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I’ve been trying to write another grant proposal recently (a seemingly Sisyphean task for academics), but I ended up a bit stuck. It was a collaborative idea that a colleague and I sketched out last year, but which — for one reason or another — ended up on the back-burner for a while. I was really struggling to pull it together. We had plenty of ideas, but I was having trouble rearranging and grouping them into a sensible structure and seeing gaps that needed to be filled. Finally, I decided to blow the dust of my copy of Tinderbox and try that.

I wish I’d done it earlier. I used to use Tinderbox a lot for writing notes and organising ideas¹, but newer, shinier applications have come along, and I’ve gradually turned to them. But Tinderbox is still a great tool, and it really excels at visual brainstorming. If you open a map view, you can just hammer out short notes containing all your ideas, then group them into similar themes later. With a linear outliner (a view which Tinderbox also has), you end up worrying more about where stuff should fit than what the important ideas are.

Once I’d got all the ideas down, I made some adornments (‘sticky notes’ on the page to visually group notes), and started moving notes around, first into similar ideas, then dividing them into aims, questions, hypotheses, techniques and random things to remember. Once that was done, I moved back to the linear outline view, and tidied things up, fleshing out the outline a bit as I went. It was really effective, and almost fun²! While Tinderbox can export notes quite easily as text (or HTML or XML), I probably won’t bother to do so in this case, because I was just using it as a tool for thinking rather than writing. I’ve started to write the final document with the Tinderbox outline view open to guide my writing, and it’s working really well.

¹ I even constructed, managed and wrote this weblog with it when I first started blogging. ↑

² Something which can make grant writing even almost fun is a miraculous tool, in my opinion. ↑

I was quite excited about the prospect of Automator when it was introduced, because it offered the prospect of being able to write quick scripts to solve little workflow problems, without having to know much about AppleScript. I can code in a number of languages (not brilliantly, but enough to get by), but for some reason, I find AppleScript quite difficult. It looks enough like English that you’re lulled into thinking you know what you’re doing until you get tripped up by some odd syntax. Anyway, Automator allows you to cobble together pre-built building blocks, recorded actions, and little shell scripts (in Python, Perl or Ruby as well as bash and other common shells) so that you don’t need to write Applescripts if you don’t want to.

Despite this convenience, I haven’t used Automator quite as much as I’d thought I would, partly because applications like Butler lets you do a lot of things you might use Automator for, but in a more accessible way. However, there are occasions when a nicely crafted Automator workflow is very handy.

Mr. Bsag often has to send photographs or scans of his prints to galleries, and they often insist on a 300dpi TIFF. He stores these images in iPhoto, and while you can certainly export as TIFF, I haven’t found an easy way to change the DPI (though you can do it in Preview in Leopard). However, you can change the DPI property of an image using the commandline tool, sips, as well as lots of other handy things. But Mr. Bsag wouldn’t be comfortable with a commandline command, which would bring it back to me doing it for him, and I’m lazy. Enter Automator!

I made a quick workflow (see an image of the steps here) which gets the selected items in Finder, puts a dialog box to say what it is going to do an allow an escape, runs a Ruby script which calls a sips command on the arguments to change the DPI and convert to TIFF, then speaks a confirmation of how many files were converted. I made it into a Finder plug-in¹, so that Mr. Bsag could just export his chosen images from iPhoto to the desktop, select them, then use the contextual menu to run the script. It seems to work fine. For common tasks like this where you want to batch convert some files to a standard format, Automator is ideal.

¹ The documentation for Automator says that if you make a workflow a Finder plugin, you should remove the first ‘Get selected Finder items’ step. When I did this it acted as if nothing was selected. With the selected Finder items step in place, it counts each selected file twice. Weird. In the final plug-in, I hacked around this by simply dividing num by 2. ↑

I’ve finally signed up at last.fm. I don’t know why I resisted for so long, but the increase in the numbers of full tracks that they feature was certainly an encouragement . I do sometimes listen to the radio stations at work when I’m away from my main iTunes library, but I’m mainly interested in it as a way of discovering new artists. A ‘similar artists’ station turned up ‘Iron & Wine’, who I had never heard of before. I liked him (yes, it is just a ‘him’ rather than a ‘they’) so much that I bought ‘The Shepherd’s Dog’ recently, as you can see from my recently scrobbled tracks.

