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One thing I also use my Sony VR for is to test the sound and flow of dialog. I try to have someone read any dialog I've written. In a pinch, I'll do it myself. Amazing how something that looks so good on a page sometimes sounds so awful when you hear it read back to you.
I have found this is especially useful if I can get my friend Alexis to read back sections of dialog or narrative belonging to a female character. Men and women seem to use language differently. It's hard to define exactly how. But most women can spot when a guy is putting words in a female character's mouth. Hearing a character speak in the appropriate gender's voice helps me catch a lot of subtle differences and improve my characters verisimilitude. Robert Heinlein seems to annoy a lot of women with his dialog. I've often heard women say, "All his women sound like men - no woman would ever talk like that." after reading a Heinlein story.
Considering the number of women I've met who don't enjoy Heinlein's female characters - and the number of guys who do - there just might be something to this.
Whoa mama! I just saw this thread. You are crazy Paul! I'm going to have to set aside some time in my schedule to read this thing.
Seriously, though. I like your ambition. But a lot of this stuff is around the forums here somewhere. It's easier to deal with this (at least in forums) if you break it down as much as possible and address one issue at a time. But there's always a time and place for large general threads also, so whatever. I'm one to talk, I've started two enormous threads here myself!
I think Mssr. Keith should start a blog. He writes well; his questions and observations are both intelligent and interesting; and he has the rare gift of "knowing what he does not know."
I'd bookmark him.
P.S. Thank you Paul. You bring a lot to the forum!-40hz (September 09, 2008, 12:08 PM)
I've never had one before 40hz. Could you give me an idea on what quality to look for? The closest I got to a voice recorder was from a PocketPC and that was very clunky both to use and to import data of.
I've had the best luck with Sony. They seem to pack the most bang for the buck where I live. Olympus is also a good choice. I hesitate to recommend specific units since a model "year" in this market seems to be about four months.
I would look for a USB output port and a reasonable number of hours recording time based on how I use it. Anything over eight hours would do it for me since I only use my recorder for notes. And I'm unusually good about copying them off onto my PC. Which leads to another major consideration for me: compatibility with Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software.
The arguments for and against voice recognition software could flood a forum thread. From what I've seen, it either works for you or it doesn't. For my PC (and my voice), it's a marriage made in heaven. It did take a lot of work to get it set up, but it's repaid itself several times over for me.
Note: DragonNS is an interesting product that puts me in an unusual position. I use it and I think highly of it. But I would never recommend it to someone. That's because it is somewhat of a crapshoot. It's expensive; there are no demos available; and not everyone can use it. So unless you're willing to risk a few hundred dollars and commit to the time necessary to "train" it, you're better off forgetting about speech recognition.-40hz (September 09, 2008, 10:54 AM)
Customization:
Here in South America a lot of computers are being sold through super markets. They use the gOS operating system. This (linux-based) O.S. is light on resources and comes with practically all a casual user would need. The interface is easy on the eyes (at least to me) And it seems to be a solid base for expanding it to your specific needs.
For more info: gOS-Shades (September 03, 2008, 09:11 PM)
I'd suggest getting yourself an inexpensive notes recorder that is voice activated. Shop Staples, Amazon, OfficeMax etc. for selection and pricing. I like Sony, but there are lots of other makes out there.
