As I mentioned in an earlier post this week, I was without my Mac laptop for a few days after the catastrophic loss of my hard drive, and during the time before I replaced it, the iPad became my best friend and so today’s favorite tool is the Poetic leather bluetooth keyboard case.  My friends gave it to me for Christmas last year after they got tired of me bitching about the virtual keyboard on the iPad. The death of my laptop happened just days before I was to leave for the RT Convention, as if things weren’t hectic enough. Out of necessity, I got used to typing on the new external keyboard pretty quickly. In fact with the iPad and the keyboard case, I was able to type notes as fast as the speakers could talk during the RT panels. After the sessions and convention were over, I had all of my notes and my ToDo list saved to DropBox thanks to yesterday’s favorite tool—the free PlainText app I used. While we’re on the subject of making the iPad useful through accessories and apps–while still at home before the convention, I’d downloaded the PDF of the RT convention schedule into […]

When last I left you yesterday, I was in the air somewhere between NY and Chicago, about to work on my WiP when I discovered I couldn’t access CloudOn or  any of my Dropbox files because I had no internet connection. It wasn’t a huge deal. I was planning on writing a new scene so I just opened my next featured tool–the free PlainText app, which I had previously installed on the iPad. During the plane ride I wrote 1500 words in this useful app. PlainText saves documents automatically and locally, until it syncs to the PlainText folder that is in Dropbox once there is an internet connection again. So I wrote offline, then later I copied what I’d written in Plain Text and pasted it into my existing WiP document in Dropbox on my Mac. Note: PlainText only edits Word documents that are in the folder synced with PlainText in Dropbox, while yesterday’s tool, CloudOn, allows you access to all the Word docs (and also Excel files) on Dropbox in any folder but alas only if you have internet. I suppose ahead of time I can put anything I’d like to work on offline in the PlainText folder before I leave on […]