If you’re new to PageFour, it may take you a little while to get used to the interface and the way it works. Here’s a few tips to make those first few days a little easier:

1. Choose a default font. When you begin using PageFour, all new Pages use Verdana 10. To change this to a font of your choice, simply open the font dialog from the Format menu, select the font and size you wish to use, and check the “Make default font for all new pages” box.
2. Set up your default paragraph options. As with the default font, changing your paragraph settings for new pages is a simple process. Open the Paragraph dialog from the Format menu, specify any settings you wish such as double line spacing, and check the “Make default for new pages” box.
3. Spell checking - the live spell check (squiggly red underline) can be switched on and off by using the F8 shortcut key, or the right click menu in the Word Processor.
4. AutoSave is switched ON by default and will save all your open work every 2 minutes, or when you close a Page. This means you never need to click the save button. You might ask why the save button still exists, and the answer is that many people simply find it reassuring - a throwback to software like MS Word.
5. The Import Dialog allows you to select Word, RTF, or text documents to import into PageFour, and can be accessed from the “Tools | Import Documents” menu, or the Import button on the toolbar. This should be your first step if you wish to edit your current work in PageFour.
6. All On / Off - Clicking Ctrl+O will switch off or on all unnecessary sections of the interface, removing any distractions and letting you concentrate on your writing.

These are just a few tips to help you get started, and touch on many of the more commonly asked questions from new users. No doubt you would have found all this information on your own over time, but many of us grow frustrated very quickly with software if it behaves in ways we do not expect.

Kathy Sierra wrote a great post back in 2005 called Featuritis vs the Happy User Peak. It’s well worth a read if you’re involved in any sort of product development - software, dog houses, electronic voting machines. The general gist of the post is that adding features does NOT add value - the secret to creating a great product is adding just the right features to give the most value, making them perfect, and then stopping.

Software companies don’t like this. The last company I worked for in the UK had what might have been a great product, but ruined it by continuously piling on feature after feature. They did this so their sales team could say to a customer: “Yes, our product does that too!” The end result was two years of development, a product that kept crashing through lack of testing, a dissatisfied customer base, and an even more dissatisfied work force. And of course, low sales.

To borrow a line from Kathy’s post: “Don’t give them new features just because your competitors have them!”

I’ve tried to follow this advice with PageFour, choosing to add features only when they add value to the product for most users, and impact little on usability. The Search and Merge Pages in the recent release are examples of this. But I haven’t always been so successful in the features I’ve chosen to add. My feeling is that version 1.50 strayed a little off course, with the inclusion of Smart-Edit.

This is a great feature, and I use it all the time. It was designed to identify over-used phrases - something that has always plagued my own writing - and I’ll be running it on this post as soon as I finish. But it’s complicated. And it doesn’t really fit in with the rest of PageFour.

The problem, is that recently I’ve been thinking of numerous additions that could be made to Smart-Edit, making it much more powerful. Each one would benefit a certain proportion of users, but these users would, of necessity, be people who have no problem running complex bits of functionality, adjusting configuration settings, and playing with the features until they obtain the best results. And this is NOT most PageFour users.

PageFour was designed with simplicity in mind, and Smart-Edit, and the extra features I’ve been thinking about, are not simple. But don’t panic! The current incarnation of Smart-Edit will be staying where it is.

So I’ve been considering a spin off product - a product built around Smart-Edit, and incorporating all the extra functionality that would only weaken PageFour. To offer a general outline: the product would be designed for use on a first draft of your 80-100,000 word manuscript, just as you begin editing and revising. As with Smart-Edit, it would not tell you what to do, only highlight areas that you might want to look at in more detail.

I’ve drawn up a list of features it might contain. It’s a very rough and ready list I put together yesterday evening, but should give a taste of what I believe IS achievable through software.

