![]() Federico Viticci offers us one such case. It's rare to encounter a new operating system with a significant user base (most writers and researchers today work on Windows or Mac OS, operating systems that are nearly forty years old), and rarer still to have accounts of a writer who is intent on bending a new operating system to meet their process and affective preferences. But we see something important happening here. We acknowledge that lengthy examinations of operating systems (OSs) and their software limits aren't typical fare for writing research. To show the extent of Viticci's transformations of the default capabilities of the iPad and the applications he uses, this chapter offers a detailed examination of iOS and its iterations over several years. ![]() Between chapters 4 and 5 it's possible to infer some of the key differences between what is possible with workflow design and what requires full-on programming skills. ![]() While few writers may have Brett Terpstra's expertise to develop new applications, many more writers could achieve similar ends as Viticci. His efforts show that one outcome of workflow thinking can be active transformations of one's tools. Through workflow thinking, Viticci has pushed against those use cases, imagining new possibilities and finding ways to script, tether, and link together writing applications. Viticci's approach is notable because he adopted long-form mobile writing during a time period when mobile devices were seen as vehicles for media consumption, web browsing, or producing short social media posts. In this chapter we look at the shifting writing workflows of Federico Viticci, a writer and creator of the influential MacStories review site, who has found ways to compose long-form texts on the iOS mobile platform (Apple's operating system for its iPhone and iPad devices). Despite growth in apps and accessibility, however, composing on mobile devices hasn't been easy, and many desktop practices simply haven't worked within the constraints of mobile operating systems. Additionally, mobile operating systems like iOS have offered innovations in computer accessibility through features like system-wide type scaling and voice-over narration. And the iPhone in particular has fostered a booming marketplace of phone- or tablet-based writing apps with names like IA Writer, Byword, Bear, Day One, and more. Note-taking services like Evernote and Google Keep focus on mobile capture-taking notes with a mobile device and saving those notes in a synced text database. Microsoft and Google both offer mobile versions of their word processors, as does the popular writing application Scrivener. We haven't seen research about long-form composing strategies on mobile devices, and today "computer" or "digital device" still signifies a desktop or notebook computer.Īn examination of software marketplaces tells a different story. With few exceptions (e.g., Swarts 2016), writing research about those mobile devices has focused mostly on the use of social network services (such as Facebook, Twitter, and FourSquare) or specific mobile features like GPS (global positioning system) and geomapping. But from the mid-2000s onward, "computer" for many people has meant either a smartphone or a tablet device-a machine that runs a mobile operating system and relies on a touch or voice-based input system. Much of that work, however, is firmly centered in the world of desktop computing-a place where "computer" means a device with a screen, an attached keyboard, a mouse or trackpad, and a desktop operating system like Windows, Mac OS, or Linux. Many writing researchers have met Manovich's call and examined a broad range of contemporary writing technologies, from the first word processors, to multimodal composing technologies, to social network services, to algorithms. Manovich uses cinema history as a way to warn about the digital computer and his concerns about the direction of analytical work at the time-or "speculations about the future rather than a record and theory of the present" (6–7). Instead we are left with newspaper reports, diaries of cinema's investors, programs of film showings, and other bits and pieces-a set of random and unevenly distributed historical samples" (6). "Unfortunately," he later continues, "such records do not exist. "I wish that someone in 1895, 1897, or at least 1903, had realized the fundamental significance of the emergence of the new medium of cinema and produced a comprehensive record," Lev Manovich (2001) writes in the Language of New Media.
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