John McCreery, BA Philosophy (1966), PhD Anthropology (1973). Was young, foolish and failed to get tenure. Followed very smart wife, then a PhD candidate in Japanese literature, to Japan in 1980. First exposure to computing was a six-week course in FORTRAN, followed by an academic year (1979-80) as a research assistant in an early-stage AI project. In Japan that became a stepping stone to more than a decade working as an English-language copywriter for Japan’s 2nd largest ad agency, back in the day when Japan was the center of everything hot in digital technology. Moved directly from CPM to Mac in 1985 and have been an Apple fanboy ever since. My wife and I are now The Word Works, Ltd (www.wordworks.jp). The bios are now nearly a decade out of date but accurate as far as they go.

Re Notetaking apps. I was an Evernote early adopter but never a great fan of the interface. Before trying Bear, I was — and still am — using Drafts to start working with text. In my best of all possible worlds I create text in Drafts and transfer it to Bear for brainstorming and revision. Why start in Drafts? A lot of what I do involves translation from Japanese or Chinese and Drafts is just right for use in a slide over window in on my iPad Pro. Why Bear for brainstorming and revision? Bear’s approach to managing nested tags makes it really easy to structure and then restructure projects and the page aesthetics make writing in Bear a pleasure. My biggest constraint is aging eyes, so the ability to change font size and line-spacing is a huge plus when working with Bear.