I know that was a rhetorical question, but a search for neo on github yields 14 thousand results. Granted, that includes some "neon", but sheesh. It's like that truck I saw the other day, for a business called "best carpet cleaners". I get that the branding is cool, but you can't google that name.
Heck, there are several different programs named neo on the first page of google search results for "neo editor"!
Finding the balance between searchable and memorable is quite the task. A text editor named Flugurbenhurg is gonna be relatively Google friendly, not quite so grey matter friendly.
I've often had the itch to create tooling to automate tasks. Later deciding to make it more generic and open source it. I have such a time trying to give them names. Internal tooling, fine, just name it what it does and move on. Public releases though... Oy, I'm sweating just thinking about it.
"Finding the balance between searchable and memorable is quite the task."
While I agree, the name Neo is crap, unfortunately.
It's like how many things are named Fuse or Fusion in open source, or new projects that start up with names that are clearly already dominated by something else. It just doesn't work, doesn't do anyone any good in the long run.
It's worth it to go back to the drawing board for a minute, and just come up with a name. Especially since so much thought and care has gone in to the rest of the app so far. Calling it Neo works like an internal project name, just to fill in the blank and get something started. But as a name that can ship, Neo is never going to work.
Unless it does, and becomes the new defacto Neo. Which could happen. But it's a pipe dream. I think it's better to start off on the right foot with a good name.
95% of what he wants can be done with a suitable Emacs config, org-mode and some elisp... What I find confusing, coming from a professional writer (though maybe that's the eye with which they would look at this), is that he seems to view very different aspects (purely cosmetic ones, such as the indented line in a first paragraph, or heavily usability-oriented ones, inserting a TODO note) as equally important.
Then again, he has tried all of the editors out there, and I'm just an Emacs geek :)
I think book-writing software is one of those areas where 'UX' is crucially important, and if that's your ultimate goal then different kinds of features all get evaluated by the same metric, 'does this pass the idiot test, while looking and feeling clean and useful?'. I think most editors miss the mark when it comes to elegance - retaining a large feature-set without 'cramping style' seems hard.
The parent comment reminds me of a recent "every Stackoverflow question" post which I cannot locate right now.
Yeah, you could emacs, or whatever. Or a regular human person could just use this app and really enjoy the User Experience out of the box without any fuss.
I use emacs+org for writing fiction. I usually start pen+paper first, handwrite the first draft, and then rewrite in emacs (I recently started scanning them into pdfs and using that instead of just reading them off the paper, readd helps with bad posture and neck pain in long sessions). Pen and paper is way more portable than the smallest laptop with a good keyboard, way more comfortable to write in than the best tablet, easy on my eyes, and no frills or other distractions. When I digitize it into an org mode file, it also becomes a first redaction of the manuscript, and allows me to catch many more errors than if I composed in emacs in the first place and re-read. I use org-mode comments as editorial notes.
I also like how it doesn't make me think about formatting, layout, pages and whatnot. It's just a single digital papyrus scroll. If I need to store separate notes about the text, than I put the text under its own section, and make another section named notes, and write it there.
That looks interesting, but I don't think it'll work for me, as I write in multiple languages and my main one (turkish) is agglutinative, so false positives would be many (it's really bad with aspell too, so I don't use it). I do use abbrevs though, I've added this function and mapped it to SPC to make it work seamlessly:
> he seems to view very different aspects (purely cosmetic ones, such as the indented line in a first paragraph, or heavily usability-oriented ones, inserting a TODO note) as equally important.
er.. and why shouldn't they be? I want all the features I want, and they are equally important, unless they are mutually exclusive and I'm forced to choose between one or the other.
In the case you point out, indentation isn't "purely cosmetic" and enhances usability, and in any case, cosmetics and usability aren't mutually exclusive so one can desire both.
The closest I've come to smooth and flowing writing is using Sublime Text, pandoc flavored markdown (for the epub support), and pandoc and LaTeX to process it.
i write passable poems using ed; it doesn't get more distraction free than that.
i understand the drive to flatten out the learning curve of software for non-software-people. most of these options could be covered quickly with an author oriented LaTeX frontend, and i venture to guess that would be easier to develop. It already has an entire document class for books, covering frontmatter, mainmatter, backmatter, chapters, table of contents, headers footers, bibliography, etc. all that is needed is a author friendly GUI. file management, tabs, etc would then be the main part of the NEO ecosystem. One just has to supplement with templates and never mess with actual document creation.
For me the most important part of writing longer, novel-length pieces is the organization help that Scrivener gives me. So far it's my favorite tool and as cool as this might be I'll remain skeptical until I see the final product.
