Story Lite notes and storyboard Rotating Header Image

October, 2012:

Better, faster, more benefits for writing, creativity, productivity

New Story Lite v2.2 is out next week, the installer is made so I will put it online soon. I listed the benefits in the last blog, well OK, I listed the features.

NEWS: Live! To buy a Story Lite v2.2 license at sale price of 95c, go here >

Benefits are:

Easy to work with many boxes of notes and ideas because you can select and move around groups now, not just one box at a time.

This means you can make say a title box and a main text box, and drag them about, also clone them for repeats.

Neater line up of rows and columns, this will help you think since the brain works fastest with simple layouts. The snap to grid tool means you can set say 20 pixels as your grid.

Transparent text boxes and Z level, so you can make layered texts.

Instant shortcuts to zoom to boxes or view. Some of these are in the current version but there are more for power users.

Better paging system on the arrow keys, makes it easier to ‘paginate’ your layouts for presentations or slide shows.

Better web export, on a Publish button, and a link to ‘how to’ guides to get your work into Blogs, Content Management Systems (CMS) and Social Media, and anywhere else. There will be more on this topic later.
And in v2.3 (along later) the process will be automated.

You can lay text directly onto anything else, and control the layers – using the transparent text box feature, and the Z levels control. I will make an example of using this next week.

So, not long to wait.

Any ideas for new features just drop a line via Contact page.

More on new Story Lite v2.2 out this week

Story Lite v 2.2 is due out. We will go to v2.2 not 2.0 as we are adding more features.

  • Transparent box backgrounds
  • Z level – can layer boxes (z is height above flat page / screen surface)
  • More exports and accurate HTML Web

This is in addition to all the other new features we already mentioned, group boxes, snap to grid, 400% zoom, recent file list, many more functions and shortcuts.

This means you can do quite artistic text page layouts if you want.

Later we are adding many other exports to social media sites and blogs. This will be along in the next update due in a month.

Comments and feedback for new features welcome, as they might get in quite soon!

Add text styles to a Story Software document

Story Software text styles

Story Software text styles

Text Styles Template file

There is a new file for text styles, you can use this as a basic method to copy/paste styles into new boxes (or clone them). You can edit these to suit, they use a serif font (Times New Roman) and a sans serif font (Arial) and a number of styles like Heading, Subheading etc.

{filelink=32}

New version of writers app Story Lite 2 out soon – update

Operation Lust - sex and crime novel

Operation Lust - sex and crime novel - no images in Story Lite sorry!

There is a new version Story Lite 2.0 coming out, this has all the features of Story Turbo, but no images. Feedback has been that people want the writing app to continue and adding images makes it a bit of a desktop publishing app, which is a distraction.

Story Lite 2.0 new features are:

  • Snap to grid – line up boxes
  • Group boxes – very useful, can now have a multiple box arrangement and move it about, even clone it
  • 400% zoom – see more
  • More shortcuts for zooming windows
  • Many speedups and improvements

So we are making Story Lite into the main writers app, and Turbo will continue down the writing, DTP, presentations, slide shows, etc path.

We are also adding spell check, text styles and pagination to selected boxes, so Story Lite can be used as you main word processor – this means you don’t have to export from the outline version in Story Lite, you can completely finish a work in it. Obviously you might still want to export to Word etc for more formatting, but you don’t have to.

We also have a new web app coming out, and an iPad version later on, probably next year now. These will be based on Story Lite and also not have images.

For more on text styles, see the blog entry on it, there is a new example file for them.