iMac Pr0n Blog - WriteRoom, Jer's Novel Writer, Scrivener

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WriteRoom, Jer's Novel Writer, Scrivener

Thursday, January 4, 2007

# Macworld - Macworld Expo Blog will keep you up-to-date on the happenings of next week's yearly conference in San Francisco. Starts Tuesday with a two hour presentation from Steve Jobs and goes through Friday. [macworld]

# Hog Bay Software - WriteRoom is an uncluttered word processor. The default is green-on-black full-screen editing, with no visible menu or scroll bar. You move the mouse cursor to the top of the screen to reveal the menu bar, to the right side to reveal the scroll bar, or to the bottom to reveal the word count. You can change the colors and whether the ruler shows by default. Lets you focus on your text and only your text. There's a plug-in that makes it easy to use WriteRoom to edit text in other applications. Saves formatted documents as Rich Text (RTF), HTML, Word, or Word XML. Saves plain text documents in a number of different character sets. $25, though the unregistered version appears to be full-featured costing only a start-up tickler dialog. Most of my typing is program text, for which Emacs is indispensible, but if I wrote essays for a living, this would be helpful. [nonstopmac]

# Jerry Seeger - Jer's Novel Writer is another new word processor with features to help creative writing of book-sized projects. Margin notes, automatic outline, database, multiple printing formats, full-screen mode. $30, but the beta is usable for free, accumulating nag points the more you use it without getting a registration key. [devcenter]

# Literature and Latte - Scrivener "is a project management tool for writers that acts like your own little writing shed at the bottom of the garden, where you have cork notice-boards, ring-binders, photos, clippings paperclipped to jottings, notebooks and reams of typewritten pages piling up - along with a secretary who keeps it all in neat piles and uses his speed-reading skills to find what you need as soon as you need it." Another new writing tool. A bit more professional-looking than Jer's Novel Writer, but differently organized. I downloaded Scrivener Gold, the free version. You can find the latest 1.0 beta in the beta testing forum. Beta 5 was posted on December 10. [devcenter]

# Ohman Chad Blog - Clean Your Mighty Mouse! - if your Mighty Mouse stops scrolling down, this may allow you to make it work again. So far, I've had luck with pressing down hard while scrolling, which dislodges whatever little piece of gunk gets stuck in there. [nonstopmac]