I used Scrivener for one non-fiction book I wrote that was very chapter-centric. (i.e. it was a compilation of quasi-independent pieces organized around broad themes). I really liked the flexibility it gave me to reorganize and include fragments of thoughts.
On the downside, once you get past a certain point and get into editing and collaboration, you pretty much have to throw all that away and switch tools.
One downside of Scrivener is how old UI feels and looks. It definitely needs a heavy facelift after all these years. Oh and the use of RTF docs.
I'd say that when someone comes to the table with markdown support, a UI that matches the times, a better format, and strap Pandoc on top of it, you'd see a true competitor to Scrivener.
Scrivener satisfies the market but I think a straight up clone with a few changes and a few extra features could easily take over. Not one of these alternatives that keep trying out something "new".
I love the idea behind Scrivener and the binding concept works very well, but as others said: the UI is too old school and there are too many features. It feels cramped. A streamlined version of Scrivener with less features and a better UI would be great.
My main personal project is a writing app, every time I see something like this on HN I get a little heart flutter which is about 50% somebody stealing my chance at greatness and 50% "oh cool, a new app to try out!"
I'm genuinely delighted to see authors stepping into the app production space. I'm surprised more don't do it. I expected Charlie Stross to have his own flavour of Linux by now.
I hope Hugh can pull this off.
Edit: forgot shameless plug: http://getpoe.com, Windows 8/10 only at the mo, sorry.
=) working on it. Testing a next generation beta at the moment which has lots of improvements. chapter list is one. also markdown + html support, inline comments (// format, ignored by wordcount), on screen widgets for wordcount etc.
It's only on the windows store at the moment, but I plan to breakout pretty soon. It's a JS UWP app right now so the quickest way to open it up is (please don't lynch me folks) Electron.
I have considered the alternatives, but I have a full time job, a family, and I'm also trying to write several novels so I don't have time to start from scratch in python or java.
Poe was created because back in 2012 when I upgraded to Windows 8, there were no distraction free / focus writing apps in the store, and none of the existing ones (like the stupendous writemonkey) had a fullscreen mode that would play nice with Windows 8's app switching. This wasn't any fault of the developers of those apps - MS gave switching priority to 'metro' apps, so anything that was win32/64 was a second-citizen (of course this changed with 10, but at the time they were committed). I was learning how to write store apps, I wanted a writing app on my surface. I saw an opening, and I took it. Everything I've done since has been built upon that first app.
Fast forward five years and I have lots of users who like the app (40k or something), but all my code is JS, built upon the Windows UWP/JS stack. It's what I know best.
I really do want to build an app for Linux, and for macOS. I have bad days where I'm totally put off, because there are some fantastic writing apps out there already that do so much more than Poe can (FocusWriter, for example, does everything Poe does and is already cross-platform, and has features that I can only dream of).
But on good days, I feel like maybe having a choice of apps is a good thing, and maybe there are things about Poe that people like over other apps, and maybe the good people of linux and macOS might actually use it. On those good days, I continue my work on porting to Electron as a cross-platform MVP. I know some people won't like that, but I am time limited, as I pointed out in another comment. This is the only way I'll have time to do it short of quitting my full-time job, abandoning my in-progress novels and selling my family on ebay.
Hmm, can anyone compare this to Scrivener, my current writing tool? Best about Scrivener is the dragging around of chapters, creating chapters, renaming etc. in the tree view.
His mention of Scrivener in the intro was so brief that I have difficulty believing he even read the interactive tutorial, much less wrote one or more books using it. (I've written and published about a dozen novels using Scrivener, via imprints of Penguin, Macmillan, and Hachette, and I'm a beta-tester for the forthcoming Scrivener 3.)
While Scrivener doesn't really emphasize page-by-page thumbnails as a navigation tool (what does, aside from Word or Pages, these days?) it just about throws the kitchen sink at the problem of how to structure a long compound document, with corkboard, outliner, and multi-select scrolling subdocument views of a project (in the current version: the next release is considerably more powerful).
What I don't like about Scrivener is the propietary format. I would love a text editor for writers, with simple text files as format, but some GUI for organization of chapters/outlines/characters, etc.
Scrivener saves in open formats (XML and RTF), but it's nearly impossible to figure out what's what unless you write your own program to open them. It's a bunch of RTF files with numbers for names and a few index files in XML.
Slightly off-topic, but I'd like to recommend the Silo Series also by the author of this blog post. They're perhaps not life-altering in content, but enjoyable sci-fi reads, nonetheless.
Howey is perhaps my favorite new(ish) sci-fi author. His novels are almost always page turners, even if they aren't always deep. Wool (book one of the Silo series) was my introduction to Howey, and also among his best. I also recommend it for anyone that likes post-apocalyptic sci fi. Sand is good, too.
