Any format Photoshop can read would be fine. They have to be free-for-use, though; if they come with Art Rage there may well be some sort of caveat that you can’t use them in another program. If they are just texture effects they are probably fine, though.
Thanks!
This is a great program. I’d be using it a lot, if not for these little quirks (I understand that it’s a beta, so it’s OK):
— All my Word documents defaulted to Typewriter, so I had to remove it from my system.
— It doesn’t work with Spell Catcher’s shorthands (and I short-hand a great deal of my character and place names). The shorthands just don’t change into what they stand for, the cursor stops and I can no longer type. Interesting that all other features of Spell Catcher seem to work.
Other than that, the execution is much better than that of your current competitor — it’s more elegant, which matters a great deal to me.
They’re custom textures I did with the editor in Art Rage, so I don’t see a problem.
I’ve put two .psd files up at homepage.mac.com/georgevw/ that you can mess around with. One’s finer grain, the other rougher.
Can we assume you’ll work on BlockWriter?
Would love to see services support added, a la WriteRoom (Send text to…), and the ability for reading/writing plain text files. Any plans for any?
GVDub - thank you very much for the paper textures, much appreciated. 
musti - I will be doing more work on BlockWriter, yes. However, it takes a back-seat to Scrivener, on which I am working intensely at the moment. From next week I get a six-week break from work (one of the advantages of the job I do ), during which I will be working full-time on Scrivener. I hope to take a day or two out of that schedule to work further on BlockWriter, which is all such a simple application should require. Thus, I am hoping that both will be ready for a release towards the end of the Summer/Autumn (or, to be less northern-hemisphere-centric, in the last quarter of 2006).
Glad to be able to help in any small way. If you want others, or have tweaks you’d like (different color, finer or rougher texture, etc.) let me know. In theory, I can take a scan of a piece of good high-rag bond, import into ArtRage, and turn that into a paper texture, too.
Great! Thanks for the reply and enjoy the break!
check out ‘word perhect’ by a tokomo takahashi - just google it and have some fun
Thought that was a typo, but word perhect it is. Hilarious - some people have too much time on their hands :mrgreen:
My my, I think I can probably disable thread notification on this one, by now.
Just a quick note on my impression on fullscreen mode.
This feature is indeed one of the reasons why I finally decided to purchase Scrivener (together with the fact that Ulysses is much too much “bare bones” for my needs). I worked with M$$ word 5.5 till the early 2000th, last on an ibook with dos emulation. Word 5.5 was the one perfect application for mass-text writing in my view; the fact that it does only display DOS type and you may code Italic, Bold etc. by color and not by type was another good issue. See here for a list of features that I find excellent there, as well as a fullscreen snapshot (attachment here).
Yet since MS-DOS would not really support HFS+ 
, I searched for an alternative, using OpenOffice most of the time. But finally, Scrivener seems to be the excellent solution!
What would I expect from fullscreen?
First, to get text-only display. No navigation bars, no fancy buttons of any sort, just and only the text. The fading navbar is an excellent solution there. The black background is imperative, though the option to set transparency is very nice indeed and useful at times.
Second, to get a clear, big, easily readable type that is independently set from the real font used throughout the document. I didn’t find out yet how to set a specific font for fullscreen mode only; is there a possibility to do so? That would be interesting to know (yes, I know how to set a specific type color for fullscreen, but not the font itself). EDIT Ah, the FAQ revealed it is a system-wide problem. Great it would be if that would be solved one day …
Last, the ideas about a “real-paper/real-typewriter-type look” sounds very interesting as well. Not so much during the work of writing (black and type only is perfect there for me) but to enjoy it during proofreading, for example. So if anything new develops there, that would be really nice.
Important would be not to remove disabling typewriter scrolling. TS is nice yet I always feel the program tries to wrestle the text out of my hand when it jumps up and I have to first look for the point where I had been before continuing, which can be quite annoying.
All in all, I do not want to miss the Black-Type fullscreen mode anymore. It is perfect. Thanks!
The Alphasmart is a keyboard powered by 6 AA batteries or a rechargeable version. I use it for just the purpose you point out: writing without looking back. It has a four line LCD readout but I tend to look at the keys, not the readout. I can go to a coffee shop to write, even outside, and hammer away all day. When I get back to my computer I plug it in via USB cable, open any text document (including Scrivener) and it emulates a keyboard as it re-types everything you wrote. I see that they have re-named it the Neo2. It costs $169 but you can get an old AlphaSmart for $25 on eBay (as I did). neo-direct.com/default.aspx
AlphaSmart+Scrivener is a winner for me.
The biggest advantage is that you get away from that writing device that also happens to be connected to Facebook.
You mean they actually make such a device? 
:mrgreen:
@stiennon Thanks a lot! I will watch out for one of those. Sounds interesting indeed.
Right now, I am looking for a USB to ADB adapter to connect my old OS 9 Power PC keyboard to the imac – the old keyboard is much better than the stylish new ones … heavy duty as I like it.
For the aural aspects of typing on an old typewriter try Noisy Typewriter http://fffff.at/noisy-typer-a-typewriter-for-your-laptop/
If only there was a Windows version of the Noisy Typer software. It looks great on the video. I’ve tried some of the free Windows apps such as Clickey which irritated me because even when I did a mouse click it sounded like a typewriter key and there was no differentiation between space bar etc sounds and key sounds.
If there is a Windows version of Noisy Typer, I would be grateful if you would let me know. At the moment I do the actual writing in FocusWriter for the key sounds.
JazzUp is a menubar app that makes your Mac sound like a typewriter. It can be found at Irradiated Software’s site.