Best writing software...

Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Sep 26, 2007 at 09:21 PM

SuperNoteCard’s outlining is far less powerful than ndxcards, at least it seems on casual inspection of SuperNotecard. There appear to be only two levels of hierarchy, which is probably fine for fiction. Or maybe not; I have never written any fiction since grade school.

A writing environment is probably the most subjective of software choices .I could never live with SuperNoteCard, because of the paltry outlining. To me a writing environment means first a powerful outliner. I collect information in OneNote; outline and brainstorm in MindGenius; link topics to the information in OneNote with MindGenius attach function and OneNote’s paragraph hyperlinks—that is, creating the attachments in MindGenius. Then I do a first draft, using the “Notes” sections in MG, hoisted to the last topical node in each branch. (I have up to four topical levels, followed by sometimes many levels of associative notes. Then I export to Word, where I turn topical words into full-sentence headings and do extensive revisions to the body text.

I don’t agree that Windows has no powerful outliners, but the difference is partly semantic. I don’t know how much of it is just semantic. I think BrainStorm is more powerful than anything I’ve seen produced for the Macintosh. For one thing, nothing else that I know of has BrainStorm’s order mark and gather (my jargon, not BrainStorm’s). To me this is a rare example of inventing a core outlining function.

(Brainstorm’s weakness in development, it seems to me, is a somewhat rigid insistence on working within the present core infrastructure. An example is the insistence is plain text, although I consider that choice defensible, even correct, for other reasons. What I think BrainStorm really needs is some mechanism for quickly creating a structure of multiple windows, a deficiency that seems incompletely answered by saving a set of multiple windows, although maybe I haven’t gotten the hang of how to deploy that feature effectively.)

tshare wrote:
>ndxCards is worth mentioning. It seems amazingly flexible.