Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Chris Baty — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 18:23:19 +0100

Our Chief of Operations, Clinton, has been talking about his first attempt at NaNoWriMo for awhile now. As software developers, besides advising him to not quit his day job, we dove into evaluating creative writing software for him to use. Adam, our Chief of Technology (yes, a lot of Chiefs around here), led the charge. We studied dozens of software packages and web apps. We found some apps simple and creative, like OmmWriter, which we love, but it is designed for writing very short pieces. We found "lite" web based editors that are good for capturing thoughts and taking notes, but not for novel writing. As alternatives, MS Word, Google Docs and other word processors just don't facilitate creative writing--they weren't designed to. We found the software packages designed just for novel writing bloated with features added over years of development resulting in their being complicated and not very easy to work with. After all, we just want to write. Today's technology has moved past the current market leaders in terms of what novel writing software could be. No matter how many features they add, it's still installed, complicated software, built for the pre-web app world. Web apps are changing nearly everything software-related, and we think creative writing software is due for a change. Each of us here at Blue Burro are restless with technology anyway. Our passion is to advance it, not accept the status quo. So, it was exciting for us to realize that we could advance the state of creative writing software. We knew we could create a modern writing environment that we would love to use. Yarny is the result. What you see now at yarny.me is just a start. We're quite happy with it, but it's still early in the development cycle. As we continue to develop Yarny, here are some promises we have made to ourselves and those that also choose to use Yarny in their craft:

We will never make Yarny complicated. We just don't think anyone should have to learn to use software anymore. Today, software should be self-evident and forgiving. Just start using Yarny. If some part confuses you, let us know, we'll work on that.
We won't stop tinkering until it's the leading creative writing environment on the planet (even then, we probably won't stop; it's just the way we're wired).
You will always access it through your browser and an internet connection from any computer and will never need to install anything. Soon you'll be able to write offline in your browser and automatically sync later when you have an internet connection.
We will never force a specific method of writing. We create spaces and tools inside Yarny to use in any manner that works best for you.
You'll be able to simply and securely share your writing with others.
We will add some formatting capabilities, but not get carried away. Formatting gets in the way of writing. If you think you need a lot of formatting, look at the Tom Sawyer manuscript; Mark Twain w-r-o-t-e it on a TYPEWRITER.
We will integrate with other online apps that provide things you will need such as book layout and publishing, making it easy to take what you create in Yarny and turn it into a published work.
We will always have a free version. A few things won't be free, but not many. Further, the paid plans, which will begin in December, will be dirt cheap. It's the internet after all.

We hope you enjoy using Yarny and it becomes your favorite writing tool. Our plans for the future of Yarny are shaped by what you tell us. So please send us an email, click the Feedback button in Yarny, or post something on our forums to let us know your thoughts. We know that we created Yarny for us to use - we all write, and Clinton will be using it for NaNoWriMo in a little over a month. We also know we created it for you, the creative writer, wanting a better way to write. For WriMo 2011, it's free. It's currently in beta, but that doesn't mean we don't take running it seriously. We've had it running for awhile now and writers are depending upon it as their writing tool. While using it, feel free to give us feedback and suggestions in the forum or the in-app feedback button. In December, we'll be out of beta and begin our subscriptions. Don't worry though, we'll always have a Free Forever plan, so if you don't want to pay - no worries. The subscription plans will add some additional features you may want. Good news though, it's going to be inexpensive, well, actually, dirt cheap. And, for some added motivation to be a WriMo winner, all winners get an annual subscription at half price - that's 50% off of dirt cheap! We wish you the best during November and please let us know what we can do to make Yarny a better place for you to write. Thanks. Now, start writing. Love, The Yarny Team www.getyarny.com (site and support forums) www.yarny.me (the place to write)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ImaDotifIonlywasaSplotch — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 07:10:32 +0100

I'm excited this is free. I've been trying it out, and what I see, I think is great so far. The offline option will be awesome. I'm pretty excited about that, too. Mostly, I just want to say I appreciate the privacy. I'm kind of leery about posting any of my content on the internet in the first place. It's a comfort to know someone still takes privacy seriously, and doesn't take the opportunity to make a buck off it.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Sunshine Cat — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 07:41:29 +0100

Ooh, I like this. I've used Google Docs for everything previously, but Yarny looks like it'll provide the same convenience as Google Docs, but be made for writers. I'm trying it out now, and it looks great! I assume details such as formatting will be added later.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

dagda24 — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 08:14:00 +0100

Love the idea. Just tried it and found it to be a little glitchy, tried giving feedback but couldn't access the form. That said, I'm on an unsupported browser, so I shall try on Chrome when I get home. Definitely an interesting idea for NaNoWriMo because I write on different computers through the month and tend to spend a lot of time emailing my story back and forth to myself.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Sunshine Cat — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 08:16:15 +0100

[off topic post removed by mods]

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cupcakemichi — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 09:45:53 +0100

It looks great, but I really want something that will work for someone whose writing computer does NOT have an internet connection. Period. Other than hoping you don't lose your flashdrive... I'm fine with a USB/ethernet/what have you to connect to another computer, just not the internet. (It's capable, via ethernet or modem, but there's no browser or virus protection software on it...)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

lilibel — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 09:57:56 +0100

It looks pretty interesting. Will give it a try this november and see how my work browser likes it ^^

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

BrigidGH — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 12:54:16 +0100

I've been trying out Yarny lately and I like it so far! It will be useful to have a distraction-free environment once November 1st rolls around. :)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Fyreheart — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:14:53 +0100

I do like the look and ease of use of this. I've tried yWriter and Scrivner in the past but didn't like either of them leaving me using google docs and MSword. This however, looks great and I look forward to really sinking my teeth into it.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

LadyofNonSequitur — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:27:35 +0100

I got a chromebook this summer, and I was resigned to having to type everything in google docs, so that I could write on all my7 computers, but this seems so much better! So far, I really like the snippets, and the built- in notes on the side... but I heavily depend on being able to mark certain things in bold, and other things in italics... any word on when that will work?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

mugendai — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 19:59:27 +0100

This looks like a very cool writing tool. I'm using it on the Opera browser and so far it seems to be working fine. Will you be testing Yarny in the Opera browser in the future? Also, I know that the formatting and such is going to be kept simple, but are there any plans for a highlighting tool? As I'm writing I like to be able to quickly highlight individual sentences or paragraphs that I know I'll need to come back to.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

KonataIzumi1 — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:10:50 +0100

This really just rocked my day~! Thanks Chris! I'll try it for this years NaNo. If I have any problems with it, I'll just post them here.

Update

cmcchesney — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 23:05:17 +0100

We have just released a minor update to fix the problem some users were having. Yarny will no longer lie to you, telling you that you're "not logged in," when you very clearly are.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Squaggle — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 23:53:20 +0100

I already started planning out my novel and writing character profiles in Yarny! It's easy to use, distraction-free, and I can get on it from pretty much anywhere! Definitely using it for NaNo this year.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

StacyRenee — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 04:15:54 +0100

This is exactly what I needed to keep all my information in one place! I can add notes on my characters on the right side which is easily accessible. So much easier than rifling through paperwork or skimming through my wordpad. I am positive that Yarny is going to be my best friend for the next two months. :)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

WhiteRaven93 — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 05:35:01 +0100

I found this about a week ago. It's pretty neat, and I'm liking it, but I seem to have a bit of trouble committing to writing software. Be sure that I'll use it; the question is just how often. I'm eager to have italics and bold and, particularly, an indent button. :X I just can't stand having to double-return so my paragraphs don't meld into each other. If I have to copy/paste into a Word doc that I can print for class, those extra spaces are a pain. :( Overall, though, I'm liking where Yarny is headed.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

fullmetalky — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 10:49:25 +0100

The first thing I thought was "Argh no speelcherker" but then I realised that, when I use Chrome, I've got one built in to that anyway. I've downloaded and trialled a load of different software and I confess I've had the same thoughts as the Yarny folk - it's all a bit complicated and needlessly 'in your face' feature wise. This looks like the winner for me.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

TarnishedHearts — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:24:47 +0100

I plan on trying Yarny once there are basic formatting capabilities (bold, italic etc) Nothing bothers me more during writing than being distracted because I cannot indent, bold or italicize something. Its like an itch on my frontal lobe and I cant scratch it. That said, Yarny is definitely the most promising writing app Ive seen! If all else fails, I will be using OpenOffice and a flash drive XD

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

PiaKaycee — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:45:03 +0100

This looks really great, but I won't always be connected when I'm writing, so the offline feature is a must for me. I'm going to play around with it, though. Looks like fun.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Kamikaze Mission — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:08:13 +0100

I'm actually really impressed so far. I write in notepad and this gives me a really nice way to keep track of everything, check word count and save at the same time, and break everything out without using clunky folders or downloading software. Definitely looking forward to an off-line mode, too.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

50percentDakini — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:30:04 +0100

I experimented with downloading my snippet and it popped up in a Firefox text file as a single block of undifferentiated text, with no paragraph breaks or indents (so not showing up like the snipped appeared on the Yarny writing screen). ARGH! Does this mean that at the end of November when I'm ready to move my hopefully completed novel to some other program I will face the daunting prospect of subsequently having to put in paragraph breaks, indents, and the like for 50,000+ words?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

bighillgoddess — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 18:40:43 +0100

I do like the way this is set up but would like to see the offline capability implemented. I will keep playing with it, because I think I can write the majority of my novel on this, as well as shorter pieces. Thanks for making it easy! I love Markdown syntax and am finding it easy to bold and italicize what I need.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

clearly_insane_87 — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 22:28:28 +0100

So far, so good. I'm pretty hooked on the fact that I can tag items in my story and that I can jot down ideas for characters, scenes and storylines. And the new layout (I always write in Word or physically in a notebook) is a great change of writing scenery!!! So, that's definitely fueling my inspiration quite a bit!!! I LOVE this application! When I write and the right and left sidebars go away like magic, it is like gently being transported into my story world. I LOVE IT! There literally is no distraction or pressure! Thanks! The only problem so far is I don't understand the tag portion because I can only see the first line of them at the bottom of the snippet...but I'm working on figuring it out.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

anamardoll — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 22:36:13 +0100

It looks really interesting. Any thoughts on an Android app that interfaces with same? :)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Litharukia — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:33:26 +0100

That's so awesome. Free writing technology! I salute you and thank you. I can't wait to start using it :)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Void-Auron — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 02:14:10 +0100

I do like this program a lot (even though I continue to save everything to Word/type most of it in Word). It's great for when you need a change of scenery because you've gotten stuck on something. However, a few days ago (Sunday maybe?) every time I'd switch to another snippet to check something all my indents would be switched to a single space. I had to go through and delete all the spaces in the front of each paragraph when I copied it over to Word. Is that intentional/already fixed? Because otherwise Yarny is pretty awesome.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Jennifermwcg — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 02:49:10 +0100

Great so far! :D I'm usually pretty computer illiterate, so I love how easy this is!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Jennifermwcg — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 02:54:31 +0100

One problem though- I can't seem to be able to add a new snippet to people/

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Viianny — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 03:07:35 +0100

Huh, someone else suggested this to me today before I even saw this. Looks like a great tool I can jot down my ideas for stories in a way that is easy to refer back to, not near as much lag as separate Google Docs.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

mightygitis — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 03:36:07 +0100

Totally just checked it out and it seems like a great concept! I don't have anything to write until November 1st, but plan on giving it a fun whirl after Nano kick off.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Sebz — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 04:00:22 +0100

First I'd like to say I love Yarny! I've been going crazy with it. Will we ever be able to add images? I like to have visual references for characters

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

typingmouse — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 09:43:02 +0100

I just started using yarny tonight, and this is easily the best writing program for me. I've tried using OneNote and other downloadable and web apps, but this one is the easiest. I love that everything is at my finger tips. I've already transferred the novella I'm trying to finish before the end of October there and it's so easy.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

JaniceWD — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:16:59 +0100

I used yWriter one year (found it on NaNoWriMo resources) and liked it. How do Yarny features compare to it? Anything yWriter has that Yarny doesn't and vice-versa? I'm using Firefox for my browser and I prefer using Works for my documents. I can also use OpenOffice, or Word (2003) as a last resort. I'm struggling financially so buying software is impossible. Thanks.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Hello, Dollface — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:05:15 +0100

Definitely going to try this out! I've been using Google Docs for my planning, but it's a bit cluttered with articles and assignments I'm working on for non-NaNo things (I know, the horror!). Yarny looks like a great way for me to still write on the cloud but not to worry about the other docs I have pending for other things!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

garretwriter — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 17:22:38 +0100

I've been a happy YarnNoWriMo for about a week now. I'm finding it very helpful for organizing my novel-to-be and its related documents (character sketches, outline, research, etc.) with minimal distraction. Thanks, Yarny - and extra thanks for being so responsive to all the comments and suggestions!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

jesusfreakhobbit — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 00:24:23 +0100

It looks awesome, especially since my Word is have authentication temper tantrums currently. But if I want to use this for this year I'm definitely going to need offline connectivity. Let me know when it comes out!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Jennifermwcg — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 02:39:46 +0100

Oh, it fixed itself... Anyways, I've tried 16 different writing sites out so far, and yarny is definately the best! ^-^

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Emochromatic — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 04:54:26 +0100

Hm... I checked out the site and it intrigues me, however, I am curious about one thing. Can you have multiple novels per account? Or is it just one novel/writing project per account? I'm still not clear on that. Definitely looking forward to that offline capability. That would be one of the more critical requirements of mine when it comes to using a web based writing program.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Jennifermwcg — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 04:59:24 +0100

Does yarny work on iPods? It doesn't seem to work on mine, but I was wondering if it was just me

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

randominu — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 05:10:07 +0100

Of all the sponsors this year this one is most appealing to me I think. I'll definitely have to try 'er out... although having used Word for so long, it might be difficult to change over haha.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Loucifer — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:39:47 +0100

Just been having a look around the world of Yarny and it looks fantastic! Nice and clean, simple layout and a great design. I'm a bit concerned about the current lack of an offline mode, but since I'm pretty much connected to the Internet most of time anyway, I can't see that it would be a problem. Does anyone know if it will work in an Android browser? I have a tablet PC that runs Android and, since it's easier to carry around than my laptop, I thought it would be great to use that for writing my novel.

Moving Snippet Types and Keyboard Shortcuts

cmcchesney — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 23:46:41 +0100

Though the official announcement will be going onto our website later, I'll give everyone here a heads up: You can now migrate your snippets from one type to another. Just right click a snippet (or click the 'gear' icon),select "Move To," then choose the new snippet type. Now it's a lot easier to make notes about a People or Place snippet into an actual part of your Story! Also, while typing, if you hit Ctrl+Alt+N, it makes a new snippet for you. Ctrl+Alt+G for a new group. Enjoy!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

LOTR_junkie6 — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 01:59:38 +0100

Thanks so much for creating this! I've been using it for only a week and a half now, but it has been such a lovely experience. First of all, just the fact that it's on the cloud. My inner geek is all over that. There's also the uncluttered layout which really helps me, considering my easily distracted mind. Also, I've just started operating off of a shiny (albeit tiny) new netbook, but the word processor on it is abysmal. Google Docs is laggy and somehow glitches constantly on the netbook, giving me only an inch to write with. I don't know about other people, but I do prefer having a neat expanse of white to write/type all over. I really don't want to install more programs on the netbook, so Yarny is truly a lifesaver. I also love the oh-so-simple organizational system of the snippets that come with categories and tags. I'll finally be able to ditch the bulky folders I'm used to carrying around. Finally, the automatic saves keep me from losing my writing due to Internet problems, which has happened multiple times with Google Docs. I've been singing your praises to my other writing friends and I know at least one of them is going to be using Yarny during NaNoWriMo. Thanks again for this writing tool!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

edgewritermom — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 03:52:35 +0100

I usually write my novel on my Alphasmart, but this will be fun to play with during those times when I've actually got a computer to use...and I like it already. Can I send my novel as created on this document directly to CreateSpace to get a proof copy? Or will I need to cut and paste it...somewhere else...to do that? (Like into a PDF?)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

stephanie1588 — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 16:27:42 +0100

Nicely done. While almost 100% of my writing is done on my laptop, I won't whine too much about having to jot the few things I write while offline in word and copying. I like that the options are hidden while writing - it's like you know I'm a bit distractable. Can't wait to try this out during word wars - saving them as a snippet instead of having to make them work in my plot RIGHT THEN will be helpful.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

craftytexangirl — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 16:31:55 +0100

...This. Is. THE GREATEST THING. THANK YOU SO MUCH. Hell, I'm going to work my ass off to win this just to keep this program for cheaper. Oh, my god. It is beautiful. WORDS CANNOT CURRENTLY EXPRESS MY HAPPINESS WITH FINDING THIS.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

anachronisma — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 17:36:00 +0100

I've signed up and have done some sampling of Yarny so far. You've said you'll be expanding export options, since only being able to export a .txt file was going to be one of my complaints. There's just one thing that makes the software a little problematic for me -- is there any intention of allowing document-sharing? Even if I'm writing alone, my work depends heavily on being able to share drafts with my readers and interested parties. Googledocs allows me to share documents even as I am working on them. While I like Yarny for writing much better than googledocs, if I am the only person who can see the work, it's not really worth the work to export it elsewhere. Is there any plan on incorporating sharing features into Yarny in the near future? I'd like to be able to invite email addresses or other uses to be able to read or edit entire projects.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

marissabreanna — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 22:21:23 +0100

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a software floozy. I use XMind for planning and Word or Q10 (mostly Q10 because of the wonderful typewriter sounds) for actual writing. I've tried yWriter, FocusWriter and the Scrivener trial. I really, really love Yarny! The design, snippets and tags are all fantastic. I love how when I start writing, everything melts away. It's a really brilliant idea that was wonderfully executed. I'm definitely looking forward to formatting and being able to work offline, I think that's a must since the Internet isn't the most helpful when you're trying not to procrastinate. =] I think my favorite feature is the People, Places and Things sidebar. It is SO helpful to be able to have my research, back story, etc. in one place alongside my work-in-progress. The only thing I really want to be added is optional typewriter sounds. Genuine sounding, like those on Q10... pretty please! Thank you Yarny, especially for making it free!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

albnutty — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 06:04:36 +0100

... Wow. Oh my Gallifrey. I absolutely adore Yarny! It's fantastic. It really is. I can't wait to use it for my NaNo novel. <3 Thank you so much for creating this.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Jennifermwcg — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 06:22:46 +0100

