Yarny

One of this year's NaNoWriMo sponsors is Yarny, which bills itself as "Novel writing in the cloud". Yarny's developers have pulled together some of the best features from desktop writing apps like Scrivener and yWriter5 into a well thought-out and easy to use web-based application.

The actual Yarny editor page is on a different URL (yarny.me) than the main web site (getyarny.com). When the editor first loads, an overlay of help bubbles explains what all the buttons and menus do. The interface is well designed, putting the minimum controls needed to organize your story near to hand.

The real magic begins when you start typing: everything except the blank white page gently fades away, allowing you to Concentrate on Deep Thoughts and Write Them All Down. Yarny discreetly tracks your word and character counts along the bottom margin, a key feature for NaNoists. There's no bold, no italics, no bullets, no color, no markup, no formatting - you can't even change the font. It's just words.

For story structure and planning, Yarny sports features like top-level categories for organizing People, Places and Things, tagging and searching by tags, versioning, colour-coding, auto-indenting,  an outliner/organizer for text snippets, export to text... what's not to love?

First, there's no mobile app, and apparently none planned at the moment, which, as a bus-commuting iPad writer, disappoints me. I use a combination of WriteRoom and Dropbox on my iPad, then sync up with Dropbox on my PC when I get home, where I continue editing in Metapad, a simple notepad clone. On the other hand, if I decide to use Yarny all the time, I guess I've now got an excuse to upgrade to a shiny new 3G iPad 2... but wait, there's a new iPad coming out soon, maybe I should hold off for a while.

Second, Yarny's in "free beta" right now. I hope that doesn't mean whoops, we might lose all your hard work, sorry.

Third, as I wondered how these clever guys intend to make money, I noticed "Free forever plan" and "Paid plans beginning in December" listed in the "Features" side bar, so it looks like they'll be monetizing with the tried and true freemium business model. While there are a lot of free online alternatives, like Google Docs, Writeboard (geek note: from the folks who brought us Ruby on Rails), the minimalist Writer from Big Huge Labs, and Zoho Writer, none of them appear to combine fiction-writing features the way Yarny does.

Finally, I found the auto-indentation annoying, and I couldn't control-shift-arrow key to select words to the left or right (try it in a text editor, you'll see what I mean), I could only shift-select with arrow keys one character or one line at a time.

In any case, I'm gonna give it a pass until there's a reliable way to use it offline, or Yarny buys me a 3G iPad :)

Thanks to iambrianna for the awesome photo