Strephon's Profile

Many thanks. I will try this out and file it as well for the future.

It's a nice, clear and positive review of Jer's Novel Writer, but maybe a bit too positive. I am a recent user of JNW for about a month and have just redone a 93,000 word document in JNW to send to the New York agent. But he wanted it in Word. Please see my recent comments on the JNW forum about trying to get the ms out of JNW and into Word, which the agent wanted. It is taking all day to redo the titles of chapters since JNW does not export the Outline View as I see it with my limited experience. Have you actually used JNW for a book ms? Would it not be good for readers to know it is not all plus yet with Jer's and tell them the main difficulties? You say it is beta but don't give the details of the difficulties. I have experienced four types of crashes though Jer says he knows of only two. Margin notes don't print as far as I know. Shouldn't your readers know what beta means, what still is not working right? So in effect, if you take your text elsewhere after creating it in Jer's you have no table of contents! That's a lot of extra work which he wants to eliminate in a future upgrade. On Jer's Forum I compared Jer's to the other writing software I have recently used. It would be nice if you looked at this and did so as well, or included my comments, or evaluated them. From your review here you say that the margin notes can be categorized as to subjects and color. I said this is needed in the future. I did not know about this feature now. Did you use it and make sure it works well? One of my difficulties is that Jer offers no help text, only the notes you point out that he includes. So it would be good to tell readers this, and that they are on their own at this point, don't you think? Maybe the biggest difficulty at this point is exporting your text out of Jer's into Word for the finished product. It took me a couple of hours on this. I would like to know if you have done this and what the best way is to do it. Do you know? Jer seems to be kinda busy with other things in his life so I don't get the most secure feeling about his development commitment. I looked all over the forum for something on understanding the notes and on exporting from Jer's. Found almost nothing by him or anyone. StoryLines is similar. The developer responds to my emails but keep apologizing about having so little time to support and develop StoryLines. So there I am a bit insecure also. We writers need these programs and are terribly grateful, I am sure. But please don't give the impression that things with these solo developers are moving ahead just fine and that you can depend on them. When I commit to writing a full book I want my software to be really stable, easy to learn, and useful. The state of the art of writer's software for the Mac is that there is no state of the art. So should not reviewers like yourself also give writers specifically the difficulties with a program in development? All in all, I appreciate your review as giving a positive lift to Jer to help him continue development in a rapid manner. This is what we are all hoping for. Please see my review on his forum because I point out some of these things. Another point is that Jer's is the only writing software to give you both a good Outline View and the main body of your text on the same screen. But is this true in your experience? Such a feature is a great help in keeping organized as you write. --Strephon