Giveaway of the Day [GAOTD] has unearthed a program called History Explorer that may be truly useful for writers who are working on large projects or who are constantly revising their work. It can be set up to track individual files or folders and to automatically save all changes. Best of all, the program, which costs $30, is available today for FREE.
If you visit the free download site, you may wish to read the many comments at the bottom. Don’t be dismayed that over sixty percent of the people there give the program a thumbs down. The comments section clearly illustrates that the commenters have little idea of why such a program may be invaluable to writers. But more importantly, some commenters provide detailed information about how the program operates. You will also find reference to some other programs that offer similar functionality — they may be worth exploration as well.
If you visit the software homepage, you can also watch a particularly clear and comprehensive demo video and view a collection of screenshots. For your convenience, I’ve grabbed the video for my collection VIDEO FOR WRITERS. It’s available today in the sidebar of this blog, but it will soon scroll off the screen. You can still find it in the future at my Vodpod collection, along with lots of other videos for writers.
I’ve been convinced to download the program and give it a full trial — especially since it’s free. When you unzip the installation file, be sure to look at the READ ME file for activation instructions. For your information, here’s a copy of the comment that I posted at GAOTD:
If you are a writer working with large projects that stretch out over weeks and months — book writers, screenwriters, biographers and such — then this program may be extremely useful. I maintain a blog about productivity for writers, and this issue of tracking versions comes up from time to time. Writers consider it a major challenge.
I’ve been using Changes Saver, which does a fine job. It’s available at <http://enins.com/changessaver/>.
Another writer, who seeks out free options, wrote a multi-part blog post about how to use open-source Subversion for this purpose. That’s a bit too involved for me — but he swears by it.
I’ll be giving History Explorer a full trial evaluation and will also check out some of the other programs mentioned here. I intend eventually to do a major comparative review to help writers find just the right tool for their own projects.
Thanks GAOTD for sharing this software. The value of GAOTD for me is the opportunity to locate and evaluate out-of-the-way programs that I’d never find otherwise.
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Comment by
markez linda
8 Mar 2009
Thanks for this helpful resources