Dan Frakes last night on Twitter linked to J. Eddie Smith, IV’s Think of Microsoft Word as the internet. Smith argues:

Word is not a writing application. It’s a desktop publishing application. When I start a writing project of any size in Word, it feels like I’m starting to build a house by first worrying about wall colors.

I’m not sure I’d go that far. If Word is a DTP app, it’s a pretty bad one. But I do agree that there’s a tendency with any ‘advanced’ office-style app to worry about presentation and formatting too much while writing. There’s also the issue of lock-in. It’s unlikely Office is going anywhere, but then I once thought the same of other applications I used for writing, such as ClarisWorks. Those old files I wrote years ago are now hidden from view, underneath layers of incompatibility. When DOCX first appeared as a format in a recent version of Word, but first on Windows and not on the Mac, I made a decision to switch to RTF or  TXT, depending on the project. I’d already realised by that point that I disliked Word (bloated, crashy, too much junk on screen) and had been looking for and testing alternatives for a while.

Today, I primarily use two applications for writing:

Scrivener is used for large projects (such as magazine cover features) and also ongoing ones where I have a collection of smaller files, such as the daily news I write for .net’s website. Its container is proprietary but you can easily enough access the package and yoink individual RTFs if you need to.

For shorter pieces, I favour WriteRoom, an efficient, simple full-screen editor. These have become all the rage of late, and the Mac App Store has at least a half-dozen competent alternatives, most of which are cheaper than WriteRoom. But WriteRoom offers, for me, the best balance of usability and customisation. iA Writer’s also pretty good, but its not working with OS X window managers limits its usefulness for me. I also hear good things about Byword, although I’ve not used it myself, and one of my editors swears by Nisus, although that to me feels a little too much like returning to a Word-type app. (This is, of course, in part down to how you set up Nisus, which is a powerful, usable app, but I nonetheless prefer the stark ‘words, count and nothing else’ default WriteRoom set-up.)

As Smith says:

When it comes to writing, I think of Word as the internet. It’s a destination, not a vehicle.

[…]

Words aren’t worthy of cosmetics until they say something. More importantly, each second you spend fiddling with the aesthetics of your document is a second spent not writing. Accumulated over just a few days, that can be a tremendous number of seconds.

I admit I spent some time faffing about with Scrivener and WriteRoom’s aesthetics, to get the defaults the way I wanted them. But after that point, I’ve not touched them, and so I spend my time writing and not worrying about anything else. Because of the efficiency and clarity of the apps, I also concentrate more on the words than anything else, whereas Word was always for me a source of distraction.

Your mileage might vary, of course, but if you enjoy writing or do it as a job, I’d strongly recommend you at least check out alternatives if you’re still using Word. Perhaps you’ll find you prefer Microsoft’s app after all, in which case you’ll at least know you’ve made the right choice for you. But you might also discover better, faster ways of working on words, which don’t involve Word.

BoingBoing on the UK porn filter:

I’ve yet to see any of them adopt a more rigorous, neutral phrasing, like “Some pornography, and things that an unaccountable group classifies as porn, will be blocked.” Instead, to a one, they imply (or state) that all porn will be blocked, and nothing but porn will be blocked. Parents who rely on this service to block porn are in for a surprise when they discover all their favorite stuff has been misclassified as porn and when their kids discover all the unblocked porn.

Still, this makes the UK government look like it’s doing something and makes a Christian charity feel all big and clever.

And in the article’s comments, ‘shadowfirebird’ says:

Not wishing to be critial—since work in this area is genuinely useful—but there is already a solution that stops your child seeing exactly what content you consider inappropriate.  It’s called “sitting with your child while they are accessing the internet”.

And ‘t3kna2007’, perhaps inevitably, adds:

My local public library blocks BoingBoing as adult content.  I was hoping otherwise, but wasn’t too surprised given the usual broad brushes used to paint blocklists.

Late last year, I wrote about the UK government’s stupid idea on attempting to block TEH EVILZ PORNZ online. I noted there were more than a few problems with this, not least the technical ineptitude of the UK government, the blacklist itself (in terms of deciding what’s on there—what about The Sun, for example?—but also in how it’s maintained), list targeting, and the very real fact that most households in the UK do not have dependent children.

The Guardian today reports that the government has got its way.

Subscribers to four of the UK’s biggest internet service providers will have to “opt in” if they want to view sexually explicit websites, as part of government-sponsored curbs on online pornography.

Because, you know, opting in to censorship would be the wrong way to go. Still, let’s hope this isn’t another government proposal driven by religious dogma, eh?

The measures will be unveiled on Tuesday as David Cameron hosts No 10 meeting with the Mothers’ Union, which earlier this year produced a raft of proposals to shield children from sexualised imagery.

Oh. Well, at least there’ll be no means for nutcases to put pressure on things they don’t like, right?

There will also be a website, Parentport, which parents can use to complain about television programmes, advertisements, products or services which they believe are inappropriate for children.

I see. Still, with an estimated 255 million websites in existence at the end of 2010, I’m sure it’ll take the Parentport no time at all to set up a blacklist of the worst ones. Completely ineffectively, of course, ignoring tons of hardcore porn and yet including the odd healthcare site, newspaper and Wikipedia in the no-no list.

The service providers involved are BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin.

So: all of the cable providers. That’s just dandy, not least given that BT and TalkTalk have been banging on about the horrors of the Digital Economy Act, and yet have now capitulated to government censorship.

Customers who do not opt in to adult content will be unable to access pornographic websites.

