StoryBox started back in 2009 as a “how hard would it be to do this?” kind of project. It didn’t take as long as I thought, but at the same time, it took far longer than I imagined.

StoryBox 2, though, was where it really became the piece of software that I really was kind of proud of. It did a lot of things that other pieces of well known writing software did, but it did some things differently.

I never added as you type spell checking, as I believe it breaks the writing flow. I also limited how flexible the formatting should be, as the app was about writing, not about making things pretty.

I moved the menu/toolbar to the bottom of the screen, for two reasons. The first was to put it close to you when you were on a laptop and were using a touch screen, but also to put it in an area of the screen we’re all used to ignoring.

It failed, though, in other ways. The first of which is that it really kind of failed to gain traction like I hoped. The week I released it, those Scrivener guys announced they were bringing Scrivener to the Windows platform. It was written in C#, which required a download of a .Net runtime for many people, at the time, which also kind of put a damper on things, I suspect. It also made it nearly impossible to port to other platforms due to the UI library I chose to use.

And, so it sat since 2016 without another update. In 2022, I took down the sales page. It still works, and you can still download it, but you could only use it for 45 non-consecutive days, and then it’s over.

Wow, I just did the math. it’s been 10 years since I released an update. Crazy. I DID make some changes that never got released. Things got in the way, new features didn’t get completed, that sort of thing. One of the changes was to the full screen mode. I wanted it to have a faster switch between modes, but I never quite got it to where it wasn’t a little buggy. Usable, but was missing features the previous version had.

So. Why am I going back through all this?

I’ve put a key on the website. You can now download the last version of StoryBox, use that key to register it, and use StoryBox for free, for as long as you want, or until Windows breaks it.

It is just, I hope, a first step. I want to release it as open source, but that UI library I mentioned makes that impossible.

Stay tuned to this space for more information coming later this summer (probably), and I’d love to tell you what it is right now, but this is not the space for that. Not yet.

Until that time, enjoy StoryBox 2 on me!