The first batch of PageFour reviews have been added to the new Reviews and Testimonials page. Each review is either quoted in full, or contains a link to the complete review hosted on another web-site or blog. In all cases, the reviewer is either named, or a link provided back to their blog.

Hopefully, these reviews will help those who are not familiar with PageFour to decide whether to download or not. No anonymous comments or reviews have been used - ‘Steve form London‘ for example - as my feeling is that these sorts of comments, with no way to verify them or identify the person behind them, add nothing and only serve to cast doubt on the authenticity of all comments.

More reviews will be added over time, so if anyone would like to post comments or opinions about PageFour, please contact me.

This post is more than a little off-topic, and probably of no interest to anyone looking for the latest info on PageFour, but if you have any sort of passion or passing fancy for fashion jewellery, please read on.

I’m taking the opportunity to shamelessly plug the brother’s business. Malene and Bob have been selling fashion jewellery (retail and wholesale) for about 7 years now, and have just gone live with their first web-site.

In the interest of maintaining family harmony, and hoping that the Google robots will do their job and follow the trail to its final destination, I’m providing them with their first link.

Their website can be found at www.nirvanawholesale.com.

The site comes on the back of a successful eBay business, and many emails from satisfied customers along the lines of: ‘If only you had a website, I’d get a second mortgage and buy everything.Today!‘

It’s only a day or two old, and a first attempt on their part to capitalise on the exposure gained through eBay. So, without further rambling, check out out their Online Catalogue with its extensive range of Fashion Jewellery (you won’t find this stuff on the High Street), Baltic Amber (the real deal, and not a perfectly preserved mosquito in sight), Sterling Silver, and Watches.

The bulk of their customers come from the UK and North America, though I hear tell there’s a short, balding guy with an unusual first name living somewhere in the wilds of Romania who has a fondness for pendants of Celtic design. He keeps asking about discounts and the possible lack of postage costs if he flies over and collects in person.

Their long term plan is to become the Tesco’s of small jewelers - which translates as high volume, low price. And who am I to argue? - I know as much about jewellery as I do about quantum mechanics and string theory.

Over the past year, there have been a number of enquiries about the possibility of a Mac version of PageFour. My response has always been that the probability of releasing a version for the Mac is very low. I’m a Windows developer, and have been for many years. Despite having a lot of respect for the Mac software community, I have never been tempted to join. My training and working life have been focused primarily on Big Business software - an area that tends to impinge little on Mac users.

Every time someone queries me on the Mac, I point them to Scrivener, a neat piece of software, written - like PageFour - for creative writers. For many months, Scrivener was available as a free beta, as the product was still undergoing development, but version 1.01 of the completed version has just been released.

Definitely worth checking out if you’re a Mac user, as it does share some features with PageFour (the use of Snapshots being the most obvious). You can download it here, or check out the authors blog here.

Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one-third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blood. Give up your social life and don’t think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips, and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage!

Hilary Mantel (Giving up the Ghost)

I had to turn to the dictionary for persiflage: ‘Light or frivolous manner of discussing a subject.‘ Guilty as charged.

Hilary Mantel is one of the writers I loved back in the early nineties, when she produced some truly wonderful books such as Fludd, and A Place of Greater Safety, but for some reason she dropped of my radar about ten years ago. This was during my nomadic phase, when I lost sight of a lot of things.

Compliments of the Snarky one:

Some Basic Guidelines on Writing Well

Well, it made me laugh.

I backtracked a PageFour referral yesterday to a site called Literature and Latte, home of a new Mac tool for writers named Scrivener. The designer acknowledges PageFour’s influence on one of the key features of the product, citing the Snapshots as inspiration for their implementation of versioning. I’m flattered that my humble offering is having such far reaching influence, but in all fairness I can claim credit only for trying out a few non-standard ideas borrowed from elsewhere.

A little over a year ago I read a book called About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design, written by Alan Cooper. It was the thoughts and ideas presented in this book that formed the basis of PageFour’s more unique features. The author questioned much of the established wisdom or ‘way of doing things‘ in User Interface design, using MS Word as a primary example of how not to do things. He demonstrated how many of the features common across software are common not because they are intuitive or even useful approaches, but because they were first implemented at a time when meeting the hardware requirements was more important than satisfying users. Today, with hard drives and memory doubling in size every eighteen months, hardware limitations are almost a thing of the past. Yet despite this, user interfaces still carry the burden of design weaknesses from a bygone era, and many of us have come to accept these flaws as the correct way of doing things.

When you put a blank sheet of paper into a typewriter and start typing, the words appear on the page as you work. You don’t have to make a decision ten or twenty minutes later to either keep what you wrote or clear the page. You’ve spent a lot of time thinking carefully about which words to use and how to string them together, so of course you want to hold onto them. Yet this is exactly the sort of decision that software like MS Word expects you to make every day. You type into a blank document, the words appear in front of you, and after you’ve finished your work, you’re asked if you want to ‘Save‘ it. You’re basically asked if you really meant it or were you just playing around for the past twenty minutes?

