Magnetic poetry type program testers / feedback

[vatanen]

Hi everyone,

Not much of a poet myself, but I have always had a love of words, especially the techniques used by William S. Burroughs et al.

I wrote some magnetic tile style software some time ago and it's just been sitting on my hard drive, so I was wondering if there's a couple of people who would be interested in trying it out to let me know if it works ok. This seems like the sort of forum to find interested people :) No use writing something if it's not used...

The software has the ability to save the selected tiles as poems and also export to PNG, use many different word sets with a specified amount of words from each file, and even use different tile colours for different files.

I did do some changes for one songwriter which could read an entire file and display that in order, as opposed to the random placement as it is now, but I seem to have lost those changes.

I'm not sure that I will develop this software anymore, I actually started rewriting it as the code is a couple of years old and it looks terrible to me now, but life seems to get in the way. I had a lot of ideas that I wanted to implement, such as a competition mode, sharing of poems, tileset retrieval from web pages or predefined online locations, add better redrawing, maybe even 3D with physics, and I would still like to do this someday but for now, I just wanted to put it out there to see if it might be useful to anyone. The software is free, and always will be, and is provided as is. It requires the .Net framework to run. I have tested it on Vista, XP and Windows 7, with only the latter proving to be a little problematic, but that was probably the 64-bit side of things.

I have attached a couple of images, one from the user interface and one showing some tiles exported to PNG.

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So, maybe send me a PM or post a request here and I will send the link/software to you. Once it has been tested a bit, I will post a link for anyone to download it if there's interest.

Cheers

Vatanen

[vatanen]

Well, sorry about that, seems like the images aren't working. Maybe something to do with my post count?

EDIT: Seems like the images can be viewed by clicking the attachment link when viewing the Computers thread.

[Salaam]

I'm only half certain as to what your program is about, but not sure it's something that would be of practical use. Perhaps something for fun. I'm sorry to say that I wouldn't want to experiment with it however. My computers play me up at the best of times and I wouldn't want to install something that would merit me getting clapped about my head by my partner should she end up losing files.

[vatanen]

I can see that there could be issues for the computer illiterate, but the program is runnable from a directory (no install needed) and there is no chance of losing any files through anything other than user error. To remove the program, delete the directory it came in, it affects no other program in any way, other than requiring the .Net framework to run, but that is installed on most Windows machines these days anyway.

I guess it is more of a fun, throwaway thing, much like the original, though I've seen mention of people using the magnetic poetry style to aid their creative thinking, hence the posting here. The application mimics the style of magnetic poetry, but allows you to select your own sets of words to use, and select how many words from that file, much like having selectable magnetic poetry sets. You can also set the colours for the tiles using words from that set, so you know which set they came from.

Well, thanks for the input, I hope I have allayed your fears a little and maybe explained things better than in my first post :)

To continue, do any poets out there use software to aid the their thinking/work? Or is it purely a case of writing things down and working on them that way?

[Salaam]

Thanks... and forgive my dubious approach. My household's been a victim of user error several times which usually results in me getting the blame. Anyway... I may give it a try. I've never heard of magnetic poetry, and I don't use any brainstorming type techniques when I'm writing. Sounds like it would be worth a try though. When I'm writing its a case of it either being there or not so I just write it down if I have the spark... whatever that may be.

[vatanen]

Thanks for that insight, as someone who only messes with words, I can see now the differences in your approach. Different people do different things. Simple enough really. So for you, it sounds like you get the feeling that it's there and then you write it, almost like Snufkin in the Moomins where he waits for the tune to come before he can complete it :)

I come from the old school of computers, I used to use an operating system called BeOS and I always loved the fact that you could run a program from the folder it's in and when you didn't need it anymore, simply remove the folder. No extra rubbish laying around on your system afterwards.

I'll upload the software and the manual to my webserver when I get home tonight, and post a link, so interested people can at least read the manual before deciding what to do, that way you can see if it's for you or not :)

Cheers

[vatanen]

Been a bit busy, but I uploaded the manual for those interested to have a look, still can't post URLs, so just change the "_" (underscores) to . (periods) and you'll be able to see it.

www_moominpappa_net/files/manual.html

The program can be obtained from:

www_moominpappa_net/files/Tiles_Beta_Release.zip

Please let me know if you have any problems and/or feedback. Be nice to see if this is worth developing again. I really like the idea of including a physics engine so the tiles would move each other around. I also remember that the version here has commented code that could export the tileset to HTML with separate images for the tiles, then using javascript and absolute positioning to place the tiles on the page with a predefined user offset. Can't remember why I commented it out, the example in the folder seemed to work fine. Well, something to include in a future version...

Cheers