Writing a Book? These Tools Might Help.
Sunday, July 6th, 2008Authoring a book is no small feat, especially if you’re diving into writing one for the first time. During the process of writing “Creating Visual Experiences with Flex 3.0″ with Andy McIntosh, we tried and used a number of applications to make the process easier. There were several areas we had to overcome, which included: communication, writing, revising, collaboration, versioning and distribution. I thought I’d share some of the tools we evaluated and what we learned using each of them, also what worked and what didn’t work.
First off, there doesn’t seem to be THE perfect tool out there for authoring technical books. We came across “all-in-one” applications that were great for non-technical writing, but focused more on the author than the entire process of putting a book together. There are a lot of roles that get involved besides the author(s). There’s technical editors, peer reviewers, production, senior editors, etc. and they all play different roles. Some people don’t even get involved until half way through the process. All that said, here’s some of my notes on various applications we evaluated and/or used while putting our book together.
Communication
When Andy and I first started writing the book I lived in California and he was in Colorado. Every few day we’d discuss the direction of the book or review each others work. To avoid any additional phone charges we’d use some applications for chatting. Some of these might seem obvious, but hey, they work.
Skype
I’m sure a lot of people are familiar with Skype, but I’d say we used it 90% of the time to talk to each other. The quality was awesome and since I was already in front of my computer it made it really easy to jump into a quick call.
iChat
If you’re a Mac user you know iChat. We would use this a lot, but not really for voice chat. We’d use the screen-sharing feature to review material, walk through a sample or collaborate. The quality of the screen-sharing was really smooth and worked great.
Writing
As you can imagine we spent hours upon hours in front of our computers writing. From the get-go we wanted to find an application we could easily work in without getting frustrated over things not formatting correctly. We also need an application that could export to MS Word because that was the format required for reviewing.
Buzzword
What better way to write a book about Flex applications then in an actual application created with Flex. Awesome, we thought. We started writing the book in Buzzword, but gradually discovered it was not to be. There were a couple things that didn’t work for us.
First off, there’s no way to create Text Styles, so we could predefine how text should look for Captions, Headers, Chapter Numbers, etc. We needed that in order to make sure formatting was consistent.
Then there was the horizontal sliding toolbars for paragraph formatting, list styling, images, etc. We dug the toolbars at first, but a lot of what we did revolved around formatting, so we were constantly having to switch between toolbars and wait for them to slide open. Sure, it only takes a second, but those seconds add up.
Sometimes we couldn’t remember which feature was in which toolbar, so sometimes the wrong one would get clicked and then you’d have to click another one. It would have been great if we could have dragged a toolbar out and have it take the form of a palette so we could quickly access the features we needed.
The last thing wasn’t a big issue, but it still came up. To use Buzzword we had to be connected to the internet. This was an issue when I was traveling, specifically while in mid-flight. In those situations I would usually work in another application then copy and paste it into Buzzword when I got a connection.
Eventually we gravitated away from Buzzword, which is a bummer ’cause I liked being able to collaborate on stuff.
Google Docs
We had the same issues with Google Docs as we did with Buzzword. Google Docs does have Text Styling features, but they’re predefined. It also appears Google Docs is integrating with Google Gears to enable you to work off line. This may have helped us, but it’s just barely getting rolled out now.
Both Buzzword and Google Docs were great for the “pre-writing” or smaller parts of the book, like putting together the book outline, bios, proposals, etc.
Pages
Eventually we settled on using Pages. It had everything we needed and was super easy to export to MS Word without any loss of fidelity. Sure there’s no smooth way for collaborating, but we figured our ways around that.
One thing I’m keeping my eye out is for a web version of iWork that ties directly into MobileMe. It would be even better if the desktop version of Pages could sync directly with the web version. Throw in some iChat and you’ve got complete collaboration.
Pre-writing
The stuff I’m calling “pre-writing” are beginnings of chapters, code snippets, thoughts, ideas, links, etc. In our case this type of writing was a collection of thoughts and ideas of what we felt would work in the book, like an evolution of the outline. We’d then take those thoughts and start forming them into chapters. There’s a few apps we found that worked great for this.
Journler
Journler was an application I started using right around the time we started the book writing process. I would use it to capture ideas, images I came across on the web, sample UI scenarios, links, or whatever else caught my eye. I could assign categories and tags to the content and it would automatically list all the resources (images, links, etc.) in another panel, which made it easy for browsing. Best of all, it was freeware and worked with WordPress. Now it looks like you have to pay for it.
Evernote
I didn’t use Evernote at all while writing the book. In fact, I don’t think it was even available then. Evernote was introduced to me by Tony Hillerson while we were working on our 360|Flex preso at the EffectiveUI offices. I just started using it and it seems to have real potential. It’s a desktop application that lets you freely write, capture web pages as text, capture images and more. What’s really cool is it syncs selected Notebooks with the service online, so you can access them on the web as well. Another cool feature is that it will scan photos for text, so you can search for text in photos.
It would be nice if text in photos could be translated to live text for editing. I’m think for handwritten notes, content I took a picture of in a magazine, etc. Being able to highlight areas in text would be nice too. I’d also like to be able to share notes with others, so they can edit them as well.
These applications work great. However, sometimes you can’t beat a pen and a pad of paper. Especially when trying to figure out what illustrations or diagrams should look like.
Distribution
When I say distribution I mean getting files to people so they can be reviewed, edited, etc. There were a lot of people involved in the process and they all needed to have the most current version of every bit of content.
Email
We very rarely used email because it was pretty much inevitable that it would get blocked or get stuck in someone’s junk folder. Plus, using email meant once you got that email you’d have to put it into some kind of organizational structure that may be completely different than someone elses. Probably not a big issue, but we wanted to try to keep things as organized as possible.
FTP
When we first started trading files we used FTP. This quickly became a hassle and had the potential to get real unorganized real quick. Plus, our Pages files would get uploaded as directories instead of files, so we would have to zip them up.
Basecamp
Eventually we settled on Basecamp. It was really easy to keep things organized with the latest version and make sure everyone was notified when the files they were most interested in were updated. Once we started using Basecamp the process became much smoother.
Dropbox
We didn’t use Dropbox while writing the book, but I just started using it and I’m liking it so far. Basically it creates a folder on you computer where you can drop files into and have it sync up with their servers. You can then access those files on the web, share folders with people, add new folders, etc. This is kinda like .Mac, but it’s free (so far). I could see Dropbox fitting into the whole file-sharing thing depending what you were trying t accomplish.
Conclusion
There’s the rundown of the applications that played a role in the process of writing the book. During this process Andy and I kept brainstorming on the “Book Writing Killer App” that would incorporate all the features we needed for ourselves as authors, but also for all the other roles involved. For example, giving technical reviewers certain access rights to do what they needed to, but then also give us the ability to easily address their feedback.
Again, this is my first book authoring experience, so I’d love to hear from others if they had any applicaions they found to be helpful.
I just got a confirmation from Ed Sullivan, the Adobe User Group contact at Adobe, that the 