• List of over-used phrases, as with the current incarnation of Smart-Edit.
• Highlight excessive use of certain phrases at the beginning of sentences.
• Flag potentially awkward tags used in dialog. For example: ‘she snarled’, ‘he bellowed’.
• Over us of ‘…’ of ‘-’ in dialog. A lot of amateur writing tends to suffer from an abundance of dialog interruptions through ellipses and dashes.
• Frequency of adverbs in sentences. How many or what proportion of sentences include adverbs? And are multiple or strings of adverbs used in the same sentence?
• Highlight weak qualifiers - such as very, a bit, fairly, quite, slightly.
• Excessive use of The, A and And to begin sentences, as well as There was or There were.
• Highlight redundant words. For example: a cold chill, the end result.
• Use of weak phrases: The fact that - of the (students of the college instead of college students), She began to - He started - appeared to - seemed to, etc.
• Use of ‘then’ in place of ‘and’ or a new sentence - she did this, then she did the other…
• Flag clichés - a trusted servant, a mighty warrior…
• Flag sentences without verbs - excluding dialog, of course.
• Excessive use of punctuation - exclamation marks, for example.

Before anyone leaves an angry comment along the lines of “But Faulkner did that ALL the time!”, I should point out that features like those above, and like Smart-Edit in the current version of PageFour, only point out POTENTIAL problems. It’s always down to the writer to decide if they actually are problems, and make corrections where needed.

The intention would be to make the product fully customisable, with the user capable of editing lists of ‘weak’ words or phrases and saying whether something constitutes a serious problem or not. Creating a separate product independent of PageFour means that the potential user base would be far larger, while PageFour itself would not be contaminated with new and complicated features.

I’m very interested in hearing feedback on this - do you you think it’s a good idea or not? Does it have potential? Would YOU use it? If not, why not? Have I left anything obvious out?

About 6 weeks ago, I noticed a gradual increase in Google traffic to this site. Without revealing precise figures, I’m getting about 4-6 times more hits from Google today than I was only a few months ago.

It’s always difficult to pin down the precise reason for such an increase, as many different factors come in to play. Back in April, I redesigned the site from the ground up. The old site - in all its green ugliness - was the first website I ever designed, and it suffered from many of the more common website design mistakes: poor wording in page titles, no use of header tags (h1, h2, h3 etc.), static content…

It was not designed with search engines in mind, and the traffic reflected this. The redesign addressed these issues, as did pulling the PageFour blog into the site. To this day, I have no idea what possessed me when I decided that hosting the blog under a separate domain was a good idea.

Most of the ‘new’ Google traffic is very relevant to PageFour, with search values such as “creative writing software” and “software for writing novels” appearing regularly. What has surprised me though, is the high number of people searching for “page four software” rather than “PageFour.” This breaking of the name in two is a VERY recent phenomenon, and I don’t know where or how it began.

Someone, somewhere, must be writing about PageFour in this way, or speaking very slowly when they talk about it, pausing after the ‘page’ to catch their breath before moving on to the ‘four.’ I’m convinced of this, because these searches only began two months ago. To date, I have had no luck in tracking them down.

The title of this post is a signpost to Google - just in case any of these potential PageFour users have difficulty finding me.

By far the most common ‘useless’ search value is a variation of “strikeout shortcut”, with MS Word often appearing alongside. I can’t help but feel there’s a message here for the Microsoft Word development team.

On a lighter note, I’m always amused to come across a search value such as “pagefour license crack.” Those cracks may or may not be out there, but if they are, does anyone really believe they’d be hosted on the PageFour site?

Version 1.60 of PageFour is now available for download. This is the release version, not a beta, and all accompanying documentation has been updated. A complete list of new features and changes is shown below.

1. New Search feature. The old search dialog has been replaced with a more integrated system which allows for searching across folders and notebooks.
2. Merge Pages. A new mechanism has been put in place to merge pages, or folders of pages together. This is expected to speed up the process of converting various pages and folders into a single completed work.
3. The word count has been enhanced by the addition of a Folder Word Count which is located on the right click Notebook menu and the Tools menu. It enables word totals to be taken for entire folders of pages.
4. Right click menu ‘Open in Tabs’ added, enabling an entire folder of pages to be opened simultaneously into different tabs.
5. All On / All Off added to the View menu with an accompanying shortcut key combination of Ctrl+O - a quick method of filling the screen with the word processor by closing all other sections of PageFour with one click.
6. Smart Quotes on/off switch. This forms part of the new Word Processor page on the Options dialog. Smart Quotes are off by default, but can be switched on when needed.
7. Background colour and left and right margins are now adjustable, also from the Word Processor page of the Options dialog.
8. Option to switch automatic URL detection off and on.
9. Lesser used menu items removed where the option still exists in other parts of PageFour. (Tabbed Pages on View menu for example).
10. Various bug fixes as reported by PageFour users.

