Writer's Café Portable

Writer's Café Portable is a software application designed to help fiction writers organize their ideas using a wide variety of features, such as Notebook, Journal, Scrapbook, Pinboard and StoryLines. All of the aforementioned tools allow them to create and structure the plots of a novel or screenplay.

This is the portable counterpart of Writer's Café, which makes it an ideal candidate for being stored on USB flash drives and carried it with you all the time.

The program’s GUI may look a bit intimidating at a first glance because it provides many options that you can work with for perfecting your writing skills. A help manual is available for elucidating any questions that you may have regarding the app’s settings. Plus, you can have a look at the built-in book which provides insightful writing tips.

You can check out a Dashboard that offers quick access to a set of utilities, which can be opened with a double-click, shows the current time, and embeds a Start button for helping you activate a thorough pack of settings.

You are allowed to populate the Dashboard with new executable files, sticky notes, image notes, and slideshows where multiple photos are displayed.

The Notebook gives you the possibility to easily store ideas, jump to the next or previous page, check out the total number of words included in the current document, and view the text data in your web browser.

The Journal looks pretty much the same as the Notebook and allows you to store ideas to a certain date from the built-in calendar. You can make use of preset writing prompts (e.g. obstacle, goal, character and setting) which can be introduced in the Journal or Notebook.

Writer's Café Portable lets you make use of a scrapbook where you can add text, images, web links, references to documents or programs from your computer, and random ideas which can be displayed with the aid of a collage.

What’s more, you can access a set of quotations related to writing, browse throughout the books embedded in the database using a bookshelf, as well as generate names for your characters.

The StoryLines panel can be used for planning each plot of your story on a separate line. Lines may have multiple cards that describe the events. You can apply the drag-and-drop support for arranging the cards in the preferred order in the working environment.

Writer's Café Portable generates an outline of the entire story and allows you to add personal notes, create characters, and manage locations. Plus, you can view a report with the linear version of the story and print or export it to HTML, TXT, ODT, HTB or CHM file format.

Writer's Café Portable gives you the possibility to back up the information so you can easily restore it in case something goes wrong, navigate on the Internet using the built-in web browser, activate the full screen mode, add custom books to the database, and enable a spell checker.

Writer's Café Portable is of great help in case you intend to write fiction books and need to outline the structure of your stories. You need to invest some extra time into discovering the tool’s features, but the final result is rewarding.