The True Drafting Tool Release
I nicknamed this one the true drafting tool release because this release puts Writer.app at the center (well, the center part towards the front, anyway) of a writer’s workflow.
What that means is that it’s even easier to get text into and out of Writer.app than ever before. (I resisted the urge to put an exclamation point there, I obviously need to hire some marketing staff.) Here’s what I mean:
Edit in Writer.app
For the getting text into Writer.app side of things we now have a service that’s accessible throughout the operating system. Select a bit of text in TextEdit or your web browser or mail client, go to the application menu, down to the Services menu, and you should see a new entry, Edit in Writer.app.
Choose that and you’re off and away, into Writer.app to start writing in relative peace and quiet.
Export on HGH
Now you can get that novel you’ve been working on out into a tool to finish the process, as I can’t see too many people writing an entire novel, start to publication, in Writer.app. Writer.app is great at getting that first draft done, allowing you a bit of focus on the task at hand.
Writer.app can now export to plain text, like it could before, to your pasteboard, for easy pasting into other applications, to Tinderbox, my personal favorite information management and novel-planning tool, to Microsoft Word, and to Mellel, a great Word alternative.
And then off you go!
Solitude
Despite the instructions on how to create a locked down network location, you still write in Writer.app with the network pipes open… email flowing in, browser open and at the ready in the background, iChat up and running, news feeds being sucked down by NetNewsWire or NewsFire.
Well, look, man, your novel’s just not going to get done that way.
With 1.4, Writer.app will offer to create that empty network location for you when you fire it up for the first time.
And when you’re done with Writer.app and your first draft is complete Writer.app will switch you back to your old enabling network location again, and you can feed your internet addiction.
I’m still looking for the first quote from an author who has been spared death by strangling at the hands of his or her agent thanks to this feature.