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.

The next beta version of PageFour will be available for download in a few days. This version will contain the new “Merge Pages” feature, which was designed to make putting your finished work together a simpler process.

Most PageFour users structure their work in such a way that each chapter takes up a single Page, but the time does come when the finished work needs to be taken out of PageFour and sent elsewhere - beta readers, publishers, best friends who NEVER criticize, etc. Extracting your work from PageFour is a simple enough process - as existing users know - but with 30 or more chapters in your novel, this comes to a lot of files.

The Merge Pages feature was created with this scenario in mind.

The dialog is very easy to understand, and is accessed from the right click menu after selecting a folder or a number of Pages. These Pages can then be moved up or down before the merge is carried out, and any unwanted Pages (notes for example) removed. The newly merged Page is then written to a PageFour folder for you to edit, export, or do whatever you wish with.

At no point are any of the Pages you are merging over-written, so there is never any danger of losing your work through misunderstanding the feature.

A fuller description will be available next week when the beta is released.

Many recent PageFour users come from countries where English is not the first language, making it impossible for them to use the spell-checker when writing in their native tongue. The current version is heavily biased towards the English speaking world: all the menus and documentation are in English, as is this web-site, and it ships with only three dictionaries pre-installed - all English.

As a first step to rectifying this, I’m making a series of dictionaries in different languages available for download. These dictionaries cover most major Western languages - I’m afraid accommodating the East is a little beyond the scope of the product at this stage. The quality of these dictionaries may vary, as many different people were involved in their development.

Full details, as well as installation instructions can be found on the new Dictionaries page.

Though I would like to add these dictionaries to the PageFour installation, I’m afraid it would increase the download size substantially, so for the time being they will have to be downloaded manually where required. In the future, I may look into making PageFour more international - possibly allowing the menus to be localised using external files, but that’s some time away.

Sales of PageFour have been encouraging over the past few months. It seems that word is slowly spreading as more and more people try it out. In the early days, soon after version 1 was released, people tended to stumble across the product through Google search strings relating to writing, or via software download sites. The numbers were never great, and sales slow to come.

Over the past six months, a large proportion of visitors who reached the site, did so through typing ‘PageFour‘ into Google - not blind searches, but specifically looking for the product. The release of the FREE EDITION and the removal of the 30 day trial limit back in September may also have contributed. As for the download sites, they still play their part, but only in a small way - providing incoming links which help with Google Page Ranking. In terms of numbers of downloads, they account for very few.

So where in the world are the buyers coming from?

As expected when it comes to buying downloadable software, the largest proportion is from the US. The figures that have surprised me over the past year are the comparatively high number of sales to Australia, as well as some of the ‘other‘ countries that pop up.

PageFour is not friendly to languages other than English, either in terms of menus and documentation, or dictionaries and spell-checkers - which is why for a product aimed at creative writers, sales to non-English speaking countries always come as a bit of a surprise.

These countries include Sweden and Norway, Mexico and Brazil, Germany, Spain and India. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be looking into providing friendlier options for those writing in other languages.

Beta version 1.53 of PageFour was released this morning. Download instructions can be found on the beta page.

As well as the vastly improved Searching capabilities outlined below, this version contains two new features and a number of minor changes and bug fixes. The new features are an expanded word counter and a new ‘Open in Tabs’ option.

Up to now, the word count has been limited to the single open Page, making it a difficult and time consuming process to build a combined total for all Pages of your current work. A new option called Folder Word Count has been added to the Tools menu and to the right click menu for the current Notebook. It is only enabled when you select a folder containing one or more pages.

On selecting this option you may be asked for your password, but only when the folder you are counting contains Pages that are password protected. If you choose to cancel out of the password dialog, the count will proceed, excluding any password protected Pages.

The word count button and short cut (Ctrl+Shift+W) will continue to function as they do now - working on the current Page. Performing the more extensive Folder count can only be done by using the menu options.

The second new feature in this release allows every Page in a folder to be opened into a new tab simultaneously. It’s an advanced feature which may not be to everybody’s taste, but cost nothing in terms of extra screen space or software complexity. Right click on any folder in the currently open Notebook and the first menu option will show Open in Tabs.

This replaces the previous ‘Open‘ feature which did nothing more than expand a folder to show any Pages and sub-folders it might contain - a feature that still exists through using the plus and minus keys when a folder has been selected.

