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Mariner Software Storymill 3.2.1

Ray Aguilera — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 03:25:00 -0600

A familiar interface helps to organize your writing.

Plenty of people entertain fantasies about writing the Great American Novel. The number of people who actually get that novel written—great or otherwise—is much, much less. Besides the talent, creativity, and motivation to keep it up for thousands and thousands of words, not having the right tools on hand can hamper the endeavor. No doubt you’ve already got a word processor on your Mac, but a specialized app for novel writing can offer features that regular word processors can’t match. And while those extra features alone won’t make a novel magically appear on your screen, having the right tool for the job makes the process of extended writing projects a lot easier, not to mention better organized.

Mariner’s StoryMill presents a paned, iTunes-style interface that will be instantly familiar to every Mac user. The far left contains your sources, organized into different groupings. You can use the hierarchical Source listing to jump to specific Chapters or Scenes—StoryMill’s most basic building blocks. You can also use this list to rearrange scenes or entire chapters within your text. Additionally, you can skip to notes you’ve entered on specific Actors (characters) or Locations, in addition to details for tracking submissions, research, and to-do items.

The center section is where you get down to business and actually write your text. The bottom of the text area features live word and character counts, which are great for anyone trying to meet specific targets. Our favorite feature is a built-in counter that tracks words, pages, or total minutes written, which can be a great motivator for lazy writers. And if you’re easily distracted, full-screen mode is perfect for blocking out everything but your clever inscriptions.

The right section of the StoryMill interface contains metadata about all of your various Scenes, Chapters, and other text and notes in your project. The tagging feature is useful for assigning arbitrary tags to bits of text, and when coupled with the Smart Views feature—like a Smart Playlist in iTunes—they can help you drill down and find exactly what you are looking for in a lengthy text. And since individual scenes can be assigned to specific times, a Timeline overview can help you see how your story is progressing, even if the storylines aren’t revealed in a linear fashion.

StoryMill can output to your text easily into Word and various plain-text formats, although we were a little put off by the fact that the app stores your text essentially in a database, making it hard to just open your project file in a text editor if something were to go sideways with StoryMill itself—although frequent manual plain-text exports can alleviate that problem. And we missed a versioning system for keeping multiple edits of a Scene or Chapter. But the database-like features for tracking Actors, Locations, and other data about your writing is amazingly helpful for managing the details of lengthy projects.

Mariner Software MacJournal

Roberto Baldwin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 03:29:00 -0500

All your blogs and entries in one place.

You started with just one blog. Since then, you’ve diversified. You have blogs about your political affiliation, your dog, and your favorite restaurants. You even have a blog about all your other blogs. With all the blogs in your life, it becomes difficult to keep them straight. Each blog is on a different CMS (content management system) and let’s face it, CMSes aren’t known for their user-friendliness. Mariner Software’s MacJournal hopes to bridge the gap between the different blogging platforms, while giving users more control over their posts. The standalone app allows you to post to LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, and MobileMe in a native Mac environment.

The paned interface allows newbies and seasoned bloggers to dive right in, offering all the important features you need without going overboard. Individual blogs are called Journals. Similar to iTunes Playlists, you add entries to Journals, and you can drag and drop text, pictures, PDFs, and videos directly into your posts. The Media window contains your media files from the iLife apps, plus any additional folders you’ve designated. Drag and drop is great, but we would have loved to have an “Insert Media” option in the toolbar to quickly add other files.

MacJournal gets around CMSes that don’t allow photo uploads from third-party apps by allowing the user to designate an FTP site, MoblieMe, or Picasa account to upload images to. Once configured, images are automatically uploaded and placed in your posting. The application also includes the ability to record audio and video directly within a post. The audio tools aren’t built for regular podcasting, but for adding the occasional sound bite, they’re a nice addition.

Power-bloggers will no doubt welcome the organization features. There are plenty of options for tagging and annotating posts and tracking the status of work in progress. MacJournal also offers advance scheduling, perfect for daily posters who want to put their blogs on autopilot for a while. Bloggers who like to get their hands dirty mucking about in the HTML code of their posts will be disappointed, however. We were able to make minor adjustments to entire blogs, but serious HTML jockeys should look elsewhere for their code-mashing fix.

ITunes For Your Recipes

Jan Hughes — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:55:00 -0500

For many cooks, nothing compares to the joy of pulling out their favorite cookbook and turning to the dog-eared, slightly splattered page containing that perfect recipe. For others though, their space-constrained home libraries bulge with cookbooks that feature only a couple of noteworthy recipes or are stuffed with random recipes torn from magazines and gathered from friends. For these cooks, MacGourmet provides the perfect solution.

MacGourmet, the self-proclaimed “iTunes for your recipes,” helps you create and organize a vast digital library of recipes that can be grouped into custom “playlists,” from which myriad functions can add to your joy of cooking. If you just went to the farmer’s market, for example, and have a basketful of fresh squash and carrots, you can generate a SmartList that will show you recipes featuring these items. If you are planning a dinner party, you can search by yield to see which recipes can accommodate the size of your group. MacGourmet helps with weekly menu planning and can even generate and print your shopping list (our favorite feature!) or export the list as an iPod note for reference while you’re shopping. The iPhone doesn’t support iPod notes, but a Mariner representative says that they are working on an iPhone app. You can also sync your weekly meal plan to iCal. If you’re trying to eat more healthfully, MacGourmet includes the USDA Nutrient Database that provides nutritional analysis for many recipes. Oenophiles will appreciate the ability to store wine-tasting notes, and the app also helps you create hard-copy cookbooks to share with friends and family.

MacGourmet offers several options for building your recipe library. Adding dishes from online sources is easiest, requiring a simple drag-and-drop from a number of supported websites or a copy and paste from other sites. (At press time, there were eleven culinary websites in an ever-growing list supported by MacGourmet.)

MacGourmet comes with a nice selection of recipes to get you started building your recipe “playlist.”

Recipes from your beloved cookbooks can be typed directly into the app, or text files can be added via the Recipe Import Assistant, which, in our tests, required a certain mount of fiddling in order to get the various parts of the recipe categorized properly. And importing a Word doc, while time consuming, worked fine. We were also able to import a recipe from a favorite cookbook by creating a PDF and copying, importing, and then editing the text. This method required some effort, but did save a bit of typing.