Yarny seems to constantly glitch on my iPod. Is this a normal thing?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

seajewel — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 05:33:29 +0100

I have to say I'm a huge Scrivener fan, but I find myself really drawn to Yarny. I do need to add my voice to the numerous requests for italics and bolding, but something about yarny is just so simple and sweet to write in.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

yuenwei — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:41:01 +0100

I've just tried it out and so far I like it. I particularly like the snippets function! So often I have random ideas floating about that doesn't belong to the current scene.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

FrodoLives86 — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 20:59:37 +0100

"I usually write my novel on my Alphasmart, but this will be fun to play with during those times when I've actually got a computer to use...and I like it already. Can I send my novel as created on this document directly to CreateSpace to get a proof copy? Or will I need to cut and paste it...somewhere else...to do that? (Like into a PDF?)" I have the same question. Will I be able to get my document off yarny by a means other than copy and paste?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Aerlinn — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 04:25:14 +0100

I haven't done anything with the left side of the page but I've spent *hours* character sketching, place sketching, and scene sketching with those handy little people/place/thing tabs in Yarny. It's brilliant. It's fantastic I love it. My only unique request (well, maybe, I only skimmed the thread) would be an "Events" or "Miscellaneous" or "Scenes" or just *one more* tab on that right hand side. Right now I'm just shoving everything that doesn't fit into people or places into things, which because of the groups is far from debilitating. But hey...shiny new tabs are fun too!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Breelink — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:01:34 +0100

Is there any way that Yarny could be made so that you can access the information offline? Also, and I am sorry if it has been mentioned, is there anyway it could be made into an app? I really love this software!!! These little things could make it so much cooler and easier for use!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

yuenwei — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 06:06:36 +0100

I am just wondering if it is possible for the different Titles to share the People Places Things snippets. I think that it would be really useful for writing a story in a series. :)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Flyingkage — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 20:41:23 +0100

I like this, its better then using google doc.s since I can have my notes all on the same page and not have a bunch of tabs covering my browser. I look forward to the other features coming up.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

FrozenBadChicken — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 02:41:04 +0100

i'd love the ability to do formatting, since i'm writing a novel where strikeout is a plot point (...too much house of leaves as a child, who, me?), and the lack of offline writing is a stumbling block, but this looks like it has a ton of potential and i love the quick notes and search functions :)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Jennifermwcg — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 20:58:47 +0100

Just a question, is yarny planning to stay free? I don't want to have to go back to google docs.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ELOAgent — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 21:08:16 +0100

I'm quite impressed with Yarny. For the three years, I've done Nano, as a full-time participant, and worked my theories on word as fast as possible on my characters. It was a pain to always lose my character profiles due to the limited amount of space in my computer, and having yarny is a good thing. I love the features so far and I can't wait for it to continue growing. Great site, everyone who is doing Nano this year, and the years on, should use it!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

BurningTyger — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 22:41:10 +0100

Hi! This looks absolutely fantastic. I love the way that it's laid out, with places for various notes. I do have one question, though. The terms of use state that we cannot upload material "that may be considered offensive," and on the registration page, it states that "obscene [ . . . or . . . ] sexually-oriented" materials can't be posted. Those are pretty vague guidelines--what may be considered innocuous to one person may be obscene or offensive to another. And my characters, despite their Victorian sensibilities, will be having sex at some point. Can I still use yarny, or would that make my novel subject to deletion?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Alleyleeplz — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 22:56:14 +0100

This was a tad bit confusing at first, but once I figured it out, it is BEYOND helpful! I'm one of those people that is constantly making side-notes, or foot notes, or random scribbles of information on a seperate page, or writing random paragraphs for later ideas. There is so much extra organization with this program, I hope it'll really keep me on track for this month, and future usage!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Wolfme — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 13:10:44 +0100

If it's okay with you, I'd like a little clarification on a few questions: 1) You've previously stated that you have an interest in going down the route of Apple/Android apps, is this something you plan on having up and running before November or are you mainly aiming towards the computer market and leaving the other markets for a later date? 2) If you are aiming for those apps to be Nano ready are you also meaning to have the offline mode ready as well? Thank you so much for taking the time to create a product that is not only user friendly, but personally suggests a way of writing that I, rather stupidly, hadn't considered....having areas set aside for storing my novel plans, beside my brain :) Al P.S. I plan on using it for Script Frenzy as well.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Roganda — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 12:42:17 +0100

I just poked the site and this is great! Last time I did NaNo I had a laptop and a boring 8-hour sit-there job. Now I'm too on the go to rely on such things. I'll try more technically later, but great idea!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

elizabethnoble — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 16:03:46 +0100

I've been checking out everyone's software and trying different things. When I clicked on this my first reaction was WHOA WOW. My next one was you did this for me! Gotta thank you. How much is the paid version going to sell for and what's different?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Siriah — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 00:15:36 +0100

I've been playing around with this and it's pretty cool! I love being able to take notes, colour-code them and move them around etc. However, I prefer to write using web formatting (two linebreaks instead of a single linebreak and an indentation) because it's more comfortable to read on a computer screen that way, and I do a lot of reading when I'm checking my own writing for horrendous crimes against spelling or grammar. Can I suggest some sort of toggle which displays the indentations as extra linebreaks instead of as indentations? :)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Ellalah — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 16:27:37 +0100

Really liking it so far, but I have one question/suggestion (sorry if someone has already asked): Is there an offline version, or is there plans for one in the future?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Sunshine Cat — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 22:57:20 +0100

I'm still transferring my August Camp NaNo project over, it's taking ages. But I guess that can't be fixed, when you're splitting up a huge doc into scenes and parts. Are all the features currently in place (and formatting, export to format other than txt) going to remain free? I know there will be extra goodies in the paid version, but I want to be sure about this. I don't want to waste my time transferring my entire novel over just to have to switch back over again. Thank you.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

zenlc — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 22:57:29 +0100

Last year I used My Writing Spot specifically for the cloud storage and "platform agnostic" approach and while that program did what I needed, it lacked many of the features I'm finding in Yarny that I like - oh, and by the way, I'm testing it on the iPad 2 Safari browser and it works well so far. Thank you for the wonderful implementation and if you need someone to beta test in iPad, let me know - I have software engineering and support experience :). I think I just found my writing too :). Thanks!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ahighcalling — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 23:50:28 +0100

I am LOVING this. It really is intuitive. Having all my characters and places (which I really need for this year's novel) right by the side and not in another tab or a piece of paper floating around my writing space somewhere is such a blessing! I only have one question, and it is probably because I'm just missing something that's right in front of my face. How do the snippets work? I started typing and that became one snippet, but how do I create another snippet. And is there a way to create a snippet without writting actual text (I would like to take some notes and put down some thoughts without actually starting to write my novel.) I'm using Safari on an iPad if that makes a difference. Sorry if these are obvious questions. And THANK YOU for creating this amazing web app!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ahighcalling — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:19:59 +0100

Yep, it was right in front of me and I hadn't noticed it. Sorry for the double post! And thank you again for such a great tool!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

lemonbar77 — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 03:21:32 +0100

First off, I friggin love this tool. I'm outlining like a fiend over here! And I've never outlined before! That being said, when clicking on the tabs on the right, I do not get the "new snippet," "new group," and "export snippets" icons for People or Things, but Places DOES give me the options. I am having to make a snippet on the left and move it where I want it. This was not always the case, but started earlier this evening. If it's any help, I'm running Firefox 3.6.23. I am on Mac OS X 10.4.11 and can't upgrade to Firefox 4 (which may explain why it keeps telling me my browser is unsupported when I log in?). Again, love this tool. Thank you!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

lemonbar77 — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 04:09:45 +0100

Thanks for the quick reply. Sure enough, Safari works perfectly. One more question: if the title for a snippet is too long and doesn't completely show, is there a way to read it in full without double clicking it to highlight it and then scroll through it? I am using "title" for descriptions of what's going on to make an outline without them counting towards my word count, so I want to be able to write as much in the title field as I can. Maybe if when that snippet is active, the title of it showed above the workspace? If not, I can just create an Outline group in Things, which would work, too. It just seems faster to have my outline in my Story section.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

hmltwin — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:10:40 +0100

I had a peek at it while I was on this computer. I can hardly wait for you to get it IE compatable! I'm so happy you aren't blocked from my work (as some other writing pages have been) and I will truly be able to write on every computer I use. I'll sign up when I get home. Thank you so much for this web-app!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Kat Collins — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 20:34:24 +0100

Just signed up for it! Exactly what I've been looking for in a writer program for my novel. Tried ywriter and Storybook, but they were a bit too complicated. This is much more user friendly. Can't wait to get going on it!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Void-Auron — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 23:58:08 +0100

I really do love Yarny, but I'm using on an unsupported browser (IE) and it does get a bit wonky. But just in case nobody else reported this: If I switch from snippit to snippit, it starts bouncing back and only lets me look at the snippit at the top of the list. This is easily worked around by moving the one you want to look at to the top. Also, twice now all the text in my snippits has gone a faint shade of grey and would not turn back to a more visible color after it broke like this. But I understand that I'm using an unsupported browser and this kind of wonkiness is to be expected.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

interneteditor — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:27:08 +0100

I think Yarny looks great. I've got Scrivener installed but it's taking me too long to figure out how to use it, so Yarny's comparative simplicity would be ideal, however, I absolutely NEED offline mode as I have a very unreliable internet connection at home and also intend to write a lot while away from home (i.e. sitting beside the beautiful sea in my car) so I am not sure I can commit my NaNo to Yarny for this year.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:50:35 +0100

Thanks for the kind words. While you're working on your novel in November, we'll be working on creating the offline feature, so you *can* sit beside the beautiful sea and write in Yarny.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

irreverent_writer — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 22:38:59 +0100

Loving this program, and loving the fact that my notes are now on my screen and not on endless amounts of paper scattered around! I really enjoy the People, Places, Things snippets. SO helpful. For the record, I use IE at work and have been using Yarny without any problems. I should fire it up on Firefox to experience it at its best. Also, thanks for the heads up about *italics* and **bold**.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

jackow — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 18:51:16 +0100

Three suggestions: 1, a Google Chrome app. I like having the pages I constant as apps: it makes them easier to get to than my already-full bookmarks toolbar. There is also the potential for an offline version that does not need a connection to reach. 2, the option to create template snippets that show up in every "title." For example, I have already found that it is useful to have a "name bank" under People. 3, the option to share snippets between titles. The aforementioned name bank could be used for all my titles in the same fantasy setting.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

felinius — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 23:38:13 +0100

"On October 27th at noon eastern (GMT-4) everything Yarny will be moving to a new (very heavy duty) server environment." I'm guessing that this is to help with the NaNoWriMo traffic. ;) I love this! Can't wait for an offline mode. GDocs is horrid in that sense and this is easier to use for my writing.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

pritchardry — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:17:52 +0100

Mind blown. In love. Organizes things exactly like they are in my head.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

12side — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 21:32:19 +0100

Glad to see you are so active in responding to user input. That is always a good sign for a company that is expecting a great return on their investments. That being said, I really plan on using this for my Novel, along with my supplemental blog. I had a few questions/suggestions. I'm sure you guys are all on top of things and have a nice long list of features to roll in. For reference, I'm using Chrome 15.0.874.106. Here are a few things I noticed: 1) The writing column width seems to be fixed, even in "hidden UI mode". is there any plan to tweak this? 2) A small thing, since this only applies to my titles/chapter headings, Are we going to be getting center/justification ability? 3) The "groups" don't collapse no matter how many times I frustratingly click the arrow. =P 4) It would be nice to have groups be able to stack into other groups (Parts>Chapters>Snippets) 5) I love the idea of the left column being the manuscript, and the right column being notes. The notes UI is a great start but I would love to add my own headings besides "Characters, Places, Things". I know this is asking a lot of your server, but maybe even an image upload area. 6) Hyperlinks don't work yet but I assume that will come along with the bold/italics/etc 7) The word count bar isn't really as obvious as I'd like it. A bit taller and maybe some text saying it is the word count might be good. I know this looks like a lot of criticism, but I really do love the simplicity of the site. I think you have a great thing going here. I'll be looking forward to the progress of the site!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

RockAngel15 — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 21:41:34 +0100

I was planning on writing my novel on GoogleDocs so that I could work on it in school. But I've only been messing around with Yarny for like five minutes and I love it! It seems so easy to use. But I almost think that you should switch the shift+enter to make an indent and just have enter to go to the next line. This is just because I'm used to writing in GoogleDocs and MS Word for school though. As for the bold, italics, etc, I'm not really that picky about because I don't use them a whole lot. Overall, I think this is a great way to write, and i'm pretty sure that I'm going to use it for my novel! :)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Jennifermwcg — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 22:53:40 +0100

I've lost all my stuff! Is there any way I can get it back? I've lost roughly 5000 words, and quite a few notes...

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Jennifermwcg — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 22:55:22 +0100

Sorry, nevermind... it fixed itself

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 23:25:04 +0100

Because of the server upgrade, when you login, you may not see your writing. Don't worry. Just logout, refresh your browser, then log back in. Your writing is there, it's just your browser cache preventing you from seeing it. Thanks.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

lemonbar77 — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 04:01:15 +0100

Again, loving everything. Thank you so much for the auto-indent. I don't need it right now, as I'm just making notes about characters, places, etc, but I know it's going to be a time saver when I actually get to writing on Nov. 1. Since most of the time a writer doesn't hit Enter until a paragraph is done, it makes so much sense to auto-indent for the next one. It's the little things in life, isn't it? I also love the fixed size page because it reads more like an actual page. Keep up the good work!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

kimby — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 06:41:15 +0100

Dig this! But my work has I.E. so like last night I was putzing, typed 2k, came home, checked my word count... it lost like one third of the new stuff.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

interneteditor — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:24:53 +0100

After saying earlier that I didn't think I'd use Yarny because I'd be writing away from an internet connection a fair bit, I've now found myself addicted to it, it's easily the most user-friendly system I have tried so far. Plus, I lost my people/places/things after the server move, came here to this thread and immediately found the answer to how to get them back again, so great support too, well done. I haven't written any prose yet (of course) but i have my chapter headings and a good bit of research. IT's great not to be worrying about the mechanics of planning and outlining any more. Thanks for all your efforts.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

WhatsForDinner — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:38:25 +0100

Argh! I didn't quite get the fact that the "snippets" are supposed to be the novel itself, so I'm merrily outlining in the snippets (left) side of the screen. It seems I should be doing this on the right, so it doesn't "contaminate" my NaNo word count. Is there any way to "move" all of this, wholesale, to the right side, the things snippets? It is just a morning's worth of work, but . . . I'm hoping. Very cool program, very intuitive for me.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

WhatsForDinner — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:39:20 +0100

Found it! Love that it is just on the little gear "move to". Thanks!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ragdolltb — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 21:13:12 +0100

I've played with it for a few minutes and already falling in love. My biggest problem with google docs is the inability to copy and paste into it, which was frustrating if I found info on a website or something and want it all together to reference later. so it's pretty awesome! That said, I know it's early, but are there any plans for an android (or iphone) app for phones and tablets? Then I could still write while waiting at the doctor or various other places where no computer is available. If this has already been answered somewhere, I apologize.

BexiiBunny — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 11:27:59 +0100

Hey can anybody talk me through this site like I'm new and it's sorta confusing so help anyone ?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

WingedJedi — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 16:25:26 +0100

I just signed up for yarny and it's addicting! It's a lot of fun and actually makes me what to develope my characters, places, etc. One thing I'd like to ask: Is it possible to add a spell check function? My spelling is horrible if I'm writing fast and I believe I will dearly need that function during NaNoWriMo. Also, will it be possible to save back-ups of the novel and snippets to my harddrive? Otherwise I'll just do it by hand to be on the safe side....

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

TommehBell — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 18:40:14 +0100

I've tried to log in and it won't let me. I signed up before the change over and since then the link for the log in isn't clickable for me. I've tried refreshing the page and the same thing keeps happening.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

fixergirl — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 22:16:31 +0100

Oh WOW. This program is incredible! I'm a die-hard longhand writer - every November I buy a new spiral notebook because I need a way to keep all my notes, musings, character sketches, and random scribblings together even if I'm doing my actual writing on a word processor. I've never found a satisfactory solution for doing all those things on the computer. I have now! This is just amazing - so simple to use, so perfectly intuitive. The learning curve for using it is practically nil. This is better than the invention of the post-it note! (If you could see my writing notebook you'd realize that's more of a compliment than it seems). I can't wait to see the tweaks and twiddles as it develops. Keep up the good work!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Akhena — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 01:31:10 +0000

cmcchesney and cmartoglio I just wanted to thank you for doing such a great job both with Yarny, which I absolutely love, but also with your responses to all of us NaNoers. I started business school in September and I've probably had at least five lectures since then on connecting to your customers using the web. We've had all kinds of examples of companies doing it wrong, but reading through this forum I saw a perfect example of how to do it right. Keep up the good work and thank you, thank you, thank you for your amazing software.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Xadrienne — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 12:25:19 +0000

This is my first year doing NaNo and I love the simplicity of Yarny. It's easy to use, doesn't have a ton of random features I don't need/want and I love the idea of accessing my work from anywhere since I will be switching between a desktop PC and a laptop. I love it! Keep up the great work, and thank you so much!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

LadyStarlea — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:32:23 +0000

This is my first year doing NaNo and I just heard of Yarny yesterday and am loving it. It is similar to google docs only has places for your research and notes wight there easy to get to without creating a new file to hold the info. Only a few problems. 1. I can't create a new snippet under people or places after I have made two. Though I can create more under the right side and then move it into the people section. I am using Chrome with Windows 7 2. would like to have a plot section like the people, places and things to hold the outline for the plot and other general plot notes that don't fall under people places and things.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Mingo — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 18:43:47 +0000

THANKS for the good work, Yarny, and your smart and fast responses. I love you already and will be looking forward to the offline version as most of my writings take place during train trips! (i did notice that i could continue working offline in my browser, than saving it on the next train station as soon as my laptop connected to the internet again. I would not want to risk that for my wrimo, though!)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

YvonneJocks — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:13:00 +0000

Oh NOES! Is this because I use Internet Explorer? I just pulled up Yarny.me and, while it has me logged in, none of my story is showing! Is it gone forever? I'll go try to log out and log back in....

