I have to replace the cover of my science fiction novel, but I'm torn as to which one to go with. Can you help me figure out which one is the better cover?

Please let me know which one you like. And also, please share for reach 🙂

#ScienceFiction #CoverSelection #IndieAuthor #HelpMeDecide #Bookstodon #FediBooks #Writing
A cover for a science fiction n…
A cover for a science fiction n…

I've been working on my Scrivener text analyzer over the weekend and while I initially thought that it might take about 3 - 4 days at least to see progress, I've been able to get to a fairly functional level in just two days 🙂

At this point, I have a working app which can load a Scrivener document, extract just the manuscript text, parse it and provide information and identify components of text — like unique words, or repeated words and the word count.

If you select one of the words from the list, the viewer highlights every occurence of the word in the document. So I'm very pleased with where things are now 🙂

All that remains is to do the following:
1. Add the ability to detect specific types of words like nouns, verbs, adjectives etc.
2. Add the ability to detect/hightlight specific words or phrases added by the user.

At that point, I believe it does everything that I want it to do. This should work on any platform but I have only tested under macOS. If anybody is interested in testing it out, let me know and I'll see about setting up a download.

#WritingTools #Coding #Scrivener #Flutter #macOS #SideProjects #Writing
A screenshot of a macOS app sho…

A very long time ago, I wrote a Word macro to help writers detect specific types of words (adverbs, passive voice etc.) in their writing. You can still find that macro here:
https://absolutewrite.com/forums/index.php?threads/helpful-macro.26020/

I was talking to somebody on here about it a day or two ago and I realized that my current writing tool, Scrivener, does not really let me do something similar. I looked into it and it turns out that Scrivener does not have any macro or scripting functionality, but the developers are OK with others writing third-party apps which access the Scrivener files and do stuff with the data.

So I thought I might as well work on that this weekend 🙂Thanks to the helpful Scrivener developers, I was able to figure out how to access the Scrivener file and read only the data I wanted fairly quickly.

The issue here was that a Scrivener file can contain many types of textual content besides your manuscript — there can be notes, research, thoughts, quotes, whatever.

You don't want all that text to be analyzed. You only want your manustcript text to be analyzed for particular types of words. That part (getting only the manuscript text) is now functional 🙂

Now I have to figure out how to do the actual word analysis. My original Word macro was pretty basic. I feel that there might be better ways to do this now. So I'm going to look around a bit and see what approach might work better.

If I go back to the original word lists approach, that's pretty simple to implement. But hopefully, I can find something a bit more automated which doesn't involve people typing in lists of words?

#Coding #SideProject #Flutter #Writing #Scrivener #Authors
A macOS application screen show…
A macOS applicatio file showing…

@Emmacox I was curious and took a look at the options available with Scrivener. Apparently, they don't provide any way to script or to add plugins. So apparently that path is out 😞

However, they do have an option under Edit > Writing Tools > Linugistic Focus... which allows you to find some types of words. But not words from a custom list.

The Scriverner documents are just RTF files. So it should be possible to simply load the files in a separate app and do any kind of search you want. I might look into this if I have some time.

My second novel, "Sir Lanka Files" is done 🙂

Details here: https://books.farook.org/2024/08/03/sir-lanka-files-done/

The cover art is by my lovely wife who spent a lot of time getting it just right ❤️

#ScienceFiction #Humour #Author #BookPromo #Writing #Bookstodon #FediBooks
A book cover titled "Sir Lanka …

In an island city where the Cat Men of the Thieves Guild rule supreme, DaVic, a private eye with more quips than credits, takes on a job for the Thieves Guild from a mysterious femme fatale. This job lands him on the on the run through the dark streets of Sir Lanka, trying to stay one step ahead of those who pursue him.

In trying to unravel the mystery, he ends up finding a sidekick in the form of a Thieves Guild Tea Leaf, KarJa. With her help, the duo start cracking the case and when Sir Lanka is brought to the brink of war by way of a clash of ideals between the Guild and a nascent revolution, would DaVic and Karja be able to stop a bloodbath? Or will they be too busy helping tree-like aliens who are wary of human contact, or dealing with a bunch of alien scientists who are conducting experiments in the very heart of Sir Lanka?

Find out in "Sir Lanka Files". Coming August 15th, but now available for pre-order on Amazon.

https://books.farook.org/sir-lanka-files/

#ScienceFiction #Humour #BookPromo #Bookstodon #FediBooks #Writing
A book cover titled "Sir Lanka …

My lovely wife did a cover for my next book: "Sir Lanka Files"

Hoping to publish on August 15th.

More details here: https://shop.farook.org

#Books #IndieAuthor #BookPromo #BookPromotion #ScienceFiction #Humour #Bookstodon #FediBooks #Writing
A book cover titled "Sir Lanka …

@sebastianmalloy I believe it depends on the server/client. Some servers are set up to show a preview for links but if the server is slow it might not show for a while ... or not at all.

I have my custom client (that I wrote) which I configured to show a web preview for the first web link if there are no images in the post and it shows it like in the attached image.

Now is your best chance to find my book, "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" available for a promotional price at @Smashwords as part of their Annual Summer/Winter Sale!

