FocusWriter Portable 1.3.2.1 has been released. FocusWriter is a fullscreen, distraction-free word processor designed to immerse you as much as possible in your work. The program autosaves your progress, and reloads the last files you had open to make it easy to jump back in during your next writing session, and has many other features that make it such that only one thing matters: your writing. It's packaged in PortableApps.com Format so it can easily integrate with the PortableApps.com Suite. And it's open source and completely free.
PortableApps.com Platform 2.0 Beta 5 users who already have this app installed, simply click 'Check for Updates' in your PA.c Menu to update to the new version.
Features
- Hide-away Interface - The most important thing about writing is your words, and FocusWriter puts them front and center, without cluttering up your view with anything else. However, it's good to have quick and easy access to the features of any program, so FocusWriter utilizes a hide-away interface: simply throw your mouse to the top, bottom, or right side of the screen to gain access to a number of customizable options and useful information, then flick it aside when you're no longer interested.
- Themes - You can have multiple environments with different fonts, colors, and background images to create ambiance or inspiration as you type. Use an astronomy photo in the background to put you in the mood for writing science fiction, or a seaside bluff to inspire your summertime murder mystery novel set in Cape Cod.
- Live Statistics - Word count, paragraph count, page count, and character count; almost anything that you could want to know about your progress, updated live as you type. Fast and easy to check, so as not to wrench you out of your zone. Enable or disable any of them to customize what you want to track.
- Daily Goals - Sometimes the hardest part of writing is keeping yourself motivated, and having a daily goal can be a big help. To that end, FocusWriter has two types of optional daily goals: word count, and time spent typing. These are charted by day and not by session, so you can feel free to come back at tinker at it several times throughout the day to reach it if you need to. Additionally, FocusWriter doesn't stop the progress count at 100% so as to not cap your creativity; if you're having a really good day, why not challenge yourself to try for 200% or even beyond?
- Spell Checking - Let's face it, we all make mistakes; from typos to simple misspellings, they crop up in everyone's work. While some people find an automatic spell check distracting, others get thrown off-track to know that a word has been misspelled but can't remember exactly how it's supposed to be spelled. FocusWriter has an optional automatic spell check (on by default), as well as the good old standby spell check dialog that you can call upon only when you want it. Through the Spell Checking tab of the Preference dialog, you can enable or disable automatic spell checking, customize your own personal dictionary, and add new dictionaries for other languages (available from OpenOffice.org).
- Document Tabs - Sometimes it's useful to have multiple documents open at once, be it additional stories, notes, or reference material. Because FocusWriter is designed primarily to be run in its fullscreen state, your files appear as tabs located at the bottom of the program. All saved files that you have open at the end of your session reload the next time you launch the program, letting you jump right back in where you left off.
Learn more about FocusWriter...
PortableApps.com Installer / PortableApps.com Format
FocusWriter Portable is packaged in a PortableApps.com Installer so it will automatically detect an existing PortableApps.com installation when your drive is plugged in. It supports upgrades by installing right over an existing copy, preserving all settings. And it's in PortableApps.com Format, so it automatically works with the PortableApps.com Suite including the Menu and Backup Utility.
Download
FocusWriter Portable is available for immediate download from the FocusWriter Portable homepage. Get it today!
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Comments
John or Chris, the
John or Chris, the link on the homepage is incorrect. It leads to the app page instead of the news page.
Fixed
Fixed thanks.
Great idea
This is a great idea for an app (having not yet tried it) but the timing... well, this would have been awesome to have been released at the end of October. Simply because November is National Novel Writing Month (a.k.a. NaNoWriMo), a concerted effort to encourage new writers to churn out 50,000 words in the 30 days of November. And this app, based on the claims above, would be great for a few reasons. Distraction-free writing -- of course you could get that with DarkRoom, which is natively portable (I think), but the live word count and the goals make it seem geared for NaNoWriMo. The only other thing that audience would want would be non-writing penalties. They have a program they recommend, I think it's called "Write or Die" (or maybe it's a web app) where, if you pause writing for too long, it makes annoying noises, or on its highest setting, begins to delete what you've written. Silly, I know, but some writers swear by it.
Anyway, I'll add this to my portable hard drive. I still like [browser of choice] and StickWiki for myself, but this, as an idea, is easier to sell to writers.
Long story short, this seems like a cool app, thanks to those who worked on it.
FocusWriter is an amazing application
You're absolutely right Nathan, this is a darn cool application, and I'm totally happy to see it added to the PortableApps suite of apps.
I've been using this app since almost its initial public release (been using it since v1.1.0) and its now %500 better since then. Best of all I've had several email conversations with the creator (Graeme) and he is a stand up application developer, has answered every asked question.
To me this is the penultimate distraction-free writing application, and I've tried almost all of them out there. The fact that its freeware, cross-platform and has matured quickly makes FocusWriter a standout in the software crowd.
My thanks goes out to those who have helped in preparing this release.
Thanks
Thanks for your work on this JW. I tweaked your setup a bit and moved the settings right into data (launcher move doesn't like a sub-directory of settings). I also added portablization of drive letters within the settings file itself so the autosave feature will work happily as you move PCs.