It’s also interesting to look back at your listening habits. It isn’t completely characteristic of all my music listening, because I also listen to CDs on the stereo downstairs, but I seem to oscillate between fairly random playlists of a wide range of my collection and intensively listening to a few albums straight through. I’m in the latter mode right now, it seems.

I haven’t really done anything with the social side of last.fm yet (if you’re on there and think you might enjoy my musical tastes, do point me to your username), and I wish that the player integrated with iTunes rather than using a standalone player, but otherwise I’m liking it a lot.

For a while now, I’ve been using a great programme called Papers to organise PDFs of journal articles along with their associated bibliographic metadata. I use the terrific BibDesk for the output side of references (formatting references into citations and a reference list in manuscripts), but I didn’t find it so helpful for gathering, organising and reading articles. Papers, on the other hand, specialises in just those kinds of tasks.

You can do searches within Papers itself for articles, using a selection of the scientific databases like PubMed or Web of Science. You can also select a PDF you’ve downloaded outside of Papers, and try to ‘match’ the paper (using the same databases) to download the associated metadata. This is fantastic when it works, because it avoids a lot of tedious, error-prone typing of information.

My workflow is like this; I subscribe to various journal alerts for the areas I’m interested in, and get regular emails listing new articles, with links to the article online. If any of the articles look interesting, I visit the link and download the paper to my downloads folder. If I don’t have time to deal with the papers at that moment, they stay in my folder for a while. Then, when I’ve got time to process them, I drag them into Papers to import them. Papers renames the files in a consistent way, and also moves them to a particular folder to keep everything tidy. I used to have to then match the papers to download the metadata, a process which sometimes failed for particular journals, or for articles which were only recently published. However, in Papers 1.7, there’s a miraculous new feature which somehow automatically extracts the metadata from either the PDF or from the web site you downloaded it from on import. It’s tantamount to magic to me, but however it works, it’s a stunning feature and saves quite a bit of manual work.

Once the papers are imported, I flag them all, and can then view all my ‘To Read’ papers with a smart folder collecting together flagged items. As I read each one (the full screen PDF viewer within Papers is really nice), I tag it with appropriate keywords, then drag it into specific folders depending on whether it’s useful for a particular project I’m working on, or as a reference for a specific module I teach). I also drag it into a ‘For BibDesk’ folder, which I periodically export to BibTeX format and import into BibDesk, so that forms my canonical list of references.

You can also generate a papers:// URL for each reference, which when clicked, opens the reference in Papers. That’s useful when you’re writing notes on a paper in a text editor, and want a quick way of opening the original. It’s made the whole process of keeping up with the literature a lot easier.

So, the Stevenote is over for another year, and some very interesting stuff was announced. The MacBook Air is a really stunning design, I think. I love the way that they emphasise the weightlessness of it¹ by tapering the edges of the case so that they are not actually sitting on the surface of the desk. It makes it look a little as if it’s floating. Of course, there’s a compromise for losing the weight and shrinking the thickness so the specs aren’t as good as the MacBook Pros, but I think it fits its intended niche pretty well. Though it’s gorgeous, I don’t want to buy one. Correction: I want to buy one, but can’t justify a need for it.

I was also very interested in Time Capsule. As it happens, I was in the process of thinking about getting more external storage, possibly Network Attached Storage, to enable me to back up all our computers using Time Machine. Our existing discs are getting a bit too full for comfort, and would be better employed to store music or to hold bootable clones of the drives. Time Machine is brilliant — one of the best features of Leopard in my opinion, and while I thought I’d only use it for backup, it has saved my bacon a couple of times when I deleted files unintentionally. Anything which makes that process even more transparent and effortless would be a great thing. I don’t currently have 802.11n wireless in the house, and Time Capsule seems fairly decently priced for the capacity offered.

I’m also intrigued by the iTunes Movie Rentals. We have a LoveFILM subscription which we enjoy, but it has a number of drawbacks. The somewhat random nature of the order in which you receive the DVDs (depending on availability) means that you often end up with a pile of very serious, depressing films when you actually feel like watching a light comedy. It’s also not very spontaneous because of the postal delay, so if you find that all you’ve got when your parents come to visit is a batch of incredibly sweary films (for example) you’re a bit stuck. Finally, we intermittently have trouble with scratched discs (something I’ve ranted about here before). When our player hits a bad scratch, it tends to jump back to chapter one. This means that we watch films with one eye on the DVD counter, so that if it does its skipping act, you can at least laboriously skip forward through the chapters to just after the point where it failed.

