Neo – Desired Word Processor for Authors
hughhowey.com
hughhowey.com
He kinda lost me at the idea of navigating a WIP using page thumbnails on the left. (a) That's so 1988 (Clive Sinclair, I'm thinking of you and your Pipedream here), and (b) the page is not the appropriate document element for navigation — scenes can be as short as a sentence or almost as long as a chapter, and scenes are how I structure prose fiction. Indeed, a manuscript page bears no real relationship to a published paper book page, or an ebook equivalent.
Finally, as functional requirements go this is, shall we say, less than ideal: but let's not go there.
Check out Granthika, a semantic novel editor with automatic error checking for timeline and character errors: http://granthika.co
In progress, pre-beta, by a friend and novelist.
I'm all for innovation which is why I stopped reading here.
However I would personally think that should just be a secondary view available when doing a late pass going over a book, not a normal way to see things while writing.
My wild theory is that the reading experience, or RX if you will permit my being cute, is going to become An Official Thing in the ebook era, especially as authors play with the different narrative structures theoretically unleashed by the medium.
Totally agree with your comment about the scene as the atomic unit of the novel, however. Or at least the molecular unit, if you consider the beat to be the atom.
There may be even bored programmers who read this on HN and have already started building it.
It would be interesting to see how many changes were made to that spec by the end of the development process.
The trickiest part to me is the idea that regardless of what computer you put the USB stick in, it just immediately loads the program. Can you even really be sure that will happen if you restrict it to the last few versions of Windows?
So that right there is one of the most challenging aspects of software development -- when a big part of the concept is something that either isn't actually feasible as stated or you are not sure is possible. Which is really common because most projects are not driven by programmers but by non-technical people.
What it seems like most programmers will do is to try to find a clever way to gloss-over this 'little detail' about how they don't know how to be sure that a program will immediately open with no effort once the USB stick is inserted. The issue with that is, if they leave it a little ambiguous, and then it turns out that whoops, it never opens on his Macbook or requires him to manually launch it.. then his super-easy program is not nearly as simple as he imagined.. if the instant launch was a big part of it. Then the average programmer would just say "well, I told you I wasn't super sure that it would work exactly as you liked" -- when really he barely mentioned it and the guy didn't believe him.
Maybe some programmers are good at handling this -- I think you really need to find a slick way to convince the guy that he never really needed or wanted that instant open USB thing, or that having to double click after it was inserted is exactly the same. Kind of about psychology as much as anything.
if a single double click was allowed, it's feasible but requires choosing a launcher/file for the os
It's a textbook example of an x-y problem. He wants to be able to work anywhere. He thinks the right way to do that is a USB drive. The actual right way to do it is as a web app.
We could try to simplify the problem with an assumption, like only run the software one device (instead of only one USB stick), but you've created new limitations to how they work. Maybe they get by with their mini laptop in the cabin, but they prefer a different computer at home. The USB works better with the multiple locations and, in theory, devices, until you get to the multiple OS (and releases) problem discussed in the parent comment.
So while it's not the job of the product owner to use the solution presented, it is their job to think about why that solution was suggested, and run their own proposed solutions through those reasons.
If you tell the customer, "computers don't automatically run applications on USB sticks because then they would get hacked," and the customer doesn't understand, then run away!
Otherwise, this is a situation where the customer needs to understand the tradeoffs among a web application, desktop application, and tablet application. If a desktop application is preferred, then there are very significant tradeoffs with applications that can run off of USB sticks, versus tiny installers that will only run on a recent version of Windows, versus an installer that will work on Windows XP.
This is also a situation where a statement like, "an application that runs off of a USB stick is very challenging, and is limited on what it can run on. This would be a major distraction. Can we limit this to Windows 7 and Windows 10 with recent updates? Otherwise, we can put an installer on a USB stick, but it might be very large in order to support older windows without updates. Would a web-based application be better? You can run them in full-screen mode."
Then again, he has tried all of the editors out there, and I'm just an Emacs geek :)
Yeah, you could emacs, or whatever. Or a regular human person could just use this app and really enjoy the User Experience out of the box without any fuss.
I also like how it doesn't make me think about formatting, layout, pages and whatnot. It's just a single digital papyrus scroll. If I need to store separate notes about the text, than I put the text under its own section, and make another section named notes, and write it there.
(defun gk-maybe-expand-abbrev-or-space ()
(interactive)
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(insert " ")))er.. and why shouldn't they be? I want all the features I want, and they are equally important, unless they are mutually exclusive and I'm forced to choose between one or the other.
In the case you point out, indentation isn't "purely cosmetic" and enhances usability, and in any case, cosmetics and usability aren't mutually exclusive so one can desire both.
Response:
"I am a writer - fiction and non-fiction.
