if one were in a professional situation but wished to show a little bit of individuality, though really, just using a fountain pen at all marks you out as “fascinatingly artistic and eccentric” and/or “bit bloody odd, quite frankly, do they ever talk to customers? have you run a CRB check?”

Denim

DiamineDenim

This is another dark ink, though not quite as dark as the Eclipse, and also blue instead of purple. It is not amazingly muted but is not a bright blue, and perhaps leans towards the indigo end. Again, like the Eclipse it is very well-behaved and a lovely practical writing ink. I used both of these inks in this years aborted NaNoWriMo and produced thousands of words with both without having any smearing or flow issues.

With blue inks I either like them to be quite dark and low colour saturation (J Herbin Bleu Nuit, R&K Salix) or absurdly bright (Bay State Blue, Waterman South Seas Blue). Denim falls into the former category. I think that it behaves better than the Bleu Nuit and is also a better colour, slightly darker – I would do you a colour comparison but unfortunately my bottle of Bleu Nuit fell to the dread plague of SITB1, and I am unwilling to load up a pen with Quorn.

A return to form

As a note, I have been a bit annoyed with some of Diamine’s “New Century” highly-saturated2 inks which take forever to dry and don’t even have the justification of some of the Noodler’s inks that they can survive in volcanoes. If you, too, have been annoyed by this, you will be happy with both the Eclipse and the Denim, which are both proper shading inks with distinctive colour that actually dry in less than a minute.

They are not waterproof, but then, you could always not spill water on your writing. I have increased respect for water-soluble inks after knocking over a bottle of Herbin Eclat De Saphir on Sunday which splashed all over the carpet of my rented flat. Not that it has disappeared, but it is gradually disappearing, with the application of water, paper towels and swear-words.

Where can I buy these wonderful inks?

Well, I am glad you asked me that. You can order them directly from Diamine in either little 30ml plastic bottles (which I prefer to test things) or big Art Deco 80ml glass ones by going to the Diamine inks site. It is not the nicest-looking site in the world, but it works. For foreign types, I believe that some other sites do distribute Diamine inks and may charge you less in postage.

  1. Stuff In The Bottle – a mysterious fungal infection that means that clumps of rubbery crud grow around and within ink. Not something that one really wants to get within a pen. Since the Nanny State banned certain biocidal chemicals from use in ink for pathetic reasons like “they give factory workers cancer”, the risk of this has increased from “effectively none” to “basically none”. However, it can happen to small manufacturers. ↩

  2. Saturated in writing terms, relating to colour shading and variation, rather than HSB-type colour saturation, though the two often go together. ↩

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The Allan’s Journal – pocket notebook par excellence

September 5, 2011 – 7:53 pm

Allan's Journal closed I recently finished using a small Allan’s Journal as a daily journal. In the end I decided not to buy another one to replace it, but that wasn’t because it was bad, just simply a few aspects of it weren’t quite what I was after.

The Allan’s Journal looks rather like a Bible in construction, as you can see from the pictures, with a tough, flexible, leather cover, a ribbon, red under gold edges to the very thin pages, and even what it is embossed on the cover. (Fewer pages, but still a lot for a notebook.) They are in fact made by an old Scottish company that usually specialises in making Bibles. When considering an order, I theorised that there are certain characteristics of a portable Bible or other religious text that are desirable for a notebook – they need to be tough, long-lasting, compact, easy to carry and be able to store a lot of information – so I was interested to see how well this theory held up.

Price

Allan's journal open First of all, this journal costs £22. You should be aware of this at the start. However, given that it lasted me for slightly over three months, and I write a lot in my journals, this works out to be pretty good value as far as I’m concerned. Worldwide delivery is free, too.

The larger, A5-ish version costs £25, and that would last for even longer.

According to the website, several colour and size combinations are out of stock as of time of writing, and are due to be reprinted in late 2011.

Size and construction

The pocket Allan’s is around the same height and thickness as most A6-ish pocket notebooks, but noticeably wider. You can get it into a large pocket, but not a small one. In practice I only occasionally pocketed it, mostly keeping it in my bag, but it’s fine for jackets and combat trousers. It has 256 pages, because the paper is so thin – see below regarding the paper.

The (real) leather cover is flexible, though not floppy, and thick enough to be tough. You’d have to be very unlucky to damage it beyond a scratch or two. It is “semi yapp”, which means that the edges of the cover extend a little way beyond the edges of the pages, to protect them on the sides as well as the faces. I never experienced the slightest hint of it coming apart.

