remnants of remnants

I’ve been stuck in a bad relationship for a while. I wouldn’t call it abusive — just a dead end, going nowhere, giving no joy. In recent months we really have just been going through the motions.

But today my life has changed. Quark XPress, goodbye. I have met InDesign CS4 and it was love at first sight.

No more gerrymandering bulleted lists. No more manually inserting punctuation spaces. No more hours spent desperately trying to select the internal borders of a table cell (“No! I meant there! Click THERE, damn you!”). InDesign is beautiful and understanding and everything I ever wanted out of a page layout program.

Yes, she is a little overweight. But I went on a couple of tentative dates with her skinny cousin Scribus, and it didn’t work out.

US composer Joshua Harris recently posted a short review of the scorewriter program Sibelius on his blog. I picked it up via a response from Daniel Spreadbury (Daniel is product manager for Sibelius), who expands on Joshua’s main complaint as follows:

[The term 'finalification'] resonates with me, and perhaps I might be permitted to attempt a (cheeky!) definition:

Fi•na•li•fi•ca•tion (fin-ah-li-fi-key-shuhn, fə-nāl’ē-fĭ-kā’shən, noun): an act of masking great power behind bewildering complexity.

(The joke here is at the expense of Sibelius’s main rival in the scorewriting world, Finale, a program with a ludicrous learning curve.)

Like Joshua, I’ve been a regular user of Sibelius for years. My love affair with the program dates back to pre-version 1, when it was called Sibelius 7 (er – don’t ask). I’m also an unashamed early adopter of Sibelius upgrades, so I’ve been using version 5 of the software for the best part of a year now, and its changes have been absorbed into my workflow fairly unconsciously. I guess that makes it more difficult for me than Joshua to step back and judge the value of those changes. Still – Joshua’s review and Daniel’s response piqued my interest.

Read the rest of this entry »

The jury is out over whether Amazon’s new Kindle device – by all accounts an amazing piece of technology – is set to rekindle the book market or simply reduce it to so much kindling:

Amazon’s reader is a brilliant device that shanghais book buyers and the book industry into accepting a radically diminished marketplace for published works. If the Kindle succeeds on its current terms, and all signs suggest it’ll be a blockbuster (thanks Oprah!), Amazon will make a bundle. But everyone else with a stake in a vibrant book industry—authors, publishers, libraries, chain bookstores, indie bookstores, and, not least, readers—stands to lose out.