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

YvonneJocks — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:46:22 +0000

Sorry -- all I had to do was log out and log back in. That said, thanks for the sense of extra security I had, knowing you were here to answer questions!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Licia — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 05:44:14 +0000

Wow! I love this program. It's absolutely perfect. Yarny could be THE ANSWER I've been looking for all along. The program I intended to use is beautifully designed and organized. Unfortunately, my creative brain jumps all over the place and it would have been hell if I'd tried to maintain ORDER. I write whatever, whenever. Nothing hurts my creativity more than feeling boxed in and programs with too many options are muse killers. Thank goodness Yarny allows me to create zillions of SNIPPETS without feeling any pressure to organize. Whew! Thank you! Oh and thank goodness, there is a cut/paste function!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

LITTLEROCKET — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 08:01:20 +0000

I'm very keen on using this, but I'm most keen on the offline version since I write frequently without the internet. It'll be fantastic when you release that!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

LadyStarlea — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 15:38:38 +0000

I have decided to write my snippets in Yarny as I would cor chapters for the book. Though I noticed as I started my 2nd snippet that it resets the word count. For me this is a good and bad thing. I like knowing how many words are in each snippet or chapter but I can't seem to find a way to show the overall count. Is there a way to find the count for all the snippets for the story together? Even highlighting all the snippets wouldn't give me the joint word count. I guess I can add the word counts for each snippet but as I write more and more snippets this will be troublesome. If there isn't a way to get the story's full count then there needs to be a way added in..

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

50percentDakini — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 21:22:08 +0000

the newest updates are AWESOME! I was just thinking about writing in to say that you need to allow text movement by using control+ arrow keys - and it's done!!! I love Yarny!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ladyOzark — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 23:43:23 +0000

Just supposing the unthinkable happened and our content in the cloud disappeared, would y'all happen to have anything backed up for us so all would not be lost? Or should we backup every night just to be safe?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

davisac1 — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:40:22 +0000

I searched the thread for this issue, but didn't see it addressed: when I export, the text document doesn't retain my paragraph breaks. Is this a feature or a bug, and is there a workaround? Thanks! I've never used writing software, just long stints in Notepad and a transfer to Word, but so far Yarny seems very close to my ideal setup.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

AshleyKeniston — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 01:39:13 +0000

I absolutely adore Yarny! I've used it for a lot of my brainstorming at both home and work (shh, don't tell) but this evening I opened it up to get down to the nitty gritty of my first words, and it's all wonky! Well, it's all wonky in Chrome which is the only browser I've used for it. I opened Yarny on Internet Explorer and, although it says it's incompatible, it still *looks* right. I downloaded Firefox and it's working fine there as well, but in Chrome it takes forever to load and then comes up in like weird blocks all out of order--it's still showing me a place to sign in over my sign in which is aligned with the left side of the page, my snippets are all popping up on the left in a really strange fashion and the text is overlapping. It's technically still usable, but it's hard to navigate and read. I've refreshed a number of ways, reloaded, signed in and out, changed the aspect ratio of the page, but I don't know what's up! Everything else is okay in Chrome. What have I done???

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Durindana — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 03:29:31 +0000

I noticed this issue this evening while I was at a write in: If you do not have a dedicated broadband connection, Yarny will flip out. I was using it earlier on my desktop with no issues, and was loving be able to add in notes to keep track of things, and then went to write in at a local cafe with my laptop. Worst idea ever. Yarny does not like not having a dedicated broadband connection (the internet at the cafe is slow, but a lot faster than a 56k), and I would have to reload the page a login again ever hundred words or so. I eventually just quit trying to deal with it, opened up Google Docs, and just went from there. It's easier to save notes and the main story in Google Docs than it is trying to convince Yarny that no, it does not need T1 speeds to save my writing every single second.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Hllangel — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:48:57 +0000

Is there any way to check wordcounts on parts of snippets without creating new ones? Ie, highlighting a passage and finding the wordcount? I do a lot of writing in sprints and would like to be able to just highlight part of a snippet and find the count rather than having to create a new one or copy/paste to an external program to do this. Is this in any way possible?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Ephemeral Gal — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:47:41 +0000

Like so many others, I am enjoying using Yarny. I was back and forth on and off yesterday and all saved fine until the scene I wrote last night. I can't find it, period. The word count is as it was before I added this part. Is there a way to check whether it is saved and retrievable, because if not, I'd better get re-writing it. Thanks.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

neddiheht — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:32:36 +0000

I've been having an odd issue. Every so often Yarny will suddenly switch snippets to the snippet at the top of the story box on the left. It's really weird and I don't know what is causing it. Because it's always the top snippet, I've been solving this by always having my most recent snippet at the top, but then I have to reorder everything when I go to export. I use Chrome for Yarny with a wireless connection.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

KMK_Mitrene — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 23:58:27 +0000

Im writinng my nano at Yarny and it IS GOOD! great job guys. It keeps me focused and is great to organize my writing Just one little problem now. I write in latvian and new export function doesnt allow other characters. Previous version was ok.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

KayDubyah — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 04:45:56 +0000

I absolutely love Yarny! At first I was skeptical to put my writing online, but the application has worked flawlessly for me! I'm one of those people who will writing something once and hate it, write it over and over again, and decide I liked the first thing the most after hours of pondering. Having the "Versions" option has been so neat, because if I don't like what I write I can go back to another version, instead of typing it all out again or right clicking the UNDO button numerous times! There is only one thing that I would like to see added and that would be a sharing option, so friends and writing buddies alike can keep track when we do swaps, help with grammar and plot ideas, etc. Has this been addressed and/or do you plan on adding something like this in the upcoming future?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Aloren — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 12:29:10 +0000

Oh boy .. I was really debating on trying a few different programs or google docs but reading through this thread won me over. It looks so clean and I am really pleased with how sincere you guys are. I want to switch from my main computer to a mini laptop and my ipod touch. Having access everywhere is amazing. I have not tried it with the ipod... *pause* Ok well it kind of works. xD I will probably just use the regular notes and then email it to myself but having it work on a mobile would be cool. Works awesomely on the computers though. :3 <3

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Fyreheart — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 12:35:47 +0000

I just wanted to drop by and say that I absolutely love yarny! I used google docs last year but yarny is absolutely fantastic and ideal for me! I love the clean, clear, open interface and it all works so smoothly. Oh and I look forward to the sharing feature, that'll be really handy!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Jessie Rose — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:45:50 +0000

I started using Yarny on November 1st, and so far I really love it. There isn't anything on the page to distract me while I'm typing, and it is super easy to make a snippet every time I add in some character information, so that I can keep track of it. The automatic word count is wonderful as well. I was writing yesterday at my school library, and there were a few internet connectivity issues which made it more nerve wracking, but I just temporarily switched to a Word doc, and updated one the internet was stable again. I am looking forward to the offline capabilities. :-) It looks like it would be really easy to keep track of multiple books all in one place as well.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ragdolltb — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 17:59:54 +0000

I've had the problem of snippet switching today too, but I was in the middle of writing. I hit enter to start a new paragraph and it switched to the first snippet. When I went back to the one I was working on it had deleted a sentence. I rewrote it and moved on. After I got my full 900, my goal for the day, I moved to another snippet. When I went back to the original, it had deleted EVERYTHING from that glitchy point on!!! 500 words gone! I'm seriously freaking out. I've had no motivation today and it took forever to push all that out, and i don't have time to rewrite today. I'm booked solid the rest of the day. Oh, but the snippet block on the side says 900 words, but when I click on it, it will only show 439 and a half. Yes, half a word. I'm afraid to try logging out and back in and possibly lose the 900 the side block says I have, but I don't know what else to do. The really amusing part is that I just read a post from you guys yesterday stating that since its on "the cloud," we shouldn't need to back anything up. HA! On a beta release of a new program. Really???? I always back up, I just didn't realize I should stop in the middle of sentences, or even words, to back my stuff up. Here I thought I could at least finish writing first. Hey, can you tell I'm frustrated! Other than that, I really love it. I do have suggestions, but it's pointless to mention if I end up losing my writing.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

seapetal — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 20:22:32 +0000

well just lost 300 words. I logged out and logged in and still gone. I guess I lost my connection and I don't know what happened.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

HuskersGirlLaura — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 23:23:35 +0000

hey, yarny folks: I would absolutely love the ability to make my font larger, as I have trouble seeing what my punctuation looks like on any screen smaller than my 17 inch alienware screen (who am I kidding, its hard to see them on the alienware..). Not to mention, I have some issue reading what I'm typing on my netbook screen, and can't see the punctuation at all on it. So maybe you could do a settings screen that has a basic version, and an advanced version, and on at least one of them have three options for font size? PLEASE?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

andowns — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 00:21:27 +0000

I've been using yarny for a couple days now, and I love how intuitive the software it. I'm studying IT, and nothing bothers me more than a bulky user interface. My only beef with the software is the saving system. If there were a prominent save button in addition to the auto-saves, I would feel much better about the software. But overall I'm loving it!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

YvonneJocks — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 01:36:39 +0000

I. LOVE. YARNY. Wanna know why? Because I thought I'd remembered to close the program on my home computer, before I left for work. At work, I added several hundred more words--a whole new scene--and then came home... and I'd left Yarny ON on my home computer!!! On some programs, as soon as I closed the home-version, it would've overwritten the longer version from work. But NO! Yarny saved the most recently worked-on version with the most words. YAY!!! FYI, I also love the word-count bar. How cool is that? It glitched a tiny bit when I created Ch. 2 (probably because I'm using Explorer?), but all I had to do was close and reopen, and all was well. I'd appreciate the ability to use larger fonts, though. My eyes, they are old.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Apooltoswim — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 01:53:03 +0000

I'm really, really loving Yarny. I've used plenty of writing software in the past, and always went back to things like WriteMonkey(I'm a fan of minimalism when writing). Yarny is king, as far as I'm concerned. Even more exciting is the fact that it's still in Beta--who knows how incredible it'll be when it's done! Last year, syncing between what I'd written at home and on my work computer was a massive headache...not with Yarny!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

touketsu — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:09:54 +0000

I love Yarny!! It's amazing!! But, and I hate someone, I don't know who, for doing this, but my school BLOCKED YARNY.ME!!!!!!!! And put the reason as advertising.....Makes me SOOO sad....now I can't work on my NaNo during schoool in computer classes......

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Ferna — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 23:09:16 +0000

Thank you so much for creating this. I've been looking for something like this for ages, since downloading things is such a pain and so is paying money for them. I love how simple everything is and how much better it is than word, which is what I used before. Word has it in for me and my novel writing. I've just started using Yarny since I saw this and am still figuring out how everything works. However, amazing job! It's really simple and I can just write to my heart's content without tearing my hair out, which word makes me want to do. Now maybe I can even write down all my random thoughts that aren't my main storyline. This is totally going to motivate me to write in NaNo and maybe even beyond, I can't wait to see future developments!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Fircoal — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:42:31 +0000

The word counts for Yarny and Nano are quite off. Is there are way to make them closer together for better Nano pacing?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Yukinflake — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 01:40:02 +0000

I love it! My only critiques: WHERE ARE MY ITALICS? And bold would be nice too, but ITALICS. That is an essential writing thing...

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Mackenzi. — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 02:50:29 +0000

Loving Yarny so far! It's exactly what I was looking for- online storage for access from anywhere, a very very simple way to keep notes on characters and settings, and a simple "just start typing" interface. I'm in love! I agree with Yukinflake and a few others before in that formatting would be a nice addition. Bold, italic, centered text, and larger text size would be really awesome. Keep up the great work, I think I'll be sticking with Yarny for a while. :)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

NicoliHunt — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 05:21:34 +0000

I love Yarny. I know I won't lose my novel now if my pc crashes....hopefully that won't happen like it did last year with my poor laptop. LOL Yarny is epic and I love how you can create groups for your chapters. I all ready have groups set up for my first 20 chapters. I also love how functional and easy it is to use. This is so awesome considering I am way ahead on my writing here and I want to make 60k by the end of the month.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

50percentDakini — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 22:03:30 +0000

thank you Yarny! So who knew that if I stretched my legs out all the way under my desk I could turn off the surge protector and neatly crash my computer all in one go. Thanks to Yarny, I didn't lose a word. Hallelujah!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

corrielavina — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 22:47:28 +0000

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!! I love this app so much already! I didn't get as many words on my NaNovel today as I hoped because I was taking time to investigate this app, but because of the features, my story and extranneous notes are better organized, and I have a much better handle on what is actually happening in my characters' world. I look forward to making much quicker progress from here on out because of this app.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

paintedmango — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 01:39:52 +0000

Can I just say that I love this so far? I am visiting my parents this weekend and don't have my own computer, so it's really nice to be able to access my novel online. Also, the "versions" feature kept me from having a meltdown earlier, when I somehow lost a section of my novel (I think some of it was highlighted and I accidentally hit a key? And then I hit ctrl-z and everything got worse). Anyway, I found that I could go back to earlier versions where I hadn't accidentally deleted thousands of my hard-earned words, and it was a lifesaver. I will probably keep writing on this even once I am back with my own computer. :)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

GEG — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 22:54:50 +0000

Really love it :) Few things I'm looking forward to in later versions = formatting, maybe possibility of tagging paragraphs as well as snippets! Working really well though for me so far! Especially as my story is not in a chronological order...and I'm not writing in either a chronological order, or the order my story will be in, so ease of movement and ability to tag to remember what I've written is great!

Yarny ate my story

kerrycat — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 22:55:50 +0000

I was loving Yarny until it lost 1500 words I wrote yesterday, that were clearly there when I logged out. Today, they are not there. Going back to MS Word, which is a big pain to email back and forth between home and work but the nature of this writing project doesn't allow for losing time by losing words.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ladyOzark — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 14:11:37 +0000

I'm using Safari and a Mac, and yarny is working amazingly well for me. If anything changes in the future, I hope that they keep this bare bones basic program because it's so easy to use. I love the way it organizes my writing and makes my chapters easy to find. It might be nice to have a feature that gives me a total word count. I have my chapters lined up on the left side, and each chapter has its own word count, which is nice because I can keep them similar in size, but when I want a total word count I have to get out the calculator. Has anyone else figured a different way to use Yarny and get a total word count? I can also figure out how many chapters I will need to reach my 50,000 word count. I discovered that Amazon has made it very easy now to publish your writing in Kindle format. I would love to be able to find other NaNo participants and read their books that way. Of course, the review feature is a little scary. The people who will be reading your Kindle book won't just be friends and family. Like my husband said, "Of course I'm going to tell you I love what you write. I have to live with you." :)

Re: lost words!!!

Ephemeral Gal — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 03:14:03 +0000

Thank goodness I backed up last evening because the 1000 or more words I've written to-day are gone with every other word!!! All more than 16,000 of them! Where can I look? Is there some cloud it might be living on? Help!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

dkirchge — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 03:58:33 +0000

I just signed up for the beta tonight and transferred my novel into it from Scrivener. I have to say, I'm very impressed with the site so far; everything works very smoothly. While I'd like the option to select my own font and font size (I'm a big fan of Courier and other monospaced fonts, and the default font size is a little small on my monitor) and I'd prefer it if paragraphs indented automatically when pasting material in, I can certainly work around it easily enough. Well done, folks!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Cambrie Mae — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 04:09:34 +0000

Just a suggestion, I'd find it helpful if there were ways to put words in the main text document that didn't add to your word count, like "[[continued from hardcopy]]" so that I can become more organised.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Mithgariel — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 15:00:33 +0000

First - let me tell you that beside yEdit, which I'm currently using, Yarny looks like the next best thing invented after pancakes and strawberry jam. First of all - I don't have to spend any time to learn how it works. I hate when I have to do that - reason I don't use any nifty writing programs is that sorry, I want to spend my time writing and not messing around with the program, then how rewarding it might be in the end. You've got everything self-explanatory, I totally congratulate you, you're my hero! :) The reason why I'm choosing to stick with yEdit right now is just one small widget - the ability to set daily goals (basically yEdit asks you how many words you want to write, you insert a number, and there's a little extra feat which allows you to add +250, +500 etc to the goal just with one click. And it starts a countdown, telling you how many words you have LEFT to write to reach the goal. That's something my brain loves - small goals, very easy to change and the countdown - number gets smaller, not bigger. Now, if you had THAT beside the overall progress bar (which I love, too), I'd be building you a temple, not just an altar. Fond regards from Estonia! Diana

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

moonfreak — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 05:16:52 +0000

I love yarny! I've been using it to write my novel, as well as to write poetry, and keep everything handy between my personal and work computers (much more effective than emailing yourself!) My favourite parts are the fact that there is no homepage (so you don't get distracted) and that I have commented a few times with their feedback feature, and seen things that I talked about fixed or improved. Awesome job guys! I don't think I'll ever stop using it.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ChartreuseWalls — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 06:17:43 +0000

So Yarny just deleted my entire novel (don't worry, I had it all backed up!). I logged out and logged back in and all my snippets were gone, so I did it again and it showed all my snippets, but it's not loading them, and at the bottom it just keeps saying "error saving data." I've been really loving Yarny a ton, and I haven't had any issues until now, but I don't really know what's going on... I'm just glad that I have everything backed up.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Fircoal — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 06:32:50 +0000

To everyone who's novel may have just gotten deleted. Login and recheck, I did for mine and it seems to be all there again.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

marispeare — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 06:34:46 +0000

I adored Yarny until 5 minutes ago when I joined the Yarny Ate My Novel crowd. I had it backed up--thank you NaNo reminders--but I think I'm done with Yarny for the time being. Back to the flash drives.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Fircoal — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 06:35:19 +0000

And now it seems to be going back to glitching.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ChartreuseWalls — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 06:37:54 +0000

Mine's back, although it ate 81 words...though my word count hasn't changed, so maybe they'll come back? I hope everyone else's work comes back too!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

jsncttn — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 06:51:13 +0000

Seems like everything I lost is back again. All I can say is maybe keep trying to log back in? In the meantime, I'm backing up my work, just in case...

