How to write your novel with open source application
Feccomandi, Andrea
Introduction of bibisco, a novel-writing application created with love by booklovers to inspire writers to create “beautiful” work. bibisco is an open source application for writing novels hosted on github. bibisco is available for windows, linux and mac and you can download it at. With bibisco you can organize chapters and scenes, manage revisions, exportnovel in pdf or rtf, and write with a fully featured text editor. You can create a novel structure, define premise, fabula, plots and settings: geographic, temporal and social context. bibisco provides you various statistics, such as who appears in which scenes,and where the scenes are located, which plots are used in which scenes, andhow many words each chapter has. And, most of all, with bibisco you can know everything about your characters,interviewing them. Actually, bibisco has 40k downloads, is translated in 8 languages and is oneof the 7 cool little open source projects that stood out in 2016 in theyearbook of opensource.
 I'm not sure if it works with MacBook, haven't tried it yet. I'm not sure if it works. No, I don't think it works. OK. OK. And now it's not. OK. Can you please take off the sign there now? I'll introduce you and then we can get started. OK. So welcome all. Thank you for saying the last lightning talk of the day. We have Andrea Fakermandi. OK. Talking to us. Please give him a big round of applause. And Florentius. OK. Hi, everybody. I'm Andrea Fakermandi. And let's talk about how to write a novel using an open source software, Introduction to Bibisco. The story of Bibisco started in 1997 when Bjork publisher third album, Homogenic, the track number four was the beautiful Bacchellorette. At that time I was 22 years old and I used to watch the video of the song on the new Bourne MTV Italy. The video features Bjork as a Bacchellorette, a young woman who finds a book buried in her garden that begins to write itself. She takes the book to a publishing house and the book becomes so popular that everyone in the city start reading it. Ever since I was a child I've loved reading, but the video impressed me so much that an urgency to write came over me. In that period I spent so many nights in front of my text editor, this one writing one word after another following the idea of the story I had in my mind. But every time I read what I'd written I felt a deep disappointment. I didn't understand why, but it didn't work. So after several attempts I gave up and dedicated myself to finishing my study of computer engineering to reading and to being a 20 year old guy. But many years later I happened to watch the video again on YouTube and that urgency to write came back over me. But I decided to study a different approach. So I started to study dramaturgy and everything became clearer and I learned some important lessons. Lesson number one, the idea of the novel is to write guided only by the sacred fire of inspiration is quite naive. Lesson number two, the most important, the conflict of each character is the driving force of every novel. But what is exactly a conflict? A conflict is a desire to be realized is a reaction to an external situation. It is a linear need. Conflict leads a character to action and to change the condition of things. So a novel is the story of a change in the condition of things and of the evolution of characters during this process. There is no novel without conflict. That's it. So it's all about characters and novels only work if their characters are believable. Charters that are completely good or completely evil are stereotypes and for this are not believable. Charters are believable when you can understand the complexity of their human nature, their qualities, their defects, their contradictions. So how can create a believable character? The only way is to know everything about them, behavior, physical aspects, sociology, psychology, all their life before the novel begins. With these lessons learned, I decided to get to know my characters through a long series of questions such as an interview. So I prepared a character sheet on a simple text document, like this. When I started to fill in the form, the characters gradually took shape, became real. It was wonderful because they were telling me their stories and I just had to listen and write down what they said. When I completed filling the forms, I was ready to write the first scene of my novel, but soon I found myself lost in a mountain of text document files. I tried to organize everything in folders on my notebook, but wasn't enough. What I really needed was a novel development environment, a unique program in which they find the architectural elements of the novel to know my characters, to write my themes with a fully featured text editor. I looked for a software like this, but I couldn't find it. So I decided to make it myself because I thought I'm a developer. I have the superpower of creating things. I soon realized that the project was complex and ambitious, but at the same time was extremely exciting because it was my project. And I felt a deep sense of well-being and fulfillment in seeing my literary soul and my computer soul, which I have always considered as opposed to merging in the construction of something new. I used to work at the project in the free time I had after my family and my professional activities, and my mantra becomes what have you done today for Bbisco? After two years of work, I released Bbisco 1.0 in the April 2014, a licensed Bbisco under the GPL 2.0. The project was well received, and the help of the early adopter was crucial. They helped me to find bugs. They suggested me new features. They translated Bbisco in their own languages. They supported the project with post-send articles. They supported me with beautiful messages I had never received as a computer consultant. And this is the magic of the open source community where people from all over the world, without knowing each other, work together to build something beautiful for the benefit of all. OK, let's have a brief look at the application. Bbisco is divided into sections, each one accessible from the main menu bar. In the project section, there are some useful tips of the project. In the architecture section, you can define the architectural elements of the novel. There is the premise that probably contains the entire architectural sequence. Then we have the settings, the description of place, time, and social context where the story is developed. Then we have the narrative strands, each one connected to the development of one specific conflict. Every card has its status flag to indicate the status of the work. By default, it is red to do, but you can easily change it to green or green for complete. You can define your architectural elements using the Bbisco text editor. It is a fully featured text editor with all the usual commands for bold, italic, underline, and for the other formatting needs. There are also specific commands and shortcuts for the dialogue symbols. On the bottom right, you have a running word and character count. On the bottom left, you can change the status flag. This is the character section. The character section is divided into main character and the secondary characters. A main character has a conflict, a driving force of the plot, while a secondary character does not have a conflict, but is useful for the story development. Let's go inside a main character's detail. Here, you can find all the cards that you need to know everything about your character. Every card has its status flag, and we also have a card for the attachment of the images of your character. Each card has a series of questions that let you know your character through an interview. If you don't like an interview mode, you can describe a particular aspect of your character using a free text mode. In the location section, you can describe the location of your novel, and you can attach images at every location. And this is the character section. The character section contains the character, of course, of the novel. And every character has its card with its status flag and its count badge. And you can use drag and drop to reorganize the character inside the novel. Let's go inside a chapter detail view. Here, we can find a card to indicate the main purpose of the chapter and a card for the notes. Then, you can create the chapter by creating the individual scenes. Every scene has its card with the status flag and word count badge. You can use drag and drop to reorganize the scene inside your chapter. BBSCO saves all the revision of your scene that you can always view or restore a previous version. When you write your scene, you can always view the architectural elements of the novel, characters, location, and chapters we have already written in a box next to the text editor. It was extremely useful because it's one program, the novel development environment. You can also tag the scene with the name of characters, point of view, location, time, and narrative strengths. If you tag properly the scene, you can use this section. It was very interesting because the analysis section show you where and how often characters, location, point of view, narrative strengths show up in your story and in exactly what chapter, all in a visual way. For example, here you can see the character distribution in the chapters of your novel. And here you can see the chapter length graph. Finally, in the export section, it's possible to export the novel in PDF, RTF, or as archive. Some numbers. At the moment, BBSCO has more than 