| Final Draft: Very MS Word like which could be a plus for some people but a minus for me since I never learned MS Word and I barely use Wordpad. Skimming the help file only yielded very basic bookmarking and indexing functions which doesn't really benefit me much as I don't know the basics of scriptwriting. The minimal interface would have been a plus if I wasn't already using YeahWrite and Q10 or even Akelpad as a text editor which are more minimalistic. |
| Power Structure: Ahh… this is more like it. The beginning options are a definite plus but only because I have never seen anything like it. At the same time, it can be a minus because unless you follow the manual and choose novel format, it can be pretty scary and confusing. I'd really be more comfortable if there were at least some tooltips available while choosing the options. I love the font size slider but the size limit really leaves a lot to be desired since I find that 10-15 pt were the only sizes that were readable in my PC. (1152 x 864) It doesn't bother me that much but I would prefer something like 20 pt for when my eyes get tired staring at the screen. Drop down category lists are great but I find I need to re-click them instead of the entries being highlighted and allowing me to scroll through them using the mouse wheel. The characters view looks like a user friendlier screen of ywriter4 and I'm still not really sure about these kind of things. On one hand, I like the challenge of needing to create depth with my characters and on the other, I find these things really tedious to work with. I just don't feel anything special about a character inputted through these methods. If I need something like this, I feel more comfortable with Compendium's Dialogue Mapping Style of Creating Things because then I could create entire scenarios for a single character and preview it all in one page with my preferred order instead of trying to conform my mind to this tree-based hierarchy which is just not for me. Don't get me wrong, I do have a need for these type of templates, Power Structure's way is just the wrong kind of template for me. It's too focused on being rigid, on trying to make a format that would make sense if you show these texts to someone in this screen, on trying to write a biography and when I write, I'm going in the other direction. I write so that the story becomes good enough to be the character's biography. I write as if the character had forgotten themselves and only remembered when they were in a dilemma and in need of remembering who they are. I write asking what is the current state of the character in line with the current story and I connect the dots from there. But Power Structure assumes that I care whether I am in Chapter 1 or not. It assumes I'm more interested in a format that would allow me to create a Dungeons and Dragons character and then transport them into a Chapter-based format. It assumes the problem I have most with stories are in separating the parts so I can import them when my main stumbling block often comes from exporting them. Actually the format doesn't prevent me from doing that but it also doesn't help me to begin improving on my story. It's more like now, not only do I have a big bunch of text to deal with, I also have several tabs distracting me from actually writing my story. This can be fixed by copying the text from another text editor or word processor but by then, I'm usually more worried editing my work than spending time separating them into snippets. It really comes off more as a professional story marketing program than a novel writing software. All these options can make it easier for editing if you can't find your text but for me, if you can't find what part of your story needs editing then chances are, the to be edited part is not just the problem but also the actual content of the story otherwise why wouldn't I want to reread what I wrote? (Yes, there's time constraints but I find that I have no problem rereading the books that I'm really into.) Also if it's only purpose is finding the edited portion, then ywriter4 is free and this isn't so even if this is more user friendly, I think it just doesn't benefit me enough for me to want to pay for it. In the end, I think this is something that I might look back on because the fill in the box approach especially combined with the questions approach can be really addicting but there's a fine line between addicting and helpful especially when it comes to payware. |
| Movie Outline: Now, right off the bat, I felt the introductory documentation is a whole let better here. It confirms my suspicion that there is a reason for why Power Structure and ywriter4 have a glaring similarity. "Step-outlining", I still haven't been explained enough value from applying it but a word is a better start than a quick start guide. Of course, either programs could have mentioned this later on or in their main sites, but I think it's something a newbie can easily miss that the right way to put it is definitely when the program first begins. Overall, the interface looks like a more polished hybrid of FinalDraft and Power Structure. A bad thing in my book because it makes many of the options on Power Structure complicated but at the same time, it's less specific question templates are both a bane and a blessing. On one hand, I'm glad I'm free from the more specific questions Power Structure asks of me but at the same time, many of the questions are obvious and are made easier in Power Structure because they turned these questions into options. In the end, Movie Outline preys on the inadequacy of my writing, making me considering on choosing it for the temptation of using it's analyses programs to draw me in but at the same time, I'm not sure if a rejected review from a publisher is much more worthwhile advice. |