If (when rentals appear in the UK iTunes Store) there is a good range of films (including foreign language films and independents), we might well ditch our LoveFILM subscription and just rent-as-we-go: for our level of usage, the price would be about the same.

¹ OK, I know it’s not literally weightless — 3lb (1.36kg) is not nothing, but it’s pretty light. ↑

Ever since I discovered LaunchBar (several years ago now), I’ve felt that any Mac (indeed any computer) without a launcher triggered by abbreviations is broken. Once you get used to hitting a hotkey, then typing a few characters to find anything on your computer (applications, files, bookmarks, address book entries and so on), having to browse file system hierarchies feels positively 20th Century. I cut my launcher teeth on LaunchBar, then switched to the dashing and rebellious newcomer, Quicksilver. Quicksilver is somewhat more powerful than LaunchBar in some respects, and is extensible with plugins, but with great power comes a certain amount of complexity, and it can be difficult to remember exactly how to use all of the features. For example, there is a great image manipulation plugin which you can use by feeding it a file and a string of commands (for example to change a TIFF file to a PNG and resize it to particular dimensions), but I don’t use it often enough to remember how to format the commands, so I have to look them up. Again. I’ve also found it slightly unstable at various times, so I’ve tended to switch back and forth between LaunchBar and Quicksilver, pulled between the conflicting forces of stability and excitement.

Since installing Leopard, I’ve been almost tempted to revert to using Spotlight as a launcher, because the speed has improved enormously. But it’s still the Scooty Puff Jr. of launchers, so I can’t quite bring myself to do it.

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I’m trying out Flock (a ‘social web browser’) following a recommendation from Martin Polley as a way of integrating ma.gnolia bookmarking into the browser. My timing was poor, because there’s a problem at the moment with posting bookmarks to ma.gnolia from Flock because of a temporary problem at ma.gnolia’s end. However, I tried it out with de.icio.us, and it was a pretty seamless process.

I’m not quite sure what to make of Flock. Martin said that it’s a kind of love it or hate it thing, and I can see what he means. If you use a lot of social software (flickr, social bookmark sites, facebook and so on), the integration features are pretty good. You can even blog direct from Flock, which is what I’m doing right now (all being well…). I also like the Web Clipboard, which lets you drag on links, text and images, then drag them on to other services or into a blog post. I can see that if you use Flock for everything, it’s really handy to collect everything in one place for easy posting.

But.

The interface isn’t bad, but it’s pretty cluttered after you’ve been used to the minimalism of Safari. It also seems slower to render pages, and seems to like popping up endless warnings about popups, available feeds and so on. I also wish that there was a way to view my Google Reader feeds in the Feed sidebar — you can use the button on the navigation bar to save feeds to Google Reader, but there’s no built-in way to view them.

I’m going to play around a bit more with it, but I suspect that I’ll probably go back to using Safari, Cocoalicious and MarsEdit for posting to my blog.

Blogged with Flock

I’ve been using ma.gnolia for my online bookmarking for a little while now, and the non-private bookmarks appear automatically in the sidebar of this site. I like ma.gnolia a lot, but I’ve had a tendency to use it mostly for bookmarks that want to publish on this blog, and largely in a write-only way. Part of that is because it always seems like a bit of work to log in to ma.gnolia and search through bookmarks for one that I’m looking for. So for sites that I’m marking for my own use — ones that I know that I’ll want to refer to later — I tend to use Safari’s own bookmarking feature. But that means that I lose the tagging capability, and I have to look in two places if I can’t remember where I saved something.

There are plenty of desktop bookmarking applications which access your de.icio.us bookmarks, but not so many for ma.gnolia, being a relative newcomer. However, they publish an mirrord API which (as the name suggests) mirrors the de.icio.us API. This means that you can use many of the desktop clients intended for de.icio.us, as long as the software lets you specify the URL of the API. So I’ve started using Cocoalicious, which is a very nice Open Source de.icio.us client. The trick seems to be to enter the API as follows:

http://your_username:your_password@ma.gnolia.com/api/mirrord/v1

and then enter a single space for both your username and password when prompted. The rating star system in Cocoalicious doesn’t link up with the rating stars in ma.gnolia, but everything else works perfectly. It’s a very nice bit of software — it’s pleasingly simple to add links via a bookmarklet in your browser, but also very fast to find what you want by text in the URL, description or by the tag. Now I’m saving all my bookmarks (private and public) in ma.gnolia, and accessing them using Cocoalicious.