He kinda lost me at the idea of navigating a WIP using page thumbnails on the left. (a) That's so 1988 (Clive Sinclair, I'm thinking of you and your Pipedream here), and (b) the page is not the appropriate document element for navigation — scenes can be as short as a sentence or almost as long as a chapter, and scenes are how I structure prose fiction. Indeed, a manuscript page bears no real relationship to a published paper book page, or an ebook equivalent.
Finally, as functional requirements go this is, shall we say, less than ideal: but let's not go there.
I'm not sure what a page even means anymore. There are some works that may only be available electronically, especially if they are on the shorter side. In that case the page size would be dependent on the Kindle or phone model, etc.
I read ebooks on my phone. While I could use page-like navigation, I find it more comfortable to just scroll down to keep the text I'm currently reading in roughly the same screen area. The only concept of a page that's left in that situation is the transition between chapters.
Agreed; "patented" or "patent-pending" is better read as "immediately stop reading this, cast the entire concept out of your mind, and don't ever think about this general problem-domain again, or we might be able to sue you or your employer if you compete with us by inventing exactly the 'wrong' algorithm/concept/thing/etc. And certainly avoid reading our patent, or we can definitely sue you for competing with us.".
So the one thing that makes the idea of caring about pages interesting is it gives you control of the reading experience. Making sure you manage certain things (for example, ensuring you put a hook on every page to keep the reader asking questions) is interesting.
However I would personally think that should just be a secondary view available when doing a late pass going over a book, not a normal way to see things while writing.
Personally speaking, I find the lack of relationship between manuscript "pages" and published pages a more solvable problem than it ever has been historically. WYSIWYG visual editors for different ebook and print formats and page dimensions would at least give a working approximation for those who wish to self publish and exercise some degree of QC over the eventual reading experience.
My wild theory is that the reading experience, or RX if you will permit my being cute, is going to become An Official Thing in the ebook era, especially as authors play with the different narrative structures theoretically unleashed by the medium.
Totally agree with your comment about the scene as the atomic unit of the novel, however. Or at least the molecular unit, if you consider the beat to be the atom.
I'm not totally convinced. Our brains are designed for perceiving a physical, spatial world, and pages provide standardised physical chunks of a reasonable granularity. I think that's useful. You can know that a certain scene was about 5 pages back. You know roughly how much further forwards 20 pages of text is.
At Plotist[1] we're taking a slighty different approach to the writing process, where the writing module (which is coming soon) will stand alongside the world building parts of the application.
We've found this to be a great way to keep yourself organized and to make use of all the notes about characters, locations, events, etc. that build up over time.
This doesn't mean that the actual writing view has to be cluttered, but it's available when you need it. And we agree with the people here who like working with their chapters as a tree :-)
I use an expensive payware application (Papyrus Autor) for my German novels because its spell-checking and style correction is unbeatable. It just works, which is the most important thing for me in addition to a strong focus on data integrity and rare updates.
If there was something as powerful as Duden Korrektor for Emacs, I'd definitely prefer that, though.
I took it more as "by the seat of your pants" (i.e., just write and organize later), vs. plotting a direction with an outline, etc. before beginning to write. Just a guess though.
Interestingly enough, these words have definitions available to anyone ambitious enough to take it upon themselves to do a web search.
> A pantser is someone who, “flies by the seat of their pants,” meaning they don't plan out anything, or plan very little. Some people, like me, call themselves “plantsers,” which means they're in a little of both.
> Simply put, a plotter is someone who plans out their novel before they write it.
I've never heard those terms in particular used before, but there is a major dichotomy in writing: do you extensively organize, outline, and plan the structure of your novel before you start writing; or do you primarily let your novel evolve organically as you write it. The former I'm guessing is being called plotter and the latter a pantser here.
Sorry if this is going to sound seriously "Grumpy Old Man", but I just typed (well, copy/paste) exactly your question into Google and got the answer in an instant.
So this is a genuine question - why did you ask this here instead of doing a search? You typed your question and random speculation into the comment/reply box, while you could just as easily - even more easily - typed your question into the search box.
So there must be a reason - why not do the search?
Because as the other answers to the question show, sometimes there's more to be gleaned from a human interaction than a straight fact-finding trip to the Internet.
Or, sometimes, people just want to interact with a human. You know, converse. We're a peer group, right? We're here to discuss things. Op is discussing. If the entire group deemed it too obvious a question to merit replying, no-one would have replied.
Further, this question and answer is now available to Google to crawl, store, and return for future searchers. How did Google get all the answers that are available in the first place? Someone typed a question, and someone else answered it.
