Archive for September, 2009

Check out StoryBoxSoftware.com. Yes, it’s a little plain (understatement of the year), but you can now download a very early version of StoryBox. It’s got all the major features I want in it for the first version, except for export to rtf, and support for image type documents. Lots of minor features are still missing, though, but in my very biased opinion, it’s at least usable.

Please, try it out, tell me what you think.

Oh, and what the heck do I mean by “Early Adopter”? Well, if you like it a lot, you can buy it now for $25, which is at least a $15 savings over what I will be selling it for when I call version 1.0 done.

This week has been a little slower, though still productive. I’ve had a lot going on with the paying gig, and that takes precedence, unfortunately. I alos received notice that my host was shutting down my server, so I’ve had to quickly move everything to a new host. This included recoding some of the Laughing Dragon Games site to use MySql instead of Microsoft SQL Server.

Progress on StoryBox, though included a new home at StoryBoxSoftware.com. It’s not linked because it’s just a placeholder at the moment.

I added a single level outliner, so if you don’t like working with index cards, you can work in the outline. It will become multi-level eventually, but I wanted the basic feature in so I can start getting some feedback.

Project wide search went in this week, also. Eventually, I will add options for only searching document bodies, synopsis, notes or tags separately or in any combination, and the option to search in any particular set of documents.

One other last change was to swap out the ribbon bar for a regular menu and toolbars. Why? Well, it turns out if you want to use that ribbon bar UI, you have to get a license from Microsoft, and then follow a bunch of guidelines. You also can’t use it on anything that directly competes with any of the Microsoft Office products, including Word. I do not know if they would consider StoryBox as a direct competitor to Word, and since I’m in a hurry to release this thing, I don’t want to go any further with the ribbon bar only to find out later that I can’t use it at all, even if I did want to follow all their technical requirements.

I’m on target, I think, for an October 1 pre-release release. What that means, is that you’ll be able to buy it early for quite a bit less than what I’ll be asking once I tag it with Version 1.0. I haven’t settled on exact final numbers yet, but the pre-release will be right around $25. Once version 1.0 rolls around, it will be significantly more.

So what’s the plan for this week? Mostly tightening up the features that are already in and working on the website.

Yeah, the title says it all. From here on out, I’m going to try to give you a weekly update on StoryBox. Once I can come up with the money to license certain components I’m using, I’ll have this thing up for early sale.

So, what went in this week? Lots of little changes.

I’ve added Character, Location, and Item nodes and put them at the same level in the binder as the Story and Box of Notes. They are now primary containers for the appropriate document types. I’ve also added a context menu to the binder tree that will allow you to create new items, which are dependent upon which item in the tree you’ve selected.

I’ve added blacking out additional screens to the full screen mode for those of you that, like me, have multiple monitors. You can also now change the background color, the paper color, and the font color of full screen mode.

I’ve fixed a bunch of bugs, added a splash screen, made it store the rich text instead of plain text so you can now use bold, italics, and underlines in your text. There are now cut, copy, and paste buttons and context menu items.

I keep trying to use it to start working on this novel I want to write, but every time I sit down to do it, I find some niggling little thing I want to fix first, which ends up in a couple hours spent working on StoryBox instead of my book.

We finally, FINALLY, started P90X last Teusday, and today is our rest day.  I thought that after doing Power 90 and Power 90 Masters Series that P90X would be  a little harder, but something that would come pretty easily – to the point where I really thought I ‘d be able to at least complete all the exercises except for maybe the pullups.

WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG

It’s absolutely a step above those other programs. I am sore today like I was sore the first week of Power 90 after having never worked out. I can finish about 85% of Ab Ripper X, about 90% of Yoga X. Anything with pullups, I struggle to complete more than about 4-6 full pullups before having to resort to using a chair for the rest of the workout. I ran out of gas on the pushups in Chest & Back. The only workout that went about how I expected was Kenpo X, which I found to be pretty much the easist of the bunch.

I’m excited to see the changes over the next 83 days. I’m really hoping I can do the pullups by the end.

Today, in a way, is sort of a big milestone in the brand new life of StoryBox. All of the basic features are in and working. You can write a novel in it, start to finish, using the Storyboard (I’m probably using the term incorrectly here) to outline your scenes, and then using the rest of it to write. You can move scenes around, mark the various stages of completion, and even export the manuscript out to a text file.

What’s left are all the tedious things that turn a potentially good piece of software into a great piece of software. Search, crosslinks, context menus and usability features, and a host of other things that I hope will make it one of the best apps in it’s class.

In the screenshot below, you can see a few things, like the dockable multi document interface, the fact that the colors are different (themes!), Session and Project word count goals. The little scrollbar below each document window lets you zoom the text. All the side windows can be placed wherever you want, and set to auto-hide. I’ve tried to keep the UI flexible enough so that you can work the way you want to work.