I found the binding very secure as well, but the book also opens and lies very flat, without needing any force at all. Opening flat (or not doing so) is one thing that always annoys me about notebooks; I found that the Allan’s was the best I’ve seen so far.

Paper

Allan's journal with writing samples There are two things you would immediately notice on opening an Allan’s journal – how thin the paper is, and how narrow the lines are. It’s almost airmail/onionskin paper thickness, and the paper has a light 4mm rule, the thinnest I’ve yet seen.

What you would not immediately notice was how amazingly good this paper is. It isn’t shiny and impermeable as you might suppose – it has a normal level of absorbency, and inks dry quickly on it and look pleasant. On the other hand there was no bleeding or feathering from any fountain pen or normal ink that I tried, from fine to broad. (Sharpies do bleed through the paper, but that’s not unexpected.) Despite this the paper is tough and won’t easily tear. It is absolutely the best thin paper I have yet come across, even including the Midori Traveller’s Notebook ultra-thin paper that I’ve mentioned before, which is not by any means bad, just a bit shinier and easier to smear on.

Due simply to how physically thin the pages are, you can sometimes see writing through from the other side, but because the ink isn’t bleeding through this isn’t a problem – I rarely even noticed it. On the other hand, the 4mm ruling did get on my nerves on occasion. When I was in the mood to write with a fine nib it was, well, fine. It’s very difficult to write tidily with a medium or larger nib with that ruling, though, and I like to do that at times.

This sounds great – why aren’t you getting another one?

This was a useful purchase because it has convinced me that I really don’t like pocket journals any more. It’s basically the perfect pocket journal, apart from the height of the lines and maybe that it’s not hardbacked, but I could get used to both of that. Given that, after using the Allan’s for three months, I was still thinking “yes this is great but I wish the pages were larger, I can’t fit all my thoughts in”, I can safely be sure now that I should not be using pocket notebooks as my main journals, and that I should stick to A5-ish for my journal and Rhodia pads and little pocket cahiers in my pockets, for small notes and ideas and shopping and to-do lists or whatever, not to record the happenings of the world for posterity.

A lot of people do prefer pocket journals, though, and if you are one of them, unless you

(a) absolutely demand a hard cover – and as mentioned, this is not all that floppy, overly floppy covers annoy me as well; (b) refuse to write with anything smaller than a medium nib, or don’t like lined paper in the first place; (c) have very small pockets; (d) really love thick paper; and/or (e) are a huge cheapskate

you should definitely have a think about getting an Allan’s journal.

For the moment I have moved onto an A5 Leuchtturm notebook, but I look forward to trying out the larger Allan’s that I bought at some later date.

Links

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Back to basics – still use my first Safari

August 19, 2011 – 7:14 pm

with F nib and Noodler's Black, on a squared Moleskine cahier

Even given all of the pens and inks that I own, which is quite a large quantity of both, when I am working (as opposed to messing about swapping pens) the one that I most often find myself picking up is the one pictured – a Safari with an F nib, filled with Noodler’s Bulletproof Black. I’m fairly sure this was the first Safari that I bought; you can tell it’s an old one since they discontinued models with the black clip a little while ago.

Some people dislike Safaris, but apart from not liking the angled grip (which is fair enough) I can’t quite see the reasons.

  • Safaris are cheap. Well, not cheap-cheap but they’re not very expensive.
  • They’re also quite easily available, though if you want different nibs (see below) you’ll likely have to order over the net.
  • They’re light, yet surprisingly durable. This one is several years old and doesn’t have a single crack, and not even many scratches. Plastic construction doesn’t mean fragility – after all, look at Parker 51s, they have plastic bodies and are regularly in working order after 50+ years. This plus the price mean that they’re good for carrying in almost any circumstance – hiking, warzones etc.
  • They’re large enough to feel good in the hand and not get lost, but not so large that they’re silly.
  • They have slip caps, but the caps actually come off less in my bag than most screw cap pens I own. And if you’re working, and you pick up and put down your pen quite a lot, a slip cap is much more convenient and less annoying than a screw cap.
  • You can swap out the nibs with great ease, and new nibs are cheap, and there are many types – not only EF to B, but also italics from 1.1 to 1.9mm, and you can even get such things as broad and medium obliques. They’re also generally good quality – Lamy use the same nibs for Safaris and also some higher-end pens – although I’ve never been hugely impressed by the EFs.
  • They come in a variety of bright and pleasant colours, but aren’t over-ornamented. This makes it easy to have a selection with different nibs and inks and quickly tell which is which.

