During NanoWrimo 2007 I decided I needed a text editor which would do the following:
1. Allow me to set a word count target, and display the remaining words as I typed
2. Take sequentially numbered autobackups at five minute intervals.
3. Nothing else *
Yesterday I mentioned this app on the yWriter group, and it was only a few minutes before someone asked me to release it.
So, at midnight last night I put version 1.0.0 online, promptly followed by 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 since I'd forgotten to include certain essential files.
If this app sounds like something you could use, give it a try and let me know what you think.
* I will NOT be adding a spell checker, grammar checker, formatting, fonts or any other Word Processing gizmos. Those are EDITING features, and you'd do well not to distract yourself with such fripperies when you're trying to WRITE.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Saturday, July 19, 2008
yWriter 5
I'm plotting Hal Spacejock book 5 and working on yWriter 5 at the same time ... get fed up with one, switch to the other.
yWriter isn't anywhere near ready for public testing yet, since I'm still adding lots of missing features, but I'm very happy with what I have so far. I've spent enough time in VB2008 to really get to like it, barring a few issues which I've mostly been able to get around by tweaking the settings. (Ctrl+Shift F2 is still a mess, and don't talk to me about the search / search & replace system. Yuk.)
The more I see the more I like this new programming language, which is saying something because I've found every Microsoft version of Visual Basic completely unusable since the excellent VB6, released in 1998.
Back to yWriter 5: I've just added the code for drag/dropping chapters and scenes on the main screen, and it's working nicely. Last time around I tidied up the editor window, leaving only the essentials on the main page (text window, title, description, chapter/scene dropdowns & viewpoint char selector) and putting everything else on a couple of tabs (one for viewpoint character info and a drag/drop list of other characters in the scene, the other for the nitty-gritty details like notes, length of time for the scene, locations, items, etc)
It's a long, painstaking process converting a huge app like yWriter from one language to another, and one of the biggest problems is that I really can't do anything to yWriter 4 while yw5 is in progress. Otherwise I have to add every change to BOTH versions simultaneously, and of course the code is all different and changes are inevitably spread over a whole load of source files.
Part of me knows that I should be writing Hal Spacejock 5 instead of fiddling with the new version of yWriter, but procrastination is part of my character. Anyway, I want to write Hal 5 in yWriter 5, just like I've matched every Hal book to date with a new version of the software. It keeps things fresh & exciting!
yWriter isn't anywhere near ready for public testing yet, since I'm still adding lots of missing features, but I'm very happy with what I have so far. I've spent enough time in VB2008 to really get to like it, barring a few issues which I've mostly been able to get around by tweaking the settings. (Ctrl+Shift F2 is still a mess, and don't talk to me about the search / search & replace system. Yuk.)
The more I see the more I like this new programming language, which is saying something because I've found every Microsoft version of Visual Basic completely unusable since the excellent VB6, released in 1998.
Back to yWriter 5: I've just added the code for drag/dropping chapters and scenes on the main screen, and it's working nicely. Last time around I tidied up the editor window, leaving only the essentials on the main page (text window, title, description, chapter/scene dropdowns & viewpoint char selector) and putting everything else on a couple of tabs (one for viewpoint character info and a drag/drop list of other characters in the scene, the other for the nitty-gritty details like notes, length of time for the scene, locations, items, etc)
It's a long, painstaking process converting a huge app like yWriter from one language to another, and one of the biggest problems is that I really can't do anything to yWriter 4 while yw5 is in progress. Otherwise I have to add every change to BOTH versions simultaneously, and of course the code is all different and changes are inevitably spread over a whole load of source files.
Part of me knows that I should be writing Hal Spacejock 5 instead of fiddling with the new version of yWriter, but procrastination is part of my character. Anyway, I want to write Hal 5 in yWriter 5, just like I've matched every Hal book to date with a new version of the software. It keeps things fresh & exciting!
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