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

samhinrichs678 — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 09:59:40 +0000

I was part of the 'it all vanished' crowd. I literally had nothing, not even a title, but after logging in and out about half a dozen times it all came back! Yay! My fiance was witness to my 'how am I going to make up 13,500 words' breakdown though. That was mildly embarrassing. But I can still say that I love Yarny, especially the fact that its word count is less then the one the validator gives me. It feels like the site is giving me a free boost!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Cathe — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:08:29 +0000

Having failed to write anything in the last two days, I didn't lose anything or panic. ;) I have been copying and pasting to Word, anyhow. For my "misc details" I use the right toolbar with the people/places/ideas tabs. For my "real" writing, I use snippets on the left toolbar. Here's my problem... Somehow, I replaced all of the text of my "chapter one" snippet with all of the text of my "chapter six" snippet. Autosave. I couldn't undo enough to get it back. Like I said, I had it saved in Word, so I deleted the problem snippet and made a new one. The "versions" feature was confusing to me. I thought I had found the correct "version" and could go back to it, but I was wrong. Is there a useful way to find versions? A way to delete previous versions? I'd kind of like to make a version that contains my first few chapters, in addition to the full, ongoing version, so I can take it in a different direction later, if I choose to do so. In other words, a copy. Can that be done? Make a more readable "version" feature? A "duplicate this story and give it a new name" feature?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

SerenBunny — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:39:23 +0000

Mines has worked fine the last few days :) I still like yarny, even though I can't spell it righ without checking lol xx

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Jennifermwcg — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 01:22:59 +0000

I've lost 1000 words... I tried logging in and logging out numerous times, no change whatsoever.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Jennifermwcg — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:19:45 +0000

I just wanted to say Yarny has some of the best customer service I've seen. :D I couldn't find it so I sent a message and got a reply within ten minutes. Thanks for helping me recover my writing. ^-^

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

candy_luminous — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 02:08:17 +0000

I can't get Yarny to load... by my count I still have about 9 hours until the maintenance shutdown, but after I go through the initial maintenance warning page, it's just getting stuck on the "waiting to load" page and not loading at all :S

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

MorbidIrony — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 04:00:49 +0000

I keep trying to log in, and I cant. When I try and get it to send me a new password, it tells me I have an invalid email. I was not smart, and have about three chapters of work that hasn't been backed up. As you can guess, I'm mildly annoyed.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

goodgonegirl — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 11:40:55 +0000

Anyone else getting Error: Empty Response and Error:Too Many Redirects when trying to load up yarny? I'm wary of using online places to save my work because I wouldn't be able to recover if I lost a lot of work, but a lot of useful notes were in the snippets bit and it's getting on my nerves that I can't reach them!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

creativeendeavour — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:23:58 +0000

I started with Libre Office, made the move to Yarny when I saw this thread, but after losing some hard earned words with a saving error, I switched to Pangurpad - I wanted to keep writing in the cloud. I really like Yarny and I'm confident it will be a great tool when it's all grown up. I'll be back as they say.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:02:20 +0000

We're backup. Thanks for your patience while we were down for scheduled maintenance. Like all good things, this took longer than we expected (or, certainly wanted). But, the backend stuff (the boring behind the scenes tech that is mostly invisible to users) was well worth taking the time to put in place. Let us know what you think. Write well.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

yamikuronue — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:21:01 +0000

I got permission to install Firefox at work, and now I'm even more in love with Yarny than when I was stuck on buggy IE :) I didn't realize the whole screen was meant to go away - in IE, snippits on the left remain faded in while I type. Much improved!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Fircoal — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:57:12 +0000

Yarny, I do have the unfortunately notice to say that the error that makes it go to the first snippet is still there. I'm not sure if you tried to fix that or not. But if you did then welp .n. Also is this a fine place to submit bug reports or do you prefer the feedback place. (One place allows me to be lazy and the other doesn't x3)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

lilyrose.23 — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:31:00 +0000

Hey, I've been using your service for most of the month, but since the site went down for maintenance last night, I get a '404 Page Not Found' message whenever I try to access it. I even went to getyarny.com and tried to link to it via the big green 'Start Writing' button. Nothing seems to work. Is the url still the same or has it changed somehow?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

steph555 — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 04:02:29 +0000

Hi I was writing in a temporary account on yarny and had written about 6000 words. When I went to a different tab and came back my whole story was gone :'( It said it was saving. I've only backed up a bit of it so now I've lost around 4000 words :( We have tried everything to get it back. Is there any way I can recover my story? Thank you for your help!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

IceCreamAddict — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 18:55:00 +0000

I just started using Yarny, but it's telling me that my word count is lower than what google docs is telling me. My word count is a lie? D: Google docs says I have closer to 14,800 words whilst yarny says I have closer to 14200, maybe something was lost in the transfer, but I don't think so?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

I Can't Write For My Life — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 19:27:53 +0000

Yesterday I did 11,111 words on Yarny for the Veterans Day challenge! It worked great and I am so happy!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

WingedJedi — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 18:23:24 +0000

I have an minor, but odd problem with the word count. I got up to 20,011 words today, yarny says. I've updated my NaNo word count with that number. I came back and logged into yarny an hour later and it says I have 20,010 words now. That's really not a big deal, but it's the second time I've noticed that my word count has gone down by 1 word after logging back in later. Does that mean one word is missing now? Or is yarny suddenly counting differently?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Little Eraser — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 22:57:17 +0000

I was using Yarny last night, and it told me that it had saved my work. I got back on this afternoon to write, and it lost over 2,000 words that it told me that it had saved. Is there any way to recover my work, or do I have to write it all from scratch again? If you want to contact me about this, please use NanoMail - I probably won't be keeping an eye on this thread :P

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ragdolltb — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 01:50:38 +0000

I like yarny because I use multiple computers and hop back and forth. Until now it's worked great, but today I wrote on one computer, then later wrote on another. When I went back to the first computer, it's not showing what I wrote on the 2nd computer. I've refreshed, logged out, and restarted the browser, but it's not making a difference. It's not a super big deal since I don't usually write on this computer, but just wanted to let you know. the one it's not showing up on is an older version of firefox, so that may be the problem. I'm not sure what version of firefox the other computer is. When I get to work tomorrow I'll see if it shows up properly there as that's the computer I mostly use (latest version of google chrome).

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Flower K. Owl — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 01:37:19 +0000

Someone might have mentioned this, and I sent you an email via yarny feeback, but I figured I would post here and get all the bases covered. Will Yarny attempt to offer the ability of working on more than one story at a time? as in, have a yarny open that would only have the items, groups, and snippets for one story open in a window, with the option of switching to my novel in a click? Or will that function just be covered in the "group" button?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

scriptchick — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:01:41 +0000

I used yarny for the first two days of nano, until it stopped auto saving. I had been writing during my lunch hour (about the only time I could week one while working an 80 hr work week), and lost all my story until then. I also couldn't access any of the writing I'd done day 1. I went and had a bit of a cry, opened back up the program - and while I could access it, I immediately sent a copy to myself and have been working in pages on my ipad ever since. Sorry Yarny - I can't take the risk...

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Aeon of Ice — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:59:12 +0000

Just wanted to give a rare response here, haha. I have been using Yarny since right before NaNo and I ADORE it! Where I work we have such super limited internet access but the vast majority of my job just has me sitting here doing absolutely nothing. I have experienced no issues (except maybe snippet jumping, but that's just a minor annoyance). And I love the convenience of the site. Thanks for creating this service!

Right justify

Cathe — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 04:04:21 +0000

Help! All of my story snippets just right-justified! I have no idea how it happened.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

dorota122 — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 10:32:53 +0000

Great stuff from you, man. Ive read your stuff before and youre just too awesome. I love what youve got here, love what youre saying and the way you say it. You make it entertaining and you still manage to keep it smart. I cant wait to read more from you. This is really a great blog.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 21:14:21 +0000

We rolled out more "behind the scenes" improvements earlier today. Keep the feedback coming with any bugs you find, questions you have, or suggestions you want to make. Thanks.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

DanaBea — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 04:52:27 +0000

Love your site! I write so much more than I originally intend each day because the space is so clean. I just get sucked in, so thank you!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

urbadave — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 04:53:55 +0000

Excellent product! I've really enjoyed writing using Yarney. Once I figured out the best way for me to use it, it's been a breeze. If I ever think of a feature it needs, I'll let you know, but sometimes people add features just to sell new versions, not because it adds anything. I like how clean an simple it is. When the beta is over, if it becomes a pay service, I will sign up. You can count on that.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

jackow — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 20:43:56 +0000

I'm having some trouble saving my login on my home computer. Normally it saved it automatically, but now it's stopped, and I don't know how to get it back to the way it was.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

sue reid — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 23:57:11 +0000

Just loving using yarny this year for NaNoWriMo. I'm almost there and it has been much easier this year with an iPad for writing in coffee shops. No more writing in longhand and typing up when I get home. Thank you for a great program - just need the iPad app!!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

YvonneJocks — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:25:55 +0000

I downloaded Safari specifically to use Yarny, and everything was going great until a few days ago. Now, when I leave Yarny open on my computer for a couple of hours and come back, it can't save anymore. I've gotten in the habit of just typing a couple of letters, then watching. It gives me a red box saying it can't save, and if i try to log off, I get another red box saying it can't do that either. The only thing I can do is close Safari and Yarny completely, then start the whole process of logging back in. Luckily this is just an annoyance--Yarny saves so often that I haven't lost any text, and it doesn't lose what I'd been working on before I left my workstation. But still... Yarny is all about NOT being an annoyance, so... suggestions? And thanks!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Naoko_Kensaku — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:09:39 +0000

One simple question: Is there a list of keyboard commands we can use, or are they all mouse based only in yarny? Thanks! Loving what I see so far; haven't used it yet but I'll probably do so in October.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ragdolltb — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 21:45:25 +0000

Thanks Yarny! Couldn't have done it without you!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

WhatsForDinner — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 22:55:21 +0000

Has anyone compare the yarny word count to the NaNo word count? I haven't tried copying yet to put mine into the NaNo Count-o-Meter, and hope it is as intuitive as everything else Yarny has been. Any comments from those who have done so?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

alysegiannotti — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 19:52:04 +0000

I switched to yarny about half way through my novel. and i have to say that so far I am rather pleased. I am not using it to its full potential i am sure because I don't haven any snippets separated. but the tabs for people places and things make my life amazing. also the word count was one less than the word count validator gave me. so that rocks. I still have another 30,000 or more to write before i finish my novel and i am going to do it all on yarny.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

telecommatt — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 02:06:44 +0000

Just thought I'd throw in a few thoughts now that I can sit back and breath again: * If you could make a mobile site or get the site to work consistently in a mobile browser like Firefox or Opera, I would probably pay $$ for it. I wrote my novel on an Android tablet and the site was very unstable on every Android browser I tried. It did, however, work more consistently than PangurPad, which would not load if it detected a mobile browser. * Even better than mobile support would be an Android app, which I would absolutely pay for! * As a writer's tool, Yarny is fantastic. It was great being able to drag and drop, the versioning is awesome, and being able to keep track of people/places/things is really helpful, too. Where PangurPad 1ups Yarny is in the ability to share your content and export it in various formats. * In the end, I found that I was writing in a text editor and pasting the content into Yarny to organize it, mostly because of the lack of Android support, but my entire novel is in Yarny and I had no problems w/ word counts or losing any content. All told, great app and thanks for making it available to us!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

YvonneJocks — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:00:35 +0000

I'd love to see an Android App! Also -- is there any chance that the $$ version of Yarny might add a more robust word-count tracker? I like the bar-graph, but I must admit that I've become addicted to the thorough stats like NaNoWriMo provides -- not just the progress chart, but also the "at this rate you will finish" and "to finish, you need X words/day" information. Those Stats made my month! FWIW, I wrote my whole, er, "novel" on Yarny (or on my AlphaSmart, then uploaded to Yarny) and I loved the experience. I look forward to seeing what you're supposed to roll out in December.

Versions??

WhatsForDinner — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:33:22 +0000

So, now that the first draft is done (yah), I'm wondering about the version thing. I have seen that there are several versions of each of my snippets, but is there any way to save this draft as a whole? Do I need to record what version I have on each of those snippets? What happens if I start revising stuff, and then maybe get to version 17, but decide version 15 was better, and go back and start revising that? Does that become 15b? Or version 18? If I ever take this to a class or a critique, how can I easily find which version was commented upon? I did enjoy writing on Yarny, and believe it helped my process immensely. Now, I want to understand how to use it for revisions. Many thanks for an awesome program.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

aliaswriter — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 09:56:09 +0000

Different fonts would be nice. Whenever I had to italicize a word for emphasis, I had to write it out as [italicize] this [end italicize], just so I know to switch it on some other program.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Dragonchilde — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:30:27 +0000

Please note, folks; if you have a BLUE BAR, you will not receive your special offer codes from this sponsor. It's not too late to validate, even though validation tools have been disabled because the event is over. time is of the essence, so if you want your special offer codes and you have not validated your winning novel, you'll need to go through our late novel validation process as outlined in the Tech Help forum. If you do NOT validate your novel before special offer codes are distributed, you WILL NOT receive a code, as we receive codes based on how many winners we have, and no more will be issued one we've received them from our sponsors.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:03:31 +0000

Just a reminder, NaNo winners will get 50% off when we add the Yarny paid plan in mid-December. We'll always have a very feature rich free version, and we will be rolling out some nice premium features here shortly. During 2012, we'll continue adding both free and premium features. Thanks and love to all of our users for the great beta testing and the helpful feedback.

NaNoWriMo Winners Rejoice

cmcchesney — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 20:31:36 +0000

Today, Yarny 1.0 is out. (Official post here: http://getyarny.com/theblog/) What does this mean for NaNoWriMo winners? 50% off of our annual subscription price! When upgrading your existing Yarny account to Premium, just click the "I'm a NaNoWriMo winner!" checkbox and enter your username. And just what does a Premium subscription get you? Premium features, of course! • Premium users have no cap on the number of Titles they can create. • Enjoy a soothing (and optional) typewriter sound while writing. • Access to premium themes: check out our new Midnight theme. It's dark, sleek, and awesome. • This is just the beginning. Over the next several months, we'll be releasing even more premium features. What does this mean for everyone else? We're releasing a number of features today: • Those of you who use simple Markdown (*one* set of asterisks for italics or **two** sets for bold) can now export your writing as an RTF. • If you're tired of always writing in a Sans-Serif font, we now also offer Serif and Monospace. • Text too small? Now select Small, Medium, or Large font size. Also, we have added a store to the www.getyarny.com site. Check out our shirts, hoodies, and even gift subscriptions. Finally, I have loved reading and responding to this forum, but our attention will now be more focused on our own forums located on our www.getyarny.com site. Please keep in touch with us over there! And of course, join the Yarny community by following us on: Facebook: http://facebook.com/getYarny Twitter: http://twitter.com/getYarny Tumblr: http://getyarny.tumblr.com Thank you for a very enjoyable November, everyone!

Happy Holidays and Unlimited Free Titles

cmartoglio — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 19:24:47 +0000

We know that our users love to write. Actually, we know that our users love to write LOTS. We also know we don’t get everything right the first time. During the past few days, we have been reminded by some of our users that early on we had said that unlimited titles would always be free. So, we’ve raised the number of titles our free users can create to, well, infinity. Remember too, that you can export your writing as a plain text file and as an RTF file. Also, for those of you that haven’t tried it yet, put *one* set of asterisks around words you want italicized and **two** sets of asterisks around words you want to be in bold. When you open an exported RTF, you’ll see the formatting. If you want to get a taste of premium features, themes and sounds, you can for just the cost of a cup of coffee (grande, mocha, Cappuccino). Click Upgrade to Premium after signing in and choose the monthly plan. You can switch back to the free plan anytime during the month and still enjoy the rest of your month on Premium (all for just the cost of that cup of coffee). Happy writing. From all of us on the Yarny Team, we wish you the Happiest of Holidays. Love, The Yarny Team

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

frontierproperties — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 07:19:57 +0000

Im excited with this! rural land

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

sue reid — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 09:32:01 +0000

Any sign of an app yet? I want to write using my iPad ......

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Sunshine Cat — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 04:05:35 +0000

Well, there is now an iOS app, but you have to be premium which is kind of...I don't know, I mean, they could have made a simple, no special features version which was free. But I don't have iOS (android here), so I guess I can't complain.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

YourDestiny — Wed, 02 May 2012 17:39:50 +0100

There is a problem with Yarny. It keeps giving me an error message saying it can't save my work and I need to log out.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

sanhui — Mon, 14 May 2012 08:19:00 +0100

good story

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

coteam — Thu, 17 May 2012 04:16:06 +0100

What a job finding a cheap kitchen is. Visited nearly twenty different kitchen companies over the last month. Finally went with a company that I found on the internet. www.solidwoodkitchen.co.uk . Why I didn’t use google in the first place I’ve no idea. Don’t make the same mistake that I did and waste a month of your life. Just google cheap kitchens and there’s hundreds to choose from

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

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Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 23:04:31 +0100

We have just released a minor update to fix the problem some users were having. Yarny will no longer lie to you, telling you that you're "not logged in," when you very clearly are.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

sophia0021 — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 04:44:35 +0100

I would love to use this, but it doesn't seem to work well with IE. I don't use either Safari or Chrome-my desktop computer has 'issues' with them, and my little netbook crashes when I try to use them. Any chance of adding IE to supported browsers? I love this idea and I would gladly use it

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

BurningTyger — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 22:27:19 +0100

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cutiepa2te — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 01:08:14 +0100

Winning!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ladyOzark — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 01:22:23 +0000

I'm loving Yarny! I finally found my way around the program to be able to use the snippets etc. I am using templates from The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing and building sections to use later. There is a template for each of my characters and templates for the story line - action sections and reaction sections. From those I can plan the plot and write the book. The templates should help me stay in line with the story and the characters. Anyway, that's what I'm hoping. Yarny is making it easy to outline everything instead of having to fill in the templates by hand. I copy and paste the templates and I can fill them in later. Just thought I'd let you know how I'm using Yarny and making it work for me. Thanks for the trial!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

shrikant — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 10:21:28 +0000

Just chiming in to say this: I love the honesty, the clarity and the transparency in the yarny.me Privacy Policy. I love the fact that you are treating users as individuals with a sense of ownership rather than random IP addresses with blocks of data. Yarny gets a two thumbs up from me. While I can't donate to your efforts just yet, I'll make sure to spread the word, in the hope that it will eventually reach those who can. Keep up the good work yarnians!! Cheers! Shrikant PS: Oh, and I know *where* I'm writing my NaNovel this month. :)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

serenwen — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 22:30:44 +0000

I am loving Yarny, sneaking the odd sentence in work, and using different computers at home. And I love the way it's just there, ready for me, like an online notebook when I want to write. And It's encouraged me to forget about structure, outlines, restrictions and just write. But I just lost 500 words, I was so engrossed and wanted to keep on writing that I kept ignoring the error saving message at the bottom corner of the screen. Next time, I'll stop and back up what I've done. I've written more words in the last two days than I have in months encouraged by NaNoWriMo and Yarny, so I'm not too worried. I'll write it again tomorrow, probably better :))

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Jazzmin — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 21:11:46 +0000

It seems to me to be a nice program to write in, but there is a little thing that irritates me. The words are counted diffently here at nanowrimo.org than in yarny. For example in yarny I've written 5703 words, but when I put it at my profile here, it is only 5233 words.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

felizabethhauser — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 04:50:02 +0000

Do you know if there is a tutorial to show us how to make the best of the features? And when there's a paid version, will there be a tutorial for it to teach us how to get the most from this cool program? I know it's simple, but a little tutorial wouldn't hurt. Thanks.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ScriptedSilence — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:24:52 +0000

I really love the layout for Yarny, but if there isn't a downloadable client already, might I suggest it? I want a program I can run without an internet connection, or can Yarny be accessed without internet and also save to my own computer and flash drives? :)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

jan83fry — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 05:48:02 +0000

Wonderful post. I would definitely try to incorporate the tips you have shared. I would be glad if you could refer me some more stuff of niche. Locksmith Peabody MA Plymouth Locksmith Locksmith Revere Randolph Locksmith

Yarny, now in the Apple App Store

cmcchesney — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:28:53 +0000

For all of you who have enjoyed using Yarny and asked for a mobile solution, we're now very happy to announce that Yarny has made its way into the Apple App Store. Check out the official post: http://getyarny.com/index.php/blog/yarny-iphone-app/

CRICKET

karanchanana.k — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:06:51 +0000

Cricket is my favourite game. karan chanana-amira

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 12:15:29 +0100

Our first goal was to focus on providing a comfortable and sleek interface that makes it easy to accomplish the most important part of authoring a novel: writing. Since our launch we've already had a few feature releases though, adding more organizational capabilities. Stay tuned, as we plan on providing some basic formatting as well as some theming/personalization options.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 12:20:39 +0100

You'll definitely get the best experience if you use Chrome. Firefox and Safari are also supported. We're growing our list of supported browsers. We definitely look forward to our users being able to use Yarny on any computer/mobile device that you have available!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 12:26:43 +0100

Being a web-app, Yarny will require an internet connection - that way we can back up your writing and let you access it from anywhere. However, we understand that sometimes the best writing environment for you might not have an internet connection. Though not available yet, we have in the works the ability for Yarny to run in a browser that isn't currently connected to the internet. Then, once you reconnect, everything you wrote while offline will be saved.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

PiaKaycee — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 13:20:12 +0100

Any idea when this feature will be available?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 17:22:12 +0100

We have some plans for implementing a subset of Markdown. So even though it's not displaying it yet, feel free to add *one* set of asterisks around writing you want italicized and **two** sets of asterisks for bold. Then, when we do rollout that release, you'll already be ahead of the game!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 18:36:09 +0000

Just a thought on how we've heard some users are marking sections or sentences to come back to. They are putting in a code word, such as REWORK or TODO. Then, they do a search for the term in the Yarny search box, and all of the snippets containing the code word shown. To quickly find a word in a very long snippet that's selected, just use the browser search. Hope this helps, while we continue to work in more enhancements for Yarny.

