How to make a virtual cork board on your Mac.
By DIY Maven
I snagged an new MacBook Pro a few weeks ago, and now I freely admit I'm a total Mac snob. I bow to the altar of The Fruit! Remove those inferior PCs from my home! Yup, a real snob, and I'm not going to apologize for it either. Um...you'll have to excuse me, my infatuation made me lose my point for a minute there. Yes, my point...I've been looking at some cool software to add to my new love. One in particular is Scrivener. Scrivener enables those of us who write hefty projects like theses, dissertations and novels and such to get a handle on all our thoughts*. One of the cool features of Scrivener is its virtual cork board, which can be very handy for keeping track of plot lines, scenes, arguments to back up theses statements, etc. The notes on the cork board are completely fluid, as you can arrange them and rearrange them as often as you want or need. Surely, I began to think, my new Mac, which can practically leap tall buildings in a single bound, has the capability of doing such a thing. It does! And here's how to do it:
- The first step really is the secret of the project: Take a picture of a piece of cork. (Keep a look out for a bulletin board somewhere.) Upload it to iPhoto and sit on it for a bit.
- Next go into Pages and open up a new 'Blank' document. I used 'Landscape'.
- Go to Media and find your cork board picture. Open it up and drag it into your document. Resize the image to fill the page.
- Okay, now we click on 'Text Box'.
- Click on Inspector. Click on Graphic. Make sure your Text Box is still highlighted, and click on 'Fill'. Under 'Fill' click on 'Color Fill' and then choose your color. I like the yellow PostIt color.
- Next, close the Inspector and resize your Text Box, if desired. I like them a little more square.
- Now we're going to highlight the text and change it to something with a handwritten look. I used Handwriting--Dakota.
- Then, making sure the Text Box is highlighted, go to Edit and click Duplicate a few times; you can copy paste too.
- Finally....go to File and click Save as Template. Now a fresh virtual cork board will be ready and waiting to help you create you next masterpiece!
*A note about help-you-write-novels software: They're very much like self-help books; they sound great, but you still have to do the work.
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