I haven't found good software to keep my notes, sentences, ideas, etc. in a way that helps me easily incorporate them into the project I am working on.
Oftentimes, I will come up with a sentence or a paragraph that I want to put in my story at a later time. It's just a moment - an idea- that comes up that I want to save for later use. Well, guess what, these ideas start piling up and I could have a huge pile of sentences/paragraphs that I will use to build my story. But hey, I don't know just yet where I want to place them to tell the most effective story.
I want a section in the particular file I am working on where I can keep these ideas instead of having a whole separate "ideas" file or worse, scribbled on a paper napkin.
I'd like to be able to easily drag and drop that paragraph/sentence from my ideas section right into my story without having to do the annoying cut and paste or worse, figuring out what file I saved that great sentence in.
I'd pay $130+ for it."
I use a small chromebook as a primary workstation for its light form factor and ARM's low power usage/long battery life. So if it's Mac/Windows or closed source without an ARM binary, I can't use it.
1. dragging/pasting ideas from an idea section directly into a writing program. This is where s/he's sitting comfortably somewhere actually working.
2. Scribbling ideas "on the fly" - which can happen anywhere (on the bus, walking down the street, etc..)
For the second, I like simplenote[0] and their tagging feature. Lots of support for various OSes. On 32-bit LinuxMint, I'm using nvPY[1] since simplenote doesn't have a 32-bit deb.
In order to solve both problems, the writing program could support something like simplenote via plugin. This way s/he gets their left-hand, drag/paste panel.
Note: also like https://standardnotes.org/ but could not get it to run on my older phone, no 32-bit linux support.
I'm thinking of writing a solution (or parts of one).
In the meantime: Index cards. Closing in on 10k of those.
I wonder if there could be a one-thing-well app made for just handling that and relegating longer-form writing to the user's word processor of choice.
On the downside, once you get past a certain point and get into editing and collaboration, you pretty much have to throw all that away and switch tools.
I'd say that when someone comes to the table with markdown support, a UI that matches the times, a better format, and strap Pandoc on top of it, you'd see a true competitor to Scrivener.
Scrivener satisfies the market but I think a straight up clone with a few changes and a few extra features could easily take over. Not one of these alternatives that keep trying out something "new".
I want to like Scrivener but it's not quite the right fit. I'm glad it exists though - this is a space ripe for exploration.
Pen and paper still are best for my initial creative stage.
I'm genuinely delighted to see authors stepping into the app production space. I'm surprised more don't do it. I expected Charlie Stross to have his own flavour of Linux by now.
I hope Hugh can pull this off.
Edit: forgot shameless plug: http://getpoe.com, Windows 8/10 only at the mo, sorry.
I have considered the alternatives, but I have a full time job, a family, and I'm also trying to write several novels so I don't have time to start from scratch in python or java.
Well... why? I get, like, macOS requiring a Mac for Xcode to ship an .app bundle. But wha'bout that Linux?
Poe was created because back in 2012 when I upgraded to Windows 8, there were no distraction free / focus writing apps in the store, and none of the existing ones (like the stupendous writemonkey) had a fullscreen mode that would play nice with Windows 8's app switching. This wasn't any fault of the developers of those apps - MS gave switching priority to 'metro' apps, so anything that was win32/64 was a second-citizen (of course this changed with 10, but at the time they were committed). I was learning how to write store apps, I wanted a writing app on my surface. I saw an opening, and I took it. Everything I've done since has been built upon that first app.
Fast forward five years and I have lots of users who like the app (40k or something), but all my code is JS, built upon the Windows UWP/JS stack. It's what I know best.
I really do want to build an app for Linux, and for macOS. I have bad days where I'm totally put off, because there are some fantastic writing apps out there already that do so much more than Poe can (FocusWriter, for example, does everything Poe does and is already cross-platform, and has features that I can only dream of).
But on good days, I feel like maybe having a choice of apps is a good thing, and maybe there are things about Poe that people like over other apps, and maybe the good people of linux and macOS might actually use it. On those good days, I continue my work on porting to Electron as a cross-platform MVP. I know some people won't like that, but I am time limited, as I pointed out in another comment. This is the only way I'll have time to do it short of quitting my full-time job, abandoning my in-progress novels and selling my family on ebay.
Heck, there are several different programs named neo on the first page of google search results for "neo editor"!
I've often had the itch to create tooling to automate tasks. Later deciding to make it more generic and open source it. I have such a time trying to give them names. Internal tooling, fine, just name it what it does and move on. Public releases though... Oy, I'm sweating just thinking about it.
While I agree, the name Neo is crap, unfortunately.
It's like how many things are named Fuse or Fusion in open source, or new projects that start up with names that are clearly already dominated by something else. It just doesn't work, doesn't do anyone any good in the long run.