Re: Update

Jonas Cribcage — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 03:14:39 +0100

Just FYI, I signed up, and am still getting that message. Looks good, but I won't commit to writing on it while it is telling me that it isn't saving permanently.

Re: Update

cmcchesney — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 22:33:10 +0100

We've had another update. This errant message no longer shows up for a newly registered user, either. Also, we've introduced a few other minor interface upgrades, and auto indents.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:44:28 +0100

We definitely gain a few inherent advantages of being a web-app. The spell checking even works if you're writing in a different language. You can just change your browser's language setting (usually by right clicking on the page and changing the language).

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:23:29 +0100

When you mention indenting, are you just referring to a tab in front of each paragraph? Or do you like to indent an entire block of text? Also, since we'll be using Markdown to handle formatting, try using single or double asterisks around your words to *italicize* or **bold** something. It feels more natural than you might think.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

TarnishedHearts — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 17:18:49 +0100

Like, automatic indentation at the beginning of each paragraph. It is just one thing that I'm peculiar about when writing :) and alright, I'll try that :)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:51:20 +0100

We've actually identified a bug where tabs are not storing or exporting properly. It has already been addressed in our next release which we'll be rolling out today. So, no, you won't have to re-add the paragraph breaks into your 50k words. Also, in a later release, we'll be giving a few extra export options. Thanks!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

50percentDakini — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:56:24 +0100

Fantastic, thanks. So far I really like the basic set-up, which makes it easy to go back and forth between research and main writing.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 22:37:45 +0100

This has been fixed. Tabs will properly save and export now.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 22:34:06 +0100

Ask and ye shall receive. Yarny now has auto-indenting: Hit 'Enter' to drop to the next line and automatically indent. Hit 'Shift' + 'Enter' to drop to the next line without indenting.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 21:09:51 +0100

Definitely glad to hear how much you're loving it. We'll look into the problem you're having; we don't want to artificially limit the number of tags you can apply to a snippet just because the tag display area isn't expanding properly. Thanks!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

TarnishedHearts — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 04:03:47 +0100

Awesome!!! That totally made me smile ^_^

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

HellYeahImAScientist — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 21:37:12 +0100

On the page (or pages) where I write the 50,000 words, it is in fact great to have the auto-identing, but it doesn't get handy sometimes on the side snippets (I use some just for little notes and topics) and on the People / Places / Things bar. And probably there are people who don't like the auto thing, so you really should try to work on some switch or something to turn it on or off when it's more convenient. You should have some options for us to personalize regarding things like these. Still, great improvement. I'm definitely using yarny for my November novel.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

acsander — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 13:22:59 +0000

Actually, I just tried to export my snippets, and I got the same problem. I am using Google Chrome. This is a nice program for writing, but the export feature is really the most important part. Can it be fixed?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 05:21:09 +0100

It was actually early today (okay, technically yesterday) that we rolled out a release that addressed this problem. Your tabs will now properly save and export.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 05:19:51 +0100

We don't put limits on the number of words you can write or the amount of snippets you can create. Go ahead and send an email to support@getyarny.com - we'll work with you to track down what operating system/web browser combination you're using that's causing the problem. Thanks!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

LadyStarlea — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:25:09 +0000

seems to still have this problem. I can't create a new snippet under people or places after I have made two. Though I can creat more under the right side and then move it into the people section. I am using Chrome with Windows 7

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 05:17:59 +0100

Yes. From the start we've wanted the ability for a user to attach an image to a snippet. After all, considering the currency exchange from pictures to words, it's something we can't ignore. However, we went a step further in our design. Since Yarny is a web app, used on the internet, why not tap into that massive reservoir and really harness already existing technologies? So, in the future, along with the ability to attach your own image, we'll add some integration with Flickr to make it really easy to search for and find the perfect, inspirational picture.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Sebz — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 22:12:04 +0100

Sounds great! Thanks so much!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Void-Auron — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 01:06:37 +0100

That's lovely news. I was getting worried I wouldn't be able to use Yarny. That would be a shame because it's awesome!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 23:49:43 +0100

"YarnNoWriMo" - I like it. :) Keep checking back, as we have several feature releases intended to hit before Nov 1 arrives. And don't worry, they all fall in with our original vision: a sleek, easy-to-use, distraction free writing environment.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 05:20:48 +0100

Multiple novels/writing projects ("Titles" as we call them) are allowed. Just click the title are at the top and select "+ Create a new Title" Also, clicking the pencil (edit) icon next to the title name will let you rename it. Hope this helps clear things up!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 21:53:20 +0100

You're right, using Yarny is a considerably different (and in my professional opinion, more enjoyable) experience than using Word. The difference that you'll most likely notice is that with Yarny, you won't have to save your documents, back them up up to a flash drive, or email them to yourself so that you can work from multiple locations. Oh yeah, you also won't have to wait for Word to launch and open your document, fight with auto-formatting rules, or keep backspacing because it's auto-capitalizing something you don't want capitalized... Let us know how your change over goes!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

anachronisma — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 17:42:46 +0100

Also, you don't seem to have support for paragraph breaks in your export function. Is this expected to be fixed soon? I know you were having problems with indentation tabs and fixed that, but I don't see any change for paragraphs/break rows to avoid paragraphs all running together.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 06:20:02 +0100

We have a few ideas on how we're going to handle sharing your work from Yarny with friends. As with Yarny's other features, we intend on keeping it easy-to-use, but I think you'll be happy with hit.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 06:18:18 +0100

Since our original design we've actually intended an option both for ambient background music/sounds as well as the typewriter sound effect. Stay tuned, as i suspect your typewriter sound will be announced in a not-too-distant release.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 06:16:42 +0100

You, and the other Time Lords, are welcome. Love, Yarny

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 06:31:50 +0100

Right now the only actual supported browsers are Safari, Chrome, and Firefox running on a PC or Mac; so, yes, some undesired behavior may occur if you try to use it elsewhere. With each release we try to expand the browser compatibility of Yarny. Our goal is definitely to let you run Yarny on any of your mobile devices. Hope this helps!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

garretwriter — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 18:00:44 +0100

Just wanted to mention that Yarny seems to be working fine so far in IE8. (But if I need to use Firefox at some point for added features or such - just for Yarny - I will). I'll look forward to that release with the typewriter sounds... oh goodie, goodie, goodie!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 21:10:21 +0100

Our plans are to implement a portion of markdown to allow italics and bolding. Although it won't show at this time, you can start including it in your writing now, so you won't have to go back later and add formatting. To italicize, put an asterisk on each side of what you want to *italicize.* To bold, put two asterisks on each side of **what you want bolded.** A release in the not to distant future will convert these to the styled text when you export your writing in various formats. Thanks.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 05:19:38 +0100

Right now, Yarny will let you export your text as a .txt file. You can export each section: your Story, People, Places, and Things. The export button is in the lower right hand corner of the snippet lists. We're already working on additional export controls, and those should be available in a not-too-distant future release. Keep checking here, and our own forums on www.getyarny.com for when we announce it!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 05:31:22 +0100

When doing my own writing, I will oftentimes create a group in the Story section called "Unsorted Scenes." This is for when I get an idea for a scene before I really know exactly where in the narrative it will fall, or sometimes, who the exact characters are, but I know I need to get the words written down somewhere. Of course, by putting it in the Story section, it means it will count towards that title's word count, and if that's a problem, consider moving any "Unsorted" or "Miscellaneous Scenes" into the Things section. Then, with the new ability to migrate a snippet from one type to another (You knew you could do that, right? Click the gear or right click, and select "Move To"...), it's pretty easy to pull it right into your story. Hope this helps!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ladililn — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 21:51:50 +0100

I concur!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Molly B — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 15:57:59 +0100

I am really loving Yarny! Thanks so much! "Of course, by putting it in the Story section, it means it will count towards that title's word count, " is there a way to see how many words are in all of Story? I have snippets lined up for my Nano, and I can see how each one has the number of words in the lower right-hand corner, but I don't see a place where Story has an overall word count. (Right now those snippets are all 0, but I did try putting in some words to test it out. ) So I don't see the difference between having a snippet in the Story section or having it in Things? (Plus, it would be nice to have the total Story count instead of having to add up each Story snippet.) Also, minor point -- I'm not getting the groups on the right side (people/places/things) to collapse when I click the triangle the way they do on the left side (story). I'd love at some point to have collaboration options where each person has a separate color. I don't need separate logins (I trust my co-writer on this non-Nano project ), but it would be great if we could cleanly see what the other has done. We've tried Google docs., and it's soooooo clunky. Again, thank you for this great program -- it's helped a lot in getting organized for this year's NaNo, and I look forward to using it with vigor in a couple of weeks!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:57:49 +0100

Though we're working on a way to make it more prominent (especially for WriMo!), right now you can see the number of Story words you have by clicking on the title bar at the top of the screen (which will be labelled, "Untitled Novel" if you haven't renamed it). This actually brings up the Title list, letting you see numbers of words for each title, swap to a different title, or make a new one. For your group, it sounds like you may not be actually dragging the snippets into the group? When you click and drag a snippet onto a group, you should be given a "+" icon, indicating that it's going to add into that group. Once they're added, you should be able to collapse and expand. Let me know if it still doesn't work for you, and we'll track down what OS/browser you're using so we can track down the problem. Though we have plans for sharing/collaborating at a later date, in the meantime, with your current set up of sharing a login, you can still color code your writing. When you right click on a snippet (or click the 'gear' icon), there is a menu that lets you change the color of your snippet. You and your writing buddy could just agree, ahead of time, on which colors to use. Also, you make a great point. We're hearing from a lot of NaNoWriMo participants that they're titling their snippets with short descriptions of what's going to happen, but leaving them at 0 words. This definitely lets you use Yarny as a simple outlining tool! Hope this helps!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Molly B — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 17:37:49 +0100

Awesome! Oops -- you are correct, I did not get the snippets into the group. They were underneath, but not in. (I should have noticed the snippets were not indented the way the story snippets in groups were.) And yes, now I see about the Story words. I'd tried clicking "Story," but that got me the Yarny version info. I'll play around with the coloring on the snippets, but I was actually looking more towards the re-write process. So far we've done an okay job in terms of sorting out chunks of story, but if he wants to tweak something I've written or vice versa, it would be good to have different colors in the same snippet (heck, in the same sentence). Thank you so much for your help!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:20:40 +0100

We do have plans for an offline version. It will still not be an installed application, but will instead run in your web browser as it does now, but will store your writing even when not connected to the internet. Then, upon returning to your internet connection, it will save as normal, and let you continue writing. Since Yarny is a web app, it is intended to run in a web browser. So, at present, we intend on focusing development efforts on making it run in all browsers (including the browser on your phone/iPad/mobile device) so that we don't need to build a separate app. However, we are getting a LOT of requests, and we recognize the advantages of an Android or Apple app. So, we'll see what the future holds!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:14:46 +0100

Lots of personalization/theming options coming up! Every time that we build a new feature into Yarny, we like to follow the the same philosophy as existing features: they make the experience better, they make it easier for you to write, and they're so easy to use they doesn't actually require a how-to guide. An overwhelming 'Preferences' or 'Settings' screen full of dials, knobs, sliders, and check boxes definitely doesn't belong in Yarny. Therefore, It's always a fine line we walk: wanting to deliver a fantastic writing experience that you don't have to think about and still giving you controls to tweak that experience. However, we have some great ideas on how to implement it. As a follow-up, how do you (and everyone else) feel about an optional typewriter sound that you can turn on and off?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

HellYeahImAScientist — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:43:49 +0100

many many typewriter sounds! :DD

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

FlipFlyFall — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 19:31:43 +0100

so long as I can turn them off, I don't really care -- I usually write with music on, so I probably wouldn't have the sounds on.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ladyOzark — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 01:28:49 +0000

I would like that!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Breelink — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 02:37:07 +0100

That would be AMAZING!!! I can't wait. I only suggested an app because I thought that perhaps there was no way for it to save in an offline environment on a browser. It seems that it can be done! Hurray! I think this tweak will be a WONDERFUL addition to an already awesome program!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Breelink — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 05:20:15 +0100

Sorry for another post but I was just using Yarny again and I was trying to put an image of my character (or what I imagine him to look like) in a snippet, but it does not seem to let me. Just a thought.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:53:27 +0100

We actually do intend on allowing you to attach an image to your snippets. Along with allowing you to upload an image of your own, we also plan on incorporating existing web technologies: we like the idea of letting you use services like Flickr to help find images for you. Of course, any web-based features in Yarny would not function when you're using Yarny offline.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:50:29 +0100

This is an interesting idea. As you can probably tell from using it, we have designed the elements (snippets, tags, etc) to be contained within a Title; they don't share. We'll keep this "series" idea in mind though. In the meantime, there is of course, the copy/paste method. :)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

FrozenBadChicken — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 02:52:18 +0100

ah, and as long as i'm asking annoying questions -- any chance of export to .doc or .otf formats for editing/personal backup/peace of mind/documentation/printing reasons?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 18:18:06 +0100

We have plans on expanding the exporting capabilities. Not only are we going to add more options while formatting (such as displaying Snippet/Group names, or not), but we'll add in more formats than just .txt. Once we introduce formatting into Yarny, we'll want you to be able to preserve that formatting when you export. At the very least, you'll be able to export your writing in .rtf, with all your formatting included.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 04:03:01 +0100

We will always have a free plan! Though we're not quite ready to "let the cat out of the bag," we do intend on introducing some "premium" features for our paid customers. Stay tuned for when we announce these. Also, as extra incentive for you NaNo participants, we intend on giving all NaNoWriMo winners 50% off of an annual subscription to these premium features.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 03:47:54 +0100

With every release, we try to expand the list of browsers that can run Yarny correctly Internet Explorer is not currently supported, though our plan is to be compatible in all browsers. Other modern browsers (specifically Chrome) let us do more interesting things (have you seen the custom scroll bars in Chrome?), but we understand that many computers, specifically those you many use at work, will only have Internet Explorer. And, of course, we want you to be able to use Yarny everywhere!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ckb104 — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 02:21:52 +0100

I read that, too and wondered the same thing. However, I think that those guidelines are referring to posts in the forums, not your actual personal writing. ~ Christine

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 03:56:46 +0100

In case you're not monitoring the first page (in fact, I almost did not notice your post over there), I'll repost my response here: ************************* than a minute ago Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud cmcchesney Sorry for the confusion on this. The "obscene, vulgar..." is referring to the forums. There, as it is intended to be a community, we can't have content that is inappropriate. For using Yarny, we actually have a different Privacy Policy and Terms of Use found here: http://getyarny.com/legal/privacy/ http://getyarny.com/legal/terms/ These are the terms that you agree to when you register at yarny.me. Your data is kept private, and is not monitored by our staff, except at your discretion, with your approval, when it is necessary to assist with technical support. Though we have had several requests for feedback and critiquing of writing, we do not actually view your data. Hope this helps!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 03:59:15 +0100

Definitely glad to hear you're enjoying Yarny! Our goal is to keep the software as simple as possible. Whenever a feature has reached the point that it will require a several step how-to guide, or a video tutorial, we feel that we need to redesign it. We want you to be able to focus on your writing, not having to learn how to use the product. With that in mind, I'm wondering what was confusing? The idea of writing in snippets is slightly different from the norm, we know, but we're definitely interested in what features you stumbled over at first. Thanks for the feedback!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 03:55:41 +0100

Sorry for the confusion on this. The "obscene, vulgar..." is referring to the forums. There, as it is intended to be a community, we can't have content that is inappropriate. For using Yarny, we actually have a different Privacy Policy and Terms of Use found here: http://getyarny.com/legal/privacy/ http://getyarny.com/legal/terms/ These are the terms that you agree to when you register at yarny.me. Your data is kept private, and is not monitored by our staff, except at your discretion, with your approval, when it is necessary to assist with technical support. Though we have had several requests for feedback and critiquing of writing, we do not actually view your data. Hope this helps!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

PlanNine — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 03:23:22 +0100

I use Chrome and Opera so I guess this doesn't matter much to me, but I have to ask out of sheer curiosity why you'd develop an online app like this and not start with support for the most used browser? From a purely market-driven point of view, it would seem to make sense.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

troutrd2011 — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 23:57:31 +0000

