I’ve implemented one of the improvements mentioned in the previous post: words-per-hour. The wph is updated every five seconds, so it neither flickers nor stops when you do.
Enjoy!
(click image to download v0.02 of devul, or read about why devul came into existance)
I got a little feedback on devul during the day, after describing the background of devul.
(1) First of all the window itself was said to “look boring”. I can agree to that. Adding some background image, changing the font & color, and removing the titlebar/window frame would improve things a lot.
But when I asked for more details of what could be improved, I got the answer that the command prompt/terminal was the real problem, not the devul window!
Being a python/ubuntu application with a command line argument (the text file to add words too), it seemed questionable to remove the terminal. How would the user specify what file to add words to, without involving some non-minimalistic open-file-dialog..?
One answer is “build a new file every time devul is started”. For example, one could imagine creating “devul.2010-nov-7.17.17.txt” for the moment I write this sentence. It should be unique for all practical purposes. Putting that file in the users desktop’ folder, should make it obvious and discoverable from a usability standpoint. It could even be named something silly like “Mindpoop.2010-nov-7.17.17.txt”, reminding us of what we are doing here: exploring how free-minded-text-spitting we can be using computer software.
Another side effect of that approach, is that it prepares devul for the windows environment, in case I feel like adding support to that environment. For example via py2exe.
(2) A second point was the addition of more stats. Right now, the word count is the only thing that is displayed. The statistic that was specifically asked for, was the speed of writing. How about adding a words-per-minute measurement to the display? Something like this:
(3) The third critique is how to install devul. Downloading a .py script isn’t really a nice way to do it. For one thing, it requires the user to know how to install Python.
A better way would be to distribute a .deb file, but I don’t know any easy way to generate a .deb file from a .py file. Anyone out there give me some help?
(click to download devul v0.01. And read about the birth of devul)
I’ve peeked at the NaNoWriMo challenge a couple of times last few months. It’s about writing a 50.000 word novel in one month. Quantity, yes indeed! Quality, not so important.
It seemed like a fun thing to try, but in the end I figured out I’m just a little too pressed on time this year to do it.
Anyway, I did go so far as to buy the founders boo
k about writing novels – “No plot, No problem“. In the first few chapters, Chris Baty describes his experiences from NaNoWriMo since it’s inception 1999.
One of the key things about writing at such a high speed is skipping anything related to editing the text: no spelling corrections, no grammar fiddling, no fixing dialogue punctuation.
Being the entrepreneur/programmer I am I thought – “Can I translate this principle into some kind of interactive software?”.
So I started thinking about removing the possibility of changing previous paragraphs, or shadowing out text further up in the document. I had a little chat with Maloki, who mentioned the importance of the Word Count in the challenge. And then I thought – maybe that’s it? Just show the word count, and skip everything else?
Said and done, I set out to hack up a little Python script. The result is “devul”, an application that features pointing out a text file, adding words to it, while only viewing the number of words in the text file.
The program is written for the free operating system Ubuntu. This is how you run it:
python devul.py mytext.txt
The name “devul” is a combination of “/dev/null” and “devil”.
<– This is the logo of devul. I’ve hosted the project on bitbucket, if you want to fork and improve it – like changing from black/white colors to something more fun, or maybe some background picture? Or a more nice-to-look-at font than the system font. 🙂
(click to download devul)
Voice Steam 