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Each view window offers a contextual menu listing all its snippets and letting you select one. You can have as many view windows open as you like. You don’t change hierarchy views in a single window rather, you open a new view window of the desired type (e.g. There are no scrollbars the snippets resize themselves so that they all fit evenly in the window. The difference is that you’re shown all snippets at all levels below wherever you are. This is like a map in the sense that snippets are shown as rectangles with their names at the top, and in that you can zoom a snippet to dive into it, so that it occupies the whole window. If you select a rectangle and press the down-arrow key, the rectangle zooms to occupy the whole window, and now you’re looking at the snippets subordinate to it pressing the up-arrow key lets you zoom back up.Īs a treemap. The rectangles represent the snippets at a single level.

Storyspace review story writing mac os x#

Map view works rather like the Mac OS X Finder’s icon view.

Snippets are portrayed as small rectangles of fixed size with their names at the top. (I would have called this a tree, but that term is otherwise engaged see below.)Īs a map. If a snippet has sub-snippets, they are listed to its right, and linked to it with lines. The top-level snippet names form a column at the left. This looks like a genealogical diagram turned sideways. The names of the snippets are the lines of the outline snippets with subordinate snippets have a discovery triangle to their left, to show or hide them, and there is basic arrow-key navigation.Īs a chart. You get not one, not two, but four different ways of viewing the snippet hierarchy:Īs an outline. When viewing the hierarchy, you see the names of snippets you can drag a name to rearrange the hierarchy, or double-click it to reveal the snippet’s text. Storyspace arranges your text snippets in a hierarchy – that is, some snippets can be at the top level, and some snippets can be subordinate to other snippets. The name cannot be styled, it must be shorter than 32 characters, and it helps if it’s unique, though this isn’t required. It can also include references to QuickTime movies, and can have a sound attached to it (but see the bug list later on).Įvery snippet has a name, as distinct from the actual text constituting the snippet. You can also import existing styled-text documents, and they can be 'busted' into smaller snippets afterwards – at every carriage return, for example. Text can be styled, and there is enough arrow-key navigation to make Storyspace a competent, though primitive, editing environment.

Once Upon a Time - A Storyspace document is a container for text snippets. Now Storyspace is back with version 2, fully rewritten, with a better interface, a better manual, and with use of current technologies such as drag & drop and contextual menus.

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The rise of HTML and the World Wide Web made hypertext commonplace instead of a curiosity, for which no special software was needed except a browser. Other ways of storing and retrieving information, mostly outliners and databases and mixtures of the two, took precedence. Nevertheless, Storyspace quickly languished on my Mac.

Storyspace review story writing manual#

Subsequently I used it to create various online hypertext documents, including a presentation of the Ancient Greek verb, a commentary on some Plato text with an embedded Greek grammar, and a manual for SuperPaint. Storyspace was the subject of the first review I ever wrote for TidBITS back in 1991. Hypertext! How the idea resonated in my brain, with echoes of Engelbart and Nelson, of Xerox PARC and Xanadu! Text within text within pictures within text, the sum of all knowledge linked mysteriously together ten thousand ways, an ever-unfolding path of discovery opening to the click of a mouse! And Storyspace was all about hypertext. But, despite its name, one thing that HyperCard wasn’t very good at was hypertext. HyperCard let me program little interactive worlds, where I or some other user could push buttons, and read or enter text it was a superb teaching tool. Ten years ago, just two applications embodied for me the prospect of all that was brave and new about the blossoming Macintosh age: Apple’s HyperCard and Eastgate Systems’ Storyspace.

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