Wiki for Fiction Writing

Posted by Manfred
Jan 4, 2009 at 05:01 AM

Stephen,

yes, you are right that Voodoopad behaves more like a word processor. This has to do in part with relative ease with which rich text can be implemented on the Mac.

CT (and other wikis) behave more like databases with separate modes for editing and viewing. I find the markup very easy, but I understand that one might prefer the mode-less approach. But you do give up power.

Voodoopad is by no means the only Wiki on the Mac. See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PersonalWiki for some that run on several operating systems (including the Mac), like Notebook, Wikit, and Zulupad, and there are some that are specific to the Mac (which do, however, seem to suffer from the dominance of Voodoopad).

I find that there are a lot of exaggerated claims about Voodoopad. Thus, you find, for instance, on Wikipedia, you find “essentially invented the modern personal/desktop wikis”, which is a blatant falsehood. VoodooPad 1.1 alpha 2: came out only in May 11, 2003. By this time, there existed already a number of multi-OS desktop wikis and some specifically designed for the PC. Notebook goes back at least to 2002, and Wikit goes back even further. Pepys (which is no longer developed, but which was also mode-less) also goes back to at least that time.

That being said, I agree it’s a nice application, no more, but also no less.

Manfred