Well this was an interesting thread to see pop up.
Hi, I'm Zack, I was a Sr. Unix Administrator at AMZN in 1999 and worked alongside very talented folks like snovotny, lamont, yvette, grabatin, gborle, jamison, craig, and so many others. The responses from Benjamin Black and Peter Voshall are correct.
We definitely were on DEC Tru64 at this time. Sun was running the big databases like ACB. I recall worries that obidos might not be able to build in a few months time so the engineer with the little corgi (Erik?) spiked out a linux build and then it was linux pizza boxes as quickly as we could build them.
We built CMF and other things to handle mass provisioning but it was chaotic for quite a while. I don't recall anyone talking about what would later become AWS in those days.
Good work on the new release. As a long time Scrivener 2 user, I'm happy to see this.
However, I wanted a simpler and subjectively nicer looking tool for distraction-free writing and thus made my own. It's free, has a few social features built-in, tracks writing progress/goals/distractions, and can make good looking books.
Also, adding features to Singular Writer has been really easy, as evidenced by it being in existence for a few months. For the Windows crowd, we've had feature parity from day one.
Check it out if you want to write more [with friends].
Some details about the person behind it and maybe some links (on the page) would be great. These days I'm wary of downloading anything I can't get a wide range of opinions on by searching, and all I get are irrelevant results.
That's an excellent point! In focusing on the features and such, I forgot to write up an About page, I'll do that.
For those reading here, I'm the guy that wrote a blog post on how to self-publish a book in 2017 that was on the front page here for a day or so back in February (www.zhubert.com). After that, I realized how ludicrous it was that publishing had to entail so much complexity, so I started thinking about what I wanted while writing my second book, then took a break and wrote the app instead.
The binaries are code signed for their respective platforms, and the links off the main page demonstrate the features by category (Writing, Publishing, Social). There are some nice pictures, some animated gifs, and a Twitter account over at https://twitter.com/singularapp.
There used to be a Linux version. You can still find it, it's v.1.6 or so (predating v.2), needs 32-bit libraries and is unsupported. But you can get it running. The problem is if you bring the project file into a new version it will convert the file format and there's no going back.
Curious whether you have any plans for an iOS app accompanying this? My partner uses Scrivener for writing currently, but does a lot of it on their iPad, so Scrivener's app + Dropbox sync is a fairly important thing for them.
(Scrivener's Dropbox sync being frequently buggy may help explain why I'm asking about this for them...)
>(Scrivener's Dropbox sync being frequently buggy may help explain why I'm asking about this for them...)
Hmm, never had an issue with Scrivener/Dropbox sync.
Mind you, I open Scrivener only 3-4 times a week and close it after I'm done with a document. I also don't use it frequently from my other machines (iMac/iPad), so it mainly syncs what I save on the main driver.
Yeah, they have a workflow that's very switching-dependent. Go out and work with the iPad all day, then switch and edit on a laptop at home.
They also like working at some coffee shops with not-ideal WiFi, which may help to expose bad sync cases. (I think it's fine for the sync to fail sometimes, but they've lost work before to this, which seems unacceptable.)
That definitely sounds frustrating. Personally I don't like how intrusive it is, always blocking the loading of the app while it shows me the sync process.
iOS (like desktop Linux and Android) are entirely possible and would be fun to build. The underlying data storage is platform agnostic (hurray SQL) and the development environment is bifurcated only along desktop vs native lines.
This is pretty much why I stopped using Scrivener entirely and started using WriterDuet for screenwriting. Trying to sync on Google Drive was an impossible shitshow. Still pisses me off.
I'm 10k words into my little writing hobby and will try this. Imported two chapters and I like the simplicity and aesthetics a lot. Absolutely love setting X words and having it tracked...simple, intuitive, awesome. I'm slowly getting back into writing after a hiatus so I'm sitting at a measly 500 words/day goal :D
My other authoring tool (Papyrus Autor) is great when it comes to Grammar/Spellchecking/Style and is pretty much the go to tool for German writers however it feels too cluttered for my personal taste. So I'm switching over to singular for prewriting with spellchecking turned off and then I'll load it into PA for the other tools (which will be an interesting and humbling experience).
If it helps motivation, try inviting a few friends and sharing your word counts with them.
I spent two years working on my first book, barely hitting 5k/week during the first draft. My experience definitely affirms that as long as you don't stop, you'll finish it! ;)
I like this! As a not-very-serious writer, I had previously been doing my writing with VSCode plus a couple of extensions and themes to make it look like Ulysses, but I think I will give this a look. I'd be happy to chip in some money if you put a donation link up.
