WriteFlow

We had to work hard for this update and it took us much longer than we expected, but it was worth it as an investment in the future of Writeflow.

Much was done under the hood, but the most important visible new feature are the new citation styles. They became much more powerful and we tried to make editing them as intuitive as possible.

Please download the new styles from our forum:

http://www.writeflow.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=71

As always, stability was a major concern, but I think we just made an enormous step here. We still find a few ways to cause exceptions and crashes, but our list became so much shorter…

We also included the Google Chrome Extension for one click webarchive-import in the dmg file when you download WriteFlow for the first time.

[feature:] Automatic References hugely improved, introduction of “Citation Styles”. Please download new styles from our website.
[feature:] A lot of new context menus introduced
[feature:] Drag’n'Drop of PDfs now directly on an entry in the media list
[feature:] “copy to” in context menu (right mouse click on quote in Media View)
[feature:] Support for “copy to” from Persons View and from Keywords View
[bug:] Abstract Reference Descriptor Bug fixed
[bug:] Inspector stability much improved
[bug:] Select all + copy to bug fixed
[bug:] Bug when copying from Notes fixed
[bug:] Some improvements on the media types
[bug:] Add Keyword in Command Tool fixed
[bug:] A lot of work done all around

Many important websites like Google Scholar can’t be accessed directly via our Media Search, because they don’t offer a Z39.50 Gateway, but it is possible to easily import the references into WriteFlow.

1. Choose “Show links to import citations into BibTeX” in the Scholar Preferences
2. Search for the articles you want to import
3. Click on the “BibTeX” link of a given article
   Select the BibTeX code and drag it on the WriteFlow Application Icon in the Dock. Now you have the Media information. If there is a PDF available, just continue:
4. Make sure that you see the grey “No content available” in the lower half of the window when the newly imported media is selected. Click on the button which is selected here, if this is not the case:
5. Click on your Download Folder in the Dock, choose the last item and drag it on the grey lower half of the WriteFlow Media View.

It is also possible to drag whole bibliographies (as text or .bib files) on the WriteFlow Application Icon.

Please take a look at our short video in our forum to see how it is done:
Click here

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 ever 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.

Last Friday, after a long time of development, we finally distributed a working copy of WriteFlow to those who contacted us in the last few months. If you too want to take a look at WriteFlow now, please contact us. It does not take any special skills, we are just interested in your opinion about what you see.