In order, we have:

• Diamine Grey. Slightly water-resistant, in that it is visible afterwards and almost readable, but not pretty.

• Sailor Sei-Boku – the greenish blue “nanocarbon” Sailor ink. As befits an ink by a company called “Sailor” this ink remains identical no matter how much it is dunked into water. Sei-Boku is termed “archival quality” so really should be able to cope with being dunked in a sink.

• Waterman South Seas Blue, which is really a turquoise. Here we see the difference between a sailor and the sea. South Seas Blue, when exposed to water, is overjoyed and leaps off the page in ecstasy, to join its brother and sister molecules.

• A black Sharpie marker which I happened to have lying around. No nonsense here. Water? Why should it care about water? Try bleach or napalm to erase this sort of thing.

• Diamine Monaco Red which surprised me a little (though Diamine inks are not noted for water resistance generally). Monaco Red just vanishes with barely a trace. I’ll grant that that example of Monaco Red was likely contaminated with a lot of J Herbin Rouge Caroubier, since it normally dries to a brownish “there’s been a murder sir” colour, but even so… evidence has been eradicated.

• And then I had run out of inked pens so decided to try a pencil, specifically a 3B lead in a Caran d’Ache clutch pencil. Pencils have something of a reputation (in my mind anyway) for being impermanent, given that they can be erased with a piece of rubber, but graphite particles embedded into the surface layer of paper are apparently entirely non-bothered by the presence of water.

So. I have picked one ink – Waterman Black, a reliable and fast-drying ink, good for all sorts of paper – and I am planning to use that for the next… well, I had originally thought “month” but that might be a bit too long. Fortnight, let’s say. I have loaded all of my normal pens with it, apart from the Kaweco Sport that I have loaded with red and use to make corrections and annotations after the fact (this does not count; this piece of asceticism is only for writing pens). The idea is that I will concentrate more on the actual writing. Let’s see how effective this actually is, in practice.

It’s an absurd-looking pen, but has a certain charm if you like that sort of thing. The cap is immense – the photos really don’t do it justice – and the clip on it is bizarrely huge as well. (I bought one with green trim, but it is available in a number of colours.) The body is a translucent black plastic which shows the cartridge or convertor. It is overall lighter in weight than one might think, though, yet it’s solid in construction – it doesn’t feel cheap or flimsy at all.

The grip is rubbery and deliberately contoured to encourage a particular sort of hold. There is a flattened dip on the top right for one’s index finger, and underneath, a shallower but wider flattened part for the middle finger. Some people hate this sort of thing but it fits in quite well with how I hold pens. The grip, the weight and the generous but not excessive width lead me to think it would be a good writer for extended periods.

This model has a medium nib, which is a “European” medium i.e. fairly broad, and is also slightly italic. It is pleasantly smooth on the paper and ink flows well, or at least it does now. Originally when first filling it the thing had trouble starting and was writing quite dryly. “Oh gawd,” I thought, “another fifteen quid wasted on a pen I’ll never use,” but being sensible I gave it a good flush and a soak for an extended period with a little washing-up liquid to clean out any gunk from factory or storage or malicious pen pixies, and now it seems fine, at least with Waterman Florida Blue which is what I have in it at the moment.

The iD takes standard international cartridges, and has space for the usual two back to back inside. I ordered a Tombow convertor at the same time for use with bottled ink and this seems effective, in fact a pretty good convertor all told, with a good seal and no air getting in.

Overall, I am happy with this pen. It has a fatter nib than I normally prefer, but it is a nice comfortable writer, and if I didn’t need a rounded fine nib to write in my usual appalling spider scrawl (being fairer to myself here, I also draw bubbles and arrows and diagrams a lot, and a broadish italic nib is not good for that purpose) I could see myself using it regularly. Somebody looking for a relatively inexpensive and comfortable pen for long periods of writing – exams, theses – might find it pretty ideal. Do flush it out first though.

Additional information (Tuesday 27 July 2010)

Having used the iD for a while now, I have noticed a peculiarity – it takes forever to clear ink out of it. I don’t know where it’s hiding it all, but whereas most pens will run fairly clear after a few fillings and ejections of water with a convertor, the iD keep pumping out the ink for ages.

This is a little annoying if you change inks as frequently as I tend to, but for most people it is probably an advantage of sorts, as if one sees an empty cartridge or convertor there’s likely still quite a bit of writing left in the thing, giving one time to find a refill.

I have a new version which traps some syncing bugs more effectively for those who can use it, which I will upload later today.

The first thing I discovered was that I couldn’t see any way to add tags – or rather, keywords, as iPhoto calls them – en masse, which seemed very odd. (It may have a mechanism which I didn’t find.) But that’s what we have Applescript for isn’t it?

Edit: after writing this post I was informed that Cmd-K brings up a list of tags in iPhoto, which can be used to mass tag photos. However, I shall keep this blog post here because (a) the Launchbar integration means it can easily be done via the keyboard and (b) the script itself might be useful for people as a starting point for keyword manipulation in iPhoto.

So I started writing a script to do this. The second thing that I noticed was that, in some cases, keywords just were not being added to pictures, and I found that iPhoto silently refuses to add keywords via Applescript which don’t actually exist in its list of keywords. A bit annoying, but surely, easy to overcome – after all, we can get a list of all keywords in iPhoto, so just check that first, and if the keyword doesn’t exist, add it before trying to tag the photos. Surely.

