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.
Hi, Mark. I came across a reference to StoryBox and have just downloaded it.
First install glitched. I went back to your website and saw that you specified .Net framework. This time I paid attention, downloaded the latest SP from MS, and tried installing StoryBox again. It now seems to work fine, although I haven’t actually done anything with it yet.
My day job is writing booklength nonfiction, for which I simply use OpenOffice’s Word clone. For fiction, I am perpetually tempted by, yet never fully satisfied by, specialized software. Right now I have Power Structure, Power Writer, Liquid Story Binder, yWriter 5, Write It Now, and Writer’s Cafe all taking up space on my hard drive and almost never getting used. Like a lot of PC users, I’ve wished for something Scrivener-like, functional and not clunky-looking, so your program interests me.
I particularly yearn for a nice drop-and-drag corkboard or index card feature. Super Note Card is an okay stand-alone program for that, but I’d really like one that looks good AND is integrated with the word processor and other features.
I’m going to play around with StoryBox for a few days and see how it works for me. If I think I really will use it, I’ll happily become an early adopter. I like the look of the interface, and the way you’ve designed the program suits my style of writing–which is sometimes scene-based and sometimes chapter-based, sometimes with outline, sometimes not. Overall, much cleaner and nicer-looking than yWriter, and waaay less complicated and distracting than LSB.
Best of luck.
Oops. Spoke too soon.
I closed StoryBox and now it won’t reopen. I get the start-up screen and this message: “Unhandled exception has occurred in your application . . . . Access to the Registry Key ‘HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\StoryBox’ is denied.”
And the only way to make the splash screen go away is via Task Manager.
Any suggestions?
Hi Rebecca, thanks for trying it out. The drag & drop corkboard is coming, as I yearn for that, too. For now, you can drag the items in the tree around and it will reorder, but of course, that’s not nearly as nice as dragging the actual items around that you’re working with.
So many things to get done, AND find time to write 🙂
Hmm – if there’s a continue button, click it. If that doesn’t work, I gotta figure out what the problem is (but I think I know) and I’ll get a new build up today. You could try running it with administrator privileges for now.
Ok, try this one: Storybox v0.0.29. It shouldn’t crash now if it can’t access that key. It won’t be able to register the document, however, and I’ll have to fix that, but this should get you going.
Hi, Mark–
Thanks for your responses. Unfortunately, I just can’t seem to get SB to work on my laptop. Something is buggy, and it may be at my end. Although I do have the proper .NET framework, all Windows and antivirus updates installed, no problems with anything else, etc.
I’ve downloaded again a couple of times, most recently with 0.0.34, and either the program won’t open, or it won’t close, or it won’t reopen. Once I got it to open, but it wouldn’t import a .txt file that I had created to test it. And then, when I closed it, it wouldn’t reopen. I’ve gotten several different error messages, so I can’t really figure out what’s going on.
When I get access to a different computer over the weekend, I’ll dl and try again. That should tell me whether the problems I’m having originate in my computer.
Despite my setbacks, I still think it’s a great-looking program, and the mix of functions you’ve included looks good. I’m going to keep tracking your updates.
Please email me at support@storyboxsoftware.com and I’ll help you work through this. I’d like to see what the error messages are. It “should” just work if everything is set up right, but “should” and “does” are often two different things.