Three hints

December 11th, 2011

After the last update we were asked repeatedly about the possibility to change the shortcut for opening the command tool. We don’t use the third party framework anymore, but it is very easy to achieve the same effect it with standard OS X functionality.

Just open the System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Application Shortcuts, click on the “+”, choose “WriteFlow” as Application, enter “Command Tool…” and press your shortcut -> Done.

Another feature which might pass sometimes unnoticed: With WriteFlow it is really easy to import book information from Z39.50 compatible library servers.

But we also included the possibility to automatically load linked PDFs when you click the “import” button. This works e.g. for Project Muse. Just make sure you’re part of your university VPN (otherwise, you often won’t have the right to access the PDFs).

And one last thing: Writeflow will produce a lot of errors and crashes when you use an (outdated) input manager. There is nothing we can do about it….

Update 0.9122 Beta

December 9th, 2011

It has been a long wait, but the new update is finally here. we had to overhaul the Command Tool, the Search function and a lot of other stuff in order to move forward. Now we are working on new features and improved usability. I hope you appreciate our steady progress and we are looking forward to feedback of any kind!

…. work in progress….

September 8th, 2011

We are working on some rather important changes, which take a lot of time and don’t permit updates in the meantime, so sorry for the long pause. Please be patient for a little longer, it will be worth the wait.

Roadmap

April 12th, 2011

While we don’t want to share all of our plans at this point, I thought you might be interested in a few details about what we are working on right now and what will be done within the next few months.
One of the more exciting and imminent things is the integration of Spotlight search. We will needed to switch completely to 10.6. to do so. It will be worth it.
While we are at working on the search function, we will make it much more flexible and we will make full use of a lot of features which are just not reasonably possible in the current Command Tool Search.
Another thing which is very high on our list is the integration of a bibliographical function and to make this truly awesome, we have to integrate it with a smart folders system, which will be a great deal for me personally, because I’ve been waiting for it for so long.
And, one last thing, we have very nice plans for Outlining. As always, we will not just superimpose a feature on a dull word processor, but it will be the logical product of the underlying Writeflow technology.
The most important thing about the WriteFlow roadmap is that we are slowly working on finding solutions to take full advantage of the very basic idea of WriteFlow. This takes more time than to just make another word processor, or another bibliographical management tool, or another information management program, or another PDF viewer, or another Outliner. But once all those bits and pieces come together, the full power of WriteFlow will be mind-blowing.
At least that’s what we count on ;-)

PS: Of course, we wont forget debugging on our way. If you want to tell us about your priorities please don’t hesitate to contact us!

The next update will be 10.6 only

April 6th, 2011

For the next update of WriteFlow we decided to completely move to 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and not try to support 10.5 (Leopard) anymore.
This decision comes as the result of tight resources, but also in view of the upcoming 10.7 (Lion) release. It will be very advantageous for us and for our users to implement some features which are Lion only.
Especially some new features for CoreData and some improvements with Fullscreen mode will make our lives easier. The next update will include a new Command Tool with better text support and Spotlight search.
By the way, I would like to encourage you to buy a license of WriteFlow now. You can significantly speed up development, with your feedback we can adapt WriteFlow to your own personal workflow, and you’ll be able to follow the unfolding of the full potential of the WriteFlow technology form a front seat.

Tutorials

March 8th, 2011

Basically, we have only two video tutorials to explain WriteFlow. We struggle with the fact that Writeflow is in full development, the tutorials are up to date only for a moment.

In the first tutorial you can’t yet see the new Safari (or Chrome) Extension, which facilitates the import of Websites. And now you can also just drag’n'drop a PDF on a chosen media in the media list. Also, we included the Z39.50 search and support searching of the Pubmed database.

In the second tutorial, the most striking difference is the way we handle the “Apply changes” when you use the same text in two different documents. Before, we had a window popping up which you had to click away with a decision. We found out that this was really disturbing, so we changed to the green “Apply changes”-bar. I think this is a huge improvement.

But we are still not happy for various reasons and will further improve this. This is one reason why we’ll wait to produce another tutorial. As always, I strongly encourage you to take a good look at the tutorials, despite all those small differences. They’ll really help to understand how WriteFlow works.

Registration on the WriteFlow forum

March 4th, 2011

As I mentioned before, the spambots targeting our phpBB forum are surprisingly good in circumventing all the counter measures and they come back ten times a day with new IPs. I don’t want to spend my time guessing if the registration is legit or not, so please don’t use usernames like “Rahecogn” or “NedairradyMen” if you really want to post anything.
In case you are not activated within a few hours, please contact me directly and mention the username you’ve used.

Sorry for this inconvenience, but it really became necessary.

By the way, I really enjoy answering your questions directly by mail, but I would also like to see some of this traffic moved to the forum for everybody else to follow. So please feel encouraged to go there and participate!

Update 0.9121 Beta

March 2nd, 2011

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

Forum registration changed

February 11th, 2011

Because of way too much spam in the forum we had to change the registration method. Apparently nowadays those tricky captcha-images are easier to read for computers than for humans…

New Google Chrome Extension for WriteFlow

February 10th, 2011

We already offer a Safari Extension for one-click-import of URLs and thus Webarchives into WriteFlow.

Here comes the same thing for Google Chrome.

Just download it from here:
http://www.writeflow.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=41