YourOtherMind’s ease of use and powerful organizational capacities make it useful for everyone:
- Track short story and novel submissions
- Visually arrange photos
- Use timelines
- Organize information into tables
- Brainstorming
- Note-taking
- Archive multimedia
- Image maps
- Reporting and data gathering
- Keep up to date on writing markets
Feature by Feature
StickIt Pages
StickIt pages allow images to be dragged onto the canvas, notes added, and links created to other YourOtherMind pages for a more visual approach to project brainstorming and organization. Also includes a flexible timeline tool.
Tutorial – StickIt. Basic StickIt features like drag/drop, adding notes, et cetera.
Tutorial – StickIt, Advanced. Advanced features, like timelines, for the StickIt Page type.
Submission tracking
This is a core feature for YourOtherMind. It lets you add stories and markets and keep track of where stories are submitted. Various fields exist to track the expenses, sales, and other data. In a soon to be released new version some graphing tools will be added to help visualize the writer’s efforts. (More Info…)
(Movie) Tutorial – Submission Tracking. This video demonstrates the process of submitting a story to a market.
Basic Features
YourOtherMind’s index facilitates grouping and locating your ideas simply and effectively using a folder structure.
(Movie) Tutorial – Index Basics. This video demonstrates how to use the most basic features of the index.
Main Interface – Adding Pages, Ratings & Keywords
YourOtherMind works under the premise that the user adds “notes” to a notebook that is divided into sections. Unlike a paper notebook these notes can be rated and flagged with keywords for later searches and brainstorming. (More Info)
(Movie) Tutorial – Adding Pages. Shows how to add a page, rate it and assign keywords to it.
There are quick ways to sort the index by keywords and subtypes
(Movie) Tutorial – Filtering. Easily filter by keywords and subtypes plus an introduction to queries.
Use pre-built queries to get the information you need quickly
(Movie) Tutorial – Using Queries. This example video shows how to get a list of all stories *ready* to be sent out to markets plus a couple other queries.
Easily edit a name or pagetype after the page is created
(Movie) Tutorial – Editing Pages. This video shows you how to edit a pagename or pagetype after the page has been created.
Index – Search
Use the index’s search to find those harder to locate old ideas, or to help with a brainstorming session.
(Movie) Tutorial – Searching. Video demonstrating how to use search.
Navigating your pages
There are several ways to move between the pages in your notebooks.
(Movie) Tutorial – Navigation. Video showing how to move between pages in your custom notebooks, including random page jumps and the history feature.
Options – Adding Notebooks
Notebooks and subsections can be added/modified to help adjust the folder structure you are using to store your ideas.
(Movie) Tutorial – Adding Notebooks. Video demonstrating how to add a notebook and subsection.
Bookmarks
Bookmarks can be used to organize a long note into smaller, sections.
Tutorial – Bookmarks.
Adding, viewing and jumping to bookmarks.
Reporting
A flexible reporting tool allows you to capture where submissions are going, their current status, how much money you are making. Includes custom report creation so you can build your own reports.
(Movie)
Tutorial – Using Reports.
This video demonstrates the core reports and how to create a custom report
Cover Letters
Easily generate and modify cover letters.
(Movie)
Tutorial – Using Cover Letters.
This video demonstrates how to create a cover letter and use it when submitting a story to a market.
Add-Ons
Small free utilities that expand YourOtherMind’s functionality. Download them from add-on page.
Customizing Lists
Add or remove items from virtually any list in YourOtherMind to fully customize it to your experience.
(Movie)
Tutorial – Customizing Lists.
Shows how to customize a list using YourOtherMind’s options
Portable, Safe, and Persistent Data
All files used and created by YourOtherMind are in the XML file format. This means that all data is basically a plain text file. See this page for more details on how you can easily extract YourOtherMind data.
Why does this matter?
In the Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas it is mentioned that there are three reasons to use plain text:
1. Insurance Against Obsolescence
2. Leverage
3. Easier Testing
And this is certainly true. Because of point #1, YourOtherMind’s data will always remain useable. And by always, I mean always. Point #2 refers to the ability of many many different types of editors being able to open a plain text file and manipulate it. Point #3 is of little importance to users, but from a developer point of view troubleshooting problems with the data is very easy because it is plain text.
Full Feature List
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