Finally, I Googled _your_ question and came up with this answer:
"Because receiving a personalized response is far more gratifying than reading a Wikipedia page. It makes you feel at the very least a connection to another human being which other than " leaving a footprint " is mans greatest desire in life."
Basic web searches note the expression "write by the seat of your pants", which in turn is inspired by "fly by the seat of your pants". That's a completely mystifying expression to me.
On the other hand, your answer is an impressive feat of projection: the armchair psychology you invoke to explain why someone would do something you don't understand at first is clearly an explanation for why you would choose to type out an off-topic
demonstration of your grasp of basic internet skills.
It must be, following your sample of psychological theory, really satisfying to plant some kind of flag saying "I know how to Google". In a forum called "Hacker News" no less.
I know it's pleasant to feel superior to other people, but this particular claim-to-superiority is both incredibly low-(intellectual)-effort and trying-too-hard. That's not s good look on anyone.
I've just imported a story I'm editing into Quoll. It seems quite nice. Little visual clutter, a decent feature set that helps with keeping track of characters, scenes etc, organize ideas, keep track of word count targets, keep you motivated etc. The achievements are a nice touch, and the ability to invite editors looks helpful (though I haven't tried that)
There are a few bugs (it reordered my chapters when I marked a chapter as edit-complete the first time. That obviously shouldn't happen).
Overall it seems like a big step up compared to Word. It can't quite keep up with the feature set of scrivener, but in exchange it has a much more approachable and clutter-free interface, much closer to the idea of distraction-free writing.
I would say the export functions are among the weaknesses of Quoll. You can export to HTML, docx and epub, with the only notable configurable option the selection of the chapters (and character notes etc) that should be included in the export. For epubs you can also configure author name and ISBN.
The quality of the exports is not that great. The HTML looks good for printing, but is a pain to read on screen. The epub looks good, except that it doesn't display chapter headings. The docx has 8 newlines between paragraphs when I open it in OpenOffice. I don't have a MS Word on hand right now to check whose fault that is, but it's unfortunate since I would probably go via docx to pdf.
Unless I missed it, he never mentioned a particular platform. Given the list of applications he's tried, I'm guessing Windows or macOS is where he does his work.
I wonder if he's ever considered working on an iPad with a keyboard. Since the 10.5" iPad came out, I've been doing just that and it's by far my favorite device to work on. Amazing battery life, super portable, fast, and focused.
The interesting thing to me about this as a programmer is that it really looks like a spec.
There may be even bored programmers who read this on HN and have already started building it.
It would be interesting to see how many changes were made to that spec by the end of the development process.
The trickiest part to me is the idea that regardless of what computer you put the USB stick in, it just immediately loads the program. Can you even really be sure that will happen if you restrict it to the last few versions of Windows?
So that right there is one of the most challenging aspects of software development -- when a big part of the concept is something that either isn't actually feasible as stated or you are not sure is possible. Which is really common because most projects are not driven by programmers but by non-technical people.
What it seems like most programmers will do is to try to find a clever way to gloss-over this 'little detail' about how they don't know how to be sure that a program will immediately open with no effort once the USB stick is inserted. The issue with that is, if they leave it a little ambiguous, and then it turns out that whoops, it never opens on his Macbook or requires him to manually launch it.. then his super-easy program is not nearly as simple as he imagined.. if the instant launch was a big part of it. Then the average programmer would just say "well, I told you I wasn't super sure that it would work exactly as you liked" -- when really he barely mentioned it and the guy didn't believe him.
Maybe some programmers are good at handling this -- I think you really need to find a slick way to convince the guy that he never really needed or wanted that instant open USB thing, or that having to double click after it was inserted is exactly the same. Kind of about psychology as much as anything.
> The trickiest part to me is the idea that regardless of what computer you put the USB stick in, it just immediately loads the program. Can you even really be sure that will happen if you restrict it to the last few versions of Windows?
It's a textbook example of an x-y problem. He wants to be able to work anywhere. He thinks the right way to do that is a USB drive. The actual right way to do it is as a web app.
You're right that suggested solution might not be the best, but the problem is trickier than you'd think. For example, I know writers who like isolation. Not just being alone. Going to a remote place where they have no connectivity to the outside world whatsoever. So while software that lives and connects to the internet gives a user "a lot of devices in a lot of places" to do their work, it does not give you the "ability to work anywhere." Now you have to make sure you solve the problem of - having the software and the user's work in progress (WIP) on whatever device(s) they take out of internet connectivity, and also making sure the updated WIPs get pushed back to the internet as soon as they reconnect.