At about the same time that I was sorting out syncing my computers, I also changed the way I receive, send and archive email. I’d read an article on CatCubed which described how to route all your email through Gmail, while retaining the ability to send email using your own email address. It combined the benefits of being able to use IMAP in a desktop email client, while having access to Gmail’s excellent web email client on the road. As a bonus, with the enormous storage quotas you get at Gmail, you can leave all your email archived there for access from anywhere, and also make use of the brilliant spam filter on the server side. Since several of my email accounts have really miserly quotas, and I like to archive most of my email, I’ve often found that I’ve gone over quota in the past, which has caused a lot of hassle. Hopefully, that should never happen again. The rate at which Google is adding storage capacity to my account is currently outstripping how quickly I can fill it.

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Thanks to pre-ordering Leopard (it was delivered on Friday), I now have Leopard installed. The installation went very smoothly, thanks in no small part to reading Joe Kissell’s Take Control book, Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard before I attempted it. Joe is a friend, but I’d be recommending his book even if he wasn’t. It’s very detailed, thoroughly researched, and a great confidence-booster if you’re unsure about which of the installation options are best for you. I had a mess of poorly installed Unix applications in /usr/local and /opt which I was beginning to find difficult to keep straight, so I decided to go for a clean slate with the Erase and Install option. I’d made a bootable backup with SuperDuper!, so I was able to use Leopard’s file transfer facility to move all my applications and user files back from the bootable backup. I’m happy to say that it worked beautifully. All I had to reinstall was the TeX distribution and MySQL (more on that later), and I had a clean and fast system.

A lot has been written about the headline features of Leopard, so I won’t repeat what you can read elsewhere, but Leopard is generally wonderful. I’ve been waiting for Spaces for ages, and love it, and Quick Look is addictive once you start using it. For example, I discovered today that it’s perfect for quickly scanning the README files included with installation packages. Time Machine is also beautifully implemented, and makes keeping incremental archives effortless. The whole operating system seems much more consistent and integrated, both functionally and visually. There are more links between applications, like the todos which you can create or view in Mail or iCal, and the data detectors which link together information in Mail messages with Address Book information or events in iCal. Even better, as Matt Gemmell observed, Mac OS X is now an even more superb development platform.

As I mentioned earlier, I used to have a mess of stuff installed in /usr/local, mostly because the versions of Ruby, SQLite3 and so on that came installed with Tiger were rather old. But Leopard comes with fairly up to date versions of Ruby and SQLite3, and even has ruby-gems and lots of useful gems (including Rails, naturally) pre-installed (the full details are available here). That’s why I was able to get away with just reinstalling MySQL and TeX — everything else I needed was already installed. The RubyCocoa frameworks are also installed by default, and integrated with XCode. These allow you to create full-blown native Mac OS X applications (taking advantage of all the native APIs) written mostly in Ruby rather than Cocoa/Objective-C. I’d been curious about it for a while, so I decided to give it a try. I used an example from the Ruby Cookbook to build a stopwatch application in XCode and Interface Builder, and was amazed by how easy it was. That’s pretty exciting, at least to me: if someone with no knowledge of Cocoa, a basic knowledge of Ruby and a few pointers from the documentation can build a proper Mac OS X application in a couple of hours, using only tools built into the operating system, that’s quite impressive.

I suppose this is something of a LazyWeb request: for various reasons that I’ll explain below, I want an easy way to record, log and report on my activity at work. Before I write something myself, does anyone know of a good tool for doing this? I’d consider a standard Mac application, Unix command line utility, or even an online application at a pinch.

There are loads of invoicing or billing applications out there, but that’s not quite what I’m looking for. My time isn’t billable (unfortunately), nor do I have clients as such (unless I get all management-speaky about the students and other ‘stakeholders’, which I hope I’ll never do). What I’d like is a very simple and quick way to record a description of what I’m currently working on, and whether it’s admin, research or teaching related, then hit a ‘record time’ button to record how long I work on it. Ideally, I’d also like to record activities after the event, if I have a lecture or a meeting that I’m not able to record actively. I’d like to be able to view and export a simple report of my activity each week, showing total hours and the percentage of time spent on each of my 3 categories of activity. In needs to be very quick and easy to use, and unobtrusive when I want it to be, otherwise I’m never going to use it, and cheap or free because I’m a poor academic.

