I like software. I like to play with shiny little utilities that are well designed, have small computing footprints, and do what they claim to do simply and well.
Writer and programmer Simon Haynes, author of the Hal Spacejock series, has a nice collection of utilities for writers and readers available for free (FREE) at his Spacejock Software website.
The ones I find most useful:
Sonar – a utility for logging and tracking manuscript submissions.
yWriter4 – a very handy manuscript organization/development tool. Lets you do lots of cool things with slabs of text that would be a pain in MS Word or a standard text editor. The best part? It’s a whopping 3 MB executable. I shit you not.
(N.B. – I use UltraEdit for almost all of my writing. UE is really just a glorified text editor with a massive ton of built-in utilities for programming. Not really designed for word processing, but because I use it for my real job (i.e., programming), when I fire it up, it puts me in that work frame of mind. I still like to play with yWriter4.)
yRead – Text to speech software. This little program will synthesize a text or html file and read it back to you. There’s nothing more amusing than a computer reading your fiction to you. I’m not kidding.
It’s all fun, it’s all free and it might just increase your productivity.
D.
Filed under: Miscellany, Writing Tagged: | simon haynes, spacejock software, writing software