It's worth it to go back to the drawing board for a minute, and just come up with a name. Especially since so much thought and care has gone in to the rest of the app so far. Calling it Neo works like an internal project name, just to fill in the blank and get something started. But as a name that can ship, Neo is never going to work.
Unless it does, and becomes the new defacto Neo. Which could happen. But it's a pipe dream. I think it's better to start off on the right foot with a good name.
i understand the drive to flatten out the learning curve of software for non-software-people. most of these options could be covered quickly with an author oriented LaTeX frontend, and i venture to guess that would be easier to develop. It already has an entire document class for books, covering frontmatter, mainmatter, backmatter, chapters, table of contents, headers footers, bibliography, etc. all that is needed is a author friendly GUI. file management, tabs, etc would then be the main part of the NEO ecosystem. One just has to supplement with templates and never mess with actual document creation.
I've bought Kindle books from Amazon that had 5 OCR errors per page.
Wild guess: pantser novelists are more descriptive (a lot of ink spilled on clothing) while plotters have much more characters and intrigue?
I keep trying to write something using composites of people I know as characters, but this ensures I don't get details as hair color right.
> A pantser is someone who, “flies by the seat of their pants,” meaning they don't plan out anything, or plan very little. Some people, like me, call themselves “plantsers,” which means they're in a little of both.
> Simply put, a plotter is someone who plans out their novel before they write it.
So this is a genuine question - why did you ask this here instead of doing a search? You typed your question and random speculation into the comment/reply box, while you could just as easily - even more easily - typed your question into the search box.
So there must be a reason - why not do the search?
Or, sometimes, people just want to interact with a human. You know, converse. We're a peer group, right? We're here to discuss things. Op is discussing. If the entire group deemed it too obvious a question to merit replying, no-one would have replied.
Further, this question and answer is now available to Google to crawl, store, and return for future searchers. How did Google get all the answers that are available in the first place? Someone typed a question, and someone else answered it.
Finally, I Googled _your_ question and came up with this answer:
"Because receiving a personalized response is far more gratifying than reading a Wikipedia page. It makes you feel at the very least a connection to another human being which other than " leaving a footprint " is mans greatest desire in life."
Basic web searches note the expression "write by the seat of your pants", which in turn is inspired by "fly by the seat of your pants". That's a completely mystifying expression to me.
On the other hand, your answer is an impressive feat of projection: the armchair psychology you invoke to explain why someone would do something you don't understand at first is clearly an explanation for why you would choose to type out an off-topic demonstration of your grasp of basic internet skills.
It must be, following your sample of psychological theory, really satisfying to plant some kind of flag saying "I know how to Google". In a forum called "Hacker News" no less.
I know it's pleasant to feel superior to other people, but this particular claim-to-superiority is both incredibly low-(intellectual)-effort and trying-too-hard. That's not s good look on anyone.
In case you haven't seen LMGTFY before: http://bfy.tw/DXEk
I've heard things like being able to do outlines or charts or whatever. But those things seem to lend themselves better to handwritten notes or hand-drawn diagrams.
(the author of this piece, i mean)
While Scrivener doesn't really emphasize page-by-page thumbnails as a navigation tool (what does, aside from Word or Pages, these days?) it just about throws the kitchen sink at the problem of how to structure a long compound document, with corkboard, outliner, and multi-select scrolling subdocument views of a project (in the current version: the next release is considerably more powerful).
I've tried various other tools (diagramming, Gantt charts, brainstorming tools, note taking tools...) and they didn't really do it for me.
If such a tool existed for iPad (I've searched and come up blank), I would buy it in an instant (ok ok price dependent, but I'd be very interested). I'd almost build it myself, but.. who has the time?
Even syncs with Scrivener.
There are a few bugs (it reordered my chapters when I marked a chapter as edit-complete the first time. That obviously shouldn't happen).
Overall it seems like a big step up compared to Word. It can't quite keep up with the feature set of scrivener, but in exchange it has a much more approachable and clutter-free interface, much closer to the idea of distraction-free writing.
The quality of the exports is not that great. The HTML looks good for printing, but is a pain to read on screen. The epub looks good, except that it doesn't display chapter headings. The docx has 8 newlines between paragraphs when I open it in OpenOffice. I don't have a MS Word on hand right now to check whose fault that is, but it's unfortunate since I would probably go via docx to pdf.
If there was something as powerful as Duden Korrektor for Emacs, I'd definitely prefer that, though.
We've found this to be a great way to keep yourself organized and to make use of all the notes about characters, locations, events, etc. that build up over time.
This doesn't mean that the actual writing view has to be cluttered, but it's available when you need it. And we agree with the people here who like working with their chapters as a tree :-)
I wonder if he's ever considered working on an iPad with a keyboard. Since the 10.5" iPad came out, I've been doing just that and it's by far my favorite device to work on. Amazing battery life, super portable, fast, and focused.