Opinions on a project of mine?

[Sprouts]

Hi Reading Excuses, I'm not sure if this the right place for this, but it seems relevant, if it isn't just let me know.

 

So I've had a passion project for a while now that attempts to combine tools like yWriter5/Scrivener with a social-platform/writing-group.  

 

The tool is called QuillSword (www.quillsword.com) and it features an editor that manages scenes, characters, and locations as well as a social network for people to conceivably share scenes they've written with select groups of people.

 

I've been working on it for quite a while now and would like to get some opinions on whether the idea sounds like something you might use / what looks like it's working so far / what needs to improve, etc.  I know some people here are pretty knowledgeable about tech-related things, so any advice or suggestions on that front would be greatly appreciated as well.

 

Just think of it as critiquing a tool in the same way you would critique someone's submission.  Groups like this are who my target audience is, so any thoughts would be invaluable.

 

If you want, you can sign up for an account and give it a whirl, or you can look at the pictures that I'm going to try and attach to see what it looks like so far.

 

Thanks a million, can't wait to hear what you guys think!

 

Sprouts

 

Link to the site: http://www.quillsword.com

 

Pictures:

 

 

[Robinski]

Hmm, this is very intriguing. I'll admit that, on the one hand, I'm feeling spread fairly thing between Writing Excuses (woefully behind); Reading Excuses (a bit behind); Write About Dragons (less behind) and NaNoWriMo (not behind... yet). On the other hand, this looks interesting, and I'm always keen to put my writing out there in as many places as possible.

 

I'll give it a try and see how far I get.

[Robinski]

So, I've had a quick go at it. It does seem interesting. I don't think I would write in it, that's not the way I work. The RE Write About Dragons group uses Google Docs for submissions and critiquing, but I just upload documents to that, I would always have the master on my home computer, that's just the way I work.

 

I guess there is still some functionality to be developed. I note that I can't edit my profile at the moment.

 

I think it's the sort of thing that I might participate in as an online writing group, but not sure I would use it as my main resource, which I would always want to have total control over, on my desk.

 

I hope that these comments are useful. I would certainly keep using it if people were participating and there was a community there, but I would probably struggle to become a regular user if Reading Excuses was still working for me, and I was still contributing heavily here.

[Sprouts]

Thanks for giving it a try!

 

The site is still pretty early in development, so there's definitely some important functionality missing.  Things move more slowly when it's a nights and weekends type of project.

 

So I'm thinking I should probably give the editor a little bit of a rest and focus on the sharing/writing-group part?  That's definitely something I'll try and do, the editor is hugely time-consuming and in retrospect it doesn't seem like the best place to be burning energy.

 

Also, how did the sign-up process go?  Did you get the activation email quickly?

 

Again, thanks for any time you spent checking the site out, every second is appreciated!

 

Edit: If you don't mind, what did you think of the design (layout, visuals, etc.)?  I'm definitely not a front-end developer, so I was a bit worried that what looked decent to me wouldn't be up to people's standards.

Edited October 20, 2014 by Sprouts

[Robinski]

Yeah, I got the confirmation email fairly quickly, I had to wait a couple of minutes I think, after signing in to my email, but it seemed reasonable to me.

 

Visually, I found some of the components a little on the large side, maybe that just my display settings.

 

I thought that the sign up process was fine.

[akoebel]

Hi,

 

The idea is intriguing. I've toyed with the idea of developing a writer's platform (with blogging, shop, publication to Amazon), but never thought about the writing part. 

 

The registration part seemed pretty standard, but the confirmation email took about 4 hours to come in. Since this is a beta release and you're not swamped by thousands of request, I think there is someone down the line buffering requests. You might want to look into it.

 

The editor itself is cool but maybe too complex for a regular writer. I mean, who's going to use all those fonts, colors, ... Nice work about localization.

What's nice about Scrivener is the ability to shuffle scenes around and the hierarchy between parts, scenes and chapters. Maybe that's in the works already, but I didn't see anything about that.

I would have liked to see a "compile"-like function also.

 

You've said somewhere that the text is encrypted. Some writers might be very wary about uploading their work, so this is a good thing. The next step could be the ability to have the writer use their own key (so that someone hacking your site won't be able to decrypt their work). Might be on the "too difficult for user" side, though.

 

I couldn't test the publication part (which I really wanted to see) and the sharing part also doesn't seem implemented yet, so I can't really comment on them.

 

The interesting point is the writing group process. You can imagine selecting a given scene and sending it to a group; then receiving their comments in the original text. I keep such comments in scrivener in notes attached to the scene, but am a bit frustrated when I have to jump between scenes and notes. Maybe you can imagine a revision mode where everything is accessible at a glance.

 

Nice work so far (and clean coding if I might add).

[Sprouts]

Yeah, I got the confirmation email fairly quickly, I had to wait a couple of minutes I think, after signing in to my email, but it seemed reasonable to me.

 

Visually, I found some of the components a little on the large side, maybe that just my display settings.

 

I thought that the sign up process was fine.

 :

Thanks for the input Robinski!  Glad to hear the sign-up process worked quickly at least once  . 

 

Hi,

 

The idea is intriguing. I've toyed with the idea of developing a writer's platform (with blogging, shop, publication to Amazon), but never thought about the writing part. 

 

The registration part seemed pretty standard, but the confirmation email took about 4 hours to come in. Since this is a beta release and you're not swamped by thousands of request, I think there is someone down the line buffering requests. You might want to look into it.

 

The editor itself is cool but maybe too complex for a regular writer. I mean, who's going to use all those fonts, colors, ... Nice work about localization.

What's nice about Scrivener is the ability to shuffle scenes around and the hierarchy between parts, scenes and chapters. Maybe that's in the works already, but I didn't see anything about that.

I would have liked to see a "compile"-like function also.

 

You've said somewhere that the text is encrypted. Some writers might be very wary about uploading their work, so this is a good thing. The next step could be the ability to have the writer use their own key (so that someone hacking your site won't be able to decrypt their work). Might be on the "too difficult for user" side, though.

 

I couldn't test the publication part (which I really wanted to see) and the sharing part also doesn't seem implemented yet, so I can't really comment on them.

 

The interesting point is the writing group process. You can imagine selecting a given scene and sending it to a group; then receiving their comments in the original text. I keep such comments in scrivener in notes attached to the scene, but am a bit frustrated when I have to jump between scenes and notes. Maybe you can imagine a revision mode where everything is accessible at a glance.

 

Nice work so far (and clean coding if I might add).

 

Thanks for trying it out akoebel!  I'll have to look into the email delay, had a similar report from a friend recently.  

 

By "compile-like" do you mean a button to combine all the scenes into one big book-document?  If so, that's definitely something that's happening, not sure when though.  It'll probably come around the same time I add in front-end for epub conversion.

 

On the topic of user-based encryption keys, would you like it to be per-project or user-wide?  That's a relatively fast addition, though problems can always pop-up.

 

I'm working on sharing right now.  The plan is to allow users to share a scene to either a list of users, a group, or everyone. Critiques/input would come in the form of short line-based comments, or longer critiques at the bottom.  I need to update how groups work first.  So that groups can be invite/acceptance-based.

 

As always, thanks for each and every second you spent looking at it.  Means more than you'd think