If it weren’t for the Safari, I probably wouldn’t have revived my interest in fountain pens at all, which does make me well-disposed to them in general, but if it weren’t for the simple “pick-up-and-write” usability of them I’d just be nostalgic and not a continuing user.

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Leuchtturm Jottbook

July 29, 2011 – 11:00 pm

I recently acquired three small softcover A6 notebooks made by Leuchtturm, a Swedish company that I’ve seen more about recently, and already own a few notebooks from. These are called “Jottbooks” – they’re around the same size as, and fit a similar niche to, the pocket Moleskine cahiers, Field Notes, and the Clairefontaine “Life Unplugged” notebooks. So I will write about them.

Construction and design

Like the Moleskines, they are stitched rather than stapled, which makes them easier to open flat(-tish) at any page, rather than just at the middle. (They won’t lie flat, but when you are using them, they don’t try to spring back into shape.) The covers are rather nice – shiny, textured, plasticky, like some sort of leatherette, tough but thin – they come in a good selection of bright colours as well. The feel of the covers as well as the colour selection makes the design feel quite 60s, in a good way, and definitely more durable than the card covers of Moleskines and Field Notes.

Inside, like other Leuchtturm notebooks, they start with a page for your name and address, then have a place for an index. The Jottbooks only have one index page with only 19 rows, so you won’t be writing the contents of every page in it – the larger notebooks have more index pages. (You could always write on the back of the page if you run out of space, as it is blank.)

There are 60 pages in each book, leaving it quite thin but larger than a Field Notes. The last 32 of those are perforated at the sides for you to rip them out. I’ve never really felt the need to tear out more than a few pages in a notebook, and 32 perforated pages is way too many, in my opinion.

It doesn’t have a back pocket. Back pockets are a silly Moleskine feature, particularly in thin notebooks like this. You don’t need a back pocket.

With each Jottbook comes a pair of stickers, one with two lines on it and one blank. Presumably these are to apply to the outside or the inside of the cover and write a title or subject on.

Paper

The paper in Leuchtturm notebooks generally is good, and pretty much the same across the whole range. I don’t think the quality is quite as good as the Clairefontaines, but it is proper paper that you can use big fat wet pens with. (See the last image in the gallery above.) On occasion there is some very slight feathering, but no paper is perfect. It’s 100gsm apparently but isn’t thick.

It’s slightly yellowy/cream off-white – lighter than Moleskine, not as white as Field Notes or Clairefontaine.

Each page of the book after the name and index pages has a space for the date at the top and a page number at the bottom. This is slightly redundant for me as, reflexively now, I date every page I write anywhere and timestamp each entry, as well as numbering the pages in any sort of journal or book – I check my watch, write the time down, underline it and then continue with the note. I’ve trained myself to do this and it is incredibly useful and you should do it too – when looking back through notes it’s pretty vital to be able to see what order they came in and when you wrote them.

Anyway, it is good that Leuchtturm are encouraging people in these habits, but their printing doesn’t quite agree with my manual scheme. In my journal:

  • I write the date on the inner side of the top of the page, closest to the centre – the date that I started the page on the left hand one, and the date that I finished the page on the right hand one, so that I can immediately see which dates the two pages span.
  • I write the page number on the outer side of the top of the page, and I continue page numbers between journals. (I am currently 3/4 of the way through page 1349, for your information; I only started continuing page numbers relatively recently too.)

The former dating structure can be continued with the pre-printed date area, but I can’t journal using the printed page numbers, unless I record an “offset” for them at the start. On the other hand, I’m not going to be using these as main journals anyway, more special purpose notebooks or casual jotting things, and for those purposes pre-printed numbers are a bonus. In general, +1 for encouraging people to think about the archiving of notebooks and not just assume they are going to throw them away.

The Jottbooks I have are lined and squared. Leuchtturm do make notebooks with plain and dotted paper as well, but I’m not sure that they put it into the Jottbooks, or if they do you can’t buy them in the UK yet.

Why would one want a Jottbook?

You may or may not feel the need for pocket notebooks like these – I’m not sure that I do, my normal pocket “random thoughts” notebook is a Rhodia pad at the moment and I tend only to use little notebooks for special purposes like dream diaries or work on a specific project) – but I know that a lot of people do, and the Jottbook stands out in a number of areas.

  • The cover is great – tough, waterproof, thin, colourful, feels nice.
  • The book is stitched so durable and opens well at any point – small stapled books irritate me on this point (hello, Field Notes).
  • The paper is good quality and won’t feather and bleed, but it’s not so thick that you only get a dozen pages in the book. There are 60 pages too which is a fair number.
  • The pre-printed numbers save you having to do that yourself, and the structure keeps reminding you to date and index the book.
  • They’re not particularly expensive. I paid £2.99 for each one, and used a 3 for 2 offer. Unless you write vast quantities or use a triple-broad nib that isn’t going to add up to a huge amount of money per unit time.

