About a month ago I discovered Simplenote, a notetaking app for the iPhone/iPod Touch which has one simple aim: to replace the built-in notes app on those devices. Like a lot of iPhone apps Simplenote syncs with a web-based service. But the clever thing about it is that it allows other applications to sync too. There are currently four desktop apps (Mac only I’m afraid) that sync with the Simplenote web app. Windows and Linux users should take heart from the Simplenote plugin for Google Chrome, a great replacement for the now more or less defunct Google Notebook. A full list of apps, plugins and extensions is here.

For me the best of the desktop apps on the Mac is Notational Velocity, a simple, lightning-fast open source notetaking tool that syncs with Simplenote almost instantly. Notational Velocity is focused on keyboard work rather than the mouse, it works in plain text or Rich Text Format, and it can encrypt notes. Unlike other similar applications it can be configured to save the notes as separate text files rather than locking them inside a database. This means your work stays yours and is easy to manage. It also opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities. If you change one of those files in another application–a wordprocessor for instance, or Writeroom–it appears in Notational Velocity and from there on your iPhone. You can even create new files outside of Notational Velocity and they will appear there when you next open it up; or put the Notational Velocity file folder in Dropbox to sync with other machines. That’s pretty slick, though it is unwise to have two instances of Notational running and pointing at the same folder at the same time.

Notational Velocity meets a lot of the needs I have in this kind of application: it is simple, fast, stores my data in an open, portable format and allows me to move it around to different devices seamlessly and straightforwardly. Add to that the ecosystem of apps growing up around Simplenote, and the interaction possible between them, and suddenly ‘cloud computing’ looks like much more than just keeping your documents on Google’s servers. In this version of the cloud, data is everywhere. We need more software like this.

My brother plays violin in a rather nifty quintet called Tango5, which specialises in the music of Astor Piazzolla, the Argentinian composer, bandoneon player and Tango master. They have upcoming dates:

2010 27th April, Peel Hall, Salford.
2010 29th April, Beverley, East Yorkshire. More info.
2010 1st May, The Forge, Camden.

In Liverpool in 1862 the magistrates tried an experiment. At the time Liverpool was widely seen as one of the worst cities in the country in terms of the amount of public drunkenness and the number of offences committed; it also had an unusually high number of beerhouses and pubs, many of them in a poor state. There was a desperate need to solve Liverpool’s problems with drunkenness and at the same time lessen the influence of brewers on the political and social life of the city. What these far-sighted magistrates did was free up licensing altogether, making it possible for anyone who could show they had suitable premises and were of ‘good character’ to set up a business selling beer.

Critics, including the common brewers and many tenant publicans who saw their local monopolies threatened, attacked the plan, arguing that more liberal licensing would lead to more public disorder and crime. The policy lasted only four years and was widely believed to have failed miserably; in 1872 the Spectator commented on the subject saying that “free licensing has been tried by the Liverpool magistrates and has produced results so ghastly that they have recoiled from the experiment.” As always the truth is more complicated. By 1866 the magistrates’ bench was once again dominated by individuals influenced by the larger brewers who had a vested interest in tighter controls–on their own terms–over licensing. This is not very far from the way large brewers in recent ears have defended the ‘beer tie’.

In a letter to the Times dated May 21, 1872, a ‘Liverpool Man’ believed to be S.G. Rathbone, an opponent of the ‘free trade in licenses’ when he sat as a magistrate, suggests the experiment was much more successful than generally thought. Indeed Rathbone seems to have changed his mind about restriction:

… I know of no evidence which shows any ghastly results followed the introduction of free licensing; certainly the police statistics do not point to such a conclusion. The free licensing system was adopted at the licensing session held in the autumn of 1862 and abandoned in the autumn of 1866. The number of apprehensions for drunkenness during the official police year which closed in autumn, 1862, was 12, 362, and for the year 1866, 12,494; so that at the end of the free licensing period the apprehensions had not increased in proportion to the increase of population. The restrictive system of issuing licenses having been returned to at the licensing session of 1866, and Sir Selwyn-Ibbetson’s Beerhouse Act of 1869 having brought the issue of beerhouse licenses under magisterial control, there has been a steady decrease in the number of drinking houses; and the number of publichouses and beerhouses, which in 1865 amounted to 2,805, is now only 2,313. The steady decrease in the number of drinking houses has been accompanied by an equally steady increase in the number of apprehensions for drunkenness, which, for the last year of free licensing, 1866, was 12,494; while for the police year ending in autumn, 1871, after five years of restrictive policy, it was 22,947. These figures are, of course, in themselves not conclusive, many causes combining to influence the apprehensions of drunkenness; but, at all events, they show that the police statistics of this town, so much relied upon by the advocates of restriction, afford no evidence that free licensing injured the morals of the inhabitants.

