Sunday, April 14, 2013

Sunday Surfing

Flogging the Quill

Why Do We Keep Making Ebooks Like Paper Books?

Feeling Rejected? Join the {Prestigious} Crowd

Style, Fear and the Bias Against Creativity

Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize at Black Balloon Publishing

The Other Face of Rejection

The 9 Ingredients of Character Development

LTUE: First person POV

How can story writers and book authors hook their readers?

Very fascinating and a little spooky: Where No Search Engine Has Gone Before


Progress on my Magic Muse writing workbench application is coming along rather nicely thus far.  I'm still dealing primarily with interface design, trying to determine what features to implement and how they best function.

I'm sure the appearance will change as development continues, but here is a screenshot of how some of the windows look now.

Click image for larger size display

16 comments:

  1. I really enjoyed the article on creativity bias. I found myself nodding a lot while reading it!

    Also, the Magic Muse is looking great so far! Good luck further developing it. :)

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  2. Why Do We Keep Making Ebooks Like Paper Books? made some strong points about the underutilized potential of ebooks. Thanks for the links.

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    1. The article did raise some interesting points. My guess is we'll see a lot of innovation over the coming years.

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  3. That Magic Muse looks neat. I use Scrivener, which does about the same. Who knew we'd have to practically go back to school to learn how to do all of this? I'll be checking out some of these links...especially the ebook one and the nine things for character development. Thanks, Jeff.

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    1. Thanks, Mike. A lot of people swear by Scrivener. I still haven't experimented with it yet, but I do have a trial version of it downloaded. I just want to make sure I've got plenty of time to really play with it when I start.

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  4. Magic Muse looks organized and appears to be coming along pretty well. :)

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    1. Thanks, Terry. I hope to be putting some meat inside of it soon. The Visual Story aspect of it is coming along nicely. I still have to handle the grouped operations (moving a selected block of objects at once and that sort of thing) and file format save/load options, but I hope to get that working soon too.

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  5. Very cool! When's the estimated completion date of Magic Muse?

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    1. The date is a big question mark at the moment. The biggest hamper is that I'm still learning the nuances of the newer version of VB and having enough free time to master it. Once I get most of the fundamentals down I'll probably offer it up to folks who would like to test it and provide a little developmental input. I'd love to be able to do that at some point during this summer.

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  6. Hi Jeff,

    Your computer prowess is much admired. Heck, I get nervous with the technology of an Etch-a-Sketch! Although I'm thinking about buying an 'iPen' :)

    Seriously, all the very best with "Magic Muse".

    Gary

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    1. Nothing wrong with an Etch-a-Sketch! I had and loved one when I was younger. All I ever see these days are little mini versions though. Let me know how the iPen works for you. Sounds like it could be a hit.

      And as always, thanks.

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  7. Sounds and looks like the Magic Muse has a bright future. Hope it works out well for you.

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    1. Thanks, Richard. It's the ultimate undertaking for a programmer who loves to write. Besides, my current version doesn't have a lot of the features I'm wanting to add to this one.

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  8. Wait, you're creating this application? Like seriously? :D

    Thanks for the links!

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