So, why am I interested in doing such a crazy thing? There are a couple of reasons:

1. I’m not required to log my time in detail at all, but funding bodies now use the concept of Full Economic Costing (FEC¹) when funding grants. As a consequence, we’re supposed to record the percentage of time each year that we spend on different categories of research, teaching, admin and so on. We just try to guesstimate it, but I’m a scientist and I’d like to have some actual data to base my guess on.
2. I’m curious. Juggling teaching and research (not to mention the administrative load of each) is very tricky, so it would be interesting to know just how much time I spend on each. I also feel that recording my time would help me focus without getting distracted, and also provide a bit of positive feedback at the end of the day. I’m feeling very swamped at the moment, so anything that might help seems worth trying. It’s very easy to have a madly busy day and feel at the end of it that you haven’t accomplished anything, when you’ve actually got quite a bit done. Alternatively, it could end up totally depressing me — frankly, it could go either way.

So, do any of you know of any great software that I’ve missed?

¹ See ‘Father Ted’ for pronunciation. ↑

Back in April, I wrote about trying to sync two computers via a server. It actually worked pretty well for quite a long time, but for a number of reasons, I’ve recently changed how I sync them. By coincidence, Merlin Mann issued a Geek Throwdown to ask people how they manage to sync two or more Macs, so I thought I’d write about my new method.

The old way involved using a self-written script to rsync files in ~/sync to my Strongspace online file space. This served as an intermediary, so that I would sync up my files to Strongspace before leaving work, then sync them down to my home computer on reaching home, reversing the process when leaving home again. As I said, it worked well, but had a few drawbacks.

1. The obvious one is that it requires working Internet connection, and for Strongspace to be operational. This wasn’t a practical problem for almost all of the time, but I’ve had a couple of instances (when I’m about to start work or leave for home, of course) when I lost the network or Strongspace went down.
2. The more pressing problem was that synching various files from ~/Library required an elaborate system of symlinks, and I had to keep my documents folder in ~/sync/Documents. This got rather tiresome to maintain, partly because quite a few applications dump files like templates into ~/Documents, without allowing you to change the location.
3. I wanted to start syncing my Movies and Pictures folders as well, but that was going to strain bandwidth and storage space on Strongspace, and would require yet more symlinking jiggery-pokery.
4. By using rsync, I tended to lose the metadata associated with files (like Finder labels). This wasn’t a huge deal, but it was annoying.

So now I do what I probably should have done in the first place, and use a 2.5 inch external hard drive to sync more or less the whole of my home folder using ChronoSync. ChronoSync has quite useful and easy to understand rules for including or excluding items, so I can easily tell it to exclude all of ~/Library/Preferences except for the Mail preferences for example. Otherwise, I include everything in home except for my .ssh directory and one or two other config files, my Preferences folder (because I have a lot of preferences set differently on the two computers), Logs and Caches. I’ve also stopped using .Mac sync, and now sync my Mail mailboxes and settings, Keychains, bookmarks (and history) and so on using ChronoSync. ChronoSync is very quick, and there’s a ‘Trial Sync’ feature showing what is going to get copied in each direction, which is reassuring, particularly when you start using it. Deleted files get put in an ‘_Archived Items’ folder, so if something does go wrong with the odd file, you can just drag it back to its rightful place.

It’s pretty easy in practice. You have to remember to quit applications that might hang on to a database (like Address Book) before you sync, but the ‘bi-directional sync’ does a very good job of working out what needs to be updated in which direction. I sync up before I leave for work to the drive, connect the drive to my work Mac, sync again, then once again before I leave for home. It does mean that I have to carry the drive around, but it’s pretty light and small, so that’s not a huge problem. It also means that I miss out on having a current copy of my files genuinely offsite on Strongspace, but I suppose I could mirror my files once a day to Strongspace anyway.

I’m pretty happy with the way it’s working. When I get home, I can open Safari, use the ‘Reopen all windows from last session’ command (I’m using the Safari 3 beta), and have all the pages I was looking at while at work open up, as well as the associated history. I’ve also changed the way I access my email, which I’ll talk about in a later article.

