I just thought I'd mention a neat little tool-of-the-trade I discovered a while ago. It's a collaborative text editor called MoonEdit. This is a text editor that, kind of like OS X's "SubEthaEdit", lets two or more people type in the same text file at the same time. (Their inputs are highlighted in different colors so folks can see what's whose.)
The editor can be used either peer-to-peer, where two or more people connect directly to each other, or peers-to-server, where the people connect directly to the server. There's a default server that people can use, on moonedit.com port 32123, or you can set up your own if you have a Windows or Linux box. (I set up my own on my home Linux box; you just have to poke a hole in your firewall to let it in.) Going server-based has the additional benefit that you never have to worry about saving your work because the server saves it automatically.
There are some drawbacks: It's Windows and Linux only, and the source is not available; you can't mark text by clicking and dragging, you have to use the shift key; long copies and pastes from or to the program will come up incomplete so anything really long has to go in several chunks. There aren't a whole lot of different highlighting colors available, so if more than 3 or 4 people are writing, odds are a couple of them will have similar colors to the rest. But for all of that, it's a very good tool for doing what it does.
I introduced MoonEdit to the RP/writing group of which I am a member, Pinnacle/Virtue's RP Congress, and as people have gradually taken to it, I think that the creative output of various RPC authors has skyrocketed. It's fun and addictive to write together, literally together, with other people--sometimes four or five other people at the same time. Lately a bunch of us have gotten together to write a climactic battle scene for the "A Sistah's Burden" storyline, where the file is placed on the server and various members of the Congress log in to put their fight scenes in place. It's shaping up amazingly well, and it would have been so much more of a nightmare of organization in the old days when all we could do was email chunks back and forth.
If you write regularly with anyone, you might want to give MoonEdit a shot.
Posted
Link is dead, but I am intrigued about it...
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Eh? I just re-checked all three links in my post and they all worked.
I just thought I'd mention a neat little tool-of-the-trade I discovered a while ago. It's a collaborative text editor called MoonEdit. This is a text editor that, kind of like OS X's "SubEthaEdit", lets two or more people type in the same text file at the same time. (Their inputs are highlighted in different colors so folks can see what's whose.)
The editor can be used either peer-to-peer, where two or more people connect directly to each other, or peers-to-server, where the people connect directly to the server. There's a default server that people can use, on moonedit.com port 32123, or you can set up your own if you have a Windows or Linux box. (I set up my own on my home Linux box; you just have to poke a hole in your firewall to let it in.) Going server-based has the additional benefit that you never have to worry about saving your work because the server saves it automatically.
There are some drawbacks: It's Windows and Linux only, and the source is not available; you can't mark text by clicking and dragging, you have to use the shift key; long copies and pastes from or to the program will come up incomplete so anything really long has to go in several chunks. There aren't a whole lot of different highlighting colors available, so if more than 3 or 4 people are writing, odds are a couple of them will have similar colors to the rest. But for all of that, it's a very good tool for doing what it does.
I introduced MoonEdit to the RP/writing group of which I am a member, Pinnacle/Virtue's RP Congress, and as people have gradually taken to it, I think that the creative output of various RPC authors has skyrocketed. It's fun and addictive to write together, literally together, with other people--sometimes four or five other people at the same time. Lately a bunch of us have gotten together to write a climactic battle scene for the "A Sistah's Burden" storyline, where the file is placed on the server and various members of the Congress log in to put their fight scenes in place. It's shaping up amazingly well, and it would have been so much more of a nightmare of organization in the old days when all we could do was email chunks back and forth.
If you write regularly with anyone, you might want to give MoonEdit a shot.