An upper limit of 20 Pages has been set, though this may change if it proves insufficient. The reason this limit has been put in place is because a folder may easily contain hundreds of Pages, and opening such a great number, though possible, would serve little purpose but to add confusion.

The feature works best when you have structured your work across many folders. For example, your current novel, along with notes, character summaries etc., all in the same folder, or within sub-folders of the same folder.

Every software product has shortcut keys for the most common actions. If you’re like me, then these shortcuts will be the LAST thing you learn rather than the first. We all know that Ctrl+S will perform a save action in anything from MS Word to Firefox, and that Ctrl+P will print something or other. PageFour follows these conventions where possible - or more to the point, where I had previous knowledge of what they were.

I use a very popular text editor called Textpad for viewing large, text based, data files. It’s a great program, and its popularity amongst techies is well earned. But every time I use it I fall foul of their unconventional shortcuts. For reasons known only to them, Ctrl+F will NOT open the find dialog - you have to press the F5 key. I use this program every day, and every day I stumble. It’s frustrating and it’s annoying. It’s so annoying I’ve just mentioned it in a blog post that was supposed to be about PageFour.

Rather than discuss all of PageFour’s shortcuts in detail, I’m going to highlight just four of the most powerful. Knowing these few simple key combinations will make navigating between Pages, Folders, and Notebooks a quick and easy process.

The Jump Command (Ctrl+J): The main PageFour window consists of 3 panes - the list of Notebooks, the Folders and Pages of the currently open Notebook, and the word processor. The Jump command can be found on the right click menus of each of these 3 panes, and each time it has the same function and the same shortcut (Ctrl+J). As the name suggests, it ‘Jumps‘ the focus from the current pane to the next.

Jumping from the word processor will immediately shift focus to the current Page’s location in the open Notebook, allowing you easy access to its sister Pages and Folders. Jumping from the current Notebook will move focus to the Notebooks list, giving you the opportunity to open another Notebook. And jumping from the Notebooks list will shift focus back to the word processor.

The Jump mechanism means you can access almost every function and every location in PageFour without ever needing to use the mouse. It’s a quick method of adding a new Page next to the current one: Ctrl+J followed by Ctrl+N (New Page), as well as a simple way of seeing where the current Page fits in relation to the Pages and Folders around it.

Tab Navigation: It’s very common to have a number of Pages open in different tabs at the same time, many of them related to each other. You might have a number of different chapters open, or Pages of character and plot notes.

Moving up and down the list of open tabs is simply a case of using the Ctrl+Shift+Left Ctrl+Alt+Left or Right arrow keys. Once you remember this shortcut, moving between Pages is a much faster process.

Left and right arrows - how hard could it be?.

The next release of PageFour will contain a new ‘Open in Tabs‘ feature, which will allow you to open all the Pages in a folder simultaneously into different tabs, making this shortcut even more powerful. A beta containing this feature will be available shortly.

Screen Size: PageFour does not yet have a full screen capability, but there is a simple method of switching the Notebook section off - the F11 shortcut key - thereby increasing the screen size for the word processor. Switching it back on again is a case of using either F9 for the Notebooks list, or F10 for the Snapshots list.

Closing Pages: As you open more and more Pages, things may start to look a little cluttered. There are 2 simple methods for closing Pages quickly. The Ctrl+W key combination will close the current Page, whereas the far more powerful Ctrl+Q shortcut will close EVERY Page apart from the current one. This is very useful when you finish a large piece of work and wish to move on to something else.

Remembering these few shortcut key combinations will allow you to get a lot more out of PageFour. Full details on all of PageFour’s shortcuts can be found in the Help section.

The beta version of PageFour containing the new Search feature is now available for download from the PageFour web-site. Please be aware that it is a beta, so it may contain a bug or two.

Before installing, existing PageFour users should take a backup of their current Notebooks. This is the first beta and does not contain all the features or changes that will form part of the next release. My intention is to release a series of betas as the changes are carried out, before the final release version which is still some time away.

The accompanying help file does not yet carry descriptions of the changes, but a full description of the new Search options can be found in the post below. Having said that, how to use the new features should be self-evident.

Any suggestions or comments, please or leave a comment. I’m interested in hearing opinions on which aspects of the new Search you feel work well, which you’re unhappy with, anything I may have left out or missed, and of course, any bugs that may be found.