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Fed up with iCal? That’s music to the ears of veteran Mac developer Chronos, which has released the latest version of its suite of organisational tools to replace the Mac’s default offerings. The suite is made up of three programs, with Organizer, a calendaring and contact management application, at its core. Organizer may look more sober than iCal, but it’s more flexible, too. Want to view calendars by year or adjust the display to show only a chosen series of weeks? That’s easy with Organizer. There’s also a List view showing a chronological list of events and tasks, which is something we’d love to see in iCal. There’s even an option to display events on the desktop.

Working with tasks and events in Organizer will feel familiar to iCal users. The only real difference is that you can allocate additional properties to an event, such as its status. To access networked calendars, you can subscribe to CalDAV servers, and syncing both ways to online calendars such as Google Calendar was easy. However, while Organizer 9 allows CalDAV calendars to be edited offline, we had trouble reconnecting to a Google Calendar when it was back online: refreshing the calendar didn’t update the connection. We had no problem with the same calendar in iCal. Organizer’s Contacts database is a bigger, more powerful version of Address Book. It’s easier to edit – just click and type in a contact field – but its main selling point is the ability to add extra information alongside contact details. Apple Mail emails relating to a contact are automatically displayed and logged calls can be stored as a file attachment.

Syncing between Organizer and Address Book was as seamless as it was with iCal, with items added to either program appearing in the other almost instantly. One touted feature disappointed, though: the ability to autocomplete an address based on postal code lookups didn’t work with UK addresses.

SOHO Notes, like Evernote (evernote. com) and Yojimbo (barebones.com), is a digital shoebox supporting a range of text, audio, image and movie formats that can be categorised in a customisable sidebar. Items can be labelled and tagged. This is useful when building Smart Folders, which let you group content according to an item’s attributes. As with any note-taking application, the input mechanism is critical. Thanks to a floating dock attached to the side of the screen, it’s as easy to add items to Notes categories as it is to search for them through a menu bar option. Although it’s a separate application, Notes links well with Organizer. For example, you can assign notes to Organizer contacts, which appear as file attachments in that contact’s entry. Further, tasks added to notes automatically appear as tasks for the current day within Organizer.

The drawback of Notes – at least if you’re used to the ease of access to data stored in Evernote – is its relatively limited syncing abilities. You can’t view data in the cloud as you can with Evernote. Notes instead relies on a Ј2.99 iPhone app to share information between OS X and iOS. Given the cost of the desktop suite and the choice of alternatives, there’s a good argument for making this free.

The third component of the suite is Print Essentials, which almost manages to live up to its name. Used to output things like labels, envelopes and invoices, it can pull in contact details, task lists or summaries from the rest of Organizer. Its best feature is the clever way it automatically generates UK postal barcodes based on details in your Contacts database. In some cases, Organizer arguably offers too many features. For example, we’re not convinced of the need for a daily journal in Organizer or the ability to record video from an iSight and attach it to a contact, especially as it didn’t work reliably in Calendar view. Still, performance was better than previous versions of Organizer we’ve looked at, although quitting applications or switching between them still felt sluggish at times. Organizer is a genuine alternative to iCal and Address Book. But it’s neither cheap nor svelte, and we don’t think the extra features justify the price unless you’re a small business that can exploit its powerful contacts features.

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Scented candles, whale song CDs and chamomile tea have no place in a writer’s study. Turning out readable fiction isn’t about creating ‘the right environment to nurture your inspiration’; it has everything to do with slog, concentration and rock-solid organisation. Microsoft Word isn’t great at that, since it expects you to do all the organising yourself.

