New bug reported - I.E. Kenner

[Novlr]

Submitter: I.E. Kenner Email: amwriting@iekenner.com

OK, so just so you get a bit of perspective on what I've written here, I'm an IT professional and have been for about 15 years. I specialise in storage arrays, servers, switching, software and training and technical documentation thereof. I've dabbled in code and really did want to become a developer, but my career took me elsewhere and I never had the spare time to dedicate to teaching myself. I'm also a writer and true to my inability to leverage the things I'm good at into the things I love, I don't write technical manuals, nor how-to guides in my spare time (no, that would probably actually make money), I write science fiction.

Anyway...if anything I put down here doesn't sound like its even possible, it's because I've never tried to code it myself. But anything I put down here - I KNOW is possible from a hardware and infrastructure perspective. Just maybe not cheap is all. ;o)

Currently I use Evernote to allow me to write wherever I am and I LOVE Evernote's always-available nature. I tried Scrivener, but honestly, Scrivener is for people who write at home and who like to do backups. I don't.

I've only tried your Beta for a short while and have added and removed a bunch of text and for what it currently is - it works well (so far). But it's very clean...like to the point of having almost no features. I figured this is just a get-it-working stage and the features would come in future releases, but I thought I'd send you a few things from my wishlist...

Things I don't like about Evernote:

Formatting.
    Evernote's formatting is basically non-existent, does not consistently survive the switch from one device to another. I make one word italic on my tablet and it's just normal when I open the note on my computer.
    You guys HAVE to make formatting consistent across devices & OS platforms. A novel lives and dies in many ways on the manner in which the text if formatted.
    My thought would be to render all of the formats server-side using XML tags (or whatever) which are invisible to the user. It may take longer to load your document and your formatting may even take longer to appear, but at least EVERY TIME you load your novel, the formatting will be the same as the last time you saved it and it would be consistent across platforms because it's rendered in one place.
    Yes, this will make it extra-special when you're working offline. Perhaps allow the local client to cache a certain amount of formatting before it has to sync with the server?
    The WordPress app is also terrible with this. It's almost impossible to actually write a WordPress post in their app!
Chapters, scenes & notes.
    Evernote doesn't allow you to create a tree of folders or subfolders. You can create a stack, but the folders in it are all peers, no parent-child allowed. I find this a little inflexible. I would be nice to allow multi-layered folder structure (at least a few more than 2 layers)

Symbolic links.
    I don't know if you're familiar with symbolic links, but they're a Unix/Linux concept which are basically a single tiny inode which points to the data of another linked inode. If you open a symlink, it simply launches the file to which the inode points, so from a functional perspective, you have possibly multiple copies of the exact same file in many different places, all of which link back to the one data file.
    Shortcuts are kind of the same thing only in Evernote you can't just attach a shortcut to the bottom of a file (at least I don't think you can) - this would be a cool feature. Rather than adding an image to your character description, you could have a series of folders containing images, perhaps one entitled "characters" then sym link those images to the character file. That way, you'd not only have your character description looking the goods, but you'd have a gallery of your characters - and all of it takes up the space of only 1 image (it's poor man's deduplication, but it's been around since the 60s, so it can't be all bad). Obviously this would work for pictures of cities, places, etc. too.

Versioning & text compare
    Evernote does not have a text compare function and its versioning is all date/time based - what if your dates on your devices are different? If it did, note conflicts would be a non-issue. As it is, I'm scared to write anything offline in Evernote just in case I start editing existing notes before I've synched & cause a conflict.
    Allowing text to be versioned using a server-side date/timestamp (this would require initial "timezone" setup on the user's account) or by using 01.02.03 type verisoning would be invaluable
    I know text compare is not as simple as adding a "compare { blah.txt, blah1.txt };", but if you put some time into the compare function, it could be! Or you know...if you bought someone else's compare function and incorporated it?
    This feature would sell your Novlr like nothing else

Other ideas:

Blog link
    Not that I'm expecting users to link their novels to their blogs & just dump all their text up there, but having a blog section where they can talk about what they're writing or...you know...why they're not would be a great feature.
    All it would need is for users to enter their blog type (WordPress, Blogger, etc), their user/pass and away they go.
    This would allow bloggers to buy your product & use it for blog writing as well (win).
    Formatting for this would be nigh impossible I would say (given my experience with WordPress), so perhaps that would be a necessary "please note" on any blog link function

Contact list
    Allow users to create a list of writing contacts perhaps with mail hpyerlinks they could use to annoy their critique partners, agents & publishers

Watermark
    A watermark feature on Novlr would alleviate almost any writer's concern that their novel is at risk in the cloud
    If the user could enter a text string which appears subtley at the top or bottom of every page (or both) which identifies this work as copyright them & as a draft, it would not only do what I said above, it would also make users feel pretty cool about the fact that their work is real and valuable.

OK, that's all I've got for now. This email literally took me like 10 minutes to write because I'm so vibed about getting my hands on Novlr, so I'm sure there's more back there in my brain waiting to come out when I actually get back to writing my novel and not procrastinating by sending you fine folks feedback.

Kind regards,

-- I.E. Kenner Twitter: @OTS_Bifrost

[thomasmuirhead]

Replied and tweeted at her/him. Good stuff.