I hate seeing people struggle to support their app. Even the Ulysses guys got blowback when they went from one-time payment to a subscription model - which seems totally warranted from a power user.
Right now it's super lean and I haven't needed any additional income to support it. In the future that might change.
If I were to charge for anything, it'd be paid "themes" for the eBook side of things. I feel that aligns with my objective of making a writing tool for everyone, while getting paid by people making money off it.
Originally the project was called Social Writer and those screenshots date back to that time. I decided the name was too limiting and changed it a couple of weeks ago.
I think I was shooting for something in between the two. If you've read the post by Hugh Howey about Neo, you'll find that we tend to think quite a bit a like.
Productivity and publishing, that's what I wanted.
Ulysses looks great but had nothing to help me measure my novel's progress. Writing down before/after word counts was just lame (sorry). The publishing tools were also rather limited.
Scrivener helped me publish my first book, but, as I mentioned, I didn't like looking at it (sorry!).
So Singular Writer aimed to have the looks of Ulysses and the brawn of Scrivener (without all the configuration).
I'd love to read about using LaTex. Even though I've read TAOCP (shock!) and been a physics grad student, I'm still semi-scared at the notion of using it for fun.
Most of my grad buddies (in experimental physics!!) had endless challenges with it.
Surmountable, of course, but I wanted to aim for an easier skill set.
I liken the idea of alpha readers to the popular tech concept of failing fast. Why not fail early in front of a smaller audience (with a chance to pivot and improve) than wait to fail late and run out of runway (or motivation).
In my case, I thought I had told a different story than the alphas perceived, so, in truth, I hadn't told the story I set out to. Making changes was a natural part of the process to correct issues "lost in translation" as it were.
PS: rooftop conversations sound awesome, by the way.
Writing Singular was probably the most emotionally trying and, at the same time, rewarding challenge I've tackled. It even feels weird to describe it that way, it's simply been a part of me for the last two years.
I'm curious how that changes from the first book to the twenty-first?
> I'm curious how that changes from the first book to the twenty-first?
For your answer, compare "The Right Stuff" (1979) to "I am Charlotte Simmons" (2004), both by Tom Wolfe. The second book, apart from being unreadable, seems not to have been written by the same person.
It wasn't the formatting actually. Change tracking of the proposed edits from the copyeditor was greatly expedited through Word's toolset. While I could have copied them all over by hand, I figured I'd likely introduce other errors in the process. Clicking accept/reject was worth the peace of mind.
It's my (possibly false...) impression that those who find Word's "Track Changes" valuable, have never used diff/patch or any of their many descendants (i.e. git etc.) Trying to keep two contributors' work straight with Word's "Track Changes" is a hair-pulling challenge. With more people, forget about it. In large groups, I've found even "change the third sentence in the ninth paragraph" requests via email to be better...
I can't address the general impression, but as someone who spends nearly every moment of my day in git (and only twenty percent of my day dealing with conflicts, I jest) I think my advice is more towards impedance matching.
When working with folks outside of tech, something like Word expedites the process as it's their native tongue. While tools like diff and patch are great (I was a Unix admin at Amazon back in the Jurassic period), they'd limit my options for copy editors.
I think there are many reasons for writing, only some of which are success/financially motivated.
Personally, I wanted to write a story about Lisp machines, Bostrom-inspired Artificial Intelligences, and a journey of discovery/adventure in the vein of my favorite stories (www.zhubert.com/reading). Not everyone gets excited about Lisp machines, so I'm not expecting a mainstream market.
That said, marketing was out of scope of my original article and quite a challenging problem, I agree.
Excellent advice. I tried to stay focused on the technical side of production in this post as reams could be written on how to improve the writing side.
Hi, I'm Zack, I was a Sr. Unix Administrator at AMZN in 1999 and worked alongside very talented folks like snovotny, lamont, yvette, grabatin, gborle, jamison, craig, and so many others. The responses from Benjamin Black and Peter Voshall are correct.
We definitely were on DEC Tru64 at this time. Sun was running the big databases like ACB. I recall worries that obidos might not be able to build in a few months time so the engineer with the little corgi (Erik?) spiked out a linux build and then it was linux pizza boxes as quickly as we could build them.
We built CMF and other things to handle mass provisioning but it was chaotic for quite a while. I don't recall anyone talking about what would later become AWS in those days.