I guess enough people expressed an interest in having an app. developed for their iPod or iPhone for National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo). Netphase developed a .99 app for the special program that runs through November each year. You can read about it here.
So what are my thoughts about it?
First, I cannot think of a reason that any writer would need this app unless they write away from home a lot.
After I downloaded and opened it. The first thing you do is add your user id # from the National Novel Writing Month website. It shows my user name, profile photo and a big fat ’0′ since I haven’t written any words yet.
Next spot is a place to add all your buddies. You have to add them manually by their user # (found when you are looking at their profile at the end of the URL). Seems you can probably add as many as you want. Great, okay so it updates your word counts for you the same way it does using your writing buddies page on www.nanowrimo.org.
The next spot is NaNoNews which is pulling the RSS feed from the NaNoWriMo blog, which is great, but it needs to access the ‘net to pull the entire post – it just gives a brief summary (about the first two sentences).
The next area is ‘reference’. With this, you are able to connect to www.dictionary.com, www.thesaurus.com and www.reference.com, which enables you to search any word, definition or whatever you would need from this.
That’s it. No bells and whistles, no writing platform, etc. It is absolutely a WYSIWYG app.
But hey, it’s only .99.
Honestly, I don’t foresee using it very often. Maybe when I’m at the local coffee shop writing and I don’t feel like connecting to the wireless I can use my iPhone to find out what my friends word counts are? Probably not.
Maybe if I’m driving down the road and wondering what another word I could use for the word obsequious, I can use the NaNoMoJo app to look it up. But then again, probably not.
So it’s on you whether you decide it is a good idea or not. As I said, .99 and I had a credit, so I got it. More than likely I would have gotten it even if I hadn’t have had a credit. I like new apps.
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