Yeah, the title says it all. From here on out, I’m going to try to give you a weekly update on StoryBox. Once I can come up with the money to license certain components I’m using, I’ll have this thing up for early sale.

So, what went in this week? Lots of little changes.

I’ve added Character, Location, and Item nodes and put them at the same level in the binder as the Story and Box of Notes. They are now primary containers for the appropriate document types. I’ve also added a context menu to the binder tree that will allow you to create new items, which are dependent upon which item in the tree you’ve selected.

I’ve added blacking out additional screens to the full screen mode for those of you that, like me, have multiple monitors. You can also now change the background color, the paper color, and the font color of full screen mode.

I’ve fixed a bunch of bugs, added a splash screen, made it store the rich text instead of plain text so you can now use bold, italics, and underlines in your text. There are now cut, copy, and paste buttons and context menu items.

I keep trying to use it to start working on this novel I want to write, but every time I sit down to do it, I find some niggling little thing I want to fix first, which ends up in a couple hours spent working on StoryBox instead of my book.

Today, in a way, is sort of a big milestone in the brand new life of StoryBox. All of the basic features are in and working. You can write a novel in it, start to finish, using the Storyboard (I’m probably using the term incorrectly here) to outline your scenes, and then using the rest of it to write. You can move scenes around, mark the various stages of completion, and even export the manuscript out to a text file.

What’s left are all the tedious things that turn a potentially good piece of software into a great piece of software. Search, crosslinks, context menus and usability features, and a host of other things that I hope will make it one of the best apps in it’s class.

In the screenshot below, you can see a few things, like the dockable multi document interface, the fact that the colors are different (themes!), Session and Project word count goals. The little scrollbar below each document window lets you zoom the text. All the side windows can be placed wherever you want, and set to auto-hide. I’ve tried to keep the UI flexible enough so that you can work the way you want to work.

I’m probably going to do these every couple of days for awhile, “these” being updates on StoryBox, as I just have to tell someone about it (someone besides Wendy – I bore her to tears with my chattering about my current projects sometimes), so you get to receive the end result of my constant need to chatter.

Over the weekend, I added mostly necessary features. You can now import from a text file (meaning you can get your current WIP into StoryBox) and export out to a textfile (meaning you can get your work OUT of StoryBox). End to end, you could actually use it to produce a project now. I added a “Help” button, window position persistance which means you can close or hide any of the information windows and it will remember where they were after restarting the app. There’s a way to toggle multiple documents on and off, so if you don’t like a bunch of tabs across the top of your window, you don’t have to have them. There are now Session and Project word count goals and progress bars. You can watch them grow while you type, which is pretty cool.

I still need to hook up a couple other interface elements, and there are a couple of different views that need to be implemented, but I’m pretty pleased with the progress. I can’t guarantee a time frame, as I still have to do other work, but if progress continues to be steady, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a pre-sale sooner rather than later.