Twine writing app

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Positives

The main advantage of Twine as I have been using it so far (I think it is capable of more) is the ability to present a wiki-like set of pages within a single HTML file that can be easily passed around. As a wiki, it's missing a lot of features... though I do like the graphical map in the editor, which isn't something I've seen in any other wiki software.

("passed around" being one way of doing user-access limitation... but definitely makes it possible to collaborate either that way or via gitlike managed repository.)

I'm tentatively thinking that the "killer app" here would be an API that lets other software generate a multi-page structure like this, with its own navigation system -- sort of a fake-web-server-in-a-file. The canonical way to do this (that I'm aware of) is to generate a set of static pages and then zip them all up -- but the way this works really streamlines the process, and also allows for some interactivity (although it doesn't have a URL system, which means you can't quickly open pages in different tabs).

Shortcomings

Bugs

The editing UI needs some work...

  • Once the text starts to take up more than a window, the bottom of the edit-area jiggles up and down maddeningly as I type, at least in the "embiggened" mode.
  • When renaming a passage, it has a tendency to rename whatever passage happens to have the focus -- which isn't necessarily the one where you clicked the "rename" button (it should be).
  • When a line-of-writing (LoW) wraps around multiple display-lines (DLs), the [Home] and [End] buttons take you to the beginning or end of the LoW, not the DL within that. This makes editing multi-DL LoWs difficult.

Design Issues

It really needs to be able to handle media (images, audio, video). Apparently you can at least include images, though practically they have to be in separate files (for HTML reasons)... but it would be nice if the editor supported automatically packaging all that in a single .tar... and then we get into stuff like "also, automatic resizing of images, and oh, how about image-cropping and cued playback (press a link to play from a certain timestamp to a certain other timestamp)..." which is not well supported by basically anything yet.

There's a need for that kind of application, but trying to cram it into HTML may not be the way to go.

Miscellaneous

Trivia: Twine is what Depression Quest was written in -- that which was the catalyst for the GamerGate trolling-and-harassment exposition. So apparently it is possible to use Twine to upset fascists, which is definitely a point in its favor.

see also Wikipedia