Kirkville

The killer app today for mobile phones is messaging, and there are countless messaging apps. Of course there’s Apple Messages, which is built into every iPhone, but there are plenty of third-party options, too. These include Meta’s apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, as well as Telegram, Signal, Snapchat, and many others. (See our article comparing several popular secure messaging apps.)

Instant messaging on cell phones began with SMS, which stands for short message service (or short messaging service). Originally, an SMS text message could only contain basic characters, and had a tight limitation on message length. SMS has progressed a lot since its origin, and it’s still an important protocol today. Although it isn’t end-to-end encrypted, it’s not going away any time soon.

Let’s explore what SMS is, how it works, and why it’s still needed—even though it’s not secure.

Read the rest of the article on The Mac Security Blog.

The Mac operating system, macOS, has plenty of features, but you only use a small percentage of them. Sure, there are lots of visible features that you may be familiar with (whether you use them or not). But under the hood, hidden deep in the System Settings, are lots of useful features that you may not know about.

Here are six cool macOS features that can help make your Mac more efficient and more fun to use.

Read the rest of the article on The Mac Security Blog.

As a writing app, Scrivener is mainly designed to work with words, but many books and long documents also need to have images and graphics. You may want to use drawings to illustrate a novel or children’s book; you may need to add images of tables or graphs to a thesis or dissertation; or you may want to include a map of your world at the beginning of a fantasy novel. Scrivener can manage these images, and include them in the final output when you compile your project.

Here’s how to work with images in Scrivener projects.

Read the rest of the article on The L&L Blog.

To learn how to use Scrivener for Mac, Windows, and iOS, check out my book Take Control of Scrivener 3.

While a general purpose word processing app such as Word is great for writing short texts such as letters and reports, if you want to write long documents, you need an app that is built for the complexity of multi-chapter projects. Whether you’re writing a novel, a memoir, a non-fiction book, or a thesis, the app you choose needs to provide the scaffolding for your work.

Scrivener is often compared to Microsoft Word, which is dominant in business and education. Most people are familiar with Word; so much so that when they set out to write a novel they automatically fire it up. But while it’s great for shorter projects, Word simply isn’t built for this task. As their novel grows, they start to run into problems such as losing track of parallel storylines or having difficulty changing the order of parts of their manuscript.

Read the rest of the article on The L&L Blog.

To learn how to use Scrivener for Mac, Windows, and iOS, check out my book Take Control of Scrivener 3.

“It’s rare to find a novel that doesn’t have dialogue,” she said. “Dialogue is often at the heart of fiction.”

“Dialogue is essential: it allows an author to create unique voices for each of their characters,” he said, “and allows those characters to express themselves.”

“And when writing dialogue in Scrivener, you can benefit from a practical tool to highlight dialog, and fade the rest of the text in your current document,” she said. “Here’s how to write dialog in Scrivener.”

Read the rest of the article on The L&L Blog.

To learn how to use Scrivener for Mac, Windows, and iOS, check out my book Take Control of Scrivener 3.