All posts by Mark

StoryBox 0.0.41

I cannot remember where I said it, but I said I’d have options for indenting in by the end of this week. Is today good enough? 🙂 Also added, some alignment options (left, center, right), and I migrated alot of the options that were on the document context menu into the one that you get in full screen mode so you don’t have to get out of fullscreen to add a tag or add notes to a character.

StoryBox 0.0.40

I was feeling frivolous last night and today, so I added some new button styles to StoryBox, as well as cleaned up the themes (especially the Black and Desert themes) a bit. Each theme has a default icon set, plus, you can go into the preferences and choose a different icon set if you don’t like the default ones. I’m partial to Plain buttons on the Black theme, myself, and I’m tempted to change that to the default for the Black theme. I’m interested in hearing which combinations people like the most, and if there are any overwhelming favorites, I could be convinced to change the defaults.

I’m going to try to give you some options for modifying the indentation by the end of the week (meaning before NaNo starts) so that you’re not stuck being uncreative with your formatting. If there’s any other feature that you absolutely need before NaNo starts, let me know and I’ll see if I can squeeze it in.

Too Many Updates or Just Right?

I’ve basically been updating Storybox every couple of days, and sometimes more often, and I wonder what you think about that. How often is too often? When do you get tired of installing updates?

Of course, I don’t actually force you to install them, and you can turn off the update check in the preferences menu if you want.

Personally, I’m a big fan of frequent updates. It often feels like Christmas when my favorite software receives an update, especially when it fixes a problem I’ve been happening.

StoryBox Update

Uploaded version 0.0.38 of StoryBox today. This adds some more options for default document views, and also enables the remembering the last view of a document. Version 0.0.37 added left, right, and view buttons to the index cards, as well as some performance improvements.

I’m preparing things to be able to put the settings data wherever you want so that you could, potentially, install SB on a thumb drive or put the settings and your documents in DropBox and have the same settings on every computer where you use StoryBox.

I’m getting some good feedback from people that are using StoryBox, and I’d just like to thank everyone that’s reported a problem. It’s really helpful in finding the things I missed or forgot about or plain just didn’t think about. Keep it up.

P90X Update

So, we’re half way through P90X, and while we love it and what it’s doing for us, there are some other life issues that are getting in the way, and we’re going to have to put P90X on hold, I think, probably until February.

I’m really torn about it, because I don’t want to quit, but the workouts are long, and we just can’t fit them in at a reasonable hour and still get enough sleep.

“But,” I can hear you say, “There’s lots of time in the day!”

You’d be right, and all of that time right now is taken up by a few things. We get up at 5:45 in the morning, so that Wendy can get to work on time, and then I work until 3:30, at which time I pick up the kids from school and watch them until Wendy gets home from work which would normally be about 5:00.

Except for the issues she’s dealing with because of the four idiots over the past year that couldn’t drive their way out of a box and totalled two of her cars. Right now, she’s seeing at least one therapist of some sort each day, which means she typically doesn’t get home until six or six thirty, then it’s time for dinner, which leads us to 8:00 or so, and then getting the kids to bed and making sure they get some time with her, and she doesn’t get a break until 9:00 at night. To then have to exercise for an hour and fifteen minutes or more means we’re often working out until 11:00 at night, and we can never get a solid nights sleep except for two days a week.

So, until she can dump a few of these physical/massage/accupuncture therapy treatments, we’re going to go back to doing workouts that are more in the 30-45 minute range so we can get a good nights sleep, which, in many ways, is just as important as the exercise.

Some Updates On StoryBox and Other Things

I just uploaded version 0.3.6 of StoryBox, with a new “Preveiw” mode so you can see how any portion of your story will look when all it’s parts are combined. It also fixes some scrollbar issues, and a couple other things.

Also, after a year and ten months of off and on reading, I finally finished Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon, and it was worth the effort in the end. But man, those first couple hundred pages are hard to get into. Too many disparate things going on for my simple mind. I always have problems with novels that start out with a large number of POV characters. Keep me with one for a few chapters, give me some background on the world, then switch. At the very least, do that in the first book.