Robert J. Sawyer

Hugo and Nebula Award-Winning Science Fiction Writer

Archive for the 'Software' Category

vDosPlus: 21st Century DOS!

Saturday, September 24th, 2016

WordPerfect (Edward Mendelson), and the whole XyWrite mailing-list community to give us a wonderful, stable platform for running our old workhorse software under Windows XP through 10, both 32-bit and 64-bit. Up to today, I’ve run WordStar mostly under TameDOS, not vDos (or vDosPlus), and exclusively on 32-bit machines; my interest in vDos and vDosPlus […]

Chicago Manual of Style with less eye strain

Monday, March 9th, 2015

Having been quite pleased with my style sheet for the web interface for Evernote, I decided to do something about the glaring white background of The Chicago Manual of Style Online. You’ll need to install the free Stylish add-on for your browser, then install my style sheet, which you can get here. If you don’t […]

Evernote web with less eyestrain

Saturday, February 28th, 2015

I use various versions of

Happy Anniversary, SmartKey!

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

Today is the 20th anniversary file-stamp date of the DOS TSR keyboard-macro program I use: SmartKey 6.0g Advanced, created by Australia’s FBN Software — an absolutely amazing program that I rely on daily. (I use WordStar for DOS, which is great on its own, but the combination of it with SmartKey has let me customize […]

Free Microsoft-compatible office suite

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

A year ago, the fine folks at SoftMaker in Germany were giving away their terrific SoftMaker Office Suite 2006 for free; I blogged about it here. They’re repeating the offer — except this time it’s the newer SoftMaker Office Suite 2008 that’s free. It’s well worth grabbing — and SoftMaker makes a donation to charity […]

Wordnik

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Wordnik is a cool new free online dictionary site. Look up words here, and read the FAQ here for what makes it special. Visit The Robert J. Sawyer Web Siteand WakeWatchWonder.com

ZTreeWin 2.0

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

My favorite Windows file manager, ZTreeWin, has just been updated to version 2.0, and now supports Unicode filenames. The latest version works with NT, 2000, XP, and Vista, and will work with Windows 7 when it’s out. Get it here. I love, love, love this program. The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site

Q10: cool little clean-screen text processor

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

Over on my Facebook page, Kelly John Rose recommended Q10, a nifty little full-screen text processor that’s totally free. Install, press F1 for help. Gives you a clean, empty monitor to write with (suppresses all the usual Windows gewgaws). Download the second version — the one with the spell checker (I missed seeing it the […]

Software for writers

Saturday, February 14th, 2009

Way back in 1985, I got a copy of the CP/M version of Grammatik for my Osborne 1 computer. Grammatik scanned documents for obvious grammatical errors (which I almost never made), homonym confusion (“weight” instead of “wait”), wordiness, and so on. For a year or two, I ran it on every article I wrote (back […]