Story Editor V1.0.0.5 (Export and printing)
A week has passed so I'm releasing another version of my favorite story writer solution: Story Editor.
So what is added in this version?
- Exporting to multiple file types is now supported. Think PDF, docx, html, rtf, txt and a few others.
- The application now has print and print preview capabilities.
Because the previous version implemented update detection you don't even download the installer, or if you want to use it, you can download it from here.
The next version will implement a complete new feature, which is the creation of contexts. Explaining what "contexts" are is a bit hard, but basically you can create your own database. For the non-technical skilled that means that you can create the context "character" in which you say that every character has a name, age, et cetera. This was actually the primary reason for me to create Story Editor as some story editors already allow this but only for a few contexts like character, item, location. But what if you are writing a space opera and you want to keep track of the various spaceships? You don’t want to store that in "character" or "location".
Well, that is where context comes in to play. Just create a context, design what the context should contain and start filling in.
I hope that I can implement the most basic feature in a single day (I have only 8 hours available for story editor) but otherwise this functionality will take a bit longer.
Anyway enjoy the latest release and if you encounter any problems, please let me know.
Story Editor v 1.0.0.4 (installer and auto-update)
It took longer than I had hoped, but the very first version of Story Editor, my favorite creative story writing software, now has an installer. No longer you will need to move around files. Just launch the installer and you are set to go.
I have also spend a bit of time to ensure that you don't need to worry if you have the latest version, because Story Editor will check if there is a new release for you. Nothing too intrusive, of course, because you are writing and you don't want to grab the mouse to click away an annoying "please restart your system" while you are writing.
When you see this at the bottom, just click on it and it will ask if you want the update, say yes and while it is being downloaded you can continue writing.
Once the download is complete, hit it again and the new version will be installed.
So what will be in the next version? Well, I'm going a bit back to add some more text editing functionality and also exporting/printing.
Don't worry about checking the website or reading my blog. From now on you will be notified 
Next version of Story editor
Quite a productive night, if I may say so.
Currently the new features are already worthy of a new release. It has an installer, it has file association and an update checker. Yep, now you can ignore my blog and still have the latest version of Story Editor.
However I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that you will have to wait untill it has been released. The good news is this release will most likely be done before the weekend. The reason for the delay is because a) it's late and b) I want to test the downloading mechanisme. Oh and of course, it needs to alert you when a new version is availabel. So I still got my work cut out for me for this week.
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.
Releasing first version of Story Editor
As you can read from the title, I'm releasing the very first version of story editor. If it's not working please let me know.
You can download Story Editor for free from here.
Just extract it where you want it and run StoryEditor. The application should explain itself but if you really need some guidance, just press ctrl+O and open "tutorial story" and if you wonder if you should open the zip file or not, then yes, it is the zip file. If have not yet decided on a extension, so until then it will remain to be zip file. Anyway the tutorial should explain a few things.
For now I'm going to bed and get some of those fairly rare Zzz's.
UPDATE: There has already been a bug found. If you remove anything but the last scene then the scene that is selected after that will contain what was in the old scene. So don't press remove: I will have this fixed tomorrow.
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.
Brick4 in week 10
Well, the major glitches in the building creation system are finished. The graphics also look nice now. Anyway a picture says more than a thousand words in this case.
Brick3 has become Brick4
Brick3, my graduation project, will be no longer developed and instead I will be working on Brick4.
The reason I abandon Brick3 is because the system has become too hard to maintain and there are too many pieces of legacy code around for me to quickly improve it. On top of that Brick3 was the first incarnation of the Brick project series in 3D with some advanced features, the new way of memory management (a 37 MB instead of 2 GB). So I had expected I would need to rewrite it, even though I wanted to avoid it.
Brick4 will have unlike its predecessor cleaner code a new way to some things (XML instead of custom file formats) and it will make heavy use of the command and strategy patterns. This will allow me to developer faster and safer in the long run, although I fear that rewriting the application will have an heavy cost and that any advantage I gain will be lost to that.
The good is that this will allow me to revisit some off the old features and make some notes and see if I can improve it.
If I’m lucky everything should be rewritten at the end of this week and with even some more luck I will also have implemented a new feature. Guess time will tell.