Writing in a database seems like an odd thing to do. It sounds like filling out a form or writing in an Excel sheet. It’s definitely something most people won’t even want to try.
But writing in a database is something that is happening every day and all the time, because every blog, every content management system of any website, every forum on the web is nothing else.
There are key advantages in using a database over a simple file based editor, as Microsoft Word or literally every other word processor out there are. Just to single out a few, we’d like to name metadata, identity and searchability as such advantages. We met people who used local installations of WordPress just to be able to use those features of a database.
Still, there are too many flaws with this solution, especially when it comes to writing longer texts like your thesis. Some of the disadvantages are that you actually do have to type your text into forms, you don’t have just your white sheet in front of you. You can’t exchange your texts easily. And with WordPress and alike, you don’t have any of the features indispensable for academic work, like footnotes, bibliography and quotes management.
You see where we are heading: The WriteFlow project was started with the claim to be the first database based word processor and to do it right for academic purposes.
We had to write nearly everything from scratch: The style management, the footnotes, the inspector, but most important, the whole text editor. When you open WriteFlow, you will see a white sheet just like the one you’re used to from Microsoft Word. The whole magic is invisible, it’s happening beneath the surface: Once you start typing, the text will immediately be passed on to your SQLite database. Some operations, like a mere paragraph mark, the split command or a change of style (i.e. from normal to quote) will trigger the action in the underlying database.
Now, all this is really cool if you want to attribute keywords to some paragraphs, search fulltext for two words in one paragraph, use some text in multiple documents, know when exactly you’ve written this paragraph and when it was modified.
But it gets magical once you start to think about quotes and bibliography. Managing all the quotes you need in a database is no work at all in WriteFlow. Every quote you ever write with WriteFlow will already be in just the database you want it to be. All the bibliographical information will be there as well. In fact, using a quote the second time will just automatically insert the right footnote, without any further work at all.
What about the other way round? You look through the quotes you’ve gathered and you wonder where you’ve used this exact quote. Or where you inserted a reference to this book, or this author. Those are questions you’ll never have to ask again, because it will be right there on your screen.
When we started thinking about writing in a database, we knew that it would have to feel just normal, just like writing in any other word processor out there.
But once you are ready to take a different perspective, WriteFlow will rock your world.
This is a frame of our animated clip, not an actual screenshot of WriteFlow.