Tag: WRITING

Quick! What's an eight-letter word that starts with R, ends with M, and has B somewhere in it?* I know that these are often life-or-death questions, especially if Scrabble is involved (or poetry, for that matter). It's a good thing we're in the 21st century and there are now handy tools like Word Finder. This handy little form, hidden away in, of all places, the Toolbox section of a photography ...

Language is an ever-changing landscape. That's a cliché if I ever heard one, but it's also true. Urban Dictionary is one of those must-know Web sites; I think it's the largest slang and street language dictionary online. It's incredibly "social," but the social features don't feel forced or bolted-on. They're at the very heart of the site: definitions get voted up or down and are presented ...

Loki is a Rich Text editor for the Web. The current leader in this arena is clearly FCKEditor (which is now called CKEditor), so why does the world need another WYSIWIG editor for HTML textareas? The first thing that caught my eye was... the very first feature on the feature list. That wasn't because it was first either, honestly! It says: Hitting Return produces a new paragraph. Mozilla ...

I have a thing for full-screen editors. I also have a thing for Markdown syntax. I wanted to start writing some of my texts using Markdown in a text editor. Amazingly enough, I was not able to find a Win32 command-line implementation of Markdown. Well, WriteMonkey saved the day. That's just one of the features of this utterly incredible full-screen editor. It's got everything I need for writing, ...

Proper writing -- you know, novels and stuff -- shares a few common traits with blogging. The most common is 'writers' block' or THE WALL. You simply run out of things to write. It can either creep up on you slowly, or just suddenly emerge before you like a big... brick thing... but either way, it's a problem. And IBM has a solution! In true, researchers-are-not-very-good-at-naming-things fashion, ...

As Paper Rater so eloquently states in HUGE type, it's a free grammar and spelling check, with plagiarism detection thrown in for good measure. It's actually an interesting study in graphic design: Look at that screenshot. Would you rely on such a website for editing an important academic paper, a newspaper article, or any other important text? At first glance, I sure wouldn't. That "Use now ...

As a writer, I often have to look words up. For years, Onelook.com has been my go-to tool. Whenever I need to look up a word, I use Onelook to directly search dozens of dictionaries, both plain English and specialized. The results page links directly to the entry I looked up in each dictionary, and getting multiple definitions is just a matter of Ctrl-clicking each of my favorite dictionaries ...

Oh, I know. What a novel idea, right? A plain-text editor which takes up your whole monitor and tries to bring back some of that 'old-school' feel while letting you focus on content rather than form. Never been done! It's not like we've ever seen DarkRoom, and WriteRoom, and PyRoom, and ... So what's the point for yet another contender in the surprisingly crowded space for freeware text ...

Creative writing is not an easy task, but the web gives us great opportunities to collaborate and get some help. For our own book, my friend and I set up a custom DokuWiki which does the trick quite nicely. But not everyone likes to tinker; some people simply want to get down to business and start telling their story while getting feedback from their writing buddies. This is the purported ...

After the Deadline has been mentioned before here on Download Squad. In September of 2009, Automattic (the company behind WordPress) acquired ATD and promptly integrated it into their wildly popular blogging platform. If you do any writing anywhere on the web and you're using Firefox, you'll be glad to know that the After the Deadline add-on has hit version 1.0 and should be shedding Mozilla's ...

Ommwriter is a Mac word processor with a bit of a gimmick. Like one of my favorite writing apps for the Mac, WriteRoom, Ommwriter goes full-screen, with a minimal interface and a focus on avoiding distractions. Ommwriter is even more extreme, though, adding a calming background and soothing music to the mix, and restricting your control over text formatting to a bare minimum to reduce fiddling. ...

If you're familiar with the excellent WriteRoom app for OS X, you might also love the iPhone version of the app. WriteRoom is a full-screen, distraction-free writing environment that whisks away the toolbars, icons, buttons and other attention-stealers so you can be alone with your writing work. The iPhone version does the same thing, and it also syncs automatically to Writeroom.ws, where it can ...

A couple of years ago, there was a site called ficlets, a home for collaborative fiction stories put together in super-short 1024-character bursts. Ficlets was great, because anybody could jump in and add to a story in no time at all, and some interesting work grew out of it. When Ficlets disappeared, the active community it left behind had no place to go. Until now. Ficly, from the creators of ...

Birdhouse is a new kind of Twitter client for iPhone. Instead of focusing on keeping track of the most friends or supporting the most third-party services, Birdhouse is designed specifically for the composition and refinement of tweets. The app's developers, Adam "LonelySandwich" Lisagor and Cameron Hunt (who you might know as cameron.io.), are two guys who put a lot of thought into their ...

Write or Die from Dr. Wicked is quite an interesting application. You must keep typing or you will receive reminders to get back to work. Sometimes those reminders are quite unpleasant. You can choose nice, gentle reminders, in the form of pop up boxes, the normal reminders which make the screen turn red and play music, or kamikaze reminders which start undoing what you have been typing if you ...