To blame your tools, use some, pt1

I thought I'd feature some useful free apps on this blog, for those who are interested. I apologise for the fact that most of these are Mac applications. There may well be Windows equivalents, or straight Windows versions of the same package, but my posts will be about the Mac versions.

I'm going to start with a program called VoodooPad. Those of you who are interested in the postential of multilinear texts might do worse than try this out.

It's a simple application, aimed at those who need a functional way to organise projects. It is in fact extremely useful for this, since projects - to coin an awful corporate term - often rely on hubs and spokes to be manageable. Interrelated items of a project can link to each other, and the user can navigate even complex project structures with hypertextual point-and-click ease.

Since VoodooPad essentially creates HTML pages as you go, this could be viewed as an ultra-stripped-down web site editor. As such, it offers potential use as a hypertext poetry/narrative tool which is both functional and simple. Although it is hardly a bells and whistles multimedia wizard, it nonetheless offers beginner programmers with an interest in writing hypertexts the opportunity to experiment with such a concept, and perhaps go further if it whets your appetite. Failing that, VoodooPad is really useful for organising any projects you might have on the go.

VoodooPad Lite is free, and does plenty. It can be downloaded here, and the full version can also be found on the site if you wish to purchase it.

Related:

Jeff Parker, A Poetics of the Link
http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr12/park/park.htm

NVU - free HTML editor for more advanced use - THIS IS CROSS PLATFORM! (Mac, Linux, Windows)