SummerFest is back, https://www.artisanalsoftwarefestival.com, with discounts on Scrivener, Devonthink, and a bunch of recommendable software. Tinderbox is there, along with the excellent Mac word processor, Nisus, and the possibly more excellent Mac word processor, Mellel. I also found something really cool in SummerFest, Easy Data Transform. Writing isn't always about storytelling. Sometimes you find financial hijinks that must be exposed. Easy Data Transform makes it easy to take a bunch of inputs in various formats, join them together, and process them in various ways. I got about 350 megabytes of data from an unnamed source and in a few minutes with EDT found questionable dealings in an office most folks have to trust without verifying. The developer is friendly, answers email immediately, and when my somewhat extreme loading of his software revealed a problem, he fixed it in a couple of days. Most of the SummerFest software is of more obvious connection to the writer's lifestyle. If you want to pursue investigative writing, EDT isn't a bad tool to have. It's $70, one time, on sale. IBM has a product called InfoSphere that probably does somewhat more. InfoSphere is $2,500/month. Altair has another product along these lines, probably fancier, for $1,995/year. I got $70 worth of good out of it in my first session, and it made me feel like Sherlock Holmes blazing through arcane clues.
It’s Mac biased, certainly. I know Hyperplan and my new favorite, Easy Data Transform, are available for Mac and Windows. I dont think there is anything there for Linux.
