ScribePad UWP for the complete Windows 10 authoring experience

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ScribePad seems to be part of a growing swell of productivity UWP applications, ostensibly aimed slightly more at Windows 10 on the desktop, but also working pretty darned well on the 'go', on Windows 10 Mobile. As the name suggests, it's a writer's aid, a computerised way of building up your stories and projects, keeping track of characters, arcs and your own editorial deadlines. Complete overkill for AAWP(!), but this could be very useful to a professional book writer.

From the Store description:

ScribePad is a great app for those who want to write and manage their stories, packed with features like Statistics, Reminder, TaskList, that will boost your productivity.

Works offline, no need for an online subscription, all your data is on your device.

And with easy backup and restore process, you can easily transfer your work into another device.  This means, whenever inspiration takes hold, you can fire up ScribePad on your mobile device, make changes, then continue your work back at home, on your PC.

With snapshots feature, you can create versioning of your Scene. This is especially useful if you want to go back and revise something or revert to an earlier version that you thought sounded better.

ScribePad gives you a beautiful looking, feature rich story creation tool for all your Windows devices. If you love writing stories, whether as a hobby or for a school class, it’s time you made story writing easier with ScribePad!

Features

  • Backup and restore your works from local or OneDrive.
  • Structuring your stories by Chapter and Scene and use Card Mode to outline your stories.
  • Manage characters, with character bios and backstory.
  • Versioning your Scene with Snapshots with ability to restore it.
  • Manage writing task with TaskList.
  • Create a reminder for your writing.
  • Easy to use, and almost identical feature between PC and Mobile version.

Here's ScribePad UWP in action on my Lumia 950 XL:

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A help pane intervenes until you've got the hang of the various controls; (right) getting started with my long awaited autobiography!

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You won't need the hamburger menu very often, but it's here all the same, as with any well behaved UWP application; (right) expanding the outline of my book - and hitting the first bug - each of the chapters actually has many words in, yet they all show as '0 words'. Oh well. The '...' menu shows context-sensitive actions and you'll start to get the feel at this point that perhaps this would be better on a desktop/laptop - and you'd also have a proper keyboard for text entry to boot!

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Keeping track of characters - making sure they're consistent throughout your fiction book (writing something like this might take years and so it's important to remember fine details!)

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Plenty of settings, though the 'dark' mode is grey rather than black, interestingly. I wonder why the developer didn't go the whole way here? 'Full screen mode' sounds tempting, but you'll be needing the Windows virtual 'back' control a lot in this application, so best leave it visible all the time after all? (right) Backing up to OneDrive is trivial and means that you can restore from this to another device in seconds, for example your desktop.

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An internal to-do list and a calendar reminder system provide ample productivity aids for the author who's still struggling to stay organised.

Very slick, though the manual backup system is a little cumbersome - I appreciate the robustness of an offline system, but why not also have auto-saves to the cloud when there's connectivity and auto-sync back from the cloud on other devices when needed? This sort of thing is normally 'hands off' in 2017, surely?

You can grab the 14 day trial version of ScribePad UWP here in the Store. The full application is about £6.

Source / Credit: Store