We could try to simplify the problem with an assumption, like only run the software one device (instead of only one USB stick), but you've created new limitations to how they work. Maybe they get by with their mini laptop in the cabin, but they prefer a different computer at home. The USB works better with the multiple locations and, in theory, devices, until you get to the multiple OS (and releases) problem discussed in the parent comment.
So while it's not the job of the product owner to use the solution presented, it is their job to think about why that solution was suggested, and run their own proposed solutions through those reasons.
But he wants the application to disable the internet! It's more an example of a customer needing guidance from a professional. In this case, part of deciding if this is a good project to work on is explaining the tradeoffs and seeing how the customer navigates them. If the customer really wants to "have his cake and eat it too," then walk away!
If you tell the customer, "computers don't automatically run applications on USB sticks because then they would get hacked," and the customer doesn't understand, then run away!
Otherwise, this is a situation where the customer needs to understand the tradeoffs among a web application, desktop application, and tablet application. If a desktop application is preferred, then there are very significant tradeoffs with applications that can run off of USB sticks, versus tiny installers that will only run on a recent version of Windows, versus an installer that will work on Windows XP.
This is also a situation where a statement like, "an application that runs off of a USB stick is very challenging, and is limited on what it can run on. This would be a major distraction. Can we limit this to Windows 7 and Windows 10 with recent updates? Otherwise, we can put an installer on a USB stick, but it might be very large in order to support older windows without updates. Would a web-based application be better? You can run them in full-screen mode."
What I would love is a tool that lets me chart out timelines (ideally with a visual representation) for characters and story arcs. I want to be able to see how different characters interact over time (double points if it takes both time and location into account and let's me, somehow, see this visually, but I'd settle for just time too). I want to be able to roughly make up how a story arc interweaves with others and then flesh it out bit by bit. I want to see how characters are affected etc.
I've tried various other tools (diagramming, Gantt charts, brainstorming tools, note taking tools...) and they didn't really do it for me.
If such a tool existed for iPad (I've searched and come up blank), I would buy it in an instant (ok ok price dependent, but I'd be very interested). I'd almost build it myself, but.. who has the time?
I use Lyx to write, well, almost everything honestly. It was made for writing imo. Leaving all the time wasting details for the core processor not for the author to stress over. It just lets you focus on simply writing the content.
Came here to say something similar. Glad I'm not the only one. Wish that more people knew about and used LyX. Yes, regular word processors (eg, MS Word) suck! There are already pre-existing better alternatives, such as LyX.
I recently surveyed a writer about their software woes.
Response:
"I am a writer - fiction and non-fiction.
I haven't found good software to keep my notes, sentences, ideas, etc. in a way that helps me easily incorporate them into the project I am working on.
Oftentimes, I will come up with a sentence or a paragraph that I want to put in my story at a later time.
It's just a moment - an idea- that comes up that I want to save for later use. Well, guess what, these ideas start piling up and I could have a huge pile of sentences/paragraphs that I will use to build my story. But hey, I don't know just yet where I want to place them to tell the most effective story.
I want a section in the particular file I am working on where I can keep these ideas instead of having a whole separate "ideas" file or worse, scribbled on a paper napkin.
I'd like to be able to easily drag and drop that paragraph/sentence from my ideas section right into my story without having to do the annoying cut and paste or worse, figuring out what file I saved that great sentence in.
Hm, looks interesting, but is there anything similar available for Linux?
I use a small chromebook as a primary workstation for its light form factor and ARM's low power usage/long battery life. So if it's Mac/Windows or closed source without an ARM binary, I can't use it.
Sounds like this writer is talking about two different things:
1. dragging/pasting ideas from an idea section directly into a writing program. This is where s/he's sitting comfortably somewhere actually working.
2. Scribbling ideas "on the fly" - which can happen anywhere (on the bus, walking down the street, etc..)
For the second, I like simplenote[0] and their tagging feature. Lots of support for various OSes. On 32-bit LinuxMint, I'm using nvPY[1] since simplenote doesn't have a 32-bit deb.
In order to solve both problems, the writing program could support something like simplenote via plugin. This way s/he gets their left-hand, drag/paste panel.
Note: also like https://standardnotes.org/ but could not get it to run on my older phone, no 32-bit linux support.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadHeck, there are several different programs named neo on the first page of google search results for "neo editor"!
I've often had the itch to create tooling to automate tasks. Later deciding to make it more generic and open source it. I have such a time trying to give them names. Internal tooling, fine, just name it what it does and move on. Public releases though... Oy, I'm sweating just thinking about it.
While I agree, the name Neo is crap, unfortunately.