StoryMill doesn’t. It takes care of managing your story flow itself, so you can get on with the fun part – the writing. The interface, which has undergone a mild refresh in version 4, is the uthreatening face of a vast underlying database. Split into logical sections, it groups together your locations, character sketches, scenes and chapters. You can skip back and forth between them, leaving off a location sketch to tap out a note about one of your characters and vice versa. Referring to these as you write your book will maintain consistency throughout. It’s up to you how you work; StoryMill doesn’t force you to conform in any way. However, we’ve found it most effective to start with characters and locations and then move on to the smallest building blocks of your story – the scenes. Each is a separate document that can be rearranged within your chapters if you later discover that a character needs to observe an event in one scene before they can act on it in another. As you convert your scene notes into fully fleshed-out narratives, the chapters build themselves. This is a boon, as it means you can focus entirely on one small part of your story without being distracted by the parts that surround it. The main working window is now split view by default, aping the familiar inbox and preview panes in an email app. One half is for your prose, the other for your reference material. The reference window is tabbed, so you can switch at will between notes, pictures, tags, links (both internal and web- based) and metadata for each scene: the characters acting it out, where it fits in the story and the location where it’s set.

Scenes can be colour coded, with chips beside each title marking its status. Combine this with the scene-by-scene progress meter that sits in the toolbar and you’ll always know at a glance how close you are to completing each draft. With manageable milestones, it’s a great way to stay motivated. The timeline view, which you use to organise the flow of your story, has had a major overhaul in this revision and is now much more flexible, with the ability to span any length of time up to 1000 years. This will benefit not only historical novelists, but anyone whose book spans irregular timeframes, with some scenes set in close chronological proximity to one another and others years apart. A Google Maps-style Scale tool lets you zoom the timeline to minutes for detailed plotting, centuries for a broad overview, and 13 divisions between.

The most welcome addition, though, has to be Snapshots, which will do more than any other feature to enhance your creativity. The fiction writer’s equivalent of OS X’s Time Machine, it lets you save the current state of any active scene. You can then edit the scene and compare the revised edition side by side with the original. The changes aren’t highlighted – a tweak we’d like to see in version 5 or an interim update – but the ability to experiment with your prose safe in the knowledge that you can rewind it is sufficient a bonus for us to recommend that all existing users upgrade.

The natural comparison is with Scrivener 2. Scrivener’s folder and file structure works in the same way as StoryMill’s scenes and chapters, and it has specific folder types for characters and places. Previously, we would have pushed first timers firmly towards StoryMill, but that’s no longer necessarily the case. It still has the edge if you’ll make use of the Snapshots, the improved timeline and the writing analysis tools such as the cliche finder and word frequency panel. However, if your writing encompasses more than fiction, then the more versatile Scrivener proves the stronger draw.

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There are some scientists who are remembered mainly not for what they accomplished, but for less worthy reasons. For my column this month I thought 1 would say something about three of these – one of whom I knew well.

I will begin with Percival Lowell, an American asLronomer whom I never met; he died in 1916, six years before 1 was born. He was noL trained as a professional astronomer, hut made his name as a diplomat (he came from a well-to-do family). His reputation established, he turned to astronomy, and in particular he was fascinated by Mars. In 1877 the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had drawn maps showing straight lines crossing the red Martian plains, and referred to them as canali (channels). Inevitably this was translated as ‘canals’, and Lowell became convinced that they were artiOcial waterways, making up a planet- wide irrigation system. He financed and seL up a major observatory at Flagstaff in Arizona, where the major telescope was – and is – a 24-inch Clark refractor, one of the largest and best in the world. Here Lowell and his assistants went on with their work, most of them drawing canals.

Well, we now know that Lowell’s canals do not exist. They were nothing more than tricks of the eye, and it is only too easy to ’see’ what one half- expects to see. Lowell was simply wrong – and it is for this that he is best remembered today, regardless of his sterling work in other fields of astronomy, notably in connection with the magnetic field of the Sun. He accomplished a great deal; he was a major mathematician, an educator and a benefactor, while the Lowell Observatory is still one of the most important tn the world. So when Percival Lowell is mentioned, do not think only of the canals of Mars.

My second candidate is also a man whom I never actually met, though our lives overlapped. The Dutch astronomer Adriaan van Maanen was born in 1884 and died on 26 January 1946. I wish 1 had met him, because from all accounts he was an exceptionally pleasant person – gregarious, friendly, generous and fond of parties – apparently he was an excellent cook! After graduating from Utrecht University in 1911 he went to America and joined the staff of Mount Wilson ObservaLory, where he spent the rest of his career.

