The other day I used my pre-alpha version of the Authors Notebook iOS application for taking notes in a real life situation. I found it met my requirements nicely and worked sweetly. So while I’m not ready to show it to everyone and it’s certainly not ready for general release - its getting closer. I’ll hopefully have some screen shots up later today. However it has taken much longer than I had anticipated.
The iOS application was supposed to be a month long project - and I’m now well past the 3 month mark. The reasons for this are manifold, but a key one was the realisation that the original vision for Authors Notebook was not actually a tool that I wanted to use. The plan was for it to be a list of inspirational questions for an author to ask about their story and iin particular about their story world. This was not going to be useful without some way to store the answers to these questions - jumping in and out of the app to enter ideas into another iOS application was just too jarring.
So now Authors Notebook is a hybrid - it’s a list of questions that should help an author get their head around how their story, characters and world all fit together, and it’s a way to organise and manage these notes. It now really is much more like the notebook of its name.
I’m excited about the direction it is taking, its look and feel, and can feel that it is something with potential to be useful to real authors.