Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Another mad January idea

I've decided to offer my services as a programmer for hire, specifically with the idea of working on legacy Visual Basic projects (VB5 and VB6, although I've also designed and written major projects in VB3, VB4 and VB Dos .. even QuickBasic 4.5)

I'm not after a job, but I am interested in exploring the idea of contract work. Full details on the link above.

What prompted this? A comment on Slashdot, a discussion on SFNovelists, and a desire to continue working from home.

I mean, here I sit with over 20 years experience, and it's mostly going to waste.

Simon Haynes is the author of the Hal Spacejock and Hal Junior series (Amazon / Smashwords / other formats)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Simon,
Look into eLance and other similar services if you want contract work. Very easy, and no worry about getting paid.
Having used YWriter since v.2, I for one don't think your years of experience have gone to waste. Now, if only it could be ported to Mac OS... ;) Thanks for all your hard work.

Anonymous said...

To be frank, I don't know where to comment or give you feedback on your ywriter 4 software. I just found this place the easiest...thus the unrelated comment to the post, but one related to the software.

First of all, thanks for the free software. I was looking honestly for something that would put the writing output into something that looked like book pages so I had an idea of how it would look visually. I didn't look hard & since your software was free, I decided to use it.

It wasn't intuitive at first. However, I got the hang of it after playing with it for about 30 mins. One function I'd HIGHLY recommend is an automatic save function like Word or at least the request to save your project before closing. I lost 3 huge scenes in my book because I didn't realize the stuff wasn't saved upon exit.

Also, if you could do the visual thing I was speaking of, it would be AMAZING!

You don't have enough time, but if you ever do, you may want to create one for writers like me who are writing non-fiction. I just adjusted scenes to mean sections in a book -- so this may not be a high priority for you.

Again, thanks for the software and keep up the good work!

Cheers,

Brandon
http://therealsouthkorea.wordpress.com

Simon Haynes said...

Brandon, yWriter does save on exit, and it also has a very comprehensive autobackup system. Just check in the Autobackups folder for all your work. (You can edit the autobackup setting through the scene editor)

Also in the editor, click 'view in yBook' to see how it would look in a real book. You need to install yBook first, naturally.