Several people have made comments comparing the feature set of My Writing Nook to Word or Google Docs. They ask "why can't I just use Google Docs?" My answer to them is - you can. If Google Docs works for you, great! Personally, I found Google Docs to be too much tool for the job I wanted to do - something akin to using a pile-driver to nail two boards together. Occam's Razor - the simplest answer is usually the best.
The longer I have been in the software business, the more I have come to appreciate simplicity in design. Just because an application has more features doesn't mean it's better - in fact, oftentimes the opposite is true. More features means more code, and code that is often more complicated. This makes the code harder to understand and maintain, leading to more bugs.
Let's look at things from the user's perspective. The user wants software that allows them to do their work easily and efficiently - that's their goal. They aren't necessarily interested in having all the bells and whistles - only the ones that are most useful for task at hand. Bells and whistles are for the marketing department, not the user. The user only wants to achieve their goal.
The goal for writers is to write. Any feature that does not help the writer toward that goal is an unnecessary feature, in my opinion. If an application forces the writer to wade through countless toolbars or menus to find the feature that they want, it is not helping them achieve their goal efficiently.
"I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal
For the users of My Writing Nook, the goal is stated right there on the home page - Write simply anywhere. I kept that goal in mind as I decided which features to provide and (more importantly) which features to eliminate.
The feature set for My Writing Nook is intentionally small. It contains only those features that allow a writer to write, simply, from anywhere. Anything else is superfluous.
To those people that still wish to compare MWN to Google Docs or Word, I offer the following hypothetical.
An illustrative tale of two tools
The scenario: A man is camping. He catches a fish and would like to clean it and cook it for his dinner. Let's follow him down two hypothetical paths:
Path 1: The man has a simple hunting knife.
1. He uses the knife to clean the fish, then cooks his dinner. Yum!
Path 2: The man has a swiss army knife.
1. He takes the knife out of his pocket and is immediately confronted with a decision - which of the blades to use.
2. He fumbles around for a bit, perhaps opening one or two blades to determine their applicability to the problem at hand.
3. Ooh! There's a magnifying glass here. He didn't realize that before, and spends a few minutes playing with it.
4. Getting back to the task at hand, he picks a blade and opens it. He starts to clean the fish.
5. While he's cleaning the fish, he wonders if perhaps another blade would be even better at cleaning the fish.
6. He cleans the blade he was using, closes it, and opens a different blade to try.
7. Finally, the fish is clean. Unfortunately, it's now too dark out to see what he's doing, and he trips over a rock, dropping the fish in the dirt.
8. The man goes to bed hungry.
Sometimes the lack of features is a feature in itself.
