Releasing Story Editor V1.0.0.3
As promised I would release the next version of Story Editor a week later and well a week has past. For me it was a crazy week so I had decided to do some of the programming in the week instead of the weekend and this has paid off.
So what has changed?
First of all I have decided on an extension. You can still work using the old zip files, although I recommend you start using the sez format.
Second you can now reorder chapters and scenes, by selecting the chapter or scene in the outline and then use the green buttons.
Next week I will try to make the Story Editor installable with automatic updates, so that you don't have to download the whole package again.
Here is the link to my favorite creative story writing application: Story Editor V1.0.0.3.
Story editor
I like writing stories. They are a form of entertainment to me and as such I enjoy spending my time in writing something else then code. However I have never found a tool that met my requirements. In my opinion an application for creative story writing should be focused on allowing you to write as comfortable as possible without any distraction, which often means you turn off the automatic spell-checker and more.
Now Microsoft Word would have been a great tool were it not that I need to keep track of all kinds of things in my story. I used to do this with an Excel file but that didn't work. I have tried some of the creative story writing software out there (open-source, free and commercial) but they either provided too much, miss certain features or required me to work in a way I thought was cumbersome (I don't want a pop-up when I look at details of a person).
So I have decided to write my very own story editor.
A key feature will be that it uses a dynamic data format. In most applications you can add and edit your characters but then you only a few predefined fields available, like name, birthday, bio and notes. If you are writing a deep space story which involves many alien races you would need to define that for each character in the bio. In my story editor I want to be able to just add an extra field.
Another feature I'm going to put in for certain is that everything can have transient properties, which is fancy way of saying that some properties might not last forever. In the Lord of the Rings we see that the one ring switches quite a bit from owner. Having one field to track information about the owner would be insufficient as I want to know the owner of the ring at a certain point in time. Of course, this system is a bit cumbersome when you want to keep track of the owner of the a ball in a football match. 
The first release will be when the editing of files and the outline editor fully works.
The programmer IDE
Everyone in the game industry knows the console wars (also because it is a recurring war ) but not many know about the editor war. The editor war was a war that played between two major editors (mostly available on Linux) which were vi and Emacs.
When I look at how code is written I always find myself a bit annoyed as the IDE (Integrated development environment) is basically nothing more than notepad with some extra features. Nothing wrong with notepad or the many IDE’s out there.
But I have always thought that code has one major weakness: Code is always written in a linear fashion. This is not inherent to only code, but a facet of how language works. In the majority of the languages we write from left to right and then from top to bottom. Some languages write in a different order, but always in one direction and then in the other.
I have always wondered why this has to be. Ok, I admit the fact that code is often a language (Like for example C++) but most languages have features like branching (if-else for example), and sub functions.
Recently I came across “Code Bubbles” and honestly I love it, it’s because I’m not a Java programmer pure sang (I did Java a long time ago), but this wants to me to make Java my primary language. Anyway here is a screenshot which demonstrates and I think any developer would applaud this.