The ‘Liverpool Man’ goes on to show that the number of licensees unable to pay their rates rose substantially during the unrestrictive period, indicating that the profit from selling beer had fallen substantially. Much of this was put down to licensees keeping open houses in ‘bad situations’ hoping for the return of the restriction; these licensees were no doubt assisted by the larger brewers who owned the houses in question. Our ‘Liverpool Man’ concludes wisely and I’ll leave him the last word:

No human ingenuity can devise a law which shall at the same time place liquor within the reach of the sober and keep it out of the reach of the drunken: yet this is really the impossible aim of all systems of partial restriction. The restrictive system, at least in our large towns, entails all the evils of monopoly without any corresponding advantages …

The real solution to the liquor question is, then, to throw the trade open on equal terms to all willing to enter it and to pay a good high Excise license duty [there was no excise duty on beer until 1880], and thus destroy the monopoly out of which many of the moral and all the political evils of the trade now arise.

My Dear Madam

We shall be most happy to wait upon you tomorrow evening, and I shall have much pleasure in the opportunity of seeing your sister and in the mean time I always am

Faithfully and affectionately yours

…

My Dear Madam

I shall be most happy to visit you this evening. In the mean time I always remain (though more briefly expressed than I could wish being in haste),

My Dear Madam
I am faithfully and affectionately yours

…

Monday Morng.

It is interesting to see that impromptu and short-notice social engagements were as much part of early-nineteenth century life as they are now. Finding out this kind of thing will be almost impossible for future historians looking back at us.

The quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen, including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not much exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of their fleet of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore, I say, we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve weeks’ allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550 ankers of gin.

Three centuries later, when Melville’s notional drunken Dutch whalers had been replaced in the fishery by the English, nineteenth century whale ships heading for Greenland would leave their home ports–Whitby, Hull, Liverpool,  Peterhead–in March and return in August with the catch. They often called in at Stromness on Orkney, or at the Shetlands, to pick up crew, but they would be at sea for most of the five or six months they were away. The amount of beer they took with them was significant.

In February 1815 whaling captain William Scoresby Jr. was preparing the ship Esk for its voyage from Whitby to the Greenland fishery. His journal* for that year records that besides nine tons of meat, and five of bread the ship took on 11 casks (probably 160 gallons each) of beer ‘from Mr. Stonehouse’ and 10 casks, containing ‘five tons of beer from Clarks’. Stonehouse and Clark later delivered a further four barrels each (36 gallons per barrel) of beer and T. Fishburn Esq provided a cask of fine ale, ‘to be distributed to the crew in the progress of he fishery, if favoured with success’. To supplement this the ship also took on 3300 gallons of fresh water in 11 casks.

Assuming Scoresby’s casks were 160 gallons each it seems the Esk sailed with an allowance of around three and a half pints of beer per man per day; more than enough to ward off scurvy, or so they thought. I’m curious too about what kind of beer this would be. No doubt it was relatively strong by today’s standards, but there is clearly a distinction in quality here between the ‘beer’ taken on board in quantity as a nutritional substitute for water, and the ‘fine ale’ provided as a reward.

There is a clue to the quality of the seamen’s supply in Scoresby’s journal for 1814, in which he details his own bottled supplies. Not for him beer from the common cask:

Wednesday 16th March [1814]. … Received from Gile and Brown stock of spirits for Harbour & Sea use, also 10 Dozn. Bottles of Porter: & from [Pierson?] & Frankland 5 Dozn. Port; 1 1/5 Dozn. Sherry & 1 Dozn. of Vidonia Wine. Completing my Sea & Harbour Stock of Wines, Spirits, & Porter.

In later life Scoresby was concerned about with the amount of alcohol sailors consumed and with the number of shipwrecks that seemed to have been caused by drunkenness among the officers and crew. It would continue to be a problem until fresh water supplies improved.

