Hi all,
I've cast my critical eye over MYNovel and formed the following opinions:
Good things about MyNovel4 demo
1. Lots of aid. For example, date selection for the novel setting is comprehensive and there is a potted world history as a brief reference. Want to use “star dates” for your Captain's Log? No problem.
2. It seems to remember where you were in many instances – I tried creating a novel, but couldn't save it, but when I returned to the application, some of the default selections were in front of me.
3. Allows use of MyNovel (rolls all files into one) as an editor, or Word or LibreOffice
4. When generating a character, there are items such as birth date (and death), status of character (protagonist, antagonist, etc), and physical characteristics, feelings, attitudes, relationships and more
5. Right-click gives context menus
6. Interface is customizable to some extent
7. It will use the Win7 TTS to read your work back to you – I think this (also on other applications) is a great tool because I feel it will aid my proof-reading
8. Spelling dictionaries: I looked up Options in the dialog and found it used an Australian spelling dictionary (where I am located). A pleasant surprise.
9. The word processor permits bullets and numbered lists and seems to offer a little more than the rudimentary word processing tools.
10. Calling or ideas for V5...
Bad Things:
1. The ribbon takes up a fair amount of space on a low-res laptop screen, but on 720p resolution screens is not too bad
2. Tried typing “wormhole” and searching using Microsoft Encarta (didn't know that still existed!) within MyNovel and got a response “no match...in Bing”
3. Not being able to save the demo is a real pain. Should be time expiry. Novels are big things, and this is capable software, with a fair amount of complexity. Takes time to learn, even though this seems an easy application to find your way around in.
4. Diagrams take up a lot of screen real estate, but the panels are dockable so you can use all the screen if you desire.
Neutral
1. The diagram tool seems okay – and again quite useful for newer writers, but... I have a doctor in my story, and he has a workplace. I created both and linked them to see how things turned out. Results were obvious (a text and line link between the two, but my feeling is that when I get things really going and there are many characters with unique relationships, I may be glad of its inclusion.
2. “Get Inspiration” seems to me a bit obscure and is only available to registered users, but it seems to be a simplistic means of giving ideas by linking to web pages.
3. Text analysis tells you how often you use particular words in your prose. Interesting, and perhaps useful for those who overuse a particular word habitually, and locates it in the text for you, but you have to close the dialog to make any edits and this could prove tedious. Also gives readability level of the piece though I am unsure of how accurate this might be.
4. Export to a file is disabled so I cannot even be certain if this is a basic “export to doc/opt/etc” or something with real formatting power, but the website says, “export your manuscript to major file formats including ePub, Adobe PDF, RTF, HTML, Word 2003-2010, Open Office etc...” I don't know how comprehensive the “etc” is...
5. “We guarantee you'll be impressed with our software...” says the website, but I couldn't find out if it was a money-back guarantee, or if this is just hyperbole.
6. Users of V3 reported their files being screwed up by the application, and losing work. No mention of this in V4 though
7 I could not establish if there was an upgrades policy for new releases. It appears that there is a 50% discount for upgrade from V4 - at least upgrades from V3 were offered this.
8. I was creating a trait for a character, and got a crash, with a popup email window that also had information on the crash as an attachment for me to email. I decided to try to continue working and everything seemed quite normal.
That's about it.
In brief I found it easy to use this software and think it has quite reasonable merit. It would cost me around $40 to register, which is not unreasonable.
Any specific questions, please ask. I'm off to play with WriteWay and Scrivener, the other two on my shortlist.
Regards to all,