Mobile Me | Answer 20 Questions

Answer 20 Questions

The 20Q Podcast Interviews – Video, Mac, Photo, Writers & More

Interview with a Best Selling author – David Hewson


Writers 20 Questions is where the Podcast is situated

Since the first Nic Costa title, A Season for the Dead, appeared in 2003 the series has grown a book a year, and spread to some twenty different languages around the world including Japanese, Thai, French, Spanish and Italian. It has won multiple plaudits including, most recently the American Library Association award for Best Mystery of 2008 for the sixth book, The Garden of Evil and was on the shortlist for the Theakston prize for Crime Novel of the Year.

David talks to me about using his MacBook Air which he will carry with him when he is traveling. He likes to use the excellent Scrivener software and the his other favourite is MacJournal. He is not a fan of the iPhone and has an Android phone on which he uses the task manager Remember the Milk.

He can’t decide whether to keep using Mobile Me, but likes Dropbox and Evernote. The fact that you can use Dropbox to have your files available to you while you are out and about.

He treats writing as a job or profession and works 5 days a week writing. I found out about him because I have on my shelf the book The Seventh Sacrament, which is of the NicCosta series. I have not read the earlier books but I don’t think it will matter in terms of needing to know what went on before. One of his early book has been made into a film Semana Santa

David talks about how he went to Italy, learned the language and writes about italians in Italy rather than writing about an English man in Rome, His books are translated into Italian as well as about 20 other languages and he says that the italians love his books too. He likes to choose an area and go there and walk the streets, visit the cafes and talk to people to get the feel for the place where he will be setting the story. His book The Garden of Evil won Mystery of the year.

Since the first Nic Costa title, A Season for the Dead, appeared in 2003 the series has grown a book a year, and spread to some twenty different languages around the world including Japanese, Thai, French, Spanish and Italian. It has won multiple plaudits including, most recently the American Library Association award for Best Mystery of 2008 for the sixth book, The Garden of Evil and was on the shortlist for the Theakston prize for Crime Novel of the Year.

Mac20Q Podcast 44 Chris Foley

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Chris has a company called FoleyPod and that’s his name of twitter too. he creates web pages so has to use Windows just for testing the web pages in the versions of IE
When editing sound uses Logic and we discuss Garageband.
Chris likes to use Pages as much as possible, has Office to be able to get into xl spreadsheets and has been known to play sudoku on the iPhone
Like me Chris is really impressed with the GPS on the iPhone, thinks it is great to see yourself as that little blue dot walking down the street.
He has bootcamp set up and also VM fusion – always amazes clients to see Mac and Windows on the same machine.

The browser Flock gets a mention for its super blogging tools built in and it is all in the sidebar – Facebook included which is normally a time sucking vortex. Easy to see  when things have been updated without having to go to the Facebook site. A Tweetie user on the Mac and on the iPhone and Seesmic gets a mention too.
Chris is a guitar player and has a covers band uses Garageband a lot to share ideas and is into Photography has a Nikon D90 digital SLR camera. personally I think that Aperture doesn’t need the faces and places extras from iPhoto, not really in keeping with the professional photographer needs, although he uses iTunes professionally
Finds Garageband to be great to use really easy  to make music with.
Time Machine is the best thing since sliced bread says Chris, he also use Carbon copy Cloner and SyncroniseProX
He has 14 drives do back things up with – Wow what a lot of drives. every 60 days will wipe the Time machine drive and starts again. Will not recommend Time Capsule because other things happening on the network like streaming from an Apple TV or a NetFlix thing will lead to corrupt back ups.
Evernote is a favourite application and would like to have this built in to Apple’s iCal
NetNewsWire  is the bees knees of an RSS reader likes the way it is synchronised so only has to look at a post once and have all the news aggregated in one place.
Apple J in iTunes gives you the show options and you can have more information in front of  you. Like if you want to mark tracks for whatever reason – comment and notes too
Chris rents movies from iTunes now and then.
iPhone favourite app is Evernote and Scrabble, Chris also uses Things
Mobile Me user and likes having all stuff synces through the cloud, he uses the public folder rather than have to use FTP

Podcasts

This week in Photography TWIP – listens and goes out shooting too at same time
Mac Os Ken
Screencasts online
On FoleyPod writes an ezine every month about tech things to do with the Mac
Recommended web sites

Reads Mac Life from the magazine good for tips
Like myself Chris loves WordPress and uses it to create web sites for clients