Van Maanen was concerned mainly with the nature of the objects then known generally as spiral nebulae, of which the best-known example is M31 in Andromeda; not far from it in the sky is another spiral, M33 in Triangulum, Were the spirals simply members of our Galaxy, or were they separate star systems, immensely remote? Harlow Shapley, one of America’s leading astronomers and who was respected all over the world – believed that they were reasonably local – that is to say, no more than a few tens of hundreds or at most tens of thousands of lightyears away. He pointed out that if M31 were not part of the Milky Way its distance would have to be of the order of 100,000,000 lightyears, greater than Shapley and his supporters could accept. There was also S Andromedae, a nova that flared up inside M31 in 1885 and reached the fringe of naked eye visibility. If it were millions of lightyears away it would have to be unbelievably luminous. We now know, of course, that it was not a normal nova. It was a supernova, but supernovae had not even been suggested in 1885.

Van Maanen was one of Shapley’s followers, and he believed that he could provide proof. He used the best available photographs to measure the positions of some of the spirals, and found definite cases of stars that shifted slightly over periods of years – for example, the Triangulum Spiral appeared to be rotating. If it lay beyond the Milky Way, and Van Maanen’s measurements were correct, the stars would have to be moving at a speed greater than that of light, which was clearly out of the question.

But were the apparent shifts real? One sceptic was Edwin Hubble, a comparative latecomer to Mount Wilson. Using the new 100-inch reflector, he made measurements which did not confirm Van Maanen’s. Hubble, whom I did meet, was generally believed to be somewhat austere and remote, and was never particularly popular (though to me, a young British amateur lunar observer, he was always courteous – possibly because I always wear my RAF tie – and Hubble had served briefly in the post-war US Army, and always liked to be referred to as ‘Major Hubble’). Eventually Hubble found Cepheid variables in the Andromeda Spiral. These convenient stars give away their distances by the way they behave – and the arguments were over. The Cepheids, and hence their host spirals, lay far beyond our Galaxy.

Van Maanen’s measurements were wrong. He had made a completely honest mistake, probably because he had not taken account of optical effects in his photographs; the stars were very slightly ’smeared’ differently on plates taken at different times. This caused systematic errors resulting in apparent movements that were not real.

Van Maanen promptly and very generously accepted Hubble’s results, and it is unfair to remember him today chiefly because of his one major mistake.

Finally, a man whom I knew very well: Fred Hoyle. There is absolutely no doubt that he was one of the greatest of modern astrophysicists, and the fact that he was never awarded a Nobel Prize was frankly scandalous. Some people tend to forget this, and turn back to the prolonged debate about the origin of the Universe. Was the Universe created suddenly, in what Hoyle scornfully referred to as the ‘Big Bang’, or has it always existed and is now in a ’steady state’, so that it will exist forever? Hoyle supported the steady state picture, and made desperate efforts to rescue it in some form or other, even after observational results had disproved it. He never changed his mind, and later in his life he supported some theories which can only be described as weird. But it is time to ignore these, and remember Fred Hoyle as one of the greatest astrophysicists of all time.

These are only three of many similar cases. But I am confident that future historians will ensure that justice is done. ©

I just love your magazine – the balance is wonderful. I rip the cover off when it arrives and luxuriate in reading it from cover to cover. As a teacher, this has helped me with my astronomy club, astronomy skill for Duke of Edinburgh students and for my A2 Astrophysics module – fantastic value. I love the video clips on the CD too – they’ve been particularly useful to brighten up a dull lesson.

That said, I took a group of students to Newcastle University recently to hear a wonderfully entertaining lecture by Dr Sean Paling of Sheffield University (and Rutherford Appleton Lab) and he told us about a UK research group, based deep underground at Boulby Mine in Cheshire and running on a shoestring budget. He modestly described the team as the world leader in “not finding dark matter” – not a failure. While your

‘Dark Matter’ article (July issue) was interesting, I was disappointed that there was not even a passing mention of the current state of the research of this dedicated bunch of Sun-deprived researchers