TiddlyWiki as a Book Writing Tool
My interest in writing has been growing lately as I’ve participated in a writers group. The group is the brainchild of my wife, but I thought it would be fun to see if I could find a creative outlet in writing since so much of my career development is focused on coding for now.
Since I’m a big geek, I enjoy the tools almost as much as I like actually producing something. Several years ago I found an app for Becca to try out called StoryMill, it’s still around in the App Store, but it’s a little expensive and it doesn’t sync to the iPad. Since Becca is doing a lot of her writing on the iPad now, she was using Evernote to keep her text. Evernote is a really good note taking application and one of the only apps that supports basic text formatting on the iPad.
Unfortunately, in Evernote creating a structure other than chronological is a little tricky. Enter TiddlyWiki. A simply brilliant piece of software that is actually an HTML file that runs in a browser and is a completely self-contained wiki. It’s just an HTML file, not an application you need to install!
I’ve customized its colors to match my favorite text editor and created menus to fit an organization system that I think is useful for writing a novel. Then, with the addittion of the tiddlyNotes app on the iPad it synchronizes with DropBox! So, I have a fully custom self-contained wiki stored in DropBox, available on any of my computers, and editable on the iPad or iPhone! It’s basically perfect, except for the somewhat tricky synchronization instructions that come with tiddlyNotes.
Pro Tip
Download Prism to make a standalone app for that html file so it launches and behaves kinda like normal software on the desktop.