You are in a dark and musty room. Oak barrels are stacked neatly to one side, and there is a long wooden counter that smells strongly of varnish. The room is crammed with people, heaped around the few tables and chairs. Many familiar faces and names come to mind in the friendly, bustling atmosphere. You suspect that this is a bar. A woman behind the bar smiles at you warmly.
>Take table
You can’t take that.
> sit
You are sitting on the floor
Several shadows can be seen moving through the legs of the room’s occupants. You realise the floor is crawling with rats. A mass of fat furry brown rats approaches you.
> rats, hello
The rats don’t understand because you don’t speak rat.
The rats gather around your feet. They seem friendly enough but you can never be too sure.
> Take rat
You can’t take that.
The rats ferociously attack your feet, nibbling fiercely at your bare toes. You scream in agony as your feet are devoured to bloody stumps while the room of onlookers smiles down on you. As you black out you wonder where you left your shoes..
Apologies for the little prologue there, I got a little carried away, I hope the thought of rats chowing down on your extremities hasn’t left you too scarred. Macworld reported today on a new app for the iPhone, Frotz (iTunes url), which lets you play interactive fiction on the iPhone. For those of you who don’t know what interactive fiction is and are left unconvinced by my own narrative above (I wonder why..), I would point you in the direction of this wikipedia article on Interactive Fiction and on one of the more famous IF games, Zork. While i’ve only dabbled with IF myself, I’ve always found something deeply fascinating about the simple act of gaming with words alone (later IF includes multimedia of course but for pure imagination-embellished fun you gotta try the originals).
After I watched the Apple keynote about the introduction of the App Store for iPhone developers, one of my first thoughts was that someone should try IF on the iPhone. Heh, I humbly had aspirations myself (Afaik the iPhone SDK is free/open to all?) but that would mean learning the SDK, not to mention actually understanding what gamers expect from an IF .. oh well, while I day-dreamed someone else went ahead and did it, surprise surprise=P So anyway, I simply urge you to check out the Macworld article and for all you iPhone users to try out the new app.
Similarly, through this Macworld video on writing tools (unsubtitled but the webpage links to each product), I discovered another cool Mac app today: Scrivener. It’s writing software that helps you write novels and screenplays by simply being focused on the act of writing. Previously I mentioned WriteRoom (Windows users try Dark Room) with its decluttered full-screen blackout effect to encourage distraction-free writing. [Side Note: I've just discovered there's an iPhone version of WriteRoom too. Direct iTunes url].
However, while the effect is really cool, there’s not much more to it . Scrivener has that functionality AND THEN SOME. In fact it has so many bangs and whistles that I really should leave it up to the developers at Literature and Latte (loving the title!!) to explain. Check out this vid (again unsubtitled sorry) or the product homepage. I’ve just downloaded the 30-day trial so i’ll give you a proper StrayDogStrut flavoured review soon, but from what i’ve seen, i’m thinking this might just get me writing seriously (Not to mention being a big help for screenwriting this semester!).
Later folks=)