I noticed that there are no formatting toolbars. Am I just missing it?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

felizabethhauser — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 04:45:12 +0000

I just downloaded it, and I'm trying it out. I like it so far. Do you know if there is any way to edit the text, like you can with WORD or other programs? Like, to italicize a word? It will take awhile to get the best good out of the features. One more question...do you know if you can copy your work into a word processing program, so it can be formatted and printed, etc.?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

BurningTyger — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 05:07:15 +0100

Thank you so much for clearing that up. That makes a lot of sense, and I'll be signing up...well, now. :) (Yeah, I totally posted twice in two different places because even after 8 years of NaNo, I'm still a noob.)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 18:15:03 +0100

No problem, I'm all for clarification. :) Our actual goal, before creating Apple/Android apps, is to get Yarny running correctly in more browsers; specifically those browsers found on mobile devices - if we can get Yarny running on your phone's browser, we don't really need an app. Ultimately, we want you to be able to access Yarny on your computer or on your phone, online or offline. However, for NaNoWriMo this year, we do not intend on offline functionality or app offerings being available. While you're writing your 50k words in November, we'll be working on getting our offline mode rock solid. Hope this clears things up. Also, glad you're enjoying Yarny! It's always rewarding to hear that our product is not only useful, but inspiring. -Clinton | The Yarny Team P.S. Good luck in April!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Wolfme — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 00:14:50 +0100

Yes it does clear things up thanks, but upsets me a little that I won't be able to Yarny away on my ipod for this Nano. I'm sure I'll get over it.....oh I have Yarny on my computer....what was I talking about, again? :D

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Wolfme — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 00:15:44 +0100

Oh and thanks again :)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 20:57:59 +0100

Look forward to hearing your thoughts. Thanks.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 11:44:47 +0100

Thanks for the kind words. We're not quite ready to post the differences between paid and free plans, or the pricing, but we can say, like all things Yarny, we're working hard to WOW you with those too.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Aerlinn — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 04:04:56 +0100

Seconded!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 11:57:04 +0100

We've received a lot of good input on the topic of double spacing and first line indents. We're always cautious about adding settings or anything else that gets in the way of writing or adds complexity. However, we know these items may impact your ease of use of Yarny, and are working on some options. Thanks and stay tuned.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 17:13:41 +0100

Plans for it in the future, yes. Keep in mind though, that we're not offering an installed solution, but we'll actually allow you to access yarny.me when you're online, then continue writing even when you're not connected to the internet. Then, when you return to a location with internet access, Yarny will save what you wrote offline. Stay tuned for when we give the official announcement/date for this release.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 02:33:42 +0100

Not to worry. We have quite a few features planned to be rolled out over the next several months, and we're certainly not going to penalize anyone for using Yarny now by getting you hooked on something and then taking it away unless you pay. That's just not us. Regarding formatting, our plans are to implement a portion of markdown to allow italics and bolding. Although it won't show at this time, you can start including it in your writing now, so you won't have to go back later and add formatting. To italicize, put an asterisk on each side of what you want to *italicize.* To bold, put two asterisks on each side of **what you want bolded.** A release in the not too distant future will convert these to styled text when you export your writing in various formats. Thanks again for using Yarny.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

zenlc — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 23:17:15 +0100

Grrrr! That was supposed to read "I think I just found my writing TOOL :)."

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 01:42:09 +0100

Glad to hear it. We know that it is not working the way we want it to work on an iPad. We'll certainly let you know when we start testing on iOS, online and offline. Thanks.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 01:50:10 +0100

Glad to hear it. We've been spending our efforts getting it to work just the way we want it to work in computer browsers, specifically, Chrome, Safari and Firefox on PCs and Macs. Right now, it's not fully working on iPads. For best use, access it on a computer using one of the browsers I mentioned. Thanks very much for the kind words.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 03:56:13 +0100

Yes, Firefox 3.6 is *the* unsupported Firefox browser. That is why that message appears when you sign in using that browser. FireFox 4, 5,6, and 7 work. We also support Chrome and Safari. Chrome performance tests the best of all. Very glad to hear you love Yarny. You'll love it even more if you can move to one of the supported browsers. Thanks very much for the kind words.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

lemonbar77 — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 04:00:45 +0100

Safari it is! Thanks!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 04:33:38 +0100

What we are hearing most regarding outlining for Nano is to use the Things list to create an outline using groups and snippets. Any words written in People, Places and Things are *not* included in the Title word count—only Story snippets are counted. Hope this helps.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

lemonbar77 — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 04:45:48 +0100

Perfect. Thanks! Now I get to copy/paste all my titles into snippets so I can read them... which I find strangely fun, so I'm happy :-)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 05:13:41 +0100

Great. Glad to hear. Enjoy.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 03:08:06 +0100

You are very welcome. IE does pose challenges for this type of app. We understand that some businesses are pretty strict on their browser standards. Safari, Firefox (4 or above) and Chrome are the currently supported browsers, with Chrome being the one that really outshines the others. We have a lot of nice things planned for Yarny, some in the near future and some a little farther out. Regardless though, we're just getting started. One thing you can count on with Yarny is that we'll always keep the interface clean and simple. Thanks for the kind words.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 23:16:39 +0100

Very glad to hear. If you have any questions as you use it, just let us know with the Feedback button in the app, on our forums, or here, in this forum. Thanks.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:22:51 +0100

Yes, using Internet Explorer will definitely cause you to experience some unintentional behavior. The light text is not exclusive to IE; we're fixing that with our next release (due to be out in the near future). In the meantime, a quick refresh to your browser should fix it. Safari, Firefox (4 or above) and Chrome are the currently supported browsers, with Chrome being the one that definitely outshines the others. Thanks for the feedback though. As we intend on growing our browser compatibility, hearing about bugs in unsupported browsers does help.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 23:57:27 +0100

If you're using IE, you might even be encountering unintentional behavior that you're not even aware of. Definitely give Firefox a shot; you'll probably immediately notice it's a lot more responsive than in IE - the editing area for People/Places/Things specifically is pretty finicky in IE. If you really want to see Yarny at its best though, try Chrome. Currently, it's the only browser that makes use of our customer scrollbars which, in my opinion, definitely help with the look and feel.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:21:51 +0100

You guessed it! Currently, we have an extremely reliable setup that has had 100% up time since our beta launched, but we're going to take some extra precautions to make sure that Yarny's performance in November is as good (or possibly better! Wait... better than 100%?) than it was in previous months. We plan on keeping the downtime to a minimum. For a more official post, check out our blog at : http://getyarny.com/2011/10/were-moving/

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:53:38 +0100

We've successfully finished our server maintenance. New servers seem to be humming along happily. If you're having any trouble after the upgrade, try logging out, refreshing your browser, and logging back in. Feel free to read the official post at : http://getyarny.com/2011/10/welcome-to-the-other-side/

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

12side — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 21:33:46 +0100

Ha, I just noticed you had a website and forums. I'll go check that out as well.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 21:52:25 +0100

Hey, we appreciate all feedback, even if it seems to be a lot of criticism. It may be a nonstandard approach, having our developers receiving and responding to feedback, but going the nontraditional route seems to be working well with Yarny. You make quite a few points here, so let me try to respond to them all: 1) Currently, it's fixed. In an earlier draft, we let the user re-size it. This then started leading down the road of it getting badly sized, and us having to introduce a control element to force it back to original size, etc. Ultimately, to keep it clean, we've decided (for now) to keep it at a fixed width, even if it does mean a rather large amount of blank horizontal space once you enter "distraction free" mode. 2) This will probably be introduced as an export option, instead of something you deal with while writing. 3) Ah. It sounds like you're not actually adding your snippets into the group. Click and drag them over the group you created until you see the "+" icon. Then let go, and you'll see they fall into the group, indenting some. Then, you can collapse/expand. 4) I know, i know. Again, we sacrificed this for simplicity. With the mix of colors, tags, groups, and titles, we decided one level deep was enough. 5) For now, just consider using tags or groups inside the People/Place/Things area. 6) Correct, hyperlinks don't work. 7) The progress bar went through several changes, and will probably continue to change. Ultimately, we want it to be a friendly reminder without being BAM IN YOUR FACE! Whew, hope i got them all. Thanks again for the feedback!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 21:54:32 +0100

We do, indeed. Also, a tumblr, a facebook, and a twitter account. Definitely check them out.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 23:33:45 +0100

Thanks for the suggestions. The first line indent function is one on which we have received **quite a bit** of input. We will be making this selectable in a future release. Regarding bold and italics, we intend on implementing a subset of Markdown, which is a fast keyboard-based means of adding formatting. Basically, put *one* set of asterisks around words you would want italicized and **two** sets of asterisks around words you would want to be bold. Even though we don't display or export this formatting just yet, feel free to add it to your writing now, so that once the feature is released, you'll already be ahead of the game.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 04:15:22 +0100

It might seem an odd choice, but I assure you it's not personal. We've been developing web apps for a long time. Creating something that will run the same on the myriad browsers available is always a challenge; there is no actual 'standard' that is universally accepted among browsers. Most often though, extraneous, extra steps are required to get elements to render consistently in Internet Explorer. IE is a solitary island, standing unique and alone in how it handles a number of elements. If Internet Explorer played a little nicer, we'd show it a little more love.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 05:34:20 +0100

Thanks for the nice comments and insightful feedback. Not to worry, we'll never stop sweating the small things.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

PlanNine — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:31:02 +0100

Ah...makes sense. I haven't used IE in a while, and I didn't realize the way it functioned internally was so different. With the consent decree over in the anti-trust case, Microsoft is making IE a much more integral part of Windows 8 (from what I've read). I use linux, so it's not much of an issue for me, I was just curious. Thanks for answering. I like what I've seen of Yarny and I'm going to use it for NaNo this year.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ilove2wite — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 19:45:54 +0000

I agree. I see this is as a "if you play nice so will we. If not there are others that we can promote to those who may not have heard of them before and may even become more popular. :-)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 12:18:58 +0100

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Fircoal — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 23:52:59 +0000

If Microsoft does that I think It'll be time to buy a Linux :D (Well once it becomes the point that only Micro 8 is on the market)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 20:57:02 +0100

Yeah, it's for organizational purposes, or for the story itself, we still let you write in snippets. This just makes it easier to write whatever part of the story you want, then drag and drop it into place later. It's nice to hear that you discovered how to move snippets around on your own. We want Yarny to be intuitive and easy-to-use. If we ever need a several step how-to guide to explain a feature, then we need to redesign the feature. Also, you can right click a snippet instead of clicking the gear icon.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 11:07:44 +0100

Glad you found it. Clicking the gear on each snippet will show the Move To menu item. Right Clicking or Control Clicking will also do the same. Thanks.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 00:52:59 +0100

We do answer this question quite often: It's a great question. We are planning for Yarny to work in computer browsers and on mobile devices. Our emphasis so far has been on making a great environment for the creative writer in compute browsers. Stay tuned as we continue to expand Yarny to work online and offline and on more devices. Great question. No apology necessary.

Re:

cmcchesney — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 15:58:15 +0100

Let me see if this will help. The best thing to do once you visit yarny.me, is just click in the middle of the screen (the writing area), and start typing. This will let you get a feel for what it's like to write in Yarny. Once you get a feel for that, move your cursor to the left side of the screen and you'll notice the controls and organizational elements come back in. Click the "New Snippet" button in the lower left. You'll notice this adds a new "snippet" to the Story list. At this point you can name it, or leave it "Untitled." Now click back in the center area and start typing again. And, that's Yarny. Create and name as many snippets as you want. You can write an entire novel in one snippet, or use them to write short scenes, or chapters. But wait... if you suddenly get an idea for a location, or a character in your story, that's what the right side of Yarny is for. Click the "People," "Places," and "Things" sections and create snippets there; these snippets are for your own personal use, they're not actually part of the story, they're just for reference. Once you have a feel for Yarny, click the "Sign Up Now!" link at the top so that your work can be saved. Yarny offers a lot more features (tagging snippets, auto-saved versions, multiple titles, etc.), but I'm comfortable you can figure these out on your own. If at any time you feel completely lost, click the "?" at the top for some helpful tips, or click the "Feedback" button if you have comments or questions for the developers. Hope this helps!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

WingedJedi — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:03:00 +0100

Never mind, just found the function to export my snippets. That's so amazing! And even in text format!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 19:59:32 +0100

Yarny works inside of modern browsers, which have spell checking built in. In Chrome and Safari you can turn it on in the top menu, Edit / Spelling and selecting Check Spelling While Typing. In Firefox, the setting is in Preferences / Advanced / General. Thanks for the kind words.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

TommehBell — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 18:42:15 +0100

ok nevermind it works when I hit enter lol sorry

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 15:47:59 +0000

Glad you figured it out. Part of our approach to design is to not have buttons when they are really not needed. Thanks.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 05:10:25 +0000

Hey, thanks for the kind words. We'll keep you posted on the tweaks and twiddles as we roll them out. We have quite a few in the works. Thanks again.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 03:08:31 +0000

Thanks so much for the nice compliment, and all the best to you in this year's WriMo.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

LadyStarlea — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:34:21 +0000

soo need a edit button in this forum..."notes write" should be "notes right" so missed the wrong word use till after poasting.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 14:19:06 +0000

We're looking into why some of our users seem to lose their "New" buttons in the People/Places/things area. While we investigate and fix this, a refresh of your browser should bring your buttons back. For General plot notes, consider making snippets inside the "Things" area, using a specific group, color, or tag to help you recognize them as plot notes.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

LadyStarlea — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 14:34:17 +0000

Wow quick reply thanks the reload did bring it back. And will do that for now for my plot notes. Thanks for the quick answer.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 02:02:21 +0000

Even though that is technically true, we don't really recommend it. If Yarny notices your internet connection isn't available, you'll receive the "Error saving message..." and, sure, you can keep writing at this point. As you've discovered, once it's able to save again, it will, but just be warned if you click to another snippet, you'll lose your writing. But you're welcome for both the good work AND the responses!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 02:00:11 +0000

Sorry for the brief panic. We recently had a big server upgrade, and it seems some of our users are experiencing this. But, as you discovered, simply logging out and back in will fix it. Thanks for having faith in us!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

LadyStarlea — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 15:45:59 +0000

Ok I guess I am blind. Just found it. How I missed the green bar count/50000 under the word story I have no clue.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:02:01 +0000

Well, in all fairness, the green progress bar will only appear if you have given your title a word count goal. So, it might not have been there all along. Also, fun trivia about the progress bar, it uses whatever is currently in your Story list to determine your "current" progress. So if you perform a search to limit the snippets visible in your list, the progress bar will update accordingly.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

LadyStarlea — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 21:23:48 +0000

oh that is a neat bit of trivia. Thanks

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

50percentDakini — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 21:25:09 +0000

Whoa - just saw this - how do you give your title a word count goal? I want to use this feature!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 22:58:51 +0000

Click the little gear icon up in the title bar (mouse over the title bar, at the top of the application). This let you rename your current novel, or give it a word goal. Once you have one set, you'll see your progress bar. Enjoy!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 23:56:18 +0000

We do *lots* of backups. I won't go into all the details, but suffice it to say your data is backed up multiple times, and stored on multiple devices. However, we understand the inherent distrust of 'the cloud,' which is one of the reasons we built in the Export button. So, by all means, if it helps you feel more secure, we won' stop you from keeping your own copies around. Hope this helps!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

LadyStarlea — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 02:35:59 +0000

Strange. I use Yarny in chrome myself and am having no problem. I do remember the Yarny team sent out an email that said if it was behaving oddly to do a hard refresh and then log back in. They say that using the restart the software type of mentality will fix most problems. Hope that helps

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 03:51:01 +0000

Hi Ashley, very sorry for the trouble tonight. Usually Chrome is the star performer. If you don't mind, on your next trip into Yarny, could you click Feedback and then just identify yourself so that we can connect the feedback to this post. When you send a feedback, we get some additional information that helps us troubleshoot. Thanks for adoring Yarny. We adore you and your efforts tonight. Thank you.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 03:57:59 +0000

Hi Lady. Thank you for this post tonight. It's nice to see our messages are making the rounds, and it's so helpful when others can spread the word. Very much appreciated.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 03:42:55 +0000

This is definitely unusual behavior. Yarny, in general, runs pretty slim, and even with thousands of words, doesn't require a super fast connection. We definitely intend Yarny to be used everywhere - your home, your work, random cafes, etc - so we kept that in mind when designing what elements are necessary for the interface, and how it uses its available bandwidth for communicating with our servers. I'm curious what type of trouble it was giving you. Was it displaying an error message? becoming unresponsive? Also, could you let us know what OS/browser you were using? Maybe this will help us track down why it kept forcing you to log back in.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Durindana — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 10:00:04 +0000

I'm using the most recent version of Firefox in OSX. And, when I got home this evening I was too tired to boot up my desktop and Yarny kept crashing on me again, so it's not an internet connection like I thought, but purely an OSX/Firefox issue. It will not save. Every time it tries to save it gives me an 'Error saving' message. I reloaded the page time and time and time again, and it really isn't saving. Thankfully I was writing in another program and pasting into Yarny just in case it crashed and lost words on me again (last time I lost nearly 700). I like the program on my desktop, but it's spazzy on my laptop.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

LadyStarlea — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:01:20 +0000

Not a problem. I like helping people when I can.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 22:30:39 +0000

Just email support@getyarny.com and they can work on restoring your writing, if possible. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

greenfairy — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 13:10:16 +0000

I've just had the same thing. The 800-odd owrds I wrote last night in a snippet have gone poof! Although the snippet itself is still there. I've sent a message to the site so hopefully someone can find where it's hiding!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

secretly-broken — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 20:52:16 +0000

I've been having this issue too. :(

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 21:34:57 +0000

We seem to be seeing this problem happening most often when you click to a People, Places, or Things snippet before waiting for a Story snippet to display the "saved at..." message. Your snippet will still save successfully, but will then select the top snippet. We're currently working on a fix for this. In the meantime, try to wait for the "saved at..." message before you click to one of your People/Places/Things snippets. This should work for now. Hope this helps!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 23:06:50 +0000

Thanks for sticking with us even when you were seeing the "Error saving..." message. The best thing to do, definitely, when you see this message is copy what you've written, back it up, then click "Log Out" in the dropdown menu under your email address. Then, shoot support@getyarny.com an email, just to let us know you were having a problem. Then, take a deep breath, log back into Yarny, and continue writing. Logging out is important, as it will hopefully clear out whatever problem was encountered that was causing the "error saving..." message. If it persists, clear your cookies, refresh, and then dive back in. I hope this helps! Even though Yarny is in beta, we pride ourselves on being reliable, so anytime you're experiencing unintended behavior, we want to start investigating it as quickly as possible to help ensure it doesn't happen again!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

serenwen — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 11:16:13 +0000

Thanks very much for replying. All looking good today - I'll let you know if I get another problem. The format definitely works well for me to do NaNoWriMo. In fact, without it, I don't think I'd even be attempting this year, I'm in so many different places in a week.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 05:22:09 +0000

