WinterFest goes for just a few more days, and it’s an effort that I’m proud to have sponsoring BrettTerpstra.com this week. The idea of artisanal software is one that we really need, so be sure to check out the available titles!

WINTERFEST, which wraps up in the next few days, brings together a bunch of great Macintosh software craftspeople to offer terrific prices on terrific hand-crafted software, direct from the designer. No gimmicks, no bundles: just 25% off the software you need for the work you need to do.

Tinderbox designer Mark Bernstein writes:

“It’s the season for new projects and fresh ideas. A few days a go, a note shows up in my inbox, asking whether an old lecture I have might be the foundation for some sort of book. Last weekend, I found myself with a few spare hours and wondered, ‘what might that little book look like?’”

“I sketched a fast outline in Tinderbox. I’d written a few blog posts on the topic, posts that I thought might be the skeleton of a first chapter, so I copied them from the Web and pasted them into Tinderbox. Next, I knew the book proposal would need to demonstrate that sources existed for the book and that I knew the field well enough that I could write it. So, I made a container for References and started rooting around in my repositories for relevant books. I dragged things from Bookends and DEVONthink and soon I had a nice list of nineteen notable books (including at least one from Take Control). A quick trip through my online wish lists and reading backlog turned up an additional seven books I’d need to read right away.”

“Next, I wanted to massage the writing of those weblog posts, to meld them, rearrange them, and let them grow a bit in Scrivener, a terrific tool specifically designed for this sort of structural edit (and one that works well with Tinderbox). Then, just to convince myself that this might actually be a book, I ran up a quick HTML export, copied the text into Nisus Writer Pro, applied some book formatting using the style drawer, and ran off a copy. Before the football game was well underway, I had a sketch of an outline, an initial bibliography, a reading list, and a rough cut at a sample chapter.”

These are great tools that work together. And for a few days more, you can get the tools you need at a great price.