Relief rippled through the land

This is a Mac thing. If you don't have a Mac, you can skip this post.

So I got an Air last year, Apple's svelte laptop. I love the thing. I really do. But I bought the 11-inch model, wanting something that was easy to haul around. And 11 inches is not a large screen.

On a Mac, it's (usually) easy to zoom the screen. But there seemed to be no way to zoom the desktop on the Air, which was really terrible. Some of the type is so tiny. You can make most of it larger but the system fonts remained (way too) small. I couldn't see them, which meant I couldn't see menu options. I went to user help sites but the people there were complaining about it too. It remained my only disappointment with the Air.

Now, this option may always have existed but only today did I find the answer to my question. I upgraded to Mountain Lion last week, and I found a Mountain Lion thread that answered the most pressing concern for 11-inch Air owners: how do you zoom the screen?

Turns out, all you have to do is go to Keyboard in System Preferences, choose Keyboard Shortcuts, click on Accessibility, and turn on the zoom option. Problem solved. I can zoom my Air screen! Woot!

Editing workflow: hardware edition

Yes, of course I'm still editing Xmas Carol. I will until the day I publish the book. But this post is about hardware.

Much to my surprise, I find that using my iPod Touch and Macbook Air, I'm able to edit very efficiently. What I do is send the book to the iPod Touch, where I read it in iBooks. The shocking thing is that I can grasp the text much better on the Touch screen, compared to seeing it in Scrivener, my writing program. It's just easier to grok. I'm not sure why.

In any case, I read the book on the Touch and when I find something I want to change, I do it on the Air in Scrivener. Now and then, I turn the Scrivener file into a fresh file for iBooks and check the changes to see if they read well. As a result of this seemingly simple process, I'm doing the best editing I've ever done. The book sounds much, much better.

Any other writers out there? What tricks do you use when editing?