It's like how many things are named Fuse or Fusion in open source, or new projects that start up with names that are clearly already dominated by something else. It just doesn't work, doesn't do anyone any good in the long run.
It's worth it to go back to the drawing board for a minute, and just come up with a name. Especially since so much thought and care has gone in to the rest of the app so far. Calling it Neo works like an internal project name, just to fill in the blank and get something started. But as a name that can ship, Neo is never going to work.
Unless it does, and becomes the new defacto Neo. Which could happen. But it's a pipe dream. I think it's better to start off on the right foot with a good name.
I've bought Kindle books from Amazon that had 5 OCR errors per page.
Then again, he has tried all of the editors out there, and I'm just an Emacs geek :)
Yeah, you could emacs, or whatever. Or a regular human person could just use this app and really enjoy the User Experience out of the box without any fuss.
I also like how it doesn't make me think about formatting, layout, pages and whatnot. It's just a single digital papyrus scroll. If I need to store separate notes about the text, than I put the text under its own section, and make another section named notes, and write it there.
er.. and why shouldn't they be? I want all the features I want, and they are equally important, unless they are mutually exclusive and I'm forced to choose between one or the other.
In the case you point out, indentation isn't "purely cosmetic" and enhances usability, and in any case, cosmetics and usability aren't mutually exclusive so one can desire both.
i understand the drive to flatten out the learning curve of software for non-software-people. most of these options could be covered quickly with an author oriented LaTeX frontend, and i venture to guess that would be easier to develop. It already has an entire document class for books, covering frontmatter, mainmatter, backmatter, chapters, table of contents, headers footers, bibliography, etc. all that is needed is a author friendly GUI. file management, tabs, etc would then be the main part of the NEO ecosystem. One just has to supplement with templates and never mess with actual document creation.
I wonder if there could be a one-thing-well app made for just handling that and relegating longer-form writing to the user's word processor of choice.
On the downside, once you get past a certain point and get into editing and collaboration, you pretty much have to throw all that away and switch tools.
I'd say that when someone comes to the table with markdown support, a UI that matches the times, a better format, and strap Pandoc on top of it, you'd see a true competitor to Scrivener.
Scrivener satisfies the market but I think a straight up clone with a few changes and a few extra features could easily take over. Not one of these alternatives that keep trying out something "new".
https://www.literatureandlatte.com/blog/
I want to like Scrivener but it's not quite the right fit. I'm glad it exists though - this is a space ripe for exploration.
Pen and paper still are best for my initial creative stage.
I'm genuinely delighted to see authors stepping into the app production space. I'm surprised more don't do it. I expected Charlie Stross to have his own flavour of Linux by now.
I hope Hugh can pull this off.
Edit: forgot shameless plug: http://getpoe.com, Windows 8/10 only at the mo, sorry.
I have considered the alternatives, but I have a full time job, a family, and I'm also trying to write several novels so I don't have time to start from scratch in python or java.
Well... why? I get, like, macOS requiring a Mac for Xcode to ship an .app bundle. But wha'bout that Linux?
Poe was created because back in 2012 when I upgraded to Windows 8, there were no distraction free / focus writing apps in the store, and none of the existing ones (like the stupendous writemonkey) had a fullscreen mode that would play nice with Windows 8's app switching. This wasn't any fault of the developers of those apps - MS gave switching priority to 'metro' apps, so anything that was win32/64 was a second-citizen (of course this changed with 10, but at the time they were committed). I was learning how to write store apps, I wanted a writing app on my surface. I saw an opening, and I took it. Everything I've done since has been built upon that first app.
Fast forward five years and I have lots of users who like the app (40k or something), but all my code is JS, built upon the Windows UWP/JS stack. It's what I know best.
I really do want to build an app for Linux, and for macOS. I have bad days where I'm totally put off, because there are some fantastic writing apps out there already that do so much more than Poe can (FocusWriter, for example, does everything Poe does and is already cross-platform, and has features that I can only dream of).
But on good days, I feel like maybe having a choice of apps is a good thing, and maybe there are things about Poe that people like over other apps, and maybe the good people of linux and macOS might actually use it. On those good days, I continue my work on porting to Electron as a cross-platform MVP. I know some people won't like that, but I am time limited, as I pointed out in another comment. This is the only way I'll have time to do it short of quitting my full-time job, abandoning my in-progress novels and selling my family on ebay.
While Scrivener doesn't really emphasize page-by-page thumbnails as a navigation tool (what does, aside from Word or Pages, these days?) it just about throws the kitchen sink at the problem of how to structure a long compound document, with corkboard, outliner, and multi-select scrolling subdocument views of a project (in the current version: the next release is considerably more powerful).
