Saturday, 24 January 2009

tools & software for writers

A few tools of the trade which you may find useful for those occasions when you need to get your work done without too many distractions. Online tools and some offline tools included as usual.

online collaboration

Backboard - Feedback for uploaded media and collaborative text. Very shiny.
Plotbot - Nice screenplay tool; also a sandbox of shareable plots to play with.
Zoho Suite - Large array of collaboration tools; interfaces with Facebook.

full screen text editors

Web 2.0 aficionadoes will go to DarkCopy and try not to think about other tabs.

Offline - Windows users can use Q10 which is USB-friendly and free. I use this one myself for when I don't want to be distracted by Internet pretty-shinies and need to get flow. Mac users get WriteRoom while JDarkRoom works for anyone with Java.

online references
Bartleby - Quotations and more; including Strunk's The Elements of Style.
iTools - Dictionaries, research desk. Collates good websites into one stop.
Online Books Project - Penn University site with lots of materials.
Project Gutenburg - The largest collection of online books I know of.
Rhymezone - Rhyming dictionary/thesaurus for those who need to.

If you know of any others which you've found good, post in the comments.

2 comments:

  1. If you like Q10 you'll love Writemonkey (distraction free writing software) even better!
    Check out http://pomarancha.com/writemonkey
    Matt

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the tip - like what I see so far and will include this in a future post!

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

Greatest Hits