PageFour - onwards and upwards
It’s been a good couple of months for PageFour - not spectacular by any means, but consistent and improving. There just may be a future for the product yet, so I’m optimistic. But then I’m always optimistic, even when pessimism is the order of the day - never allowing elbow room to those negative thoughts.
Every time a published author buys PageFour I get just a little kick inside. While it’s true that not everyone is a fan of my interpretation of a writing tool, the positive comments far outweigh the negative, and every time I google a new buyer’s name and come up with an Amazon link, I know I’m on the right track.
Over the past two weeks I’ve had three journalists buying the product and one published author. The journalists have surprised me, as PageFour was designed first and foremost for creative writers struggling with that first novel or set of short stories, but it just goes to show, people always find uses for things you never envisaged. What this means of course, is that I’ll need to start looking at the PageFour feature set with journalists in mind.
May 23rd, 2006 at 3:37 am
I originally purchased PageFour for fiction writing, but it works great for my weekly column/blog as well, so I can see how journalists might use from it. You may want to focus on bloggers and journal keepers as well. For the bloggers, uploading to the common blogs and blogging software from within PageFour would be nice.
For the journal keepers, a way to attach a date to a note would be helpful.
Just a couple suggestions. You know me–the idea guy. Not always doable, but they’re there.
Mike
May 23rd, 2006 at 9:17 am
Good points Mike.
The blogging option has definitely come up before, and the date stamp is something I’d kind of like to have myself.
May 30th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
A blogging option would be great! I need to start keeping a journal, too — I can never seem to stick with one.
If you DO decide to include blog-publishing support, please include Blogger!
I have actually been using PageFour for all my creative work, then using MS Office 2007 (Beta) for all the technical writing. Office ‘07 just doesn’t inspire the friendliness of PageFour — and I like friendliness when I’m trying to focus on the writing.
For my needs, Office and PageFour are a great combination — both have their strengths, and both have a permanent place on my hard drive.
I’m glad that things are getting a little better for PageFour. This is quality software.
May 31st, 2006 at 9:36 am
Seth. Thanks for the www.download.com review. I’m assuming it was left by you - every little helps!
June 2nd, 2006 at 5:22 am
Guilty.
January 16th, 2007 at 10:21 pm
I recently downloaded PageFour and started tearing apart my manuscript from MS Word as I am quite close to finishing the first draft. In any case, I wrote software similar to this about a year an a half ago; I’ve side-lined it since as I’m concentrating on *writing* instead LOL. In any case, the software offers pretty much what I am looking for and I’m quite happy with it so far. I would however love to see plugin support - PageFour would do well to support blogging.
My single biggest gripe about any word processor outside of MS Word (and this is because MS Word has spoiled me thus far. Is the robust RichText component. I don’t usually write in preview mode, but I do prefer to be able to set my left and right margins so reflect Manuscript dimensions (1″ margins for left, right, top, bottom). And it would be nice to run full screen and maintain this aspect. See MS Word for what I mean. Full screen allows me to block out the clutter of my desktop or any background windows.
BTW - the print templates are a huge time saver for me.
PS. A standalone version would be really, really nice (execute & run from a jump drive etc.)
January 17th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Glad you like it so far Chris. The blogging issue has come up before. I find myself doing the usual cut-and-paste from PageFour into Wordpress and Blogger, and of course, losing the text formatting in the process, so it’s something I’ve thought about for selfish reasons as well as product improvement. Interesting point about the margins and page structure. The design was probably dictated more by my own personal taste - which leans away from the ‘paper page’ - than offering up what people had become familiar with through MS Word.
A standalone version is something that’s also being asked for before. There are ways to make it work at the moment (installing onto a USB drive, setting the ‘Pages Location’ to a folder on the same drive, etc.), but it’s by no means straight forward.