For now. The issue here isn’t just that adults should be able to decide what they want to access, without ending up on some kind of ‘list’; it’s also not just the fact that there is no way whatsoever that the blocks will be entirely effective, meaning kids won’t in fact be shielded from porn; it’s that this is the start of government-sanctioned nationwide censorship of the internet. And it’s using porn—the issue that most resonates with middle England—to get everyone to accept this. What’s to stop the government next deciding that ‘children’ (i.e. everyone) shouldn’t be able to access websites that showcase things it doesn’t want you to access, unless you’re on a list? Think about it.

Cameron:

[W]e should not try and wrap children up in cotton wool or simply throw our hands up and accept the world as it is. Instead, we should look to put ‘the brakes on an unthinking drift towards ever-greater commercialisation and sexualisation’.

We should also treat adults as adults, rather than wrapping up the entire country in cotton wool and censoring the greatest communications medium of the modern age, in a ham-fisted way that simply will not work.

I’ve no problem with opt-in censorship. I’ve no problem with the government setting up a website to inform non-technically savvy parents about how best they can deal with internet traffic coming into their house. I’ve not even got a problem with legislation to enforce ISPs to offer some kind of site-blocking option. But it shouldn’t be on by default, and this could be the start of the slippery slope. I just hope I’m wrong about that.

Note: the BBC is at the time of writing claiming the block will be opt-in, contradicting the Guardian’s report.

UPDATE: Duncan Geere on Twitter:

Just spoke to @virginmedia. Things are a bit more complex with this block than is being reported. Will detail in a story, coming soon. Crucially, they say that existing customers will have to opt IN to the block, not out of it. New customers will get the choice at signup.

If this turns out to be the case, fair enough. It won’t work. The ‘porn’ will include things people consider porn but that aren’t porn, but will ignore loads of actual porn, and I’m sure perfectly decent sites will get caught in the crossfire. But if that’s a household’s own decision, that’s their problem. That said, I still worry about government-sanctioned censorship in any form.

UPDATE: ISPs reportedly “livid”, and arguing government misleading the public over discussions and resolutions. (SROC)

UPDATE: PC Pro gets responses from the four ISPs in question. Three appear to be using opt-in parental controls for PCs, and a decision will be required on joining the service. TalkTalk, by contrast, will offer a network-wide content filter.

Yeah, that iPhone 4S. What a disappointment, eh? I guess the one million pre-orders in just 24 hours will be rapidly dismissed by idiots as being all made my idiots, with only the former idiots actually being proper idiots. Those idiots (the actual idiots, mind) will be crossing their idiot fingers, hoping desperately that Apple somehow manages to sell no more iPhones at all until the iPhone 5 comes out. The idiots.

Apple:

Apple® today announced pre-orders of its iPhone® 4S have topped one million in a single day, surpassing the previous single day pre-order record of 600,000 held by iPhone 4.

Translation: See? SEE? All you tech pundits that said we’d screwed up are dolts. SEE? This is why our PR people ignore you. Probably.

iPhone 4S is the most amazing iPhone yet, packed with incredible new features including Apple’s dual-core A5 chip for blazing fast performance and stunning graphics; an all new camera with advanced optics; full 1080p HD resolution video recording; and Siri™, an intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking.

“Siri, how do we get tech pundits to think before they type?”

Ex-Apple and now venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki writes for CNN: “What I learned from Steve Jobs“. There’s some great stuff in there, which should be required reading for anyone in product design, sales, marketing and even journalism.

If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, “Better, faster, and cheaper”—that is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can describe their desires only in terms of what they are already using—around the time of the introduction of Macintosh, all that people said they wanted was a better, faster, and cheaper MS-DOS machine. The richest vein for tech startups is creating the product that you want to use—that’s what Steve and Woz did.

This is the one that almost no companies understand. They’re too scared to create something they really want to use, and they focus-test everything to death. But focus testing often results in safe decisions and mediocrity. You can see it in high-profile tech right now, with Metro being welded to Windows 8, rather than Microsoft making a braver move; but you see it everywhere in media, too, with most games, television shows and movies being tiny incremental steps, more or less copying what already exists.

Take a look at Steve’s slides. The font is 60 points. There’s usually one big screenshot or graphic. Look at other tech speaker’s slides—even the ones who have seen Steve in action. The font is 8 points, and there are no graphics. So many people say that Steve was the world’s greatest product introduction guy. Don’t you wonder why more people don’t copy his style?

This goes for more than just presentations: it’s about communication and clarity in a more general sense. Plenty of print and web design doesn’t follow this mantra—there’s a desire to try to get too much information over, which overwhelms the readers. Stick to what’s important and make it clear. If someone wants more detail, they can always ask you.

Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence. When Apple first shipped the iPhone there was no such thing as apps. Apps, Steve decreed, were a bad thing because you never know what they could be doing to your phone. Safari Web apps were the way to go until six months later when Steve decided, or someone convinced him, that apps were the way to go—but of course. Duh! Apple came a long way in a short time from Safari Web apps to “there’s an app for that.”

The problem with changing your mind is that too many people consider it a sign of weakness. This is most common in politics: politicians will run with the most bone-headed idea, because otherwise the press will be on at them for weeks about a “humiliating U-turn”. And the same sometimes happens in tech, too. The reality, as Kawasaki says, is that you can often think you’ve got it right, but experience states otherwise. I’d argue stronger people are willing to admit they got something wrong, not weaker ones. People who fix problems are strong; people who ignore them are idiots.