In the beginning, I had an iMac, and it was good. I kept all of my stuff on it, but all of my important stuff I ran through GMail, so that I could access it through the PC at work. It was a little kludgy, but it worked. I eventually put a copy of Firefox on a USB stick and used that on the PC at work to keep everything nice and tidy.
Then I got an iPad, and it was really good. I could synchronize my stuff between the iPad and the iMac pretty seamlessly. I wrote most of a novel on the iPad while at work (things were really slow there for a while), and my pages would be waiting for me on the iMac when I got home. I didn't have to use the PC at work for any of my stuff.
Then I got an iPhone, and it was really cool. I could do everything that I could do on my iPad without having to be tethered to a WiFi connection. The WiFi really wasn't that much of a hardship, as you can find a public WiFi network in downtown Iowa City by throwing a rock. But the iPhone made it something I didn't have to think about, and once again, all my stuff is accessible from all three devices.
Then I got a MacBook. My office is upstairs, but I spend most of my time downstairs, watching the boy. I got the MacBook so that I could have a portable machine that I could use in the morning. Just having a few minutes at a full machine makes it a lot easier to get more things done in the course of a week.
But the MacBook is a used MacBook, which means the best it can run is Lion. Which is great, and it runs Lion wonderfully. But there are some iCloud hooks that are in Mountain Lion that aren't in Lion which I had gotten used to using between the iMac, the iPad, and the iPhone. So, now I'm struggling to find ways to make sure that my stuff on the MacBook is where I can get to it on the other devices.
One of the things that I've been using the MacBook for is writing. I've been bouncing between ByWord, TextWrangler, and good old TextEdit, but the problem really is where to store it when I'm done writing. The lightbulb finally went off today when I realized the solution was good old nvALT, which I had been using to synchronize writing between the iPad and the iMac. For a while, I was storing everything in nvALT, but recently I've gotten out of the habit, using a combo of Evernote and Dropbox to keep everything between the two devices.
But I really should return to the nvALT stack, at least for writing. I started this post on the MacBook, and now I'm working on it on the iPhone. If I went to the iPad or the iMac, the writing would be where I left it.
But nvALT isn't the sexiest environment to write in. I've gotten really used to ByWord, and I'm exploring a lot of other text editors, including the idea of rolling my own in Objective-C. So, I think I need to look into finding a script or an Automator action to move text between nvALT and whatever editor I'm working in.