He kinda lost me at the idea of navigating a WIP using page thumbnails on the left. (a) That's so 1988 (Clive Sinclair, I'm thinking of you and your Pipedream here), and (b) the page is not the appropriate document element for navigation — scenes can be as short as a sentence or almost as long as a chapter, and scenes are how I structure prose fiction. Indeed, a manuscript page bears no real relationship to a published paper book page, or an ebook equivalent.
Finally, as functional requirements go this is, shall we say, less than ideal: but let's not go there.
Check out Granthika, a semantic novel editor with automatic error checking for timeline and character errors: http://granthika.co
In progress, pre-beta, by a friend and novelist.
I'm all for innovation which is why I stopped reading here.
However I would personally think that should just be a secondary view available when doing a late pass going over a book, not a normal way to see things while writing.
My wild theory is that the reading experience, or RX if you will permit my being cute, is going to become An Official Thing in the ebook era, especially as authors play with the different narrative structures theoretically unleashed by the medium.
Totally agree with your comment about the scene as the atomic unit of the novel, however. Or at least the molecular unit, if you consider the beat to be the atom.
We've found this to be a great way to keep yourself organized and to make use of all the notes about characters, locations, events, etc. that build up over time.
This doesn't mean that the actual writing view has to be cluttered, but it's available when you need it. And we agree with the people here who like working with their chapters as a tree :-)
[1] https://www.plotist.com
If there was something as powerful as Duden Korrektor for Emacs, I'd definitely prefer that, though.
Wild guess: pantser novelists are more descriptive (a lot of ink spilled on clothing) while plotters have much more characters and intrigue?
I keep trying to write something using composites of people I know as characters, but this ensures I don't get details as hair color right.
> A pantser is someone who, “flies by the seat of their pants,” meaning they don't plan out anything, or plan very little. Some people, like me, call themselves “plantsers,” which means they're in a little of both.
> Simply put, a plotter is someone who plans out their novel before they write it.
[0] http://thewritepractice.com/plotters-pantsers/
So this is a genuine question - why did you ask this here instead of doing a search? You typed your question and random speculation into the comment/reply box, while you could just as easily - even more easily - typed your question into the search box.
So there must be a reason - why not do the search?
Or, sometimes, people just want to interact with a human. You know, converse. We're a peer group, right? We're here to discuss things. Op is discussing. If the entire group deemed it too obvious a question to merit replying, no-one would have replied.
Further, this question and answer is now available to Google to crawl, store, and return for future searchers. How did Google get all the answers that are available in the first place? Someone typed a question, and someone else answered it.
Finally, I Googled _your_ question and came up with this answer:
"Because receiving a personalized response is far more gratifying than reading a Wikipedia page. It makes you feel at the very least a connection to another human being which other than " leaving a footprint " is mans greatest desire in life."
Basic web searches note the expression "write by the seat of your pants", which in turn is inspired by "fly by the seat of your pants". That's a completely mystifying expression to me.
On the other hand, your answer is an impressive feat of projection: the armchair psychology you invoke to explain why someone would do something you don't understand at first is clearly an explanation for why you would choose to type out an off-topic demonstration of your grasp of basic internet skills.
It must be, following your sample of psychological theory, really satisfying to plant some kind of flag saying "I know how to Google". In a forum called "Hacker News" no less.
I know it's pleasant to feel superior to other people, but this particular claim-to-superiority is both incredibly low-(intellectual)-effort and trying-too-hard. That's not s good look on anyone.
In case you haven't seen LMGTFY before: http://bfy.tw/DXEk
[0]: https://quollwriter.com/
There are a few bugs (it reordered my chapters when I marked a chapter as edit-complete the first time. That obviously shouldn't happen).
Overall it seems like a big step up compared to Word. It can't quite keep up with the feature set of scrivener, but in exchange it has a much more approachable and clutter-free interface, much closer to the idea of distraction-free writing.
The quality of the exports is not that great. The HTML looks good for printing, but is a pain to read on screen. The epub looks good, except that it doesn't display chapter headings. The docx has 8 newlines between paragraphs when I open it in OpenOffice. I don't have a MS Word on hand right now to check whose fault that is, but it's unfortunate since I would probably go via docx to pdf.
I wonder if he's ever considered working on an iPad with a keyboard. Since the 10.5" iPad came out, I've been doing just that and it's by far my favorite device to work on. Amazing battery life, super portable, fast, and focused.
There may be even bored programmers who read this on HN and have already started building it.
It would be interesting to see how many changes were made to that spec by the end of the development process.
The trickiest part to me is the idea that regardless of what computer you put the USB stick in, it just immediately loads the program. Can you even really be sure that will happen if you restrict it to the last few versions of Windows?
