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Post by chumbake on Oct 21, 2005 5:28:15 GMT
I saw that for future possibilities there could be a daily word count. The thought of having that has never crossed my mind, but it would be great for us writers. It would be nice to see how much I've accomplished in one day. It would also be nice to have a goal meter of some sort. I love to set goals for myself, and then accomplish them. I know those doing NaNoWriMo woudl definitely use it.
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Post by chumbake on Oct 21, 2005 5:36:46 GMT
Oh, I was looking through the ToDos a little closer this time and saw that there is a plan for a progress bar. This program sounds perfect. I can't wait to try it out.
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Post by KB on Oct 22, 2005 11:40:37 GMT
Thanks for your comments. Yes, both of these are on the to do list. The goal meter probably won't make it into the beta before the end of NaNo, unfortunately, but hopefully it should be in there before the first commercial release.
The daily word count is listed as a future possibility rather than a definite to do because it needs a lot of thought. For instance, should it count the words typed since the program was launched, or should it automatically reset at midnight? (Or should the user manually reset?) There are other issues, too, because of the fact that one project has so many different documents. Should it only count words in draft documents, for instance (that is, documents that are intended as part of the draft rather than research documents), or in all documents? That said, I do like the idea myself, and it may make it in earlier rather than later...
Thanks, KB
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amberv
Junior Member
Posts: 99
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Post by amberv on Oct 26, 2005 16:06:02 GMT
I am in favour of a manual method.
Just bring it out to the draft level. Other documents should be considered supporting documents. Generally, you do not count background material and such in your word count. Of course, Nano is a unique situation as you get to count everything you produce during November, including character sheets -- so that might mean organising things a little differently in the Draft. Have a "meta" section. At any rate, it is the users choice in how to organise all of that. Personally, I use diagrams and such in my supporting documents, so I would just be doing text dumps into a Meta branch of the Draft, to get my Nano count. It is kind of clunky, but honestly, I cannot think of any other situation where you would want research and supporting documents to be counted in the words to goal. Providing the option to do so would be bloat, I think.
In whatever area will have the Total Progress Metre, provide a small button to set a checkpoint. Clicking on the metre will have it count from the last checkpoint, as opposed to the total. Now here is where you can make the checkpoint semi-automatic. When the project is loaded for the first time in that day, the Set Checkpoint button would be doing the little Cocoa pulsating trick to draw the attention of the user and let them set a checkpoint if they wish. This pulsating should fade after ten seconds of activity in the project.
This way, you are not bugging the user with a dialog box, but you are also providing a gentle reminder -- because it is very easy to forget those kinds of things. At least, for me.
If using plists for project preferences, I would imagine checkpoints setting an array of strings with the current work count, and epoch time. The metre would only reference the last checkpoint for progression stats, but storing all checkpoints would allow for an interface which would provide the user a review of word count history (and possibly projection, based on wpd averages). I am not sure how I feel about that last one. Having the data would be nice, but I have not thought of an elegant way to express that data.
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Post by KB on Oct 26, 2005 18:10:24 GMT
Well, the solution I rolled for daily word count looks like this: The table shows daily word counts, reset at midnight, since you launched the project, but is forgotten between sessions. I could add a button next to the "Words since project opened" to reset the count. And I could have the table represent this data rather than anything added since midnight, and save the data to disk if users feel this would be a better implementation. You can see that there is the option to view stats for only the draft or for all documents. I don't think this is bloat, as sometimes I like to see that I have actually done something even if it hasn't made it into my draft. One problem with any implementation of a daily word count is that it will count documents you import on that day as well as those that you type. I'm not really sure whether that is a big deal or not. The project target is a separate thing, and my implementation looks like this: As for a checkpoint scenario, I am thinking that I may rejig the daily word count and incorporate it there. I may get rid of the "reset at midnight" thing (in which I am not confident anyway - it could get mixed up by sleep cycles) and make the whole thing manual. Stats would be saved so that you could see all of your old progress in the table. You would see your stats since you opened the project (and have the opportunity to reset them, in which case they will appear in the table). You could also set a target, which would appear as a progress bar at the bottom. Hmm, I have an idea of how to get around the imported word count, too... Well, enough thinking aloud, time to get back to the code. Thanks, KB P.S. Did you check out the screenshots of the in-progress annotations as per your suggestions, btw?
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