Why I love DayOne…

— Posted inmemory, writing — 3 min read

To me, journaling is essential to remembering when important events took place in my life. I don’t put a lot of faith in my own brain to keep an accurate record, so journaling helps add reliability to my memories (from  Ross Lockwood’s post)

I completey agree with this statement. This is why I started journaling more frequently, since 2011. My first post in DayOne is on March, 5, and it’s a simple statement to test the new diary (in Italian, my primary language). After some hesitations, I started to write more constantly, since the summer of that year.

Keeping a journal it’s not too different, in some way, to keep making photos concerning your daily life. It’s something that can help the mind to recall, to extract that file, to retrieve from the archive all the sensations and the emotions of those specific days. For this reason, it’s of invaluable help.

It’s not important that you write always in excellent style. You are not requested to create masterpiece. That’s the good part of a diary, after all. It’s completely your business. This time, you’re not called to satisfy any requirement, to fulfill any expectation. It’s your place, it’s a place entirely for you. In my diary, I have very short  as well as very long posts, depending on my mood and on my desire to write.

And they are both fine.

They do perfectly their work, which is, to fix a given moment, an impression, an intuition. Making possible to come back to it, anytime.

Trust me: you could be surprised, as much you can still learn from yourself, just by reading your old posts.

DayOne is a very comfortable place to write, since I can reach it anytime, anywhere. From my MacBook, from iPad, or from my iPhone 5. I have my whole archive always with me, thanks to iCloud synchronization.

In time, I’ve seen DayOne growing with features, some of these I largely appreciated. The two I liked most was, in time order, the introduction of tags, and the possibility to publish single entries.

The first feature is of invaluable help in organizing your entry, as you may guess.

The second feature is expecially intriguing, to me. I see it as a sort of bridge between in and out, between my inner private world and the external environment (the rest of the world). Sometimes – after having written a post – I realize that I’d like to share it with others. In the past I elaborated a blog post on it (sometimes I still love to act in this way, since a personal diary is a great tool for raw material to process and publish at a later time), now I have also another possibility: I can simply hit “publish” and DayOne do create for me a nicely and clean webpage with my post content. I cannot ask more – except, maybe, a link to a list of all my published post.

There are a lot of other interesting feature in DayOne. But the best think, for me, is that it makes writing easy and attractive.

This time, I really cannot ask more.

My new book

— Posted inwriting — 2 min read

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In case you didn’t know, here is my new book of poetry (in Italian). The name of the book comes from a song of Victor Heredìa, “Ojos de Cielo”. I was inspired by this passage 

Eyes of heaven, eyes of heaven, don’t abandon me in full flight

(In pieno volo it’s the italian way to say in full flight)

I can interpret the song in many different ways. What is the full flight? It’s the adventure of life, basically. Is the unique adventure of my ilfe. It’s also my spiritual voyage, needed to understand that life has a deep meaning – and it’s worth living each day. Not least, it’s the marvellous adventure of writing, it’s a recognition that writing is an important part in my life. A part that I’m called to defend and develope, since it’s needed for my full flight.

This small book is an important milestone for me. It’s a message I sent to myself, always believe to your dream. 

I’m pretty sure you can do the same to you, for your dream. I’m still certain that if we allow ourselfes to take care of our dreams, the world can turn in a much better place. Let’s do it! 

How can I save stuff on Facebook?

— Posted infacebook, social networks — 3 min read

Facebook is a great service, no doubt. You can find a lot of interesting stuff each day (together with a greater amount of not-so-interesting items, the so called waste of cyberspace). I’m pleased by the fact that you naturally build a sort of story of your posts, in the form of a diary, with easy access to past years and months.

You may already know that you can also easily integrate your diary with information from the past, such as the day of your birth (that’s fine, at that time you was not thinking about updating your timeline with smart phrases such as I was finally born or similar amenities, but more probably Facebook was not accepting messages yet, simply because it still did not exist).

That’s fine, but what about saving an interesting post? With saving, I mean here, having a way to access that post also after some hours, or days, from the original publication. You can like the post, of course. But this does not solve your problem, it only allows you to be notified for comments, from now on. What about a great post with few or no comments at all? How can you easily retrieve a list of all your liked post?

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Nope. There is no way to do it (at my knowledge).

What to do, in the not-too-infrequent case in which you find interesting stuff you want to retrieve at a later time?

Have you experienced the frustration arising from your complete inability to find a given post, at a distance of just a few hours from when you red it? It disappeared from your timeline, that’s all.

You know, Twitter has its way to do it. Tumblr has its way to do it. You can simply mark the post as favorite: anytime, you have an easy way to access to your favorite posts. Facebook has no way to do it. It’s interesting that neither Google+ has its way to do it: too much shaped on Facebook style?

