My day job crisis is finally slowing down, and I’ve manage to squeeze out a few hours for StoryBox. Fixed a couple bugs, and added some additional export options, and spent a few hours trying to make the rtf export correctly merge documents so that the formatting (bold, italic, etc..) doesn’t get lost, but for some reason, it gets lost if I merge two documents together. Yay for bugs in components I didn’t write!

I’m really really sorry for the delay between the last update and this one, but there literally was no time. I couldn’t even finish my NaNo novel. I heard a couple grumblings that maybe I’d gone away, never to return, and that SB was “dead”. That is absolutely not the case. I’m completely committed to supporting StoryBox for the long haul. I’m approaching the point where the really easy fixes and changes are done, and only hard stuff remains. In software development, typically the first 90% of the features take up only about half the development time. And I think that’s where I’m at now. I’ve got the first 90% done. Now, it’s time for polish and refinement, and that’s probably going to take another three months or so. You won’t see any huge changes between now and then, I suspect, but there will be lots of difficult, minor looking changes (like the rtf export issue – I think I’m going to have to write my own rtf library… boo! hiss!).

Drag and Drop index cards! Yes, now you can drag your index cards from one spot to another to reorder them. It’s not, perhaps, as smooth as it will be after years of refinement, but it works.

Also in this build, I removed Session word counts and replaced them with “Daily” word counts. I’m a little worried about this one, really, about if there are some of you that actually would prefer a session word count over a daily word count.  Personally, I got annoyed that the session word count would reset every time I closed StoryBox because sometimes, well, sometimes I closed it on accident, or I have to do multiple sessions in a day to get my target. If you want session word counts back, I can put them back in (in addition to the daily wc), just let me know. One other little tidbit about the daily word count. It does not reset until you close the project for those of you that start your writing at 11pm and write til 1am. Your daily wordcount won’t reset on you in the middle of your session.

Oh yeah, if you have documents open when you close a project, when you reopen the project, it will now reopen the set of documents you had open when you closed it.

There are a couple other additions, too – read the release notes on the download page for more information on them.

0.0.42 is up, but it’s mostly some minor changes. A couple of bug fixes for some annoying things. Updates probably will start to slow down here soon, with NaNoWriMo starting in three days and the major features completed, if not yet polished. There are still minor things I’m going to add, and I’m going to leave the early adopter pricing up until at least the end of NaNo, even if I hit 1.0 before then. I don’t think StoryBox will be 1.0 before then, but stranger things have happened. In any case, I’m committing to $25 for another month, at least.

Here are some things that I’m going to be working on that I expect to be in v1.0.

• Bullets
• Line spacing
• Export to manuscript format
• Export of specific document trees (so you can export your entire project, notes included)

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.