Erros que encontrei
O programa, quando abre arquivos de texto puro, não lê adequadamente os caracteres acentuados (tipo á, â, ã, ê, í, ú, etc...) e cedilha (ç), colocando um caracter estranho no lugar deles. Só lê adequadamente os arquivos que são escritos nele e salvos através dele.
Uma pena, pois o programa é ótimo.
Acredito que a correção não seja complicada...
"The program, when it opens archives of pure text, adequately does not read the accented characters (type á, â, ã, ê, í, ú, etc... etc…) e cedilha (ç), placing caracter strange in the place of them. It only reads adequately the safe archives that are written in it and through it. Therefore the program is excellent. I believe that the correction is not complicated…"
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A tradução para o português-BR, inverteu o alinhamento à esquerda e à direita. Ou seja: o botão que diz que alinha à esquerda, alinha à direita e o botão que diz que alinha à direita, alinha à esquerda.
"The translation to Portuguese-BR, reversed alignment to the left and right. That is: the button that says that aligns left aligns to the right and the button that says that aligns to the right, aligns to the left."
»Pure Text« considered UTF-8
Apparently FocusWriter considers »pure text« being UTF8-encoded files. Thus, if you have text files using the UTF8 character set, all is well, even when writing á, â, ã, ê, í, ú, etc.
I actually prefer this. If needed, a conversion to (or from) some Windows character set can easily be made using, for instance, NotePad++.
A thing I did not like was that FocusWriter seems not to display n-space and m-space Unicode characters correctly. I regularly (and almost automatically) type an m-space at the beginning of each paragraph.
Caracteres Acentuados (Accented Characters)
Para contornar o problema, eu estou abrindo os arquivos com «texto puro» utilisando qualquer editor de texto (tipo NotePad, EditPad, etc.), seleciono todo o texto, copio e colo no FocusWriter. Ele aceita os caracteres acentuados normalmente. Após isso, é só editar e salvar.
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To work around the problem, I'm opening files with «pure text» using any text editor (type NotePad, EditPad, etc.), select all the text, copy and paste it into FocusWriter. It accepts the accented characters normally. After that, just edit and save.
Wrong %APPDATA% folder, loses settings
For some reason, FocusWriterPortable creates a new (wrong) Folder
on a German-language Windows XP+SP3 system.
It should use
instead. (%APPDATA% is »C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\username\Anwendungsdaten« on this system.)
Also, it loses all settings upon next start. For instance, my themes are again called "Untitled 1", "Untitled 2" and all back to standard settings. Maybe this is due to reading and writing differnt paths. (I can see my »Moonbase.theme« in »C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\username\Application Data\GottCode\FocusWriter\Themes\« while FocusWriter is running.)
All data in and under
are not removed when the program is closed.
The newly created
is left on the guest system and not copied to the USB stick when the program terminates.
The default load/save location inside FocusWriter becomes %APPDATA%, which is probably not the best place. I’d suggest the USB stick’s »Documents« folder instead. (Many users simply save to whereever the system points and would probably never find their text files again …)
Hm
Mine doesnt even write to C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\username\Application Data and the launcher ini suggests that too.
Is there anything special on your system?
I am on a german system too.
Oh and btw, please create a new forum thread next time as that is better than posting bug reports as comments to a news story.
Maybe first-run problem?
Odd. I seem not to be able to reproduce it now. Maybe it only happens on first run or such.
New themes, for instance, are now written directly to
Will this location be preserved when updating?
The only thing I modified in the meantime is copying the theme data over from the "Application data" subfolder into the folder on my USB stick mentioned. And erase the "Application Data" folder on my system. Also, I added the "de_DE_frami" dictionary into
Otherwise the system is quite regular, "almost" freshly installed, nothing fancy on it.
Btw, when checking FocusWriterPortable.ini, I find
in the [FileWrite1] section. Shouldn’t that be
At least the original ini file resides in
while running. When exiting, the whole "data" subdir vanishes.
Oops. Just while typing, I see that upon the next start, all my themes and settings are gone again. Sigh. Seems there are still some problems with this app …
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Graeme Gott responded to my email regarding the Unicode input problem (Alt+NumPlus+xxxx) in the meantime. He is aware of the problem, but thinks it might be in the Qt framework he uses. I nevertheless suggested checking out using QKeyEvent::Text() in combination with QKeyEvent::Key() which might help solving the problem in a platform-independent way. He promised to inform me about any changes.
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Thanks for the hint on better opening a new thread. Maybe some moderator would like to split this thread and move the bug part elsewhere?
unable to reproduce
I can't get the same error. I tried wiping the data folder and trying again, but it still doesn't happen.
Try reinstalling it.
Your themes folder should be inside Data\FocusWriterData\themes
I think FocusWriterPortable.exe might have been closed somehow (not sure how/why) and it didn't do a cleanup.
If you still get errors, download Regshot Portable and scan X:\ and submit it via Pastebin
If I was an admin, I'd move these posts, but I guess I'll leave it to the next admin that feels like moving it.