We’ve mentioned the e-writing app Scrivener (available for Windows or OS X) a time or two, and some of our commenters have expressed fondness for it. Indeed, even my brother loves it and has been pestering me to try it; he seems to think that lack of Scrivener is all that’s keeping me from writing the next Great American Novel. I have to admit, with the things I’m seeing about it I’m definitely starting to get tempted to try it out. On The Creative Penn, writer Joanna Penn blogs that she used Scrivener for her latest book, and that...

A while ago, I wrote about the idea of using a MiFi to retrofit 3G mobile web access to wifi-capable devices (such as e-readers), and I also mentioned the TruConnect MiFi pay-as-you-go service that allows bite-sized prepaid-3G-wifi usage with no contract required. It has been a couple of weeks since I received my TruConnect MiFi for Christmas, and I’ve used it enough to get a decent idea of how well it works. I use the MiFi mostly with my iPod Touch and iPad, though I have had the chance to try it with my laptop as well. Fundamentally,...

This past week, Google launched its new Flipboard-alike Currents app, but Flipboard hasn’t been standing still either. The company launched a scaled-down version of its iPad reader app for the iPhone. (Alas, it requires at least OS 4.0, so it won’t run on my first-generation iPod Touch—not that I’m really surprised.) The app proved to be so popular that the added demand took down Flipboard’s servers for a while after its release. (Something similar happened after the original iPad app was released.) I suspect Flipboard may not have too much to worry about from Currents just yet. Meanwhile, cloud...

We’ve taken websites, that we used to print out on full-sized paper, and shrunk them down to fit on handheld devices. So shouldn’t we shrink the print down, too? That seems to be the premise behind the Little Printer, a cute little device about the size of an alarm clock whose purpose is to print out information from the web onto a cash-register-receipt-sized paper strip. The device will sync with a smartphone app so that you can decide what services you want to print out, then print paper copies of to-do lists, social network notifications, news stories, and so...

About a year ago, I mentioned Google’s decision to stop active development on Google Wave, and the Apache Foundation’s subsequent move to take ownership. More recently, Google announced it will shut Wave down entirely in April 2012. Wired’s Webmonkey column reports that Apache’s efforts with Wave are now available in the form of “Wave in a Box”, a standalone client/server application that replicates the Wave experience. Wave in a Box consists of two parts, a standalone wave server and a web client. The Wave in a Box web client looks a bit different than...

FutureBook’s Robin Harvie has a post speculating on whether e-books will soon be more widely adopted to send review copies. The costs for sending review copies of physical books can run into the hundreds of pounds for just a single book, and this would seem to be an area where e-review copies could save publishers a bundle. However, there isn’t a system in place yet to allow this. At the moment there is no structure in place that allows review copies to be delivered directly to the reviewer as an eBook. Publishers rightly furrow their brow...

While most of the attention on yesterday’s Kindle announcement centered around the new prices and new devices, a couple of interesting articles have turned up about one of the less-in-the-spotlight elements of the Kindle Fire, the new Kindle Silk web browser. According to these more in-depth pieces in Wired Cloudline and TechWorld (found via Slashdot), Silk begins at the same place as previous split-client browsers such as Opera Turbo but then goes further, with a few inherent advantages that are part and parcel of Amazon’s cloud efforts. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is the network of computers and...

It used to be that the term “aggregator” was generally used for on-line services such as Google News that pulled together articles from a variety of sources to provide a web-based news summary more inclusive than any one source alone. Then Flipboard came along, showing a completely different way of gathering and displaying news on tablets. Needless to say, when something new and original comes along, the rest of the world immediately tries to copy and improve upon it. So now PaidContent has a comparison chart of Flipboard and eight other news aggregation apps: Pulse, Zite, SkyGrid, Editions, and...

On Wired’s Gadget Lab, Charlie Sorrel has a report on Book Creator for iPad, an intriguing program that turns the iPad from a device meant only for reading e-books to one that can also create them. Sorrel calls it “a kind of InDesign Lite”, that allows editing e-book format, putting text in boxes, adding pictures from the library, resizing, layering, and more. Once done, the resulting book can be opened in iBooks or sent to Dropbox, and from there you can e-mail it to friends, kids (it’s a great way to make a children’s book) or...

Looking for a great, cheap way to download e-books when you can’t get a wi-fi signal, even if you don’t have a free-3G-enabled e-reader? TruConnect Mobile might just have you covered. Last year I wrote about retrofitting 3G to wifi-enabled devices (such as e-readers) by use of a mobile hotspot such as a MiFi. Now Rick Broida’s latest “The Cheapskate” column on CNet points out what might be the best deal yet for such a device: $96 for the MiFi plus shipping, then $4.99 per month plus 3.9 cents per megabyte for service. The fee is charged only...

The major publishers seem to be desperate to hold onto printed books for as long as they can, doing everything possible to try to make e-books less attractive than print books. (Though to what extent they’re really doing this has long been a subject for debate. Consumer complaints aside, even agency-priced e-books still seem to be selling pretty well.) But what might it look like if they went the other way—shoved the New Media throttle wide and cut the rope to the Old Media barge they’re towing? It might look more than a little like what Reed Hastings is...

An article in Knowledge @Australian School for Business discusses the fact that the present Internet addresses system, known as IPv4, will have literally used up its 4.2 billion addresses soon: APNIC, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, is the registry that issues Internet addresses for the booming Asia-Pacific region, and is expected to be the first to run out. Registries in other regions may last just a few months longer. The article's writers describe the new address system, IPv6, and its 340 billion billion billion addresses, as the system that will save the Internet from the end of capacity.  It...