Software works this way because hardware works this way.

A blank document in a word processor is not the same as a sheet of paper. When you type into MS Word, your work is stored temporarily in one type of memory. When you ‘Save‘ your work (which of course you want to do, otherwise you wouldn’t have bothered to begin with), it’s stored a second time in a more permanent type of memory. This is the ONLY reason software asks you if you want to save your work, and it only asks you because once upon a time memory was scarce and very, very expensive, and if there was even the slightest chance that you really were just playing around, it wouldn’t have to use up that little bit of permanent memory.

And because software worked this way once (out of a kind of necessity), it still works this way today.

Users are expected to understand how the hardware and Operating Systems of their computers work in order to use even the most basic software. They are expected to know what files are, how folders can exist within folders, and why they need to ‘Save‘ their work even though they can see it right there on the screen in front of them. Most people who use software should not need to know any of this - that’s what software is designed for, to control how the user interacts with the rest of their computer and act as a buffer between them and the hardware. Properly designed software is supposed to handle all this for you.

Many of the core elements of PageFour came from ideas presented in the chapters of Alan Cooper’s book, in particular the ‘concealing‘ of files from the user, the quick Snapshot feature to replace the over- and often mis- used ‘Save As‘ option in MS Word, the naming conventions of Pages and Notebooks, the automatic saving of all changes, and the interactive archiving.

These ideas are not my own, I simply tried out different ways of doing things suggested by other people, and in doing so attempted to dump the baggage of decades of ill thought out interface design at the door. The guys over at Literature and Latte are more than welcome to copy or adapt features from PageFour, just as I’ve copied and adapted ideas from Alan Cooper, and hopefully they won’t stop there. Just because things have been done one way for decades, does not mean there are not better ways.

In Borders on Sunday I was seduced by the smell of freshly opened pages. I rarely splash out on new books, preferring to pick up second hand copies on Amazon or eBay, but the shiny blue cover of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink pulled me in, and I was reluctant to resist. In Blink, the author of The Tipping Point turns his attention to those first few seconds where we make decisions and form snap judgements.

Pay no attention to the blurb on the back of the book, or the many glowing recommendations displayed provocatively on the cover. The central argument of Blink is NOT to ‘trust your instincts‘ as many reviewers seem to suggest, but rather that the decisions we make quickly are based on far more information than we are consciously aware of. Whether that decision is the correct one or not, depends very much on how we interpret all that unconscious information. If you like your arguments to be clear and unchallenging, leading to bold conclusions you can either agree or disagree with, this book may not be for you. But if you’re fascinated by interesting questions that will set your mind wandering, and content to finish a book more confused than when you began, then Blink is worth a read. It got me thinking about a couple of examples from my own life over the past week.

In the previous post, I wrote about a Canadian rock band called Must be Tuesday, and referred to them more than once as an all girl band. I reached this conclusion despite the fact that the picture on their web-site clearly shows a male band member. Even after my error was pointed out to me, I continued to look at the picture and see three women.

So how did I decide that Bart was female, despite clear evidence to the contrary?

Once I started looking, it was easy to retrace the steps that led to this assumption. On the band’s homepage, sitting right next to the photo is a link to Gaywire - a radio show targeting gay Canadians. From this, I probably drew the conclusion that Must be Tuesday were either a gay band, or had a strong gay following. The lyrics of the song I downloaded pushed me even further towards an incorrect conclusion. Having watched a few episodes of the L-Word last year, I found myself putting ‘turkey baster‘ and ‘u-haul truck‘ together and getting lesbian rock band. And once I’d reached that conclusion, it really wouldn’t have mattered if Bart had a beard and a hairy chest - I’d already decided he was female.

My snap judgement was coloured by assumptions I’d made through unconsciously combining bits of information from the web-site with snippets from my own memories, and these assumptions affected how I interpreted the picture. They failed to allow for a male band member in what I saw as a lesbian rock band, and as such my judgement was incorrect.

How many of the decisions we make in life are just as incorrect, and based on pulling together similar strands of loose information?

Here’s a puzzle from Gladwell’s book. It’s not the sort of puzzle you can work out with a pencil and paper - the answer will either come to you or it won’t.

A man and his son are in a serious car accident. The father is killed, and the son is rushed to the emergency room. Upon arrival, the attending doctor looks at the child and gasps, “This child is my son!” Who is the doctor?

It took me about a minute to work out the answer, and when I did it was one of those ‘How could I be so stupid?‘ moments. But it wasn’t stupidity that made me assume the doctor was male, it was an assumption I’d made through my own experiences with doctors over the years, and through the portrayal of doctors on TV shows (Grey’s Anatomy aside). If you haven’t worked it out yet, the doctor is the boy’s mother.

