Today, 28th September, 2006, I finally released the App I’ve been working on for around 3 months.
Skrift is a complete writing application written in mostly Java that is designed to help writers create their stories and books easily.
There’s a good few of these kind of apps around, and a lot of them get shoveled into facebook adverts, I’ve found. Most of these are the types of tools that promise to make you a published writer in less than an hour if you’ll just pay a fee of something like £80. It’s once you’d paid up that you realise they don’t have much of an app behind them, and certainly no decent editing facilities or friendly UI, because they’re designed to just use an AI system to write your ideas for you. You’re given a basic AI tool within the app and allocated a certain amount of tokens each month and then you can just type in a brief idea and let the app burn up all this months credit with some AI slop story that you’ve not written a word of. Of course they’ll push it up to Kindle store for you as well, which covers the published part of what the advert claimed. From what I understand, you don’t get much for the credits they allocate every month either. One or two punts of a whole novel and you’re out of tokens to do anything else until they feed you more so you’re basically going to have to edit the AI story manually. I’m betting it doesn’t make sense either.
Ok, so I can see how these things would sell. Nobody likes subscriptions because they’re usually not worth it but the developers all like to have a continuous revenue stream so it caught on. These apps don’t have it, and they are promising to give you AI tokens indefinitely, and, let’s face it, there are a lot of lazy writers out there who might have an idea but can never get the impetus to actually write the thing. But how can you call yourself a writer – let alone published – if you’re throwing up something you want to sell that you didn’t even write?
So I’ve used AI for coding and really like it. For me it’s a way of skipping the slow part of developing something and, thus, the part that usually blocks me. I have a minefield of ideas when it comes to things like games and apps and I want to work on all of them. But here’s the thing. Development isn’t really a one-man-band type of hobby any more. Apart from obvious indie exceptions, it’s usually a team that develops games , apps, films or whatever.
So now my working team when developing games, apps or anything that requires code becomes me as the designer and project leader, Aaron as my support guy who helps test stuff, gives design input, throws me bug reports and tells me if anything is shit and then Claude as my lead coder, usually working solo because he’s pretty good at his job. The knack is getting him to work through my ideas with me so he knows exactly what I want. None of this youtube prompting shit: “Make me GTA 6. Make no mistakes!”
However, writing isn’t like that. Writing can be made easier with AI but it shouldn’t ever, ever, ever be something that is replaced by AI. I get that it’s real handy to write documentation manuals, instructions, marketing blurbs and so on. But we’re talking books here, and books are personal stories that are shared between people. I was always a believer in writing what you know. Originally probably a tactic by writers who were lazy in research and just stuck to what was in their comfort zone, but the internet changed all that. Now research was so much easier than all those trips I used to make going down the library every time I’d thrown in a sentence that I wasn’t completely clear on. If you lie then you’ll get caught by someone. Now we can write about anything and look up stuff instantly so writers now have it so much easier.
I’ll use AI for a lot of things and possibly even in writing projects for a research tool or reworking a sentence that I’m not happy with, but I’m not going to to use it to write chapters for me, or even the whole flippin’ story. That’s just shit.
So, I started developing Skrift while me and the missus were working on the basic story behind “The Tomato Dream” which we published via Amazon a few months ago. Originally, I’d been putting it together in just a word document until I remembered that I had bought a writing app called Scrivener a few years back. I dug this out and found that my original licence did still work – thank heavens for an app that wasn’t holding me hostage for another fee every year. I used Scrivener to write that story using Triona’s ideas and mine and developing it as a character, places project, which is how Scrivener works, rather than just a word document that becomes a nightmare to keep track of everything happening in a story once it’s more than a few pages in size.
This all worked great but, while I wasn’t writing, I started thinking how much I liked how Scrivener worked, but I had my own ideas what else I wanted in a writing tool and why not do my own app as a side project just so future stories would be easier to write, and I could change my app around whatever features I needed as I go.
I went way beyond the basic app in the end because the ideas just kept flowing. Early stuff like the Scrivener import option was there just to hopefully catch some people who also used that and might find my tool more useful as it’s constantly evolving, which I believe Scrivener might not be. I’m also very OCD about keeping things tidy and having a place for everything so the UI works a lot better in helping me do this.
The one thing I did dither on but did implement in the end was actually an AI system within the app. It sounds mad after I’ve just been bleating on about how AI shouldn’t be used to write your books for you but I’ve not done it for that purpose. When using the app, or watching the video demo or even reading the documentation, you’ll be able to see that it’s all toggled on/off by a simple switch. If you turn it on then you have what’s called a research panel. You can ask questions in there and, if you’ve plugged in a Claude key then it’ll answer them for you. Great for simple questions like “What was the date of the second world war starting?”, “What caused the second war to kick off?” and so on. It can also do rewrites on highlighted paragraphs based on the context you ask for, and even write/rewrite a complete chapter, should you ask it to. It needs a fair bit of context such as previous chapters to reference and outlines, as well as characters and places all set up before you’d get anything meaningful, however. There’s no option to create a whole book based on just a prompt, which is what I understand all these AI writing apps try to do.
How would that even work?
You type in: “Write me a story about fred the bank robber and how he got caught because his safe bomb was too loud.” and get yourself a 40 page manuscript?
Sounds like bollocks to me.
Anyway, Skrift is now available on both Mac and Windows. Full details on my nice, shiny Claude-assisted website for it.
https://skrift.co.uk
If you download the Mac version then it’s a trial and you will need to purchase a licence from within the app. If you’re using a Windows machine then you don’t get a trial version because of the horrible security signing that Microsoft actually charge you to include in downloadable apps now. It is available for purchase in the Windows store, though, and you can go right there.