Definitely glad you're enjoying it. We recently tweaked the export process, and we're constantly developing this area of Yarny, so I'll look into it again and see what might be going wrong in the new export.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 05:23:35 +0000

Though we're not ready to give the official announcement about sharing... yes, it's on our roadmap for a future release. That's all I can say right now, though. :)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

yamikuronue — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:47:19 +0000

Hopefully that includes collaborations - I was just thinking my upcoming collab piece woudl be perfect in Yarny :)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

danheretic — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:56:01 +0000

Just want to add my voice to the clamor of praise for Yarny. One of the best noveling tools, and THE best NaNoWriMo tool! I love being able to be nomadic and not have to worry about carrying my laptop or a flash drive and keeping versions updated between them. I used Google Docs for my last two years' NaNovels and so far this is a vast improvement. I've made the switch. So far every machine I use (various PCs throughout home and computer labs, my netbook, and my Chrome Notebook) have performed very well with Yarny. I'll be interested to see what happens when I get above 30k words -- Google Docs doesn't like that at all. To those who distrust the cloud's ability to retain your data, I have this advice: So do I, even though I'm a HUGE Google Docs user. No matter the cloud service, I back up regularly to my PC. Cloud apps are most useful for the convenience factor, and I consider them a secondary backup system only. That being said, the convenience factor far outweighs my worry about losing 1k words of a crap novel draft. Yarny features I'm eagerly awaiting are word counts for highlighted sections (for word sprints), formatting options, the ability to have more snippet categories than People, Places and Things, collaborative features like sharing and real-time group editing, and for Yarny to make me breakfast when I wake up. Then it'll be perfect.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 02:36:14 +0000

A great way to handle word sprints is making a brand new snippet for it. This way the word count can be monitored. I know - it's not quite as convenient as highlighting and counting words in an existing snippet, but it will definitely give you the functionality you're looking for. Also, consider using groups, colors, and tags to get that extra level of organization in the People/Place/Things area. We have a pretty clear list of future features we intend on adding (some, I just can't talk about yet - we have to keep something a surprise!), but I can say with a somewhat high degree of certainty that breakfast-making will likely never be on that list. Reasonably sure, anyway. :)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ragdolltb — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:47:05 +0000

Emailed support and got a nearly immediate response (THAT'S full of awesome), and the disaster has been averted, and I learned what the version icon does. LOL.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 19:10:02 +0000

I was actually in the middle of composing a response to your forum post here when I saw your email come into support@getyarny.com I'm glad we resolved your problem, but I'll share the resolution here so others can benefit: If it ever appears that Yarny is acting strange, or that it seems to have lost your words , the first thing to try is reverting back to a previous version of that Snippet. Select the snippet, then click the Version button at the bottom (it looks like a clock) and slide the Version bar to the left to see if there is an earlier version of your snippet that contains all of your words. Yarny really does frequently save for you - every few seconds, every time you create a new snippet, even just at random times when you navigate through the application. Next, definitely email us. We don't necessarily provide 24/7 support (We are EST timezone based, and we do have to sleep occasionally!), but we will definitely get back to you as quickly as possible. Also, in addition to a regular e-mail, you can also use the in-app feedback button. Let us know what happened, give us a description of what led up to it, and even include what OS/Browser you were using - these clues can help us investigate. Finally, consider what you would normally do if an installed app started to behave strangely. You would probably save your work, close the app, and relaunch it. Do the same with Yarny - if something strange happens, copy your work and save it elsewhere, click the "Log Out" button in the upper right, refresh your browser, and log back in. I know we're in beta, but we really do want you to have the most relaxed, stress-free writing environment possible. Everytime you let us know that something went wrong, we can use it to make Yarny better. We're doing everything we can to keep the service both reliable and free. We don't charge money, we don't put in ads, and we've even increased server capacity three separate times since our launch, just to make sure we were ready for NaNoWriMo. Keep writing, and enjoy!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ragdolltb — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 19:26:03 +0000

Here's the big issue I have, that kind of made me go a little overboard with frustration. When I Signed up for yarny, i clicked the link for yarny.me. It seems to me that the page with feedback/forums, etc is a completely seperate page. there is no way that I could find to access it from my yarny page. I had no idea what the site address for all that was, and in order to email support I had to go through the forums here to find the email address. I know you're trying to make it sleek and distraction free, but there should be somewhere on the yarny.me page to be able to access the support page. I only got that site through the support email. If this had happened six months from now when it's not in the middle of nano, would I have been able to get any support on the forums? unlikely. And if I known how to access that page earlier, I wouldn't have had my melodramatic meltdown on the forum here. :-/ You could add a link into the drop down menu next to the username. just a suggestion.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 02:30:50 +0000

You make a good point here. The forums found on getyarny.com are distinctly separate from the application on yarny.me - it even has a different set of usernames. We did this intentionally. We really wanted our development efforts to be focused on the application. In the future, we intend on integrating the Forum/Faq/Support/Community side of Yarny more directly into the app. That will be a bit down the road, though.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Vananooniel — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 01:17:03 +0000

I just lost 300 words as well. My connection is fine, but I noticed (too late, obviously!) that the screen would say "Saving" but never finish loading and say the time it saved, so when I clicked to another tab and then clicked back to Yarny, it was gone. So very sad :( Other than that mishap, I've enjoyed the program!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

michaelmichael — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 01:42:31 +0000

Try checking the timeline, especially if you use Internet Explorer. I thought I lose some words today (oh, roughly 4000) but I was able to find a version that restored everything I wrote. Feel free to hit the Feedback button and let them know. They've been very helpful and they were in the process of checking the database when I let them know that I was able to recover what I'd written. And when in doubt, export often.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

michaelmichael — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 01:52:15 +0000

A temporary fix is to zoom in or increase the text size in the browser. For modern browsers, I think this only affects the window or tab you're currently in, rather than everything.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 02:26:38 +0000

Though i answer this in a later post, let me reply here. As michaelmichael mentions, you can use your browser's zoom function. Firefox, specifically, has a "Zoom Text Only" mode that works well with Yarny. The Zoom controls can usually be found in the View menu. Try zooming in once or twice, and see how it works out.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 02:22:04 +0000

Yarny saves pretty frequently - no only when you see the "saved at..." message. Creating a new snippet, selecting a snippet, performing a variety of navigational tasks - all of these, among others, trigger a save. Though we would like you to move beyond the habit of hitting Ctrl+S or hitting a save button, consider selecting one of the snippets in the People/Places/Things area. Read your notes there, and relax, knowing you probably just triggered several more saves.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

michaelmichael — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 01:50:48 +0000

Internet Explorer does do some wonky things with Yarny. If it's at all possible, use Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. Also, you should be able to increase the text size in Internet Explorer, which will make the text in Yarny bigger. Try checking the View menu and see if there's an option for text size or Zoom, which I think just affects the window or tab you're currently in (in more modern version of IE, I think. I'd test it but I'm on a Mac right now.)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 02:17:02 +0000

Yes, Yarny keeps track of what you've done most recently. This can be dangerous if you're logged on in two places (like in the situation you've described), if you return to the first place you were logged in and just resume your typing without refreshing - no work should be lost, but you may experience a brief moment of panic if Yarny incorrectly treats the version of your work on the first location as the current version. The newer work you had done at the second location will still be saved, but Yarny on your first location will treat it as an "older" version. No work should be lost, but you may have to use the Version slider to go backwards to find your current version. --- that sounds much more complicated than it needs to --- Also, yes, be wary of using IE, it can cause all sorts of unexpected - and undesired - side effects.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 02:18:32 +0000

Also, though we do intend on adding in some accessibility features (some users even need different color combinations than black/white to be able to read well) in a future release, you can, as mentioned, use your browsers zoom function. On most browser, this is under the "View" menu. It will make your font larger, but, unfortunately, will also make the writing area narrower...

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 02:28:42 +0000

Everything that michaelmichael said. If you seem to have lost work, hit the Version button (the clock icon at the bottom) and see if you can scroll back to a previous version that has your missing work. Then, either via the in-app feedback, or directly mailing support@getyarny.com, get in touch with us, and we'll see what we can do to help. After all, we're here to help (as well as continue development AND participate in NaNoWriMo)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 02:11:30 +0000

Glad to hear you're enjoying it. We don't like to use the "Beta" tag as a shield, but it's true we're still in development. One thing we do promise though, as far as new features are concerned, we will always keep Yarny's easy-to-use, simple interface philosophy in mind. We've been receiving great feedback on our existing feature set, and even when people report glitches or bugs, that helps us make Yarny even more reliable. We are definitely equally eager to see what Yarny 1.0 will be like!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 02:25:06 +0000

Sorry to nest posts, but let me follow up - some browsers have the "Zoom Text Only" option - which, in Firefox on a Mac anyway, seems to retain the size of the writing area. Hope this helps!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

YvonneJocks — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 08:18:25 +0000

"Zoom Text Only" is a perfect solution -- I'm glad I upgraded to Safari!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

danheretic — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:10:06 +0000

Excellent advice on the word springs. I've been putting a marker ('xxx') in before the word sprint, then copying & pasting words written in the word sprint to a new snippet to get the word count for the word sprint. Your way is so much simpler. I'm embarrassed I didn't think of it. I've used groups and tags only minimally, and colors not at all. I'll need to delve into that and see how it affects my organization. Out of curiosity, do you have any plans for sharing and collaborative functions, like real-time multi-user editing? If/when you implement anything like that, I would request that you allow individual snippets to be shared separately of the entire document. One last feature I'd like to request is the ability to export the entire /project/, not just sections. Currently when I back up, I need to export four different sections (Story, People, Places, Things). it's not so efficient. I continue to use Yarny and am very happy and impressed with it. And your customer service is the most excellent I've ever seen.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

neddiheht — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 20:01:23 +0000

Have you tried getting a teacher to support it not being blocked? Teachers and professors usually have way more pull at a school than students.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 19:33:59 +0000

Hi, We're happy that you love Yarny, but don't get sad over it being blocked. Instead, talk to your teacher or the school principal and ask that they contact me. I'd be happy to explain to them how there is no advertising, how we securely cordon off each user's writing from others, the security measures we take, and how we specifically designed our systems, policies, terms and conditions to make it easy for schools and minors to safely use Yarny. We have students across the US and in many countries around world using Yarny for their classwork (and NaNo). You can find my contact phone info here: http://www.bburro.com/contact . If they call, have them use the toll-free number and ask for me, Chris Martoglio. Or, they can just send an email to support@getyarny.com, and I'd be happy to contact them back. Be patient and respectful. Sometimes, good things take a while to work out. Keep me posted.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

neddiheht — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 20:02:15 +0000

If you're in secondary school (Middle/High School) try getting your english or writing teacher to support it being available.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 02:03:59 +0000

We have identified a bug that occurs in our word counting when certain non-english characters are used. Words containing these characters will end up counting as two words. We're looking into it.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Yukinflake — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 01:41:47 +0000

And although it's supposed to be user-friendly, a few more complex controls like formatting and styles would be nice. Perhaps in an area so that it's not necessary you use them?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 02:07:25 +0000

We do intend on having formatting in a future release. I apologize if this answer has already shown in this forum, but... To handle formatting, we'll be implementing a subset of Markdown. You would put *one* set of asterisks around words you want to be italicized and **two** sets of asterisks around words that you would want to be in bold. Even though we don't display or export the formatting, go ahead and start adding this to your writing now, if you like - then when we do release the feature, you'll already have it.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Griddlebone — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:03:22 +0000

Is this word count thing going to be fixed in the update today? When I got the notice that Yarny would be down today for an update, I downloaded my NaNo work into MSWord and found my word count differed by nearly 200 words! I won't go back if I can't rely on an accurate word count....not for NaNo, anyway.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Yukinflake — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 18:10:05 +0000

Ok, that sounds useful. Thanks.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

YvonneJocks — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 03:49:06 +0000

This may be one too many bells and whistles, but I'd love the ability to highlight my text, to make it easy when scrolling to notice that I'd flagged something I want to take a closer look at. That said, I am rapidly becoming a major Yarny devotee!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

michaelmichael — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:48:19 +0000

A temporary fix could be to use non-alphanumeric characters, like a row of asterisks or dashes, to mark off the sections you want to review later. These won't be included in your word count so you can make sure you're still accurately on track for NaNo.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

touketsu — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 02:47:51 +0000

Thank you. I'll check up on it on Monday, and see if its still blocked. Then I'll go to the advice that you gave me.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 06:35:12 +0000

Nicely put. A benefit of writing your novel in the cloud. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

michaelmichael — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:51:18 +0000

If you're using Internet Explorer, that could account for the word loss. I logged into Yarny in IE 7 and managed to lose around 4000 words. Fortunately I'd exported my novel the night before and hadn't made any changes but even still, using the timeline I was able to recover the words that Internet Explorer ate. It is definitely a handy feature.

Re: Yarny ate my story

cmartoglio — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 23:12:15 +0000

Sorry for the trouble. Try this; log out, then log back in. If that doesn't make the words reappear, then after you login, select the snippet with your missing words and click the versions button in the bar on the bottom of the writing area (looks like a clock). Slide the slider to the left to see prior versions. If neither of these two things work for you, then click the feedback button while you are logged in to Yarny and let us know and we'll track down your writing for you (clicking feedback sends to us some additional diagnostic info we can use to troubleshoot, in addition to your note). If you were seeing the "Saved..." notice appear while you are writing, your writing is likely safe on our servers.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 15:11:31 +0000

We actually do provide a way to see an overall word count. Click the gear icon next to the Title at the top (if you haven't changed it, will probably still read "Untitled Novel"). The screen that shows up will let you edit the name of your title and also to set a goal. Once you have a goal set, you will see a progress bar in your Story snippet list. This progress bar tallies up all snippets currently present in the Story list. Also, though we do have several features planned, we will always adhere to the Yarny philosophy. Every feature should be easy-to-use, simple, and require as few clicks as possible.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

zenlc — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 23:09:08 +0000

Smashwords has a similar NaNo area to publish the work in progress.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

paintedmango — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 22:17:51 +0000

Nah, I was using firefox, but I think the fact that I was on an unfamiliar laptop with a smaller keyboard made me accidentally hit a key while everything was highlighted, so the stuff got deleted because it typed a random letter. It hasn't happened to me since, so I think it was just a typo on my part.

Re: lost words!!!

cmartoglio — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:25:26 +0000

Try this; log out, then log back in. If that doesn't make the words reappear, then after you login, select a snippet with missing words and click the versions button in the bar on the bottom of the writing area (looks like a clock). Slide the slider to the left to see prior versions. If neither of these two things work for you, then click the feedback button while you are logged in to Yarny and let us know and we'll track down your writing for you (clicking feedback sends to us some additional diagnostic info we can use to troubleshoot, in addition to your note). If you were seeing the "Saved..." notice appear while you are writing, your writing is likely safe on our servers.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 17:57:05 +0000

Thanks for the nice feedback. We read all messages we get and they all count in our decisions about what to work on next. On our roadmap for Yarny, we do have themes, which will allow for varying fonts and sizes. Thanks again.

Re: lost words!!!

Ephemeral Gal — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 02:23:55 +0000

Thanks for the additional ideas. I discovered from another writer's answer in this forum that I can check out my other "versions" which have been saved. There was a glitch, all the words disappeared, but the version immediately before this one was complete - it had saved and was keeping my work in some cloud or other :-)) I love this writing program! Easy and with the snippet columns, I can add bits and ideas as they occur to me. To-day it occurred to me as I was writing about something else, that my student might be thinking of a tattoo (will research this) and that my lady who's in a coma might have an organ donation application completed or not ... so I added these ideas as snippets. Perfect! I'll see them later and add then. Thanks again!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Robin Rhyner — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 06:23:48 +0000

Yarny just deleted my entire novel. I backed up yesterday. But the over 500 words that I wrote today are gone forever, I guess. Because I hadn't saved yet tonight. I am hoping hoping hoping that somehow, someway, there exists some techie guru there who will help me get my novel back? I sent them a "help" question, but have no reply yet, obviously. I am trying really hard not to cry. And not to post really bad, nasty words in this comment.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:17:18 +0000

We do apologize to any of our users who experienced Yarny's temporary, surprising, and rather unscheduled downtime. We have gotten our servers back to stable condition and are investigating what went wrong that caused some of our users to begin receiving the "Error Saving..." message. The good news is that no saved data was lost; our database servers kept hold of your data, our application server just temporarily had trouble connecting you to it. If, at any time you receive that message, it's best to backup the words that are currently present in the editor, log out, clear your cookies ... take a deep breath, fix yourself some tea or coffee, prepare yourself a sandwich - essentially, give Yarny a couple minutes to recover - even consider grilling that sandwich... and log back in. If that doesn't work, send us an email directly to support@getyarny.com - we can't always directly respond to your in-app feedbacks if they were sent while Yarny was having trouble. For those of you who were affected by last night's outage, when you visit yarny.me today, you may have to log out and back in before your work will load. Also, if you seem to be missing some words, try clicking the snippet that is missing them, click the Versions button (clock icon at the bottom) and drag to an earlier version. We do apologize again. We've upgraded our servers three times already, to handle the usage. Looks like our fourth upgrade will be in the very near future.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Robin Rhyner — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 06:24:48 +0000

My snippets are gone. My notes are gone. My title is gone. The whole thing is gone.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Robin Rhyner — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 06:25:49 +0000

So much for "the cloud."