Anyway, I think am pretty sure that it would be a very welcomed feature. At the moment, when I find something that I do not want to loose, I’m forced to copy/past the text in some note taking app or website (like the excellent MomoNote). Not that I do not see the advantage of this procedure. But I also understand that it’s not comfortable, having to switch to another environment just to save an interesting piece of text, for example.

To be honest, there are workarounds already available: for example, if you use Chrome you can benefit of extensions like Facebook Favourite. Anyway, even if the idea is good, it’s still far from obtaining the real benefits of a native Facebook feature, and apart from that, while the extension basically do it’s work, there is (let me say so) great  room for further improvements.

To have a Twitter style manner to save post for a later usage, will be simply great. Let’s hope Facebook just realize it.

Make more art

— Posted inart, writing — 1 min read

There is only one possible answer. This diagram has the advantage of a great simplicity. You can’t escape. When I saw this on Jeff Goins Facebook page, I was immediately struck by the evidence of the answer. Yes. The only answer is make more art, no matter how you can evaluate your craft.

MakeMoreArt
There is only one possible answer…

The other thing that prompt me to reflect is the simple fact evidence that if you make art, you’re an artist. No matter what. So it’s extremely liberating: you are immediately free from the prepotence of your inner censor, the one that always keeps saying “no, you’re not good enough, it’s better that you quit now”.

Our work as artists is not to win the internal censor, that’s probably impossible. It’s different, it’s to keep on notwithstanding the internal  censor. To keep on embracing your fear.

So, let’s make more art. World is waiting for us to express our unique voice.

Thanks Jeff, I definitely needed it 🙂

OSX, a tale of complex simplicity

— Posted inapple, OSX, Software — 4 min read

One thing I like very much about working with a Mac, it’s not the Mac itself. It’s the software. I found several pieces of software for OSX that have a sort of intriguing personality. At first glance they seems very simple guys: they are not intimidating you, they do not bother you with a lot of possibilities to do what they are supposed to do.They do their job in a simple way and most of the time you’re fine with them. Perfectly fine. 

Then it may happen; at a given point you want to search for a given feature that’s not so immediate, or you want simply to explore new possibilities of a program that it’s now quite familiar to you. And then you discover that normally you use your program (as your brain) only for a little part of its possibilities. In other worlds, the simplicity does not come at the price of reducing the possibilities and the features: I propose the terms complex simplicity to address this issue. I used linux for several years, sometimes even Windows, but only coming to OSX I found programs with this attractive peculiarity (be advised, anyway, that things may change, and my knowledge can be partial or biased).

This seems to me particularly true when I turn to writing software. Note that I am now on the point to reveal you which are my favorite programs to write down worlds in a computer (one of the things I like most, definitively). Just to start from here, I’m writing this post with MarsEdit, a program that fits wonderfully this paradigm of complex simplicity. It’s only after some time spent looking around that you discover what it really can do. At the first glance, you’re presented with a very simple interface, letting you to write down your thoughs without having to deal with an excessive amount of technology. MarsEdit can even be reduced to a simple windows, to just  write (see below). There are many option but you do not need to worry about them until you actuality start searching them.

MarsEditScreen

 Writing this post with MarsEdit was a pleasure 🙂

At any rate, the software that surprised me most, about its complex  simplicity, is definitively MacJournal. I bought this long time ago, to be adopted mainly as a daily work diary (a task which it does quite well,in passing). It’s only recently that I realized how MacJournal is good at writing. I mean, writing short stories, as well as poetry. Wonderful, for that. I’ve adopted MacJournal to manage a series of short stories I’m developing. I created a diary named Racconti (which stands for Novels in Italian) which has various folders (you can organize your diaries at your pleasure), one for each project. Each entry in such folders is a novel, at various stages of completeness. For each post, I can easily see the number of words, I can make it editable or not, see the creation or last modification date, and a number of other useful option. Of course I have a full set of options for text formatting. I can even set a word goal for a specific diary, very useful when it does contain novels. When it comes to create, writing without distraction is easily done by choosing Focused Editing Mode, which turns MacJournal as a all screen application, showing text over a customizable background. There is much more in MacJournal, of course. This is just to give you an idea of an excellent software, very good for writing. And, needless to say, for each kind of journaling! 

But the first  great program for writing, you guessed, is Scrivener. Admittedly, Scrivener takes some times to understand how can you use it in an intelligent way (i.e., to really take advantages of its peculiarities). It is a kind of program which ask you to live with him for a while, before starting to use it at its best, moving inside its incredible set of features. Nevertheless, even with complex piece of software as Scrivener, you can follow a gradual approach. Thanks to its complex simplicity, you can be productive almost immediately, even you’re still barely scratching the surface of the sea of possibilities. I’ll probably talk more about Scrivener in a future post.

This was intended to let you understand why I like OSX software. And why I think that a writer feels at home with a Mac (no advertise intended!).