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WriteMapper 4 is out for Mac and Windows
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 13, 2023 at 12:07 PM
It’s an easy app to underestimate – the improved mindmapping options alone are interesting, and the full Document View (which is also editable) is extremely useful.
There are niggles: you can’t select multiple nodes, for instance, which means you have to move/copy/delete mindmap nodes individually. The same applies in Document View – you can only select the contents of one node at a time, you can’t select text across multiple nodes.
I’ve suggested the following to the developer (Guan):
1) Smart punctuation! (By which I mean, curly apostrophes, quotation marks etc.)
2) A search and replace function would be very nice! (Not least to resolve the smart punctuation issue noted above)
3) It would be great if one could emulate Ulysses, Scrivener etc. by viewing a selected node plus subnodes in the mindmap as a contiguous document, rather than having to view the entire document in one go. To explain further: the “Document View” is great, but if you could select a node (e.g. “Tune your setup” in your help file) and then view that node plus all its subnodes in, as it were, a “sub-Document View”, that would be extremely helpful, especially when dealing with very large documents.
4) Similarly, it would be great if one could select multiple nodes in the mindmap using e.g. Cmd (or Ctrl in Windows)/Shift + click. And then move, delete, copy them all together, rather than one by one.
5) A small extra suggestion: why not put a magnifying glass icon in the toolbar for Quick Search (eventually maybe for Quick Search & Replace)? Just for the sake of completeness ;-)
The price is fairly robust, but not bad compared to many other writing apps. I’d agree that Scrivener is a better bargain (and also much more powerful), but I like the WriteMapper model, I must say. I also like the broad range of export options, although the results aren’t always exactly elegant.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 13, 2023 at 02:19 PM
Hm, talking about writing apps, this is an intriguing announcement by Scrivener:
“Before the end of 2024, we’ll be launching a new writing app on macOS, Windows and iOS that will join Scrivener and Scapple in our family of writing apps. We’re now looking for beta testers.”
https://www.literatureandlatte.com/latest/help-us-test-our-new-writing-app
Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 13, 2023 at 02:29 PM
They have enough beta testers for the time being, but it all looks rather exciting. And cross-platform too (come on, Jesse, this is essentially what Bike is about, too, and you’ve already developed a sensational app. Now iOS beckons!)
Posted by Dormouse
Dec 13, 2023 at 09:22 PM
MadaboutDana wrote:
>
>The price is fairly robust, but not bad compared to many other writing
>apps.
Which writing apps do you think its pricing compares well to?
I think it’s far more expensive than all the most popular competitors:
Word365 (as part of Office) comes with all the other apps and 1TB cloud on 5 devices. About the same price (albeit for a year) but for 5 devices.
Ulysses is $40 a year for unlimited devices
For free are Docs, LibreOffice, SmartEdit Writer, Obsidian, yWriter etc etc.
Dabble is more expensive - but very well designed for its particular niche. And the popular screenwriting programs are more expensive.
And for most niches I can think of WriteMapper fails on some required features, never mind nice to have.
A large % of fiction writers expect first line indent. Academics, and many journalists, require management of sources.
And it is totally confused about lines and paragraphs.
It interprets markdown lines as paragraphs. But new lines are simply added to the end of the paragraph - it doesn’t understand that it’s new line inside a paragraph.
Does better with docx
But it doesn’t understand new lines internally either. They become separate paragraphs when exported to docx.
Markdown’s assumption, taken from text editors, that Enter=new line has caused so many problems. WriteMapper taking Enter=New Paragraph is good; not displaying blank lines between paragraphs is good; but only if there’s a first line indent to clearly define paragraphs.
It looks like a markdown editor, which brings its own limitations. And no colour.
Very simple local plaintext file type; suprised they don’t make more of that in their publicity.
Posted by satis
Dec 13, 2023 at 10:37 PM
MadaboutDana wrote:
> Hm, talking about writing apps, this is an intriguing announcement by
>Scrivener:
For years the dev Keith Blount - who admitted a decade ago he’s not a programmer - has essentially been riding a successful tiger he can’t control, based off a hobby project he wrote after a few months learning Xcode. He offloaded development of a Windows app to a programmer who has a profit-share deal with him because he didn’t have the expertise himself, but Scrivener Windows users typically get features long after Mac users, and Windows users have dealt with a lot of bugs over the years.
The iOS Scrivener app is an oddly-designed subset of the main app. Blount made the same type of business deal with an iOS developer but the result was subpar and now he has a single iOS dev person on staff for the iOS/iPadOS platform.
Development is a bit of a mess overall.
If suddenly we’re talking about a new cross-platform app I’d bet it’s an(other bloated, relatively slow) Electron app with that framework’s attendant security issues (especially if it’s not regularly and quickly patched when compromises are announced and addressed). Blount can use it to maintain a single codebase, eliminate the costs with outside developers, and be able to push out updates simultaneously. But I don’t have much hope that it will be a fast app or a pleasurable one to write in, or one that takes advantage of each platform’s UI and included functionality. (A major problem with Electron apps.)
Literature & Latte has eight employees, I think, and most aren’t full-time. Hopefully this new app ends up being useful and successful, but I don’t think I want to go anywhere near it for the first couple of years after release, until it proves itself.