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.