Saturday 28 October 2006

Pic of the day: It will make your laptop sizzle! Actually it may be a bit slow on older laptops. Also, it might make you sizzle too, and not necessarily with creativity only.

Power Writer re-re-visited

I could not hold my hands off, despite my own negative review two years ago, and several other negative reviews online. Because, at the heart of it, Power Writer is cool. The way it integrates worldbuilding and the actual writing in one environment, letting you write "out of character" notes either embedded in the text or in designated places in the margins, where they associate with characters or events. I just know Piers Anthony would have loved these features. (He has written in great detail on how he makes his novels, and it included always writing, even if it was ideas for a completely different novel. Keep writing, and your mind will eventually return to your work in progress.) It would be hard to get writer's block with this program for sure. If your head runs dry, the program will prompt you with questions.

Unfortunately, the program fails on an entirely different front, namely technical. Admittedly I only have the free demo version. Disturbingly, it seems to be the same as two years ago. This is dubious when it comes to software today. Especially when the software from two years ago was buggy. It was, and it still is.

The good news is that the newest generation of computers have eliminated the speed problem while dictating. It was after all just a question of processing power. So dictating to the program is now far more convenient than it was. Unfortunately, it still bugs up if you try to correct something you have dictated. In fact, this may cause entire entries of text to disappear. So don't use it unless you already have trained the dictation software to the point of near perfection, or at least correct it manually. (Which is a bad idea ... the speech recognition software will remember what it did and that you did not protest, and will be more likely to make that error again in the future!)

The other bugs also seem to remain, at least enough of them that I bowed out after the first hour. This is a shame - if they had used those two years to fix the bugs, even if they added nothing, it would have been an awesome writing tool that would have made creative writing more fun and productive.

Better luck some other year?