Thursday 28 October 2004

Pic of the day: "I just called to say x=1/2y^2." Another episode with Cecilie the supergirl from Sims2. This entry may not be much more personal, but there you have me. Even the topics change randomly here at the Chaos Node.

Power Writer revisited

Half a month ago, I wrote about a new word processor for creative writers, called "Power Writer". I kinda fell in love with it, or at least the concept. A full- featured word processor, but without the business-oriented stuff with clip-art and pie charts. Instead it had built-in features to keep track of all your characters, notes and the progress of the story. Backstory, chapter hooks, all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes when you write. Or ought to go on behind the scenes. Often it is all in the author's head (or sometimes on post-it notes, I hear ... I prefer Notepad myself). And sometimes it is even in the author's subconscious.

I have tentatively come to believe that much of this stuff will be more useful in my subconscious than categorized in this program. As I said, this is the program if you suffer from Writer's Block, because it lets you keep writing. If you are stuck in one chapter, you can work on another; keeping track of story progress is a snap. If you are stuck everywhere, you can work on meta-stuff like the eye color of all your characters and their greatest failure in life so far. You can always keep writing.

But that is not really my problem. My hands cannot type as much as my brain wants anyway. And this program does not really facilitate data input for the almost disabled. When I try to dictate into it using Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition, it responds somewhat sluggishly. But when I need to correct the last sentence – which is half the time or more, although the correct meaning can often be found listed as an alternative – the program seems to backspace through the entire statement, then type it all over again. It takes plenty of time during which it is easy to get distracted and lose the flow of the story.

Even when typing, I would prefer OpenOffice.org, which has a decent auto- complete and is more on spot when spell-checking. They both can spell- check while you type, but OO.o has a very reliable dictionary, while PowerWriter seems more iffy. Goodbye, for instance, is not an option; good-by is. That's not how I want it.

Two times out of the five I have test-run it, it managed to muck up most of my plot points. These are the next sub-division under chapter, typically a viewpoint scene is one plot point if you have multiple characters, or a section that is separated by a jump in time. "The next morning" signifies a new plot point, for instance. Well, one of the great things about this program is that it lets you put invisible headers to your plot points. Not invisible to you but they are not printed out with the manuscript. You can also move about plot points as a unit, although I would not recommend it unless you re-read it in context to see that it fits into its new neighborhood. (Not good to refer to things that haven't happened yet, for instance.) Anyway, since this is a big selling point, you should not watch the plot point headers get converted to plain text for no obvious reason, and the program making it hard for you to create new plot points from there on. (Although you can save frequently and just reload if it bugs out.)

You have to expect better from a word processor so expensive that they are ashamed to list its price on their web site. I have not found the price at all, but another website (StoryMind) claims to sell it for a hundred bucks while the list price is 160. I don't know whether StoryMind is legit or a bunch of pirates, but I know that I won't pay $160 for PowerWriter. It is a good idea, but not quite bug-free, and not what I really need for now. Perhaps another year, if it improves. At the very least, processor speeds are likely to improve, so the sluggishness during dictation may fade over time. Of course, time is not something we can take for granted, but in this case it is the only recourse I can think of.

***

I think this is a fair verdict. The program is exceedingly cute and exciting to use, but it distracts me, it is too slow for dictation, spell checker needs work, and it has a serious bug that compromises a main feature.