The third thing that I learnt this morning was that it seems to be entirely impossible to add new keywords to iPhoto via Applescript. You just can’t do it – you can’t make a new keyword at all, it kicks up errors when you try, including the ever helpful “AppleEvent failed”.

So the result is a script which does mass add keywords, but only keywords which already exist. It warns you if they don’t rather than just failing; you’ll have to add them to one photo manually first. But I have now replaced my manual folders with smart folders and events, and my sidebar looks a lot tidier. I also now find it a lot quicker to tag photos using the keyboard only, via Launchbar.

Here’s the script to download:

• Applescript: iPhoto mass add keywords

I tend to use Yojimbo to capture “blobs” of information, which don’t have an immediate category and aren’t part of an existing list – say:

• the URL of a good blog entry I just read, which is interesting and well written but has no relevance to any work I’m doing;
• an irritating piece of Applescript syntax that I had to google to work out, and may have trouble with later;
• a phone call I just received from my bank;
• an idea for a piece of software I just had which I might develop at some point if I ever get the time;
• a dream I had, a building I saw, or the particularly vivid colours of a bird that flew past my window. (In practice this sort of entry often comes when transcribed from my pocket notebook, or via Simplenote on the iPhone.)

Anyway, to proceed to the meat of this post: one of the things CPN does very well is keep lists, and one of the types of list I keep in my Notebooks is an activity log, where I write down all the tiny details of my day in case I need to look them up later – IM conversations, little changes I make to a module, what just happened in a phone call. I almost never do, but sometimes it’s vital, and if I can very quickly enter a log entry I’m much more likely to do so. These aren’t really Yojimbo-type blobs to me, they’re timed sequential items in a list, with the list being the blob.

CPN doesn’t have any sort of “quick entry” panel, though, and it’s not Applescriptable. But there’s a way of using Launchbar to add quick text entries to lists like activity logs that now works properly with the final version of Launchbar 5.

Firstly create a page in a notebook for the activity log. Right-click on the page and select “Add a Clipping Service”. I have my log pages formatted to show the created date in the margin – you need to drag the red margin line across a bit to see the whole date and time (the drag bar appears a bit to the left of the icons by each node).

Clipping services normally allow you to right-click on selected text and send that text straight to the page with the clipping service on it (you can have lots of these services) or send a PDF straight to the notebook from the print dialog, but in this case, the point is to use Launchbar to direct text via the service to the page.

To get Launchbar to recognise new services, you might need to quit and restart it, and then re-index (Cmd-0) – it doesn’t seem to always pick up on these things automatically – but after that it will stay there.

From then on, if you can find the “Clip to…” service with Launchbar…

…you can just press Space and then type your log entry…

…then press Return, and the entry will be saved to your page. Ctrl-Space, a few letters, Space, the entry, Return – a pretty simple way of adding an entry from any application.

Of course this isn’t something that no other note-taking app does by any means – lots of them have quick entry functions – but it fills a gap in Circus Ponies Notebook’s capability list that was very significant for me.

Download from the dedicated page as usual.

Edit: Please can you post (a) the version of OS X you are using and (b) the version of Yojimbo you are using, when reporting a bug? I have a feeling that there may be some subtle Applescript differences involved here, and even if there aren’t, I’d like to eliminate that possibility.

From p76 of the Applescript Language Guide:

Stay-open script applications can perform periodic actions, even in the background, as long as the script application is running.

What I need therefore is an idle handler.

If a stay-open script application includes an idle handler, AppleScript sends the script application periodic idle commands—by default, every 30 seconds—allowing it to perform background tasks when it is not performing other actions.

So, I will put one of those in and it will run the sync periodically and everything will be happy. That should be straightforward.

• Version checking at startup, with the option to download now or later, or skip a version.
• Logging information to ~/Library/Logs/Simplenote Yojimbo Sync.log, which is the primary purpose of this version, to get some more debugging information for the people for whom it doesn’t seem to work. If you are one of these people, please leave a comment or get in touch with me on the Yojimbo or Simplenote API lists.
• A couple of little coding improvements which probably aren’t very interesting to most people, but which you can see if you’d like to open the bundle and peer at the scripts.

Planned future improvements

• It’s been suggested that the app have an option to sync with the simpletext.ws website used by Writeroom as well as or instead of Simplenote. I think this is a good idea, as there is an API and also I do own a copy of Writeroom for the iPhone, and it shouldn’t be very hard to just change the method of finding notes, but I’ll make sure the basic sync structure works for everyone first.
• I find it a bit counter-intuitive that deleting a note on one platform doesn’t delete it on the other one and in fact re-syncs it next time unless you delete it on both. However, again, until I’m sure the basic sync structure works for everyone, I’m going to keep it like that, because it minimises the chance of data loss. Once that’s sorted out, I plan to fix it so that deleting a note deletes it on both.
• There needs to be an automatic sync option. At the moment you could use something like Lingon to run it, but that isn’t a very user-friendly method. Unfortunately, adding this feature is complicated by the fact that I have no idea how to do it. I’m sure it can’t be that hard.