Tools for Typing – Author Blog Part One

Those with a passion for DIY will already know there's nothing more satisfying than admiring that fully organised toolbox. With it, you can do any job and have so much fun. Certainly, there's a lot of enjoyment in bashing down walls and hanging up shelves, but it's unlikely that this will help structure your next article. Fortunately today, we're bringing you four cool additions to your writer's online toolbox.

Making Notes

Cherry Tree
When it comes to making detailed notes and structuring them clearly, you need to make your way to the Cherry Tree. This neat little programme will enable you to organise your ideas in a tree structure, with each note forming a new branch on your tree. Your finished scribblings can be exported easily as a PDF or txt-file. If that weren’t enough, you can even import your existing notes from your text editor and work on them in your Cherry Tree.
Cherry Tree is available as a free download for Windows and Linux.

Working Efficiently

Tomato Timer
This tool is based on the Pomodoro technique, developed by Francesco Cirillo. The idea is that you’ll work most efficiently by structuring your productivity in set intervals. With carefully planned breaks, you should be able to focus more during your scheduled productive phases.

This is where the Tomato Timer comes in. With this tool, you can set short or longer breaks. Press start and you have a 25 minute countdown (during which you can write productively) followed by a 5 minute break. After you’ve completed 4 intervals, you can enjoy a 10 minute break – just the right amount of time to make a cup of tea.

Meeting Deadlines

Scrawl
Writing to meet tight deadlines is a real skill. But like many skills, it can be developed with practice. Scrawl is ideal for this kind of task – under the button „Taskmaster“, you can enter how long you’d like to write for. But be warned…if you don’t stick to this time frame, you will be alarmed. Literally. The only way to stop the alarm is to continue writing.

Counting Words

Ilys
Sometimes, the best thing to do is to just start writing. It’s easy to lose a lot of time thinking about how well a sentence could be phrased, or rewritten, or restructured. This is where Ilys comes in. This tool will not tolerate corrections. It will not tolerate any deleting. The only thing Ilys will show you whilst writing is the last letter you typed. Only once you’ve reached your final word count are you able to edit and correct your text.

Let us know what you think! Are these tools helpful? Are online tools more helpful than offline? Tune in next time for some more exciting tool tips.