Yes, there’s another one. This one has updated UI components, so you should uninstall any previous version before installing this one. It’s not critical, but if you don’t, you may see some odd UI behavior. There may still be some odd behavior – I think I’ve caught all the issues, but I probably haven’t.
All posts by Mark
StoryBox 0.1.57 and the Future
Uploaded a new build with some new features, like auto numbered scenes and chapters, and a menu item that will open the support forum in the internal browser. A couple bug fixes finishes it off.
Version 1.0 is coming, really. If you are already using StoryBox, whenever 1.0 eventually arrives, there won’t be a big host of new features over what you’re already seeing. I have one or two more semi-large items to add, and a lot of tweaking to do, but it’ll be basically the same as what you’re looking at now. I’m really feeling pretty good about it now. Tell your friends, if you haven’t already. Get them in on the Early Adopter version before the price goes up.
StoryBox 0.1.56
Look what happens when I get big huge bugs that annoy me for months fixed… I release a new update in less than a week with quite a few fixes (for the time I have available to me). Get the latest version and see the release notes. Fixes/improvements to the search features and a few other minor annoyances. Enjoy!
StoryBox 0.1.55
Yay! It’s graduated to 0.1 status. I fixed a few other minor things, along with the export that I mentioned in the previous post. Please, if you find errors in your exports, report them to me and send me your project (zip it up if it’s too big) with the bug so that I can debug it and fix your error. With that big headache out of the way, I’ve got a whole bunch of requests and bug reports to tackle now. I’m really happy, though. It can be used from import to export in the basic generic case and not be too terribly annoying in the process.
StoryBox Progress
Finally, finally, I have merged documents that don’t lose formatting. I still have some things to clean up, and I’m sure, once you get your hands on it, you’ll find all sorts of situations where it doesn’t work right, but, at least now, I’ll be able to fix those things.
Basically, right now, the only things that will break the exporting would come from text and other things that are pasted into the document. Not all pastes will break it, but anything with odd formatting might.
I spent far too many nights fiddling with oddball solutions that I just couldn’t wrap my head around or get to work right, so I finally gave up and just wrote my own RTF parser/merger. Hopefully, in the next couple of days, you’ll get to try it yourself and tell me how badly it’s broken. I can say, however, that it is currently FAR better than before.
iPad In My Hands
Last week, my iPad finally arrived. Yes, I’m a tad late to the party. But that doesn’t really matter. All in all, while I think it’s a game changer in many ways, and I love it, I do have some gripes, but the gripes mostly have to do with the way eBooks and other content is sold.
What I love about going to the bookstore is the way it’s laid out. You can walk in, see your bestsellers up front, then skip them and move into the category of your choosing. Most online bookstores seem to mimic this behavior to a degree. However, where they fall down is in the way you can actually browse a category.
In a regular book store, authors books are organized into two sections (often) – new books, and the rest, and those are alphabetical, generally. The books sit there, face out or spine out, right next to books by the same author, or right next to an author you may never have heard of. It’s EASY to find new authors (as long as their books are on the shelves) that are somewhat like what you’ve read (in the same basic category) but that are different, too.
In online book stores, it’s pretty damned difficult to find stuff from an author you’ve never heard of that isn’t a bestseller. On Amazon, you only get to see 12 titles per page, which means you have to click a lot to see more than a few books, where in a real book store, you can run buy a hundred books by taking a couple steps. In most online book stores, either I’m blind, or there is no easy way to see a list of authors in a particular category. I don’t know about you, but there are some authors I forget about unless I see their name. If they’re mid list authors, and I have to click 20 times to maybe see their latest book, I may never think about books in their back catalog.
The app store on the iPad has the same issue. There’s not an easy way to see apps that aren’t new or a best seller. In games (where I buy lots of stuff), the iPad interface lumps them all together – there’s no category options like strategy or rpg like there is on the iPhone/iPod app store. I’ll buy fewer games because I can’t find the stuff I want.
Basically, I just want ways to browse the back catalog that aren’t tedious, and that jog my memory about authors that I like, but don’t necessarily think about all the time.