A few days ago, I’d almost decided the time had come to resign from the day job. Passions were running high after a particularly frustrating week, and I’d built up a list of reasons as to why leaving was the strongest course of action. And then I started to wonder. Was there more to it than the same old reasons that had existed for so long? Was I processing information I was unaware of? Maybe I was sub-consciously picking up on hints that the company was floundering, or that management was preparing to move against me.

When we make quick decisions about minor things like a face in a picture, the effects of being wrong are usually small and we brush it off as just one of those things. But how often do we make similarly incorrect judgements about the bigger issues? We quit a job, begin to suspect our partner is cheating on us, or form strong opinions about a politician. And often we make these decisions without ever really understanding why. We fail to pick up on the thousand and one little things that push us towards one judgement or another.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book does not provide conclusive answers to these questions, but it does ask them, and that’s a start.

Every few weeks I like to check how my web-site and blog are getting along with Google. Front page positions for the relevant key words are always good, but nothing beats holding down the top spot. This morning I discovered that I’d been relegated to second place by a rock band called Must be Tuesday, from Alberta. Now, I’m not entirely sure where Alberta is, but the little I remember from my days playing Risk places it somewhere in Maple Leaf land, where it’s cold and snows a lot. I could be wrong.

Not being one to grumble over the rising fortunes of others, I wished them well with their new Google ranking and went looking for some samples to download. They’d already demonstrated good taste when it came to naming the band, so I was predisposed to like them.

I chose Psycho Girlfriend from the list of available tracks - it’s name appealing to me for reasons I have no intention of sharing.

I have to come clean and say I didn’t really identify with these lyrics - possibly because I’ve never found a use for a turkey baster - but I’m sure someone out there does, so good for them.

Just when I’d made up my mind to abandon my domain name sisters due to musical differences, the cello came in at the end and changed everything. I was so impressed. They’d gone from “beware the psycho urge to merge,” to a cello solo that would make Yo-Yo Ma proud. And then I realised it WAS Yo-Yo Ma, and iTunes was simply doing its thing by moving on to the next track automatically.

If Must be Tuesday make it big, my humble blog could ride high on their shirt tails - so go for it ladies. Keep knocking out those powerful lyrics, and if you’re prepared to take a little advice from a fan a few oceans away, you may want to consider adding a cello to the end of Psycho Girlfriend. It really worked for me.

A couple of days ago, Paul Graham posted a short piece on his Infogami blog where he touches on a startup company’s fears of being copied by the big boys. His advice was nothing new and the wisdom of his words nothing special. We’ve heard it all before. Twenty four hours later it was in pole position on the Reddit hot list.

Paul Graham is the guru of gurus for software startups. Legions worship at his feet and his every word is pounced upon as if it were an extract from a newly discovered gospel. I’ve got a copy of his book on my own shelf and a link to his essays in my Links list, so I’m in no position to claim any sort of special immunity.

Joel Spolsky plays Laurel to Graham’s Hardy. Open a new Bloglines account and he’s right there waiting for you, pre selected as a blog of great note that you simply must follow. Spolsky has built a reputation as a master of user interface design, having churned out a couple of books on the subject and added his name as ‘editor‘ to a couple more.

These are smart men. They have interesting things to say and their opinions are often worth listening to. But do we have to worship them? Spolsky’s software company released a web-authoring tool called CityDesk that would struggle to meet many of his own design guidelines. Paul Graham’s short little note on Infogami was probably thrown together during a fifteen minute coffee break - as many blog posts are.

Are we easy supplicants, too quick to worship?

We put people on pedestals, call them Yoda, and kneel at their feet. We turn them into gods they never claimed to be. There’s nothing wrong with calling people experts and authorities, but that doesn’t mean that every time they open their mouths we should drop to our knees. What they say is more important than the fact that they’ve said something, so if what they say is not overly interesting, or has been said before - why talk about it? why bookmark it?

As I write, the number one spot on Reddit is held by a piece titled “Paul Graham ate Breakfast.” It’s refreshing to see that we can still recognise our own absurdities.

I’d never read anything by Rose Tremain, and I’m not sure why I clicked the Buy button on Amazon, but I’m glad I did. A book hasn’t captured me so quickly and so thoroughly in years.

Sacred Country is the story of Mary/Martin Ward, a young girl who at the age of six realises she’s really a boy. The book tells the story of her childhood growing up in a small Suffolk farming community, her transformation to Martin in 1960s London, and her eventual acceptance of herself and the life she has chosen.

The characterisation is exquisite, and the prose reads like poetry - easily the best book I’ve read all year and maybe last year too.

Rose Tremain has restored my faith in English writers.