Glass Writer Pro 2.5
Reviewed by Michael Potter
$20 USD (30 Day Free Trial available) Requirements: Mac OS X 10.2 or later; PowerPC / Rosetta (Universal version in the works); 128 MB RAM; 2.2 MB Hard Drive Space; 1024x768 or higher display resolution |
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Strengths: Dual-screen workspace, central log window, running word counts, can track multiple drafts, clean and simple interface, bookmarks, extensive notes and “stickies” are a plus, great price. Weaknesses: limited export capabilities, fixed window size, intrusive backdrop, no spell check, manuscript is stored within the application. |
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Introduction
Programs are written to scratch an itch, to solve a problem we encounter when the tools already at our disposal don’t cut it anymore. If you think back on the paradigm shifts we’ve gone through with personal computers, each was brought on by a new way of thinking to accomplish a task in a fraction of the time previously required. It should be no surprise, then, when an application like Glass Writer Pro surfaces, developed by novelist Glen Bledsoe, to solve his own, unique, needs.
Throughout the user manual, Bledsoe refers to problems he encountered as a writer – the inability to view more than one page at a time, the lack of bookmarks and no convenient place to keep track of things like character and plot. Bledsoe argues that novel writing is a special case, requiring special tools and Glass Writer Pro is the result.
Getting Started
Installation of Glass Writer Pro is as easy as you might expect. Drag and drop the program to your Applications folder and double-click to begin. Those simple installation steps so familiar to Mac users may come back to bite you with potentially hazardous consequences, however. More on that in a bit.
There are two versions of Glass Writer Pro; one for smaller MacBook and iBook screens and one for larger MacBook Pro and desktop Macs. The reason for this oddity lies in the way Bledsoe coded the application window. Because Glass Writer Pro uses bitmap images, it’s a non-resizable window and the two different versions provided are supposed to accommodate the different screen sizes found in the Mac world. As you can see in this screenshot, even with the version designed for desktops, Glass Writer Pro is easily dwarfed by the larger display found on my MacBook Pro. More than one time I found my mouse cursor groping for a non-existent resize handle to make the display window larger. I can’t help but think this application feels very much like an OS 9 program running in Classic mode.
The grey background Glass Writer Pro throws up behind the composition window is a tool intended to help the writer stay focused on the task at hand, but I find it too distracting, especially for someone like me who uses Exposé to access my running applications. When Exposé is activated, the grey background appears as an “active window” taking up valuable space that should go only to the windows of the programs I’m using. Fortunately the “backdrop” can be turned off in preferences.
Using the Software
Glass Writer Pro’s greatest strength is the unified dual-screen dashboard, which includes a running word count per day, per chapter and for the entire manuscript as well as a page count and a quick-click list of chapters. This, combined with the ability to set up to 10 bookmarks throughout the manuscript, is a great way to quickly jump to different places in your novel to compare dialog, scenes or perform simple consistency checks.
“Reminders” are a neat feature that allow you to post “stickies” along the side of your composition window – over 80 according to the manual. The manual implies these notes can be placed anywhere you like, but I found that if I try to drag the reminder to my text, it simply disappears behind the window. Oops! Still, reminders could be very useful for temporary storage of a neat turn of phrase you might want to utilize later on. I’d like to see something similar to what Adobe Acrobat does: allow you to place a small, yellow, “sticky” within your text and expand the note from there. Perhaps in the next release.
Continuing our tour of Glass Writer Pro’s composition window, the right side provides spots to keep the information most important to a novelist at his fingertips: Characters; Background; Plot; Revision Notes; and Chapter Notes. Unfortunately, these sections don’t provide any organization to the information typed in. I would like to see Glass Writer Pro impose structure on the information entered to make it easier to find later. For instance, an outline mode would be very handy when laying down the details of the plot, and a searchable database of characters would be more handy than a running list. Granted, I could make up my own formatting and structure, but that defeats the purpose of an application like this – to give time back to the author.
Basic text formatting in Glass Writer Pro is held to normal (plain), bold, italic and underline and you can choose from four basic fonts, Geneva, Helvetica, Times and New York. This selection of typefaces should be sufficient for most people and, from a small press editor’s perspective, I’m glad to see this limitation. For those who need to, the size of the type can be bumped up to a point size greater than the default 12pt.