So that right there is one of the most challenging aspects of software development -- when a big part of the concept is something that either isn't actually feasible as stated or you are not sure is possible. Which is really common because most projects are not driven by programmers but by non-technical people.
What it seems like most programmers will do is to try to find a clever way to gloss-over this 'little detail' about how they don't know how to be sure that a program will immediately open with no effort once the USB stick is inserted. The issue with that is, if they leave it a little ambiguous, and then it turns out that whoops, it never opens on his Macbook or requires him to manually launch it.. then his super-easy program is not nearly as simple as he imagined.. if the instant launch was a big part of it. Then the average programmer would just say "well, I told you I wasn't super sure that it would work exactly as you liked" -- when really he barely mentioned it and the guy didn't believe him.
Maybe some programmers are good at handling this -- I think you really need to find a slick way to convince the guy that he never really needed or wanted that instant open USB thing, or that having to double click after it was inserted is exactly the same. Kind of about psychology as much as anything.
if a single double click was allowed, it's feasible but requires choosing a launcher/file for the os
It's a textbook example of an x-y problem. He wants to be able to work anywhere. He thinks the right way to do that is a USB drive. The actual right way to do it is as a web app.
We could try to simplify the problem with an assumption, like only run the software one device (instead of only one USB stick), but you've created new limitations to how they work. Maybe they get by with their mini laptop in the cabin, but they prefer a different computer at home. The USB works better with the multiple locations and, in theory, devices, until you get to the multiple OS (and releases) problem discussed in the parent comment.
So while it's not the job of the product owner to use the solution presented, it is their job to think about why that solution was suggested, and run their own proposed solutions through those reasons.
If you tell the customer, "computers don't automatically run applications on USB sticks because then they would get hacked," and the customer doesn't understand, then run away!
Otherwise, this is a situation where the customer needs to understand the tradeoffs among a web application, desktop application, and tablet application. If a desktop application is preferred, then there are very significant tradeoffs with applications that can run off of USB sticks, versus tiny installers that will only run on a recent version of Windows, versus an installer that will work on Windows XP.
This is also a situation where a statement like, "an application that runs off of a USB stick is very challenging, and is limited on what it can run on. This would be a major distraction. Can we limit this to Windows 7 and Windows 10 with recent updates? Otherwise, we can put an installer on a USB stick, but it might be very large in order to support older windows without updates. Would a web-based application be better? You can run them in full-screen mode."
I've tried various other tools (diagramming, Gantt charts, brainstorming tools, note taking tools...) and they didn't really do it for me.
If such a tool existed for iPad (I've searched and come up blank), I would buy it in an instant (ok ok price dependent, but I'd be very interested). I'd almost build it myself, but.. who has the time?
https://www.aeontimeline.com/
Even syncs with Scrivener.
Response:
"I am a writer - fiction and non-fiction.
I haven't found good software to keep my notes, sentences, ideas, etc. in a way that helps me easily incorporate them into the project I am working on.
Oftentimes, I will come up with a sentence or a paragraph that I want to put in my story at a later time. It's just a moment - an idea- that comes up that I want to save for later use. Well, guess what, these ideas start piling up and I could have a huge pile of sentences/paragraphs that I will use to build my story. But hey, I don't know just yet where I want to place them to tell the most effective story.
I want a section in the particular file I am working on where I can keep these ideas instead of having a whole separate "ideas" file or worse, scribbled on a paper napkin.
I'd like to be able to easily drag and drop that paragraph/sentence from my ideas section right into my story without having to do the annoying cut and paste or worse, figuring out what file I saved that great sentence in.
I'd pay $130+ for it."
I use a small chromebook as a primary workstation for its light form factor and ARM's low power usage/long battery life. So if it's Mac/Windows or closed source without an ARM binary, I can't use it.
1. dragging/pasting ideas from an idea section directly into a writing program. This is where s/he's sitting comfortably somewhere actually working.
2. Scribbling ideas "on the fly" - which can happen anywhere (on the bus, walking down the street, etc..)
For the second, I like simplenote[0] and their tagging feature. Lots of support for various OSes. On 32-bit LinuxMint, I'm using nvPY[1] since simplenote doesn't have a 32-bit deb.
In order to solve both problems, the writing program could support something like simplenote via plugin. This way s/he gets their left-hand, drag/paste panel.
Note: also like https://standardnotes.org/ but could not get it to run on my older phone, no 32-bit linux support.
[0] https://simplenote.com/
[1] https://github.com/cpbotha/nvpy
I'm thinking of writing a solution (or parts of one).
In the meantime: Index cards. Closing in on 10k of those.