This marks the completion of version 1.60. It was not possible to implement all features requested, but most of the changes made are in response to feedback over the past few months. Any issues or questions about this release, do contact me, or leave a comment here on the blog.

The final beta of PageFour prior to the release of version 1.6 has just been made available. Download instructions can be found on the beta page.

Apologies for the delay - I’m aware that this version is a little behind schedule. Having implemented the new Smart Quotes feature last week, everything looked to be in order and I was ready to release on Thursday. Final testing however, turned up a major problem - none of the smart quotes were printing correctly. This issue took a little while to solve, and involved some major reworking of the printing mechanism. So if anyone encounters new or strange behaviour when printing, please drop me an email.

Not that you will, of course! It’s all working perfectly.

The changes in this release are cosmetic, and mostly linked to the PageFour working environment. A new page of options has been added to the Options dialog, accessible from the Tools menu, and a new menu option appears on the View menu.

1. Smart Quotes.
When you launch PageFour for the first time, smart quotes will be switched off. To turn them on, open the Options dialog, click on the new ‘Word Processor’ page, and check the box marked “Use smart quotes (curly quotes).” Whether you decide to do this or not is very much a personal decision, but it can be switched on or off at any time.

This will NOT change the quotes on your existing Pages, but it will allow you to carry on working from that point on with whichever type of quotes you choose.

2. Page Margins
The left and right page margins within the word processor have up to now been set to a standard and unchangeable 20 pixels. The new options allow you to change these settings, and may prove popular with users working on wide screens. Simply enter the pixel width that best suits you and the screen you work with.


3. Background Colour
The background colour of the word processor is now fully customisable. This change ONLY affects the word processor - all other PageFour windows will continue to display the old background colours.

4. URL detection
URLs have always appeared as standard blue links in PageFour. Clicking on these links does what most people expect - it attempts to open the link in your default web browser. Switching off the “Launch web browser when URLs clicked” checkbox causes all links to be treated as plain text.

5. All On /All Off
When working on laptops or PCs with small monitors, screen space is often limited. The new option on the View menu, marked All Off or All On allows you to switch all unnecessary PageFour features off and on again very quickly. This affects the toolbar, Notebook lists and status bar. A shortcut key combination of Ctrl+O has the same effect.

As mentioned in the previous post, implementing correct handling for en and em dashes was beyond the scope of this release. However, a mechanism HAS been put in place to ‘convert’ standard dash combinations to en and em dashes when saving to a file outside PageFour. This feature is a stop-gap measure until dashes are fully handled in a future release.

Anyone interested in using this feature should contact me directly for details, as it will not form a ‘standard’ part of version 1.6, and will not appear in the PageFour help file.

Version 1.6 will be released as soon as the help file has been updated and any remaining bugs ironed out. Please let me know of any problems or issues with the beta version, so they can be addressed quickly.

The final beta of PageFour prior to the release of version 1.6 will be available for download shortly. One of the enhancements in this version will be the ability to handle smart quotes. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, or unaware that PageFour did not use smart quotes, they are the curly-type single and double quotes used by MS Word.

Up to now, existing PageFour users have been using old fashioned quotes identical to the ‘inch’ symbol. In terms of publishing houses and sending your work to third parties, smart quotes are pretty much expected these days, and they do look a whole lot more attractive.

One of the downsides - and it’s not much of a downside - is that smart quotes only appear correctly when using True Type fonts. Having said that, the only non-True Type font I’ve ever heard of writers using is Courier, and there is a True Type replacement for this called Dark Courier.

All of the other standard fonts - Times New Roman, Verdana, Georgia, and Arial are True Type.

The addition of smart quotes should please a lot of users, as it was one of the most often requested enhancements. However, a similar ability to handle En and Em Dashes has not been possible for this release. Unfortunately, the work involved is quite considerable, but I will be looking at it for a future release.

Smart Quotes will be switched on by default, but along with a number of other cosmetic changes, can be turned on or off very simply. I’m expecting a few minor ‘glitches’ when it comes to opening and closing quotes, but hopefully these will be ironed out before the official release.

