Goodbye to Twitter

For the last two or three years I’ve opened the day with coffee and Twitter.

Well, email first, and the weather and then the familiar feeds from trusted sources I’ve carefully curated over the years.

News from the Guardian, BBC, the ABC, the Saturday Paper and then links and insights from authors I trust, colleagues, former colleagues, ex-students.

I kept my reading selective, used a twitter client called Tweetbot that got rid of the ads and didn’t see a lot of hate.

But that’s been changing, and the whole experience has felt a lot less stable under new ownership. Increasingly, I felt less and less comfortable with the idea of participating in Twitter and passively endorsing where it seems to be going.

So, like a lot of people, it seems, I’ve moved over to a smaller, more decentralised version that can’t be bought by a megalomaniacal billionaire. Mastodon, specifically the zirk.us server. You can find me there at @warrick_w@zirk.us

Goodbye Ulysses

When some favourite turns on you it always seems worse somehow. So, very annoyed to learn that my favourite text editor, and go-to writing tool, Ulysses, has moved to a subscription model.

So, a product I’ve paid for on the iPad, iPhone and Mac, and tweeted about positively for ages, now wants to charge me monthly to keep using it. I pay subscriptions now for Apple Music and even software like Adobe’s Creative Cloud and Office 365, and they’re decisions I didn’t make lightly, but a monthly fee for a text editor, even if it’s probably the best text editor I’ve seen? No. When my favourite text shortcut utility Text Expander did the same thing a while ago, I gave up on it, and went to Type it for Me and haven’t looked back.

So, dont’ spurn me! Last night I dug back into some old favourites like Ia Writer and Byword looking for something that will allow me to write quickly, distraction-free on any device I have with me, and sync across the platforms in the background.

It took me about an hour but I’ve moved my writing out of Ulysses into iAWriter and I’ll keep that for poetry and creative stuff and use Byword for my blogging and work-related stuff. I’m hurt, but I’m bouncing back.

Goodbye Ulysses.

The Disappearing

The Disappearing is a new app with a place based focus that lets you explore poems about where you are right now. Especially if  you’re in Sydney! It’s a nice idea, and they promise to expand the range of poems later on, and you can submit your own poems right now. It’s got a great looking cover, and works well. Here’s the opening screen:

You then select a location, or use the location feature on your phone to find poems around you now.

The actual poems themselves are a bit plain looking, given the nice entry to the app, but it all works.

They say:

The Disappearing is an innovative new app for iPhone, iPad and Android that (literally) explores poetry and place.

Transform the world around you with new poems by some of Australia’s finest poets, who’ve created a poetic map charting traces, fragmentary histories, impressions and memories.

Beginning with a collection of over 100 poems about Sydney, The Disappearing will stretch across Australia during 2012.

Along with previously unpublished poetry, The Disappearing features exclusive videos of readings and interviews with poets.

Users can upload their own poems to The Disappearing, preserving ideas, emotions and experiences about their own environment that vanish over time.

I love the idea, but I’ve been half in love with disappearing landscapes for ever.  Witness my Suburban Margins Project. So, I’ll be following this project with interest, and maybe contributing too. Or maybe I’ll make some new maps of my own.