I’m here in St George, Utah now after a flight to Las Vegas (there was some concern on some persons parts as to whether I’d get stuck there) and a nice drive. I’m as excited as can be for the Writer’s Death Camp to get started tomorrow. Six days of death? I can’t wait.
Updates for StoryBox will resume when I return.
I’ve been watching the results of the first Beta of another piece of software the last couple days by a developer we’ll call BetaMaker. I even tried it out. It has problems, like every other incomplete piece of software. The sheer number of problems is larger than I expected, and I’ve been trying to understand why that would be.
Ultimately, I think it stems from using large scale development methodology with a small scale team.
Everyone who has used software on a computer for any length of time these days understands what a beta is. It’s a version of the software that is incomplete and may have bugs. Usually, a beta build comes after an alpha build that is not made public. A beta build is often the first public release of a piece of software.
Beta’s work great for large teams making large pieces of software. They generally have testing resources that test each build on large numbers of configurations of computers over the course of the development cycle. Beta’s are generally supposed to be feature complete, and close to release, but may have bugs.
I’m a lone developer. I have a limited number of fingers, eyes, and brains (some might suggest that my brains are more limited than other parts). I also have a limited number of computers. In other words, I can’t replicate the testing that goes on in a large development team employing a typical development cycle.
Developers create bugs while they are writing software. They don’t see them for any number of reasons, including poor planning, incomplete understanding of the problem space, blindness, and fatigue, among others. Bugs are easiest to fix when they are caught close to the time that they are created. The code is fresh in the developers mind and there aren’t layers and layers of other code on top of what was just done.
Since I can’t code and test at the same time, and I have other limited resources, if I followed the alpha, beta, release style of development, when I reached beta, there would have likely been a large number of bugs lurking that are hard to find because they exist in code I hadn’t looked at in six months or more. This, I think, is what’s happening to BetaMaker.
To solve that problem, I do lots of incremental releases with a limited number of changes. You get new features on a regular basis and the bugs that slip out are quickly fixed when found. The best thing is that StoryBox has been relatively stable since about three months into development, unlike BetaMaker who spent two years building something without anyone seeing it, only to find themselves snowed under with issues.
This is a bugfix release that solves some annoying issues. I recommend (and most people won’t normally do this) that you don’t switch your date display format around a bunch if you can avoid it, but if you do, it will be handled much better than in the previous version.
I swear this will be the last release for a couple weeks. I only have two days left before I go, and a lot of things to get done. I’ll see you in a couple of weeks unless I decide to blog about my trip. The goal of the trip is getting writing done on my novels, though, and not wasting time online.
OK, OK, I know. I said I wasn’t going to do anything. But I had some free time and there was this feature that I really wanted, and I thought some of you that are doing NaNoWriMo might want.
So I coded it up, and while it’s a might unpretty, I think it’s pretty cool.
Basically, there’s a Statistics item in the View menu that will bring up a page of Statistics. Right now, there is only a weekly view of your daily word counts, but I will be adding other nifty things as I come up with them.
I’m releasing it now, instead of later after it’s pretty, so that the daily stats can start being tracked. If you’ve already started a project, your first day is going to be HUGE! There’s not much I can do about that.
So, install this build BEFORE you start heavy writing on your project.
I released StoryBox 1.0.85 today, which adds the ability to export and print notes and synopsis. It also fixes a data destruction bug (doesn’t affect the actual text – just the synopsis, notes, title, and document properties) when trashing a document under certain circumstances. I highly recommend updating to this version.
I am going to be taking a break soon from updating for about the next three weeks. I will be attending David Farland’s Writers Death Camp, during the first week of November and will not have the capability to fix anything while I’m away.
I will fix any critical bugs that are found this week, but with Halloween and preparations for my trip, I won’t have much time to add features.
The first update in the new era!
I’ve added printing, storyboard background images, and a status indicator to the outline view, among other things.
You can print either single documents, or your whole project. It has the same options as the Export (minus the file format selection), however, it does not automatically print your whole story. If you want to print the whole story, select the Story in the File Drawer and then print.
The Storyboard background images can be set by right clicking on the background of the storyboard and selecting one of the three options in the context menu.
There is a “fix” or a “feature” that has been added to the version management. When you delete a version, it will now compact the file which should limit the file bloat. It will ask if you want to back up the file first, and I recommend doing that. I’ve tested it on my projects and it works, but I’m paranoid.