iWonder Designs A (one man) team of designers and developers specializing in web applications

ScribbleSquid for Writing Groups

ScribbleSquid is a great way to conveniently work with other writers to critique each others’ stories. 

It’s true I’m not a writer but I do know that the competition out there is brutal.  Writing groups are a common way for you, the writer, to escape your own head and get some objective advice about your stories.  Reading others’ stories is a good way to learn some things you may not have known or think about things in a slightly different way.

But finding like minded writers locally can be challenging.  Thanks to social websites like Facebook and Twitter you can find others who are interested in being part of a writing group.  All it really takes is two although more opinions are usually helpful. Either way, now you have to decide how you want to share your stories with one another.

There are really only a couple of ways to handle this over long distances:

1. Email.  Just take your Word document (or whatever) and send it to everyone in your group.  They all mark it up with comments (somehow) and sending it back to you in another email along with a message summarizing their critique.  The more people you sent it to, the more copies of your own story come back to you – each marked up in a separate file.
2. Online Word Processors.  I’m talking about Google Docs and the like.  These are great because not only can multiple people be looking at the same document at the same time but the comments (at least in the newest version) will not be “inline” with the story.

These will both work fine, frankly, if you only rarely go through the critiquing process or if the group is made up of only two or three people.  It’s when you get five or more people in a group or the group has a steady stream of new stories making the rounds.  It’s in these cases that a tool like ScribbleSquid can really streamline the whole process.

Let’s take a closer look at the two most common ways of sharing stories mentioned above.

First, there’s email.  Incredibly simple to distribute your stories and have a conversation about it with each critic.  The real problem here is that once you move to multiple critics, things start getting a little messy for the writer.  Each response to your story comes back as a separate email marked up in its own way.  Merging all these into a new revision of the story can be painstaking.  Responding to each comment can be a little tedious as well especially since it’s likely more than one person will be making the same comment.  And speaking of repetition, maybe it would be better if people didn’t bother making comments that they know other people already made.

Next, there’s collaborate editing applications like Google Docs.  Google docs is great when you’re editing your own document or multiple people are editing the same document.  It’s even good (with the latest release) for having others make comments on what you’ve done.  Like email, though, this medium is not really made for the multi-critic, multi-revision world that is story critiquing.   Google Docs does keep a history of revisions but the demarcation for each revision is not up to you.  In fact, I’m not entirely sure how Docs decides it’s time for a new revision.  That’s a problem because the way writing groups generally work is that the author writes a first draft, sends it out, gets comments, makes another draft, sends it out, gets comments, etc.  That is to say, the author decides what makes a revision.  On top of that, an author will probably want to clear away comments made about the last revision.  But he probably still wants to keep the comments around for reference later on.  Google Docs doesn’t really offer that capability.   In fact, Google Docs was just not built for this at all.  As an editor, fantastic.  As a writing group collaboration tool, not so much. 

So ScribbleSquid solves these problems in a couple of ways. 

1. Shared critiques.  When a writers posts his story to ScribbleSquid and shares it with a group, everyone in the group will then be sharing a common canvas, as it were.  All the group members see everyone else’s comments and annotations.  Additionally, the author gets to see everything in one place and respond to each comment in its own thread on that same “canvas”.
2. Revisions.  The writer gets to decide when it’s time for a new revision.  After all the comments have come in and everyone has had their say.  The writer takes those critiques and folds them into his next revision.  He then uploads the new revision to ScribbleSquid where everyone can comment.  Comments from the last revision are gone (although accessible) and there’s a clean slate.  Also, group members can compare two revisions to see what the author changed.
3. Fallback. Any document in ScribbleSquid can be downloaded in whatever format you want or printed or both.  You don’t always want to (or maybe you just can’t) sit in front of the computer to critique.  Print it out and take it with you.  When you do get back to the computer apply the comments you made to the online version. 

So that’s about it for critiques and revisions.  ScribbleSquid offers more enticing features for writers but sharing is really at the core of its mission. 

And more importantly than anything else, let it be known that ScribbleSquid is designed specifically for writing groups.  That’s important, because it means that ScribbleSquid doesn’t try to be all things to all people – just you and your writing group.  And that’s a burden it’s happy to bear.

Prism HUD

For windows.  That it comes up onlywhen things change is key...

Prism HUD is a lightweight but detailed and accurate HUD(head-up display)-style system performance & resources monitor, which can help you know what and how well your system is performing always.

via Prism HUD.

It just *feels* weird

This is why it's so important to get very specific and logical explanations when someone judging your UI decides not to like it.  "It's just weird" and "Seems confusing" just won't cut it.

[The new widget] is odd. And yet, both the checkbox and the menu part tested very well in the lab. The people who hated the widget outside the lab also understood how to use it but promised others wouldn’t because it was so «weird.» There were some optimizations I wanted that didn’t make it in (highlight the current selection state in the menu, show keyboard shortcuts, etc). But it tested fine without those things.

via ignore the code: Opinions vs. Data.