| Storymind/Storyweaver: This is probably the first program I really felt comfortable with. Links to videos (though I never tried them), light and finally a simple offer without trying to paint complexity into the program. At first, I was confused because the whole thing looked like a help file and I thought I downloaded the wrong thing so I went to a different site to download the same thing and I was scratching my head for a while there until I finally got it. If there's anything keeping me from buying this, is that I haven't tested it to the end to see whether it was all really worth it but the questions here are definitely less rigid than both Movie Outline and Power Structure and they are written in much more details that makes it more invigorating to answer them than the other two. If there's a con to this program is that it begins assuming you don't have a story in progress and starts you from scratch but that’s also the pro of this program as it's very difficult to be attracted to a program that assumes you already have a story you want to be massacred into a complicated hedge of step outlines. |
| Dramatica: I'd say this is 2 for 2 as far as checking this applications made by Melanie Anne Philipps. There's just something reassuring about her writing style that clicks with me that the shock of finding out that she has a transgender support site didn't phase me after all. I'm not anti-Transgender but I'm a straight guy and as much as I want to stay as objective as possible, these things should bother me so when it didn't, it in turn gave me more faith that these applications are written by someone who was interested in elevating their story rather than just due to a damn good marketeer. Of course, I've been wrong before so we'll see... (I'm a sucker for infomercials) Interface wise, it draws on my curiosity because even though it's different from StoryMind's, it's actually much clearer as an app this time but at the same time, it gives me that Civilization 2 like feel that I just want to click on the buttons and it's probably the first app that really made me want to click on Help even though I find all the description texts, too small. All I can say is that I've only tried the StoryGuide in the beginning and I like that it reads like an interactive fiction on helping you to create a story. I also like that from the get go it warns me that the level 3 path would take 3 to 4 days which makes it easy to set aside time when further testing this product. All in all, the thing that keeps me from using this is the small fonts, the lack of scrolling through arrow keys and that's it. Among all that I've written about at this point, this made the best first impression. |
| Storyview: Very MS Word like. Not my thing. A let down compared to Power Structure and FinalDraft. |
| WriteMonkey: Thanks. It can never hurt to know more about these programs but I already use Q10 so while I do plan to make a feature by feature comparison of these two someday, I'm not really foreign to these types of software and it's a good editing platform to string along with rewriting my story on paper but it's not something that I can live with on it's own. |
| CeltX: This looks very promising but I can't see it's similarities with FinalDraft but I'm judging purely on the UI. This is definitely something I'd like to get a chance to explore someday but right now, I can't really tap into many of it's options since I don't really understand anything about pre-production and without that, the value of being able to preview something just isn't there. Even trying the sample comic book didn't really give any clue as to how this would help me as the slideshows aren't really any different from creating a comic book panel by panel and putting them all into images. I'm really tempted to request for a guide to pre-production but at the same time, I'm not sure I can absorb the information well. The whole feel of the program just screams "more than one person". I really don't see why I couldn't do what the program offers with any outliner on a single person basis. |
| Liquid Story Binder: Umm…wow. I need someone to teach me how to work this thing. This looks like the GIMP of novel writing software and unfortunately I haven't even graduated from Photoshop. |
http://www.walyou.co...stumbleupon-toolbar/
Nothing fancy:
a simple, elegant and space-saving design. In contrast to the standard boxy approach which is overloaded with features. Nothing against all the features and new features, but they have to be designed , hidden, properly to make them tolerable to the eye.
The by far best design in this regard is still the one from dpreview and this is 5 years old or even older.
http://www.dpreview.com/forums/-Lutz_ (September 08, 2008, 11:00 AM)
Paul Keith, you make some good points. I can see why to some users less features is more enticing, and why Chrome is perhaps better off without them from the start. however I stand by my comments that users would be safer and less aggravated by the browser if it had a better rendering engine and was more secure, which would have been accomplished if Google had made the source available prior to the "launch". You can't tell me that Google will go to the same effort for the final (if indeed there ever is one).
Ehtyar.-Ehtyar (September 08, 2008, 01:06 AM)
I find it very interesting that Google's toolbar is not built into Chrome. Which is the leading software next to it's search engine. Leading me to think there are other plans in the works for that software.
Electric Bug Zapper: (see attachment in previous post)http://www.amazon.co...p/product/B000FEO50W
Good for those bigger creepy crawlies.-mouser (August 20, 2008, 07:46 AM)
