All posts by Mark

StoryBox, Writing

Writing vs StoryBox – It Doesn't Have To Be A Grudge Match

You may have noticed that the novel progress bar hasn’t moved much. There are several reasons for it, but it’s mostly a matter of choices.

I would like to be making better progress on Shadow, but I have other competing responsibilities and commitments. You know I make games for a living. I generally spend eight hours a day working for money to pay for the house, and the food and all the other necessities of life. I don’t have much choice about that, yet.

But next, I have to make a choice about what to work on. Writing or StoryBox. The past two weeks, it’s fallen decidedly on the StoryBox side. StoryBox has customers, and I’ve made a commitment to update it on a regular basis, at least until I realize the complete set of features that I want it to have. The vendor of the component suite that I use released an update I’d been waiting on for quite a while. I had to get StoryBox updated before I could embark on some of the newer features I want to add, and the update consumed all of my extra work time.

I could have chosen to write, and spent less time on StoryBox, but then I would not have hit my once a week update schedule that I try to keep. (Don’t hold me to that schedule – it’s not a promise, only a goal). I’ve been feeling guilty about that, too.

I realized, today, that I shouldn’t feel guilty about it. I like working on StoryBox. It has customers. It’s a living product that I have goals for. And ultimately, I’m not spending my time on the couch watching reality television, or taking time to clean the house, or surfing the web for hours on end trying to find the answer to why I’m not getting my writing done.

I didn’t get my writing done because I was working on another product that I like to work on, and that is perfectly acceptable. Sure, it wasn’t writing, but I wasn’t procrastinating, and it was important work. I’ll now be able to go back to a schedule of updating StoryBox mostly with weekend work, and I’ll be able to get back to the writing and finish Shadow.

If only someone would invent a twenty-eight hour day.

Software, StoryBox

StoryBox 1.2.95 Released

2 Comments

Outliners should like this update. The outline view is now hierarchical so you can collapse branches you don’t want to see. It’s also themed appropriately (it’s an entirely different component than the previous outline view). There are still a couple of leftover things that need to be done, but the update needed to go out since the outliner is unusable at in 1.2.94 in the black theme (white text on white background – not good).

As always, if you find problems, use the bug report option liberally.

http://www.storyboxsoftware.com/download.htm

Software, StoryBox

StoryBox 1.2.94

I spent a lot of time this past week working on this build. It may not seem like I changed that much, but updating to current versions of the major components was a large change under the hood.

You will find that the themes have changed. The theme system for the components was changed by the provider, and they changed the look of the themes that they supplied by default, and I didn’t like their new look. For every theme but the Black theme, I tried to approach the previous look as well as I could, but you will see some differences. I pretty much gave the black theme a complete overhaul.

I also added text to speech. It can only be accessed at the moment via a shortcut key (Ctrl+Shift+S) as I haven’t decided the best way to toggle it (A tool bar button? Context menu item?) If you have a section of text selected, it will read that text. If you don’t have any text selected, it will read the current document. The shortcut key also works in the notes and synopsis panels.

If you see any problems with the build, file a bug and I’ll get anything major fixed as quick as I can.

http://www.storyboxsoftware.com/download.htm

Uncategorized

NaNo Winners and StoryBox

1 Comment

If you’ve poured your heart and soul, or maybe just a lot of blood and sweat into reaching 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo this year, visit NaNoWriMo.org and send a private message to mfassett, and I will give you a coupon for 40% off of StoryBox. If you didn’t win, you can still get 20% off through December 5th via the coupon code NANOWRIMO2010.

Congratulations to all the winners.

Software, StoryBox

Updated Themes For StoryBox

2 Comments

I’ve been waiting for quite awhile to do this update. I was waiting on a promised change from the developer of the suite of controls I’m using to build StoryBox. It will hopefully fix quite a few outstanding issues, and perhaps should be faster (they keep talking about speed improvements).

They finally released the latest version earlier this month, and one thing I found is that the themes I’d been using had changed. I didn’t like them at all, especially the black, which had even less “black” in it that the current black theme.

The next update is all about integrating these controls and making the themes look the way I want them. There will be changes to every theme. It’s unavoidable. I hope you like the new ones better.

Here’s an early look at the “New Black”