*The Arctic Whaling Journals of William Scoresby the Younger Vol 2: The Voyages of 1814, 1815, and 1816. Edited by C. Ian Jackson. London: Ashgate, for the Hakluyt Society, 2008.

But now the fabled iPad has arrived and it has book reading built in, complete with support for the open ePub format. Of course that pleases those of us who like to read books from Project Gutenberg and Google Books on our iPods, but Apple has done something very strange with the look and feel. Having read books on my iPod Touch for a year and a half now I’ve broken free of the need for pages that look like pages. When I’m reading a book that’s all text, all I need is text. It’s certainly an improvement for books with pictures, but I can’t help thinking Apple’s iBooks look a little cheesy with their flippy-over paper-like pages.

Books though are not the most exciting thing about this device; it offers real possibilities for creating new categories of publication. As this post at Snarkmarket argues:

For all its power and flexibility, the web is really bad at presenting bounded, holistic work in a focused, immersive way. This is why web shows never worked. The web is bad at containers. The web is bad at frames.

What the iPad offers is a frame, and one with well-defined limitations. I’ve been arguing something similar, though less concisely, over at shiftinglandscapeofmagazines. Here is a spur to create new forms of content and perhaps also to persuade people to pay for it. That will please Rupert Murdoch of course, but the real revolution could be for smaller players; it could be a lifeline for struggling literary magazines and a new outlet for authors who want to self-publish and get paid. Writers essentially become app developers.

If the iPad doesn’t do it for you, there are lots of alternatives.

Edited 29/1/10 because Wordpress originally exposed a draft. Probably my fault in some way.

It's not pretty, but it works.

I’ve been on the lookout for good todo list software for a while now. My primary machine is a Mac, but I also use Linux and Windows and these days an iPod Touch has taken over most of the duties of a laptop when I’m out and about. Since it’s my main machine I looked first for Mac software and tried Omnifocus (powerful, complicated, expensive) and the Things (simple, brilliant, pretty, great support) but quickly realised that none of the standard solutions were really cross platform. Certainly none of them had the ability to sync from Mac to Linux. I could sync from desktop to iPod/iPhone, and Mac to Mac (sorta, using Dropbox), but Windows and Linux might as well not exist.

Then I discovered Tasque, which is an underdeveloped free application from the Linux-centric Gnome desktop. Tasque is simple and straightforward and runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. It isn’t pretty and isn’t especially Mac-like, but its killer feature is that it syncs with the web-based todo list Remember The Milk. So Tasque, plus a $25 per year Remember The Milk Pro account and free iPhone app (there are apps for other handhelds, including Android and Blackberry) means I can sync my todos across platforms and across computers; there’s always Remember The Milk on the web too. Despite its lack of shiny shiny I find Tasque works very well on my Mac with very little fuss.

But I have hope. Firstly iPhone apps such as McSweeney’s show what can be done in terms of delivering nicely produced, good-looking content on a small device. McSweeney’s has proper typesetting and feels good to read even given the constraints of a tiny screen. Secondly Apple’s attempt to revive the album through iTunes LP shows what can be done when the constraints of the devices involved can be tightly controlled. Interestingly, given the current hype surrounding ‘content in the cloud’, neither of these examples is truly an ‘online’ experience, since the content is downloaded to a device. The result is that it is tightly controlled and not subject to bandwidth issues. Apple does something similar with its Apple TV, storing content on the device, rather than streaming it on demand across the network like other media players. In terms of magazines the following remarkable video shows what might be possible.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

The other floating church in Liverpool belonged to the Church of England. Based in the donated former frigate HMS Tees, the Mariner’s Floating Church opened its companionways to worshippers in 1827 and remained in place in George’s Dock until 1872, when it sank at its moorings. The first chaplain of the Floating Church was William Scoresby Jr., the former whaler and arctic scientist turned minister. Scoresby had always had a strong religious sense and was well known as a whaling captain for refusing to catch whales on a Sunday. This was partly because he believed in observing the sabbath, but also because he believed that a day of rest would be beneficial to the crew. He was deeply concerned for the moral and spiritual health of sailors and was also a Temperance campaigner, arguing that drunkenness at sea was at least partly responsible for the large numbers of ships lost. Scoresby first moved to Liverpool from Whitby in 1819 and built his ship the Baffin there. He returned to the city as chaplain in 1827 and stayed for five years before moving on.