All posts by mhanlon

Writing

The Red Room

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Sure, it sounds like something I remember seeing in Amsterdam, but it’s not. I swear.

I’ve just been accepted as an author at the Red Room (http://www.redroom.com) – My Author Page.

I will attempt to blog over there (I’m not a huge fan of writing blog posts on the web, and they offer no integration with clients like ecto, just yet), but it’s a pretty good site for authors to plug their works, provide information to fans.

And if you’re not into my writing, there are plenty of much more well established writers on there: Amy Tan, Salman Rushdie, Khaled Hosseini (my new nemesis, I’ve decided), Maya Angelou, to name a few.

To celebrate, I was up at a Hosseini-esque 6am to get in a little work on a short story or two.

QI Software

Writer.app Reviews

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Okay, so most of these aren’t articles/reviews dedicated solely to Writer.app (for shame, for shame!), but we get a little mention (including… well, let’s see the commentary below, on a per article basis):

  • Writer.app – a Distraction Free Word Processor for the Mac – This one is solely about Writer.app, which I thought was nice. Eric gets through most of the major features and also gets that it’s a drafting tool, more than a polished word processor. Well worth a read.
  • Top Ten Writing Programs for the MAC – We make an honorable mention, but the one really, and I mean really weird thing about this review is that it mentions Blockwriter, Khoi Vinh’s original website discussing a few ideas we implemented for Writer.app… and, umm, tells you to give it a try. When, umm, you can’t, like, download it. Or anything. And we’re referred to as Blockwriter’s more spartan sibling. Which is… well. Let’s just say I think we should get an award for being more spartan than something that doesn’t actually exist.
  • The Black Screen of Life – This one is largely about WriteRoom (an app I have no particular desire to use – the full screen stuff is nice, but I hate the default color scheme, and if I wanted to mess around with preferences and layout I’m sure I’d be happier with it… and less productive, as a writer), but Writer.app does get a (favorable) mention, so there.
  • How to Write Without Distractions – Another one about focusing on writing. Gives a big mention to WriteRoom and one tiny little one to our dear, dear Writer.app.
  • Writer.app – Der Mac als Schreibmaschine – This one is more concerned with our license than anything, but says they like it (they like it, they really do!) in the end. In German. So I have no idea, really, if that’s all true.
  • Of course, one of my favorite reviews is this old blog post from Paragraph NY: Turn Your Mac into a Smith-Corona

Not bad.

QI Software

Writer.app 1.4 – The True Drafting Tool Release

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Writer.app:

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:

Continue reading Writer.app 1.4 – The True Drafting Tool Release →

QI Software, Writing

One Dot Three Dot Two!

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After literally years in development, Writer.app has hit that all-important 1.3.2. 1.3.2!

In dog years, that’s a lotta years.

At any rate, there are a few handy new features in 1.3.2:

  • There is a new copy command to copy the text of your document without struck text to the pasteboard. You do not need to have the text selected to copy it.
  • If you don’t have a lock-down location set, you can avoid seeing the message every single time you launch the app.
  • There is, at long last, a new icon! It’s a Christmas Miracle! (Thanks to Brian Dote at http://www.dotestudios.com/)

And here it is, a first peek at the absolute best feature of this release:

Writer-App-Logo-V3A

And thus ends the shortlived career of the desk L and I share (and some random papers with superimposed text) as an icon. Let the healing begin.

QI Software, Sane Magazine

Find By Content No More

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I don’t know if the Sane main issue writer is just really old (well, it is… 2001 or so, which is old, in software terms, I suppose), but this little Cocoa app that drives Sane Magazine each week (umm… except for the last two, since we’ve been on… hiatus/vacation), needed a little upgrade recently. But moving it to Leopard the other day I noticed that it still used Find By Content’s FBCSummarizeCFString() function… which was new as of 10.2 and deprecated as of 10.4 (doh). This was for the handy dandy summary of the latest issue we produce. A little known, little used feature, but there it is. At any rate, to get our summarization up to speed, it just took a little digging and a tiny little bit of work.

So I figured I’d write about the quick and easy fix, since it took me a few minutes of digging to find the replacement function to use: you need to look into Search Kit.

A combo of SKSummaryCreateWithString to get an SKSummaryRef and SKSummaryCopySentenceSummaryString on that with the number of sentences you want to limit it to gets you back to where we were with FBCSummarizeCFString.

CFStringRef myTextString = CFStringCreateCopy(NULL, (CFStringRef)[[self mainText] string]);
CFStringRef mySummaryString;
UInt32 numOfSentences = 2;

SKSummaryRef summaryRef = SKSummaryCreateWithString(myTextString);

mySummaryString = SKSummaryCopySentenceSummaryString(summaryRef, numOfSentences);

Enjoy.