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Two additional online writing apps
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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jul 13, 2021 at 04:51 PM
I just learned about two online writing apps that I thought I mention here, in case there is interest.
LivingWriter is another Scrivener clone, this one more full-featured than Slice. A subscription is $96 per year… about twice what a one-time purchase of Scrivener costs.
NovelPad goes about the job of helping you write a novel with a bit more creative imagination. I don’t know if its system would be affective or not. A subscription is $60 per year.
I am not endorsing either of these apps, because I haven’t used them. But if you’re interested in Slice, you might check these out… And I’m not saying Slice isn’t a better choice. That’s all up to your personal needs, of course.
Steve
Posted by satis
Jul 14, 2021 at 11:46 AM
Most of the people I know who use Scrivener professionally are daunted by its complexity and only use a small percentage of its features. I own Scrivener but I don’t use it because it’s too clunky and I didn’t feel comfortable writing in it. I’m also wary after a well-known writer I know lost a few chapters in it causing her to abandon the app for an even clunkier and uglier option - the Save The Cat app, which is $100-$180/year depending on the plan, plus Microsoft Word (a business necessity when submitting work and dealing with Track Changes from an editor).
These Scrivener alternatives, at least most of the robust, competitive ones, tend to be services now, usually with a bloated Electron app front-end to make it easy to deploy to multiple OSes. Unfortunately that is considered best practices these days for many classes of app in order to scale up a cross-platform product that’s easiest to develop and support, can garner the most customers, and can obstruct pirating.
I do like NovelPad’s scene-card kanban view, which seems more functional and attractive than Scrivener’s. But I don’t see anything that would make me switch from Ulysses and a free kanban service plan.
Posted by novelpad
Sep 7, 2021 at 02:54 PM
satis wrote:
>I do like NovelPad’s scene-card kanban view, which seems more functional
>and attractive than Scrivener’s. But I don’t see anything that would
>make me switch from Ulysses and a free kanban service plan.
Hey there, I’m Steve from NovelPad. There are a couple nuances of the KanBan view that aren’t obvious from the marketing material: anywhere you see a pen icon lets you read the card/cards in that group. This lets you categorize cards into plots, and then read that plot in isolation. It also lets you use our automatic character identification to read your novel from a single character’s perspective. A lot of our users use this for consistency checking while editing.
We’re also just pushing out a new update that gives you the ability to rewind your novel to any save. This isn’t really a feature of the editor, but we thought it was important to make sure that even in the case of a catastrophic failure, very little data will get lost. As a small company, it’s a bit difficult for us to keep the educational and marketing material up to speed with the application’s functionality, so my apologies!
Next release will be a set of small features that have been requested during this longer release for the “rewind” feature, but after that we’re moving onto building editing features (i.e. sharing with an editor, change tracking, etc…). That’s probably a couple months out though.
Let me know if you do have any questions about NovelPad—I’m happy to answer!