Announcing WordTarget - a writing productivity tool Nov 7 2014
Wow, where has the year gone? It's been a very busy Summer and now Autumn too here at KickCode HQ, with Winter just peeking around the corner. I have a bit of catching up to do here on this blog, and I've got some fresh new content and some other interesting news and announcements coming over the next few weeks (including a long overdue update about the book!), but for today I want to talk about a new Mac OS X app I've built.
WordTarget is a productivity tool (written in RubyMotion) that sits in your menubar, and helps you to hit a writing goal. If that sounds straightforward, it's because it is! But the real key to WordTarget helping you is that it will track your progress across any applications, and you can start and stop it counting right from the menu bar. So perhaps you want to write 500 words a day, but depending upon the day (or time of day!) you might be writing a blog post, working on a book, writing some documentation, getting through your emails, or writing a letter. No matter which apps you use, WordTarget will be counting so you can keep tally, and know when you've hit your target. Or if you prefer, you can switch it to count down to zero from your target instead.
It allows you to view the data for previous days so you can track your progress over time too, so it's not just for the here and now, but can really help you with a longer term goal, if you're aiming for a certain word count for a larger project like a book, a thesis or essay etc.
It's been available on the Mac App Store for a little while now, in a sort of stealth/soft launch mode, and in that time I've had a few people checking out and using the app, who have let me know it's useful for them, and provided some great feedback. I've been working on an updated version that is not too far away, and with those additional features will come a small price increase, so it seems like the perfect time now to let people in on the fun, and if you pick it up now you'll then be entitled to future updates of the app for free through the App Store, even if the price changes later!
I'll be going into details on the new features in the next version in a future post, but for now I'm announcing a competition where someone can win a copy of WordTarget every single day from now until the end of November, to celebrate National Novel Writing Month (#NaNoWriMo). All you have to do to enter is to follow @WordTargetApp, and then tweet about the app, making sure to include @WordTargetApp, and a link to the competition in the tweet - that's it! You can even use the buttons below to make it easier.
If you can't wait to see if you're a winner, you can of course buy the app on the Mac App Store right now - it's just £4.99/$6.99, which is a small price to help you keep your writing squarely on track each day! More information about the app is available here, with setup screencasts for Mac OS X 10.8, 10.9 and 10.10 available here.
If you have any questions about the app, the competition, or anything else, tweet @ejdraper, or comment below!