Entries for June 2024
Essaylum Testflight Beta
I am pleased to finally be able to present Essaylum today. Finally, because I have been working on this project for a very long time. Many of the developments that originated in Essaylum have since found their way into some of my other apps. So Essaylum will be familiar in various ways to existing users of my other apps.
Notes on the beta test
Essaylum uses Apple’s Testflight system for beta testing. For those who have not yet had any contact with Testflight, it is recommended to take a look at Apple’s overview page, where everything about Testflight is explained. The corresponding links are at the end of this entry.
In order to use the full range of Essaylum features, it is necessary to activate an In-App purchase. In Testflight, In-App purchases are provided free of charge during the beta phase. Please note the corresponding App Store messages that you receive when you log in and click on the In-App purchases. Overall, the whole procedure is structured like in the normal App Store and should be easily accessible to anyone who has ever downloaded/purchased something in the App Store.
What does Essaylum do
Simply put, Essaylum is a writing application that is primarily designed for longer texts, but of course you can also keep it short. In Essaylum, new writing projects are created as a single file in which the text can then be divided into corresponding subsections. This doesn’t sound particularly exciting, but Essaylum offers a variety of tools to help with creating a dossier, drafting an exposé or outline, proofreading, editing, publishing, checking writing performance and, of course, writing itself. These tasks should be both easily accessible and designed in such a way that the actual writing is not pushed into the background.
Due to the extensive range of Essaylum’s features, I will not go into all the different features today, but will only discuss a few of them and then gradually go into the other features over the next few weeks.
Organization
Essaylum is basically divided into three areas. On the far left is the list of main texts, which represent the final text. Next to it is the main text editor for the main texts. On the right-hand side of Essaylum’s user interface, you can switch between the different tools as required.
The editor
Users of MarkMyWords, Note-C or Myary will immediately feel at home in the editor, as it is based on the same foundation and also offers all the familiar functions. What is special about Essaylum, however, are the text clips, which can take on several values in Essaylum. To give an example, if you want to write a story about Sherlock Holmes, you will certainly use different expressions to name this person. You should therefore create a text clip that covers the different possibilities. The procedure for this example is as follows: use „sherlock“ as the trigger and call the text clip function to get the previously entered values, e.g:
- Sherlock Holmes
- Mr. Holmes
- Master detective
- Detective from Baker Street
This means you always have the right words at hand to add variety to the text. A special feature for text clips in Essaylum is the option to add the words in the text clips to your personal spell checker.
Scratch pad
A „scratch sheet“ can be created for each main text. There you can quickly jot down short notes and spontaneous ideas for later. You don’t have to leave the editor to do this; the keyboard shortcut CMD + Shift + Space can be used to quickly call up an input mask in which the idea can be written. The note is then added to the scratch sheet using CMD + Enter and the actual work on the main text can be continued.
The corresponding scratch pad can be found in the Info tool.
That’s all for today. More soon!
Until next time!
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