(Intrepid souls can go here to see it.)

One of the things I do is write help/support libraries for software. I use this documentation development software called Flare, which is essentially the half-sibling of RoboHelp. Flare lets you compose help resources of just about any size and export them to a variety of formats. In my case, that’s XHTML on a web site.

A word count on a project of that nature is not a conventional tool available in that sort of software. We just kept writing until we felt we were done for a given release. Little did I know how much we actually had written.

I downloaded a trial of Analyzer, Flare’s companion application for doing all sorts of quality control checks on your documentation. I didn’t have time to play with it much since it took two hours to complete the analysis of the help library. In the end, all I needed to see was the Statistics panel.

Total word count: 161,029

I think the actual number is a bit lower because it appears to have included a few sections I excluded from the final, compiled version. Still, the true word count has to be over 150,000.

In comparison, according to what I think are the statistics from Scholastic…

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’s total word count: 168,923

Excuse me while I go ice my hands.

For those of you who use a Mac or are thinking of switching, the vast majority of people I work with are on Windows machines, but I’d only need one hand to count the number of compatibility issues I’ve had in the last five years. So, if you are looking to switch, don’t let compatibility issues worry you.

On with the list!

• Scrivener – I discovered Scrivener about two months ago and continue to be floored by how astonishingly good it is for a version 1.x application. Its developer is also a writer, and it shows. Scrivener provides you the tools to write and then gets out of your way. There’s no way I can cover it all here, so go to their web site, download the demo, and then go through the included, well-written tutorial. It’s a steal at $40.

  Scrivener and Copywrite (below) have helped solve the problem created by having your writing in word processor documents scattered all over your hard drive or crammed together in a single, unworkable document. Both allow you to easily manage hundreds of ‘documents’ that can range from chapters and pages to the electronic equivalent of a box of index cards and sticky notes. Scrivener also has a nice tagging system to allow you to search your library of stuff in multiple ways.

  I wrote a 4,000-word short story recently using Scrivener. I spent 99% of my time writing and 1% fiddling with Scrivener. This is how software should work. In short, I think Scrivener is the current gold standard for Mac writing software.

• CopyWrite – CopyWrite is what I used before Scrivener, and I still have a lot of use for it. It falls into the same category as Scrivener in that it allows you to collect into a single file library lots of small documents, random notes, brainstorms, character descriptions, or whatever other ideas you have related to that library of stuff. If you don’t need the more robust features of Scrivener, CopyWrite is simple, yet powerful editor and organizer. It’s also a steal at $25.
• MarsEdit – I wrote this blog entry on MarsEdit. It lets me write drafts on my computer and post them to my blogs whenever I’m ready. It also syncs nicely with the online version of your blog if you edit it outside of MarsEdit. I think it’s missing a few features, but on the whole it’s the best blog writer and editor I’ve used. You need to know a little HTML to format the text (no WYSIWYG editor) and have some idea of how blogs work. Otherwise, it works well with most flavors of blogs and fits my style well. It’s a good value at $30.
• Swift Publisher – Price-wise, Swift Publisher is “poor man’s desktop publishing”, but it’s certainly rich in features. You can produce brochures, flyers, booklets, and about anything else in a form comparable to much more expensive programs.

  As a standalone application, it sells for about $45. For just under twice that, you can get Printfolio, which includes Swift Publisher along with: Business Card Composer (a brilliant app for creating your business cards), Disc Cover (for creating labels for CDs and DVDs), Mail Factory (a fantastic label and mailing generator that integrates with Address Book), and a light version of Image Tricks (a decent image editor that integrates with the other apps). A mountain of templates and good clip art are available with them.

Sometime in the future I’ll talk some about “big-pile-of-stuff organizers” whose purpose is to help you organize various types of media together in one place. These let you keep together text clippings, images, web sites, movies, documents, and about anything else you can think of. They’re invaluable to have in your writer’s toolbox.

There are other writing programs out there, but after finding ones that work for me, I haven’t been very motivated to branch out. Ulysses struck me as way too expensive, especially when compared to Scrivener, which I found at least as feature-rich as Ulysses but easier to use and much cheaper. I’ve been meaning to tinker with Mellel, but haven’t gotten around to it. It’s an intriguing spin on word processing, but honestly I don’t compose much in word processors anymore. I’ve heard Jer’s Novel Writer is worth a look as well, but I haven’t done so yet.

I still have a Windows machine and use it for a couple of projects because something involved is Windows-only. The new Intel Macs allow you to run Windows on them, but I’m too cheap to pony up the money to buy another Windows license.

In case you’re wondering, the only piece of writing software I need but can’t get in some form for my Mac is MadCap Flare, which I use to create help libraries for a couple of software projects.