One of the important features of WriteFlow is its ability to connect to servers to download bibliographical information. At the moment we are integrating the Yaz framework to be able to connect easily to a lot of different servers. Users of WriteFlow will be able to connect to any bibliographical server providing a supported gateway by just entering the corresponding login information.
Still, we have to overcome some problems because the information many of those servers deliver is not as clean and correct as we would like it to be, and furthermore the ways those servers provide fulltext pdfs are not always identical, which makes it hard to offer a smooth user experience.
But those of you who used WriteFlow already will know that it’s a rocky start, so no surprises here.
The second big topic we are working on are versions and chapters. Unfortunately, there are still some ways to cause major hiccups when you play around with the WriteFlow Element System. It proved to be much more difficult than we initially expected, because we have to deal with a lot of special cases and as nobody has every tried to do what we did with WriteFlow, we had (and still have) to reinvent a lot of very basic stuff.
What you see in the current version of WriteFlow is a compromise between functionality and usability which frankly does not make as totally happy (even apart from those annoying bugs). There are a lot of examples where we opted for a solution which was at first easier to implement to reduce complexity, but which in return raised complexity for our users.
So, that is what we are doing right now: We want to reduce complexity, go back to our initial goal of a rather simple word processor where all the magic only comes in when you want it.
This will take some time, but we would like to thank those of you who follow the development closely and especially those of you who decided to support us by already buying a license. We will continue to update WriteFlow regularly throughout the process because we really appreciate the feedback we get from you.