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/7491

#SWSale2024 #Smashwords #ScienceFiction #Humour #SciFi #BookPromo #SupportIndieAuthors #FediBooks #Author #Bookstodon #Writing

Do you think you might hate my book more than this person did?

Care to try? 😛

https://shop.farook.org

If you do, please let me know what you think? I found this review after 13 years.

#ScienceFiction #Humour #Reviews #SupportIndieAuthors #FediBooks #Author #Bookstodon #Writing

@davemark Those books led to this book 🙂 Don’t know if you remember this one and how you were kidnapped by monsters to teach them iOS 😛

Happy to share that "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" will be on sale through Smashwords all July long for their Summer/Winter Sale! Stay tuned for the discount link and more exciting updates!

https://shop.farook.org/

#SWSale2024 #readers #books #SciFi #Writing #FediBooks

I'm busy writing a new novel, but I decided to dust off my first novel (from 20 years ago) and re-publish it. It's on Amazon Kindle (and a few other places) 🙂

There'll be a promo from Saturday where the book drops to 0.99 in price (but slowly goes up again over the week). Let me know if you like it?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B099FPBP98

I wrote my first novel 20 years ago. Have written a few books since then but haven’t really gotten back into the swing of writing till now. I’m really excited about the new one but am only 25% of the way through 😛

#ScienceFiction #Humour #Quirky #Writing

@davemark This is what Bard says:

Spent what free time I had yesterday on adding Trakt access to "ShowMan", and that allowed me to get access to my calendar of shows today.

I'm getting pretty excited about the app now since the integration of the multiple services allows me to do a bunch of different things — all in one app 🙂

Now I can see what I have not watched over the past few days and also get an idea as to what is coming up. When I watch something, I can tick it off the list by simply checking the box ...

Next, I need to add more Trakt integration to let Trakt know when an episode is watched and then add BetaSeries too for the same purpose. Lots of fun stuff to do!

#Coding #App #Swift #SwiftUI #macOS #ShowManagement #Entertainment

I didn't get as much done today on my TV/Movie manager app as I'd hoped because I got stuck in several different SwiftUI issues ...

But at the end of the day I'm able to at least see all shows I'm watching, the seasons for the show and episodes.

So hopefully done by next weekend's end? 😛 (I kid ... I don't think I'll have everything done, but I'm hoping that I'll have TV show management complete at least.)

#Swift #SwiftUI #macOS #Apple #Entertainment #ShowManagement

A few days ago I discovered "TVMaster" (https://noben.org/tvmaster) by way of @keyle

It's a great looking app and it helps you manage the TV shows you watch via this very nice interface.

But I wanted more 😛 I wanted to monitor both TV shows and movies I wanted to watch. I also wanted to be able to interact with external sites (since I use several) to monitor the progress on shows and movies.

I’d already created the movie watchlist solution several times in different ways, but this would give me one app which would handle everything and that seemed a rather attractive proposition.

So got to work, and after about a day of work, I have a new app … and the project for this weekend 🙂

Basic functionality — done!

The next part is a bit more complicated since I need to allow the user to connect various sites with the app. But I’m hoping that if it’s not a single-week project, then it’ll only be a week more.

I guess we’ll see?

#macOS #Swift #SwiftUI #Apple #Entertainment #ShowManagement

When I mentioned Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/) and my new movie to-watch list solution, what I totally forgot to mention was how easy it was 🙂

Given the lack of details, I didn’t realize at that point, that someone might think that you had to maybe copy and paste every value from IMDB or something. But really, it's much simpler ...

Once set up, all you do is search for a movie by name, select the right one from the results, and you're done!

I also forgot to point people to instructions that let you set it up yourself. Sorry about that!

Instructions here: https://minimal.guide/guides/movie-database

#Obsidian #MovieLists #SimpleSolutions #FreeSoftware

I've been looking at various solutions for managing my to-watch movie list. I looked at software, writing my own solution etc. I didn't like any of those solutions for one reason or another — mostly because adding a new movie to the list included a bit too much work 🙂

But apparently, I missed the one solution which I already had/used — Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/) 🙂

With just a bit of tweaking (and some coding to customize the output) I was able to get exactly what I wanted!

And I love it!

The best thing is, now that I’ve discovered this particular facet of Obsidian, I can rework it and use it for so many other things too!

Obsidian is free, keeps all the data on your own machine in a format that you can read even without Obsidian, and it has so much customisability that I wonder why I didn’t use it more previously!

(The answer to the last question is probably that I didn’t take the time to learn all that Obsidian is capable of … but isn’t that always the case? 😛)

#MovieList #Obsidian #Workflows #FreeSoftware

The project for this weekend was to build a usable backup GUI (with rsync as the engine).

I thought it might take longer, but I was able to come up with a working solution in a couple of days ...

It has the ability to do dry runs, runs with deletions (of files which are on the destination but not source), and standard syncing — all with one task config. It also has logging of previous runs and the ability to clone tasks for quick creation of a new backup task.

It still needs notifications and scheduling, but that's about it. So I'm happy 🙂

#macOS #SwiftUI #SwiftData #Apple #rsync #Backup #GUI #Coding