Unless I’m missing something, Glass Writer Pro does not take advantage of the Mac’s built in spell checking – nor does there seem to be any internal spell checking tool. I find this to be a huge nuisance as even the most seasoned writer will make common spelling errors in their writing and shouldn’t be forced to export their document to another application to run a spell check.
Rather than save each project as a file and open it via the File menu, Glass Writer Pro simply maintains the state of the current project internally each time you close the application. Because everything you do in Glass Writer Pro is contained within the application, if you want to maintain multiple projects at once, you need to have multiple copies of Glass Writer Pro installed on your Mac. Unfortunately, this means re-naming each installed copy to the name of your novel and tweaking each copy of Glass Writer Pro to your preferences when you start a project as there are no centralized preferences (including your registration information) stored in your user Library. In addition, it seems to me that each novel you write will forever be locked to that version of Glass Writer Pro – how could you upgrade the program short of exporting your manuscript and then importing it again to the new version? With these limitations, you can imagine the tragedy of treating Glass Writer Pro like any other program on your Mac – as I did in testing – when you suddenly find the novel you’ve worked on for months gone in an instant (all that Lorem Ipsum, *sob!*) because you forgot it was contained in the program itself and you copied a new version of the program over it! Bledsoe’s answer to that may be “RTFM”, but I find that a poor excuse for not providing a means to save the content separate from the program.
Lacking the ability to maintain separately saved projects outside of the application, the export capabilities of a program like this becomes critically important. I would not want my novel locked up inside an application with no way to get it out should something change in OS X that would prevent the program from running. With Glass Writer Pro, you’re limited to exporting in Rich Text Format (RTF). The export process works smoothly, and there is an option to export your notes – though not as individual files. There is one strange anomaly when exporting the entire manuscript: Glass Writer Pro automatically inserts the non-intuitive phrase “[Page Break]” in between chapters. This is done, as explained in the manual, to provide an easy to search for phrase when inserting actual page breaks in your word processor. It could lead to confusion down the road when the manuscript is handed off to an agent if the author fails to swap out this text. I suppose I might not be so critical if it was more accurate - say “[Chapter Break].”
To get a good feel for how Glass Writer Pro might serve a real-world novelist in day-to-day life, I turned to my father, Robert Potter and sought his opinions on Glass Writer Pro vs. Microsoft Word, and this is what he had to say:
“The most obvious feature of Glass Writer Pro is dual screens: Bledsoe claims that novelists need to be able to compare two pages at the same time, presumably to ensure the protagonist isn’t climbing out of his paramour’s bed on page 238 when she committed suicide on page 185. I suppose I can buy his logic, but I would be more likely to use the second writing surface as a bulletin board, for notes about the characters, an outline of the plot—that sort of thing.
“Other features, while not essential, are nice to have if you are using Glass Writer Pro anyway. All chapters are listed in the center of the screen; click, and you are in Chapter Eight or Ten, or whatever. A continuous word count is also displayed. You can insert bookmarks … if you wish. You can easily import and export text. In other words, Glass Writer Pro is yet another word processor—feature-poor compared to Microsoft Word if you are running an office, but with special features tailored to the novelist.
“Perhaps most satisfying, for an under appreciated writer, is the proofreader feature. When I highlighted a section of text and clicked TALK TEXT on my MacBook, a voice, sounding much like that of an international graduate teaching assistant, read the text aloud. Finally, someone spoke my words!”
Conclusion
Many of the my annoyances with Glass Writer Pro exist in the program because that’s how Glen Bledsoe the novelist works … and I certainly can’t fault him for that. Glen wrote the program for Glen and then was kind enough to share the fruits of his labor with other novelists by releasing the program as shareware. While I appreciate that Glass Writer Pro was written to scratch one particular novelist’s itch, itches aren’t always in the same place, so I wonder if, in future releases, other styles and methods of writing will be taken into account and folded into the feature set now that the program has matured to version 2.5.
Recommendation
With the need to drop into a more full-featured word processor to complete many simple tasks such as spell-check, I find it hard to give a wholehearted recommendation to Glass Writer Pro. On the other hand, the interface is clean and simple – though perhaps overly so – and Glass Writer Pro might be perfect for someone who’s looking to better organize themselves as they mentally prepare to tackle a first novel. Twenty dollars is not a lot to spend on a specialized word processor and sometimes it’s the little things that count the most. As author Robert Potter said about the proofreader feature of Glass Writer Pro, “Finally, someone spoke my words!” This feature, alone, has the potential to endear Glass Writer Pro to any budding poet’s heart.
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