A few days ago, I noticed a bit of buzz about a new CSS framework called Blueprint. The main idea behind the framework is to make it easy to construct purely CSS grid layouts, and also to set up good-looking typography, and to make the whole thing as similar as possible in all browsers. Even Internet Explorer. That’s no small task.

I’m certainly not a CSS expert, but while I’m not too shabby at making things with pretty colours and attractive padding, I usually seem to come unstuck when it comes to positioning blocks of text on the page. Getting neat columns of text has always seemed a bit of a trial by ordeal to me, and line spacing has always been a matter of complete guesswork.

I’ve been putting off producing a few pages for a web site for work¹ for ages, so I decided that this would be a good opportunity to try Blueprint out. The site is very simple (just a few pages, mainly text with a few images), but I wanted it to look professional, clean, minimalist, but also attractive.

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I was lucky enough to get an invitation to the Skitch beta (thanks to Matt Lyon and Alex Payne on Twitter!), and I’ve been having some fun trying it out. Skitch is a kind of image/snapshot/sketch creation application, which also makes it easy to share those snaps with others. That makes it sound complicated, but it really isn’t. In fact, Skitch is a blast to use, and I keep finding myself dragging photos in, making screenshots, and scribbling on my pictures, just for the hell of it.

It is designed in an unusual, highly visual and intuitive way. Almost all of the tools and functions can be discovered just by playing with the interface. You can drag images in to the frame (or select them from your iPhoto library), click on a pencil tool to draw a scribble, then move it around on top of the underlying image. Resizing the image is done by grabbing the frame and resizing it, which gives you a visual feel for the size, without having to guess how big 500 pixels wide is. You can take a screenshot of the entire screen, a selection (with some nifty crosshairs for accurate selection of an area), or a window. As a nice touch, when you are snapping a window, you can set a white or transparent background (with or without drop shadow), or you can set your desktop background as the window background. To clarify this, even if your selected window is sitting on top of a messy pile of other windows, the screenshot will show it sitting on a clean desktop background.

The sharing options are quite extensive and equally easy to use. You can use the provided space on the Skitch servers, Flickr, .Mac, or upload to FTP, SFTP or WebDav file space. When you’ve finished with your sketch, you select where you want it to go via the drop down at the bottom right of the window, then hit the ‘webpost’ button. This tells you that the image is uploading, and when it has finished, the button changes to allow you to click it to copy the URL (or a chunk of HTML) for inclusion in a blog or forum post.

Your ‘Skitches’ are automatically saved to a Skitch folder inside your Pictures folder, but you can also access all your saved or uploaded images via the history feature. It’s a simple thing, but having images automatically saved to a particular folder (but being able to find them again easily via the interface of the application) removes another barrier by giving you one less decision to make.

Skitch is one of those applications that you didn’t know you needed, but become indispensible very quickly. Many of the individual features are replicated in other applications — I have Snapz Pro for screenshots, various image editors for drawing and reszing images, and Transmit for getting images on to a server — but Skitch brings all of those features together into a single, very easy to use package. It has limitations and simplifications, but that’s part of the point: it exists to let you make and share screenshots and other annotated images as quickly possible, while being fun to use.

It seems that I have two invitations to give out for the beta, so if you’d like to try Skitch, let me know your email address.

When I first used beamer (the LaTeX package for making presentations), I noticed that there was an included packagage called PGF for drawing figures. Unlike the drawing packages most people are familiar with, in which you click on tools and use the mouse to drag shapes out on a virtual page, PGF requires you to enter commands to specify points to be drawn in an x,y co-ordinate system. So, for example, if you wanted to draw a diagonal line going up and to the right, you’d specify a line from (0,0) to (1,1). I took a look at it and thought it looked interesting, but far too taxing on the brain when you could use something like OmniGraffle and actually see what you’re drawing as you’re drawing it.

And then I downloaded the latest version of beamer several weeks ago, and noticed that there’s now a more user-friendly syntax layer on top of PGF, called TikZ. TikZ tones down the hardcore nerdiness required to draw pictures (a bit), and after seeing some of the rather gorgeous output that it can produce, I could feel myself getting curious about it. Then I glanced at the superb user manual (3.5 MB PDF file) and was really hooked.

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