The Official Chasing Daisies Thin Pocket Notebook Recommendation at the moment is thus either one of the Jottbooks, or a Clairefontaine “Life Unplugged” Duo. The latter have slightly nicer paper but are smaller, are staple-bound and don’t have quite such great covers. Swings and roundabouts really.

Purchased from…

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Noteshelf 4 – stop me before I cliché

July 27, 2011 – 10:51 pm

The problem with writing a review of the new Noteshelf 4 is that I keep accidentally adding the sort of awful clichés that bad tech bloggers always use. It’s ahead of the curve! Leaves the competition in the dust! Best in its class, bar none! Argh! I will try anyway and you can slap me with a cheap Android tablet if I slip up.

Noteshelf is the stylus-based notebook app for the iPad that I have written about before – initial review, version 3 review. It is, easily, my most used “content creation”1 app and also one of my most used apps in general, apart from Mail and Safari obviously. Many iPad apps look nice but have few features (meaning that you have to switch out of them a lot, which is annoying on the iPad). Some have lots of features but are ugly and annoying to use. Noteshelf, even in version 3, had lots of features and was very easy to use. It did and still does have the best zoom system for writing and detailed work that I’ve seen on the iPad – this is essential if you want to use a free-drawing notebook app for anything but the roughest of sketches… well, I’ve written about the previous version before, I won’t go over it all again.

It did lack a few things that I found myself missing, though, particularly highlighting, being able to move pages between notebooks, being able to change paper types within a notebook, and cut and paste within a page. Version 4 addresses my previous issues so well that I’m suspicious that the app has been recording me muttering about them and sending the information back to the developer. New features of Noteshelf 4 include:

  • highlighting
  • moving pages between notebooks
  • multiple paper types within notebooks
  • cut and paste within pages

as well as

  • custom paper types, either user created or bought via an in-app purchase
  • notebook covers not based on paper type, and also with new ones available via purchases
  • an additional and very useful toolbar on the zoom view giving access to common functions without having to move your hand all the way to the top of the page – yes, lazy maybe, but faster
  • auto-advance when reaching the right hand side of the zoom view
  • a better interface for inserting images
  • groups of notebooks, rather than them all being on one shelf (rather like app grouping on iOS 4)
  • reworked and more convenient “export page(s)” UI – actually lots of UI elements have been reworked to make them more convenient

and probably lots of others. What impresses me is the level of care taken to make UI elements usable. For instance, the “auto-advance” feature puts an area on the right hand side of the zoom window, and if you write in that, the view shifts to the right once you lift up the stylus, or moves to the next line if you’re already at the right hand edge. One can change the size of this area. But it doesn’t just shift immediately – it waits for a period after you’ve finished that’s just enough time to dot an i, cross a t or maybe add another letter in the same word if you’re printing, but not so long that you think “this is taking too long to advance”.

I struggle to find anything with Noteshelf now that I don’t like or feels incomplete. The only ones I can think of at the moment are:

  1. The new way that landscape mode works is not how I would like it to work. (Previously Noteshelf let you work with the iPad in landscape but with the page itself still in portrait; you scrolled up and down it. Now, the orientation of the page changes with the orientation of the iPad.) However, the developer has already said that he’s going to make the new landscape mode optional in a quick update, so that isn’t much of a criticism.

  2. The new pens are pretty ugly. Really. The old pens were better. Even a colour palette would have been better.

Apart from that, this is really the best app that I’ve seen so far for notebook-like behaviour on an iPad, with all of the advantages of export, backup, undo, quick colour changing and so on that digital notebooks provide. Not everyone will want an app like this, but if they do, this is the one they should get. It’s the piece of software that’s been most likely to stop me using fountain pens and paper routinely, and that really is saying something.

  1. Does anybody believe that old nonsense about the iPad “not being for content creation” any more? It was never true, and it’s certainly not true now. ↩

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SNYS v0.41

July 27, 2011 – 3:19 pm

I noticed that SNYS was having trouble with Lion, and I think some of the later Snow Leopard security updates, and wasn’t able to spawn processes properly. I’ve updated it so that it is able to do so. (Basically this just involved re-saving the script as a new application in Applescript Editor and then copying the resources back in.) This is v0.41 which is now available for download at http://daisychase.net/software/snys/SimplenoteYojimboSync.zip as usual.

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