The penultimate beta before the next official release is now available for download. Version 1.54 includes all the changes and additions of the previous betas, as well as the new Merge Pages feature. A full description of this feature can be found in the post below.

To try out this new beta version, visit the beta page and follow the download instructions.

A number of smaller, ‘cosmetic‘ changes are still to be made before the official release of version 1.6. As regards larger functionality, this beta contains all the major work of the upcoming release version. Watch this space for details of the final changes, and the release date.

The Merge Pages feature has now been released as a beta download. As the Help file will not be updated until the release version is made available in a few weeks, a full description follows.

The purpose of Merge Pages is, as the name suggests, to merge any number of PageFour Pages into a single Page. It can be accessed via the right click menu after you select a folder or Pages in a Notebook, or from the Tools menu. In the dialog that pops up, you have the option to change the order of the Pages, choose to exclude them from the merge, open them for viewing in the main PageFour window, and specify the name of the newly merged Page.

The dialog is very straight forward, but a few points are worth mentioning in detail:

1. No blank lines are inserted between the Pages - one is simply appended to the other. This means that if you wish one or two blank lines to appear between chapters, you should add them yourself to each Page before the merge. Options to insert extra elements such as blank lines may be added later, depending on feedback, but my feeling was that over-complicating the process at this stage would have been a mistake.
2. The Remove button only removes a Page from the list about to be merged. It does NOT delete the actual Page in PageFour.
3. The new Page created during the merge will be inserted into the same folder as the first Page in the merge list. The full location of the merged Page will always be shown on the dialog’s status bar prior to the merge being carried out.
4. The name of the new merged Page cannot be the same as a Page you are about to merge. For example, you cannot merge Chapter 1, 2, 3 etc. into “Chapter 1″. This is a protective measure to ensure you do not inadvertently overwrite your own Pages.
5. If a Page with the same name as the new merged Page already exists - from a previous merge, for example - you will be asked if you wish to overwrite this Page before the merge is carried out. If you choose “Yes”, the Page is overwritten, but a snapshot of the old Page is taken first. If you choose “No”, an incremented Page is created - for example “Merged Page(2)”, and the old Page remains as it was.
6. Once the merge is complete, the dialog will close automatically and the merged Page will be opened.
7. The Merge Dialog will default to always appear on top of other Windows. This option can be switched on or off by selecting the “View | Stay on top” menu.
8. Double clicking on any Page in the dialog will open that Page for viewing in PageFour. This should allow you to quickly identify the contents of a Page without closing the Merge Dialog.
9. Shortcut keys exist for most of the merge options. The Del key removes a Page from the list. Enter opens the selected Page. Ctrl + Up or Down moves a Page up or down in the list.

Comments on the new feature are, as always, welcome. Either leave a comment on this post, or contact me direct via the contact page.

It’s always difficult to work out what you should charge for software. In one sense, as a digital download, the software has no ‘real‘ value. Despite what Microsoft or the record industry would have us believe, digital goods, delivered down a high speed connection, are not the same as a DVD you’d buy in a record shop or a loaf of bread freshly cooked at the local bakery.

The costs are mostly in the development, and once the product is completed, tested, and reasonably stable, that’s pretty much it. Sure, you have website costs and bandwidth costs - all ridiculously cheap these days, as well as support costs - not that high when you have a stable, easy to understand product.

Which brings me to PageFour. Over the past year I’ve played around with the pricing many times - all in an effort to determine which figure produces the greatest return. Apologies for my capitalist tendencies. The conclusion I’ve come to is that for small software products such as PageFour, there is a $30 price barrier.

Moving beyond the barrier, even by as little as $5 seems to have a seriously inhibiting effect on buyers. I’m not sure why this is, as $30 is not a vast amount of money, but the barrier does exist. People seem to hesitate, as if what might have been an impulse buy at $29.95 suddenly becomes cause for serious consideration at $34.95.

With that in mind, the price of PageFour will be returning to a more modest $29.95. The crowds have spoken.

The latest user reviews of PageFour can be found on www.download.com. So far, it’s five stars all round, with no dissenting voices. Download.com is a useful site for checking out what users REALLY think of a software product, and as such is always worth a look before you buy - a little like reading reviews on Amazon before buying a book, or IMDB prior to renting a DVD.

So thanks to all 8 reviewers who took the time to share their views of PageFour with the world.