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ChartreuseWalls — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 06:30:06 +0000

Hopefully they're just having a server error or something (I'm not a computer person, I don't understand these things) which just makes our work unavailable for the time being, but that it's not actually lost/gone forever? Just temporarily unavailable..? Hopefully.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Fircoal — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 06:31:03 +0000

I'm hoping that too, espeically since it seemed to have happened to everyone else too. (at least a good amount of people who posted here.)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ChartreuseWalls — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 06:34:23 +0000

My title and my snippets are still there, but when I click on a snippet it doesn't load, so my work isn't really there... Are your snippets loading?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Fircoal — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 06:36:14 +0000

They did but things seem to have gone to the wayside again. :/ I'm not sure what's happening but I think they're trying to fix it.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

jsncttn — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 06:38:32 +0000

I seem to have lost everything but the title. I've been making back ups of my snippets to Google Docs on a regular basis so I only lost probably a few thousand words. Still, it is called a beta. I'll probably just continue using Google Docs instead... seems like less of a risk after this.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Robin Rhyner — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 06:37:31 +0000

If I sign out and sign in, I can see a few things, which I am desperately copying to flash drive. But then it disappears again. And now, the sign out, sign out thing isn't working anymore either. Yes. I am hoping for a miracle. And not likely to trust yarny anymore.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

marispeare — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 06:40:53 +0000

After logging in for the 3rd time, I got back all but about 100 words. Good luck everyone, but break out those flash drives!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:21:57 +0000

Thanks for sticking with us, even after our trouble. I've said before that we don't enjoy using the "Beta" tag as a shield, but the one thing we can promise is that, during our beta, every single time we stumble or receive feedback from our users about problems that are occurring, we use it to make sure that Yarny becomes better and more reliable. While you're creating 50k word novels for NaNoWriMo, we're increasing stability, fixing bugs, and adding features for our next release. Thanks!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Robin Rhyner — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 14:56:16 +0000

Yarny, I am enjoying using your product. And my novel is back. Thank goodness. Some feedback: Especially after this experience. Saving is such a hassle in Yarny. Because the export feature doesn't work. When I export, it comes out all wrong. And I don't want to save it looking like that. So when I save my work, I have to open up each snippet individually, then copy and past it into a document, and save the document. And yes, I do have to re-save each snippet, because I work in different snippets and change them and/or add to them all the time. You could fix this by 1. Making the export feature actually work. 2. Making some way to show all the snippets in the body of the text, so that when I have to copy and paste, I can just copy and paste one time, rather than 36 times (my current number of snippets). Actually, the second feature is really necessary for me anyway, as just a matter of being to re-arrange my snippets on a continuous page of work. I need to be able to "drag and drop" them into the body of the text, to see how they work as a complete chapter. It is really necessary for revising. Otherwise, I am really enjoying Yarny. Thanks, Robin

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

yamikuronue — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:42:44 +0000

I dont' work for Yarny, but generally when you provide bug reports, the more specific you can be, the better. "Doesn't work" can mean any of a dozen things; it will probably help their devs if you specify a) what it should look like and b) what it does look like so they can understand what you want changed specifically.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 21:32:26 +0000

To clarify how versions work, let me use an example, as this might be the easiest way to explain it. Let's say you have 10 versions and version 10 is the one you are working on when you realize you want to go back to an earlier version, say version 8. Use the version control slider and slide back to version 8. Put the cursor anywhere on version 8 and start typing and it becomes a new version 11. Version 10 is as you left it before sliding back to 8, and version 8 is still there as it was before you selected it and started typing. To put it another way, when you select a prior version and start typing on it, it becomes a new, current version. To address your desire to have two parallel stories (let's call them branches) going at one time, I would *not* use versions for this. It could get confusing tracking version numbers, etc. Instead, take the part of your story you want to branch, copy it, and paste it into a new snippet with a snippet name that clearly identifies it as such. This way, you can bounce from one branch to the other branch by moving from one snippet to another. If you want to have multiple snippets in your "branch," you could create duplicate snippets (e.g. chapters 1-3 for branch a and chapters 1-3 for branch b), then use tags to tag one set of snippets as "branch a" and the other set of snippets as "branch b." You can also create groups to, well, group them into different branches, and be sure to set colors for the snippets to make it easy to see the two branches. Hope that helps.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 21:34:53 +0000

Since Yarny runs in a browser, for spell checking, we rely on the browser built-in spell check. For example, in Chrome and Safari, from the menu, Edit/Spelling will let you turn on the spell checker, and In Firefox, it's a setting in Preferences.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Robin Rhyner — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 05:40:48 +0000

Okay. Fair enough. More specific. When i am working in Yarny, I have a document that looks like readable text. It has indents where I put them in. It has double spacing where I put in spacing. It contains recognizable letters that people can read. When I click the icon that is meant to export my work, I get a little message that says it is "exporting." My word processor on my computer automatically opens up a document where I can see the exported text. The exported text has a mixture of letters and symbols. Some of the symbols are those that are contained on a computer keyboard. Some of the symbols are entirely rare and foreign to me. It is in places readable as text, and in places completely unrecognizable. Where there were once spaces between words, there is now long stretches of blank space, mixed in with continuous words and symbols with no spaces. All indents have disappeared. Double spacing or single spacing is completely random. So a) it should look like readable text with some recognizable formatting. b) it currently does not look like readable text and the formatting has all disappeared. Hope that clarifies "doesn't work." I apologize for my vagueness before. What I LOVE about Yarny is the environment. And I am using it again tonight. Thanks, Robin

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Cathe — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:59:12 +0000

Okay, let's ignore the parallel stories. Back to versions: Why do I have (for example) 12 versions? What causes yarny to decide to save a 'version'? Is there an easy way to find the specific version I want when, as I explained above, I realized that I had lost information at some point? Also, do I have separate versions for every snippet or does the version slider bring me back to a "version point" for the entire file?

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 04:26:41 +0000

If you seem to be missing some words, try clicking the snippet that is missing them, click the Versions button (clock icon at the bottom) and drag to an earlier version. Most likely, your writing is in an earlier version. If you are still having trouble, click the feedback button and send us a message. We get additional information when you send us a message from inside Yarny that can help us get you back up and going.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:02:26 +0000

We have a new release coming up soon, and one of the things we've been address is some of the problems we've found in the export process. Keep a lookout for the official e-mail that's going to go out later today, which goes into more detail about the release. Could you let us know which operating system/browser/word processor you're using? Then we could try to make sure that our fixes will work in your specific setup. In the meantime, try saving the .txt file that is exported and opening it up in a different program, such as Word, Wordpad, Pages, or TextEdit.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Robin Rhyner — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 03:58:07 +0000

Thanks, Yarny. I just read the email about the release. I'm excited to how Yarny develops. I've been using TextEdit, by the way, on my MacBook laptop, and Word on my HP laptop. I have fiddled around with changing the .txt to .doc or .rtf. Sometimes it works.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Robin Rhyner — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 03:58:24 +0000

Oops. Excited to *see*

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Jennifermwcg — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 02:35:33 +0000

Same here...

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 03:45:01 +0000

We are up and running again (For a few more hours anyway, until we come down for our actual scheduled maintenance). I won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say some of our customers were being routed to our downed servers when they shouldn't have. Feel free to email support@getyarny.com if yarny.me continues to give you trouble loading. Until then, refreshing yarny.me should cause it to load for you. Thanks!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

NickiIV — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 03:48:04 +0000

I had a similar problem just a moment ago, and I was afraid my new 2K+ hadn't saved right. !! But after making some mashed potatoes and switching computers, all is right with my world. I would try rebooting, and I'll be waiting until after tomorrow's maintenance to add words to Yarny, just 'cause. Let me just say...I LOVE the word counting features!!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

raoulduke — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 02:45:47 +0000

I'm having the same problem as well. I signed up back before Nano, but hadn't used Yarny until today. I went with it this afternoon because my laptop wasn't close by and I figured I'd just log back in later and copy it to my main file. But I can't get in. So I have no idea where I left off. Oh well, it was only 657 words, and I can just write another scene or not care that a chunk is missing and will have to be worked back in later.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

candy_luminous — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 04:09:59 +0000

Thankyou!! I will now transfer my thousand or so words I wrote in Word while waiting for servers to come back up onto Yarny again. (And gosh will I be glad to do so - am SO preferring Yarny to my previous experiences trying to write creatively in Word!)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

raoulduke — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 06:04:24 +0000

Thanks for the update, I did manage to get back in and copy over what I'd written earlier. After the maintenance is concluded I'll probably go ahead and copy everything out of Word into Yarny.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 04:53:34 +0000

We understand you being annoyed. Yarny is all about getting technology out of your way so that you can just write. Tonight, that didn't quite work out as planned. All is back to normal though. If, after refreshing your browser, you still can't login, email us at support@getyarny.com with some specifics. We'll get you back writing. Thanks.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:19:22 +0000

We're still down for maintenance. It took a little bit longer than expected. We should be back up shortly. Thanks!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:41:10 +0000

If you want to see if it's just a matter of your writing being in a prior version, click on a snippet that appears to have lost words and then click the versions button on the bottom (looks like a clock). Slide the control to the left and you will see your prior versions. Hope that helps. Looking forward to having you back.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:03:10 +0000

Actually, that's "We're back up."

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:31:06 +0000

Yes, the update today now uses a word count algorithm more similar to the NaNo word count. To see the update, you will have to select any pre-existing snippets and let them re-save; upon saving, you'll see the new word count.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:10:20 +0000

We watch a lot of places for any posts, but when you send in a bug report from the in-app feedback button, we get extra information that can help us troubleshoot. So, that is the best place. If you don't mind, could you send us some details via the feedback button about when, specifically, you are experiencing the "snippet jump." Also, let us know your browser and OS. Thanks.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Fircoal — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 20:50:21 +0000

Sure I'll do that when it happens again. (It's hard to remember now since it was a bit ago x3)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Griddlebone — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 23:08:45 +0000

That's great, thanks! Btw, I noticed that the * you suggested we use to mark bold and italic are counted as words, not sure if the NaNo algorithm does that? Gotta say, loving Yarny in the cloud - it's so darn convenient to have all the character charts, storyboard, research and bless those versions....recommended it to all my friends.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

lilyrose.23 — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:33:13 +0000

Okay, sorry, I fixed the problem myself. For some reason my browser was trying to load it with https://yarny.me/offline.php. So I manually deleted the '/offline.php' part and it went straight through. Sorry for wasting anybody's time with that . . . :(

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 22:47:28 +0000

No problem, at all. Your browser may have just been filling in the url based on a page you had already visited (in this case, adding the '/offline.php' to the end). If you want to bookmark us, bookmakr yarny.me - then you should always be accessing the proper place.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 02:06:30 +0000

Though I think you're probably the Steph that I responded to via email, i'll follow up here as well. Based on the email you sent, we were able to track down your writing. Go ahead and sign up for a permanent account, and use the in-app feedback button to let us know once you have. Then I'll copy your temporary work into your permanent account.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

IceCreamAddict — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 19:45:07 +0000

Nevermind, I did miss something, the difference in word counts is much more slight. * embarrassed*

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Fircoal — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 21:15:56 +0000

Me too! :D

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

I Can't Write For My Life — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 23:22:25 +0000

Doesn't it give you so much freaking satisfaction! Especially when all your friends said you could never do it and you proved them wrong!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 01:13:18 +0000

I also sent this through NaNo mail. Try this: Be sure you are logged in, then select a snippet that is missing words. At the bottom of the writing area, select the version icon (looks like a clock). Slide the version bar to the left to show prior versions. Your missing writing is likely in a prior version.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Fircoal — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 17:01:33 +0000

Yes it does. Until I stall out at 1.6K for the next 3 days. D:

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ragdolltb — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:24:30 +0000

ok, it is not showing up on my work computer. Its over 400 short of what I've actually written, which means I can't write today, and I've already fallen behind. What's the deal, ya'll.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:54:35 +0000

Can you send us this report from inside of Yarny using the Feedback button. That will help us track this issue better. Also, try this from either computer: Be sure you are logged in, then select a snippet that is missing words. At the bottom of the writing area, select the version icon (looks like a clock). Slide the version bar to the left to show prior versions. Your missing writing is likely in a prior version.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ragdolltb — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:25:25 +0000

Ok, sent. And I should have mentioned I already tried checking the previous versions. not there.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

ragdolltb — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 01:15:51 +0000

I got it fixed. Apparently it was not saving. Which means the update I got an email the other day about a notification or something to let you know it's not saving isn't working. But i backed it all up so it's all good, now

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 04:38:32 +0000

Yarny actually does let you work on multiple novels or titles. To access the Title controls, click the title at the top (which will read "Untitled Novel" if you haven't changed it). Here, the first option is to Create a New Title or select a previously created novel. Each title has its own set of Story, People, Place, and Thing snippets. Also, click the gear icon next to your currently selected title to change its name or to set its word count. Hope this helps.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Flower K. Owl — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:38:59 +0000

[quote=cmcchesney] Yarny actually does let you work on multiple novels or titles. To access the Title controls, click the title at the top (which will read "Untitled Novel" if you haven't changed it). Here, the first option is to Create a New Title or select a previously created novel. Each title has its own set of Story, People, Place, and Thing snippets. Also, click the gear icon next to your currently selected title to change its name or to set its word count. Hope this helps. [/quote] Yes! That does help. I had tried editing my novel title and making a new one, but all it said was "error record ID" or something similar. It all works now.

Re: Right justify

Cathe — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 04:05:33 +0000

I closed it and reopened, and it works fine. :)

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 02:47:19 +0000

You are very welcome. I could say we built Yarny, really though, it's Clinton and Adam here at Blue Burro that have strived and worked so tirelessly for months on end to make such a clean and intuitive writing environment. They are the stuff that novels are made of, but are real-life.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

DanaBea — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 15:46:37 +0000

Well, please pass my thank you for a fantastic writing experience along!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 00:41:07 +0000

Yarny is designed to keep you logged in until you click the "Log Out" button. In order to do this though, it relies on your browser to handle cookies. Make sure your browser is set to keep cookies "until they expire." Otherwise, your cookie may be removed when you close your browser, and you'll have to log back into Yarny. Check your browser setting, and if it continues to give you trouble, e-mail us at support@getyarny.com and we'll investigate further, collecting some more details.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 00:43:10 +0000

Yeah, based on feedback, we have a large number of users who will run Yarny on an iPad. Though we don't fully support it (yet), Yarny will function in the iPad's Safari browser, just not at its best. We're aiming more to become fully compatible on the browsers of mobile devices rather than creating a separate app. Glad to hear your NaNoWriMo is going well, almost 50k!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:56:54 +0000

Thanks for letting us know. We made an adjustment this morning that should allow you to stay logged in for a long period of time. If you continue to experience this, please click the feedback button inside of Yarny (once logged in) and let us know. When you use the feedback button, we get some extra troubleshooting info sent to us that often helps us. Thanks again.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 02:29:22 +0000

Congratulations on your win. It is a wonderful achievement. We thank you for using Yarny during such an important challenge. Yarny is here, and we promise to only make it better. Again, congratulations.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

NickiIV — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 02:38:53 +0000

If you export and have added group and snippet names to your export, you will have a higher count on NaNo than you have on Yarny because Yarny doesn't include group and snippet names in your word count. That's good for me, though, because I rather like having those descriptive names I've got being used in the novel.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

rehtse — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 05:03:09 +0000

I only lost around 70 words but it's only because I have words with dashes and the NaNo counter counts spaces rather than words. But other than that there is no difference and if you include chapter names like NickilV says than you will probably have a higher count.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:26:01 +0000

This is true. In our first word counting algorithm, phrases like "easy-to-use" would count as three words. But in the interest of being more similar to NaNo, we now only count that as one word. Also, you're correct on the snippet/group names when you export. We don't count those towards your goal. When it comes time to submit your final work, you may want to export with the "Inlude Group Names" and "Include Snippet Names" unchecked.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:08:09 +0000

We're very happy to hear how well Yarny is working for you. We are continuing with behind the scene tweaks and have a large rollout planned in December. I do want to make you aware of something a few people have experienced. You mention that all of your writing is in one snippet. If you have a snippet with a very high word count (e.g. 20,000 or 30,000 words) you should try splitting the large snippet into a few smaller ones. Every time Yarny saves, it saves the entire snippet, so a very large snippet will take longer to save and has a better chance of being interrupted by a finicky internet connection. Also, to repost something we've put in a few other forum locations, if a save is interrupted, Yarny may create backup versions when the connection gets interrupted. If you see that a portion of your writing is no longer in the current version, just click the version icon (looks like a clock) on the bottom of the writing area and slide the control to the left (the slider will be greyed out while it's loading large versions). Your prior versions will appear. Display the version you want and just start writing on that version. It will become a new, and the latest version. Hope this helps you continue to have a trouble-free Yarny experience. Congratulations on the NaNo win and best wishes for completing the Novel.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

NickiIV — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 02:51:07 +0000

Ooh, an Apple App would be GREAT!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 19:11:34 +0000

Thanks for the good comments. We have had very good input during out beta period so far and have found some good ways to make the platform even more reliable. There is nothing like having thousands of users pounding away on Yarny 24/7 to show us where we can improve things. We're getting those in place first, and then we'll be rolling out new features, both compatibility (tablets, phones) and usability. We take our customers' writing too seriously to not make sure we build the most solid platform we can. Thanks again for the very good feedback. Congratulations on your win.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 19:12:54 +0000

Hi Nicki. We agree. Thanks, and great job winning NaNo.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 19:26:24 +0000

Hi Yvonne, great minds think alike. We agree and have mapped out more metrics and goals for future releases. Very good to hear you loved the Yarny experience. We'll keep working on making it even better. Thanks and congratulations on your win!

Re: Versions??

aliaswriter — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 09:57:50 +0000

I agree. It would especially be helpful now that NaNo is over, and we are moving into drafting stage. I'd like to save what I wrote as Draft 1, and be able to keep it for future reference, while I work on a second draft. I hope this makes sense.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 19:29:09 +0000

We'll soon be releasing themes with different fonts. Also, to handle formatting, we'll be implementing a subset of Markdown, which is a way of rapidly adding formatting while typing. Basically, you put *one* set of asterisks around words that you want italicized and **two** sets of asterisks around words you want bold. Even though we export this formatting yet, feel free to add it to your writing now, so that when the feature is released you'll already be ahead of the game. Thanks and congratulations on your winning NaNo!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

LadyStarlea — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 05:15:48 +0000

Got a question. How long do we have to buy the premium with our discount? Money is an issue for us and I do want to buy the premium at some point so thought it best to ask.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmartoglio — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:25:19 +0000

Not to worry. You have until the start of NaNo 2012.

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

cmcchesney — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:31:54 +0000

Don't worry, our Android users won't be ignored. We intend on having an app for them, too. Just, not today. We wanted the app to be another avenue for our Premium users to enjoy Yarny. After all, without our Premium users, we wouldn't be able to keep Yarny free for everyone else. So let's hear it for our Premium users!

Re: Yarny, write your novel in the cloud

Fatal_Velocity — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 17:46:51 +0000

For some reason it's always amused me that iApps tend to get a look in first. I would have thought that there must be at least as many people on Android as on Apple product these days. Of course, I haven't done any market research into it recently so maybe I'm wrong. That being said, I'm glad you are working on an Android app. Until the support becomes avaliable however I'm going to be sticking with Evernote for my mobile cloud-ness, nothing against you guys though, I'm sure you understand :)