Good VoiceOver accessible apps for authors

Pages is a good app for writing books.

The following is a list of apps I've found to be useful and that work well with Voiceover. Yes, MyWritingDesk and Index Cards are among them.

1. Story Planner: helps you organize characters, scenes, and plots
2. STory Tracker: USeful for freelance writers, this app gives you a place to keep track of what articles you have submitted where.
3. Genesis: Has a large number of generators for everything from fantasy creature to starships.
4. THoughts: A great app for keeping track of ideas and the beginnings of stories or articles.
5. Just Write: Has quotes, warmups, and prompts to get your imaginative juices flowing
6. Fictional Character Generator: Creates a random person and a few details about them to get you started on a new story.
7. Topics: Generates the beginning of a story for you to finish
8. Creative Writing Prompt Narrator: Works the same as Topics, but with different prompts...
9. Index Card: Create projects and write notes on notecards within that project. For example, you can start a project called "The Well" (a story I'm working on), and jot down research on notecards about psychology, depression, and PTSD (topics that fit that story).
10. Dictionary.com: A dictionary and thesaurus well worth downloading; it has a widjit for the word of the day, too.

IPAD ONLY APPS
11. My Writing Desk: An organizational app for writing stories.

I have not been able to find out if Write or Die is accessible or not. But hopefully some of these apps will help you out!

I was looking for something like that but, for some reason, I never searched for an app on Ios. After reading this post I purchased Story Planer and it is just amazing: simple, easy and voiceover friendly. Could you tell me something else about Index Card? Is it worth it? Any diferences with Story Planer? Thanks and good writing!

I personally write all of my stuff in markdown and let leanpub do it. I don't have an example handy right now or I'd give you all a link. Actually if you go to the guide about making a bootable thumb drive you can see an example there. These are just simple text files you later upload to leanpub for conversion. You have to be willing to learn a bit of code but it really is beautiful, at least to me.

I have heard a little about Markdown, and it sounds interesting. What is it, and from where can it be learned? How do you write it, and, once it is written, what do you do with it?

James,

Yes it does, simply select ‘Markdown’ from the Text format selection menu that is below most text fields.

This program has nice VoiceOver features. I bought it when I first got my device. I like the Outline feature and the Word Finder feature. The only things I would like it to do would be search and replace, and double tap to replace misspelled words with the choices it suggests.

Where can you learn the syntax for writing Markdown? Also, what is Byword, and can Markdown be used in ordinary word processors such as Microsoft Word?

Hi,

For story writing, you don't need to know a lot of MarkDown. Here is some syntax that will get you started. Once you have read this, I recommend that you get the program called pandoc. I use it on PC. I'm unsure if there is a Mac version, but I'm thinking that there is. Here is the Syntax.

To make paragraphs, leave a blank line between each chunk of text by pressing ENTER twice.

To create heading levels 1 through 6, put 1 pound sign followed by a space at the beginning of a line for heading level 1, and increase the number of pound signs for the other levels.

# This Is Heading 1

## Second level heading

### Third outline level

To make numbered list entries, put numbers, followed by a period, followed by a space at the beginnings of the lines of each entry.

1. First numbered entry
2. Entry number two
3. Final entry

To make a bulleted list, start the lines of each entry with a hyphen, followed by a space.

- My kitchen
- My dining room
- My den

To end a heading, numbered list, or abulleted list, leave a blank line after the chunk of text.

To create hyperlinks or e-mail addresses, where you want to use the actual address, and not link text, just type the address.

To make a hyperlink or e-mail address that has link text, start with an open square bracket, type the link text, type a close bracket, enter an open parenthesis, type the address, then enter a right parenthesis.

[Google](http://www.google.com)

You can also have lists inside of lists, and other fancy stuff, such as tables, images, and links to the middle of a document, either the one you are making, or another one.

Once you have created your MarkDown document, you can then use PanDoc to convert it to various formats, such as rich text, which you can then open in other programs, such as Word and Pages, Media Wiki, for sites such as Wikipedia, and HTML.

Hi,

Does anyone know of a writing app that can expand, collapse, jump among, and move chunks of text in an outline? For those who use PC, Microsoft Word can do this. Word can expand and collapse whole heading groups and swap them up and down, and so forth.

Hi WriterGirl,I aspire to do technical writing, because I have a 27 year history in Information Technology. Technical writing mostly consists in telling people how to use things and some of it can be about using things besides software and hardware. I want to keep track of ideas mostly for what I'm thinking about, whether personal self-help stuff, or boring stuff like how code libraries work together. I even try to write poetry for my own amusement sometimes. The main idea is to try to keep thoughts Organized and centralized. So I hope whatever I use will be able to be used on my phone and PC.

Thanks.

Jim

Hi, does Pages or Word for IOS do spell checking?

I use MBraille for most of my writing on iOS. It beeps when I misspell a word and it's easy to get suggesttions. Now that it even has search capability, it rivals any other writing app I've ever used on the platform.

Pages for osx does spell checking nicely acgtually. Not sure about ios as I have the app but don't really use it much.

I know that this is extremely off-topic, but how do you do outlining in Word for Windows?

I know this is an old thread, but if TJ is still wondering....
There are two things people can mean by Outlining: either making an outline or an outline view of a document that collapses or expands text. For the first kind, Word does Automatic bulletted/numbered lists and an Outline is possible that way. But for the second, in Word, hit alt+shit+left arrow to elevate a paragraph to a heading level, or alt-shift-right arrow to demote it. At that point, you can either use Word's document map in the navigation Payne (Windows or Mac) or Jaws' quicknav mode to quickly navigate long documents. Word also has an Outline View in which you can expand/collapse heading levels and read your whole document that way. IWork Pages had an outline view until version 5, when they also took away scriptability to dumb it down to be in line with their IOS app. Now, VoiceDream Writer has a good outliner, but it's a rare animal on Mac, it seems.

Hello. I have come to treasure the Ulysses app. It uses markdown and activates the commands when you export to a different format. At the moment, it's usig the built-in spellchecking features in iOS. I've contacted them about perhaps finding a better way to spellcheck more easily and they may do that at some point. The support staff respond to questions quite quickly. I do all my writing in Ulysses these days. It's a relatively expensive app but worth every penny in my opinion.

I also use an app called Wordbook which is a dictionary and thesaurus that works offline. I used to like Wordweb but something made it less accessible and I thankfully found Wordbook and another nice similar app called Terminology. The Google and Wikipedia apps round out my writing app collection other than Blog Touch Pro for posting blog entries to Blogspot after writing them in Ulysses. Timeglass is a nice app letting you build timers with sound cues and different stages. I use it to work to the Pomodoro technique which I find very useful. In a nutshell, you work for 25 minutes and then take a break for five minutes taking a longer break every two hours.