I love trying out new software - but, if you’ve ever read my blog you already know that. Over the past few weeks, there have been three new apps released. If that seems like a lot - and it certainly does to me - I’m putting it down to the ease with which developers can now create an app thanks to AI such Claude Code.
So, without further ado, here are the apps which I’ve been made aware of and my take on each:
Neo - Free
Author Hugh Howey has recently released his own writing software. He discusses it on his blog. It is, in essence, a distraction free blank canvas. This is how he, and many other authors, like to write. A basic page that does nothing but label your chapters and provide a simple page with no distractions. That’s all it does. That’s all it’s designed to do. If that’s what you like, I highly recommend Neo.
Writer’s Studio - $59 one-time fee Available only for Mac.
When I was a PC user, apps like this annoyed the bejesus out of me. I don’t know why developers only write for one platform. I happen to have switched to a Mac (not exactly happy about it, but there it is) so I was able to try out this software.
The key feature of Writer’s Studio is the fact that it works with AI. You have a choice of either connecting an online AI to your work or, if you have Ollama already installed on your computer, it can work with that.
What the AI does is, upon your command, find all the characters in your novel, places, and create a timeline. For each character, it gives additional information as to who that person is in the story, their personality traits, description, and backstory - all gleaned automatically from the text of the novel. You can also add relationships between characters, which I liked very much.
The key to this feature, however, is that it only works as well as the AI agent you connect to it. I connected Google Gemini because that’s what I’ve been using recently as a detailed search engine. However, when I’ve tried to use Gemini to create a list of characters in an uploaded novel, it did a terrible job. (After playing with Writer’s Studio I tested Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT in creating a list of characters in an uploaded document. Claude and ChatGPT did really well, Gemini failed miserably.) Therefore, because I had chosen to use Gemini, when I asked it to find the characters, it missed a good number, including the hero! I don’t put this down to the fault of the software, though. I’m certain it was the AI I chose to do the task.
I think Writer’s Studio has great potential for authors who want to write and keep track of the details of their work. It provides really nice statistics of your writing practice as well, including total number of words in the document, how much you wrote that day, and much more.
For a very reasonable one-time fee - no subscription! - I think this software could be really good, but only if you connect a good AI to it.
Minstrel - Free for basic, $20 one-time fee for Standard, addition (?) $10 or $20/month for AI usage depending on how much you use the AI.
When you first open Minstrel you are presented with a number of templates you can choose from. Each comes with an explanation of how that writing system works. There’s everything from the Snowflake Method to the Hero’s Journey to the “Character Crucible” (some of these, including this one, I’d never hear of). If you don’t wish to use a template and/or have already started writing your novel in either Word or Scrivener, you can choose to open one of those file types and it works in Minstrel.
Immediately, it splits your document into chapters for you regardless of how you’ve already done so. Each scene (if separated by a # or a Heading 1 style) is a new chapter. So, if you’re like me and have many scenes per chapter, you end up with a lot more chapters than you intended. It somehow found 72 chapters, but I don’t even have that many scenes!
The “Untitled Chapters” are scenes meant to be within chapters.
It is simple to change these “chapters” to scenes by clicking on “Insert Scene Change” in the top toolbar. It then includes the following scene into the previous chapter.
One thing the developer touts is the apps ability to “proofread” your manuscript better than Grammarly. I beg to differ. It catches “long sentences” and questions the spelling of every word not in its dictionary, any word that is shortened with an apostrophe (somethin’) and every name (suggesting either a random similar word for the name or another name altogether). It also questioned some of my open quotation marks for some reason. When it caught a spelling error, instead of replacing the misspelled word with the correct spelling, it adds the new word onto the end of the misspelled one and then immediate the entire manuscript jumps someplace else (randomly)! So… no, this app’s proofreading most definitely do not work!
It claims to have a “manuscript review” but it filled in “No expert feedback yet” for each category. I don’t know how or where it’s supposed to get this “expert feedback”. The app will also format your book for you but only with limited pre-determined templates. If you don’t like any of them, you’re out of luck.
There is AI integrated into the app, but I have yet to discover the point of it. When I tried asked it to tell me about a character, I was able to type the first two letters of my query into the box and then the curser (and my typing) jumped into a random place in my manuscript. So… again, this does not work.
As a curtesy I emailed the developer about these issues, but I have heard nothing in response. Also, as an aside, when the developer posted about his app on Reddit, a number of people objected to the name of the app saying that it was offensive to people of color. I agree, but once again, the developer did not address the issue.
I would highly recommend avoiding this software.
Word Smith - Obsidian plug-in Free
This is a hand little plug-in if you write in Obsidian. It will point out adverbs, passive voice, and a number of other grammatical or word choice mishaps. It also allows you to have a “typewriter” mode where it will automatically scroll up as you type. It has really good statistics as well - down to the number of characters in your document.
Of all of these new writing apps, Writer’s Studio is the only one which I would keep if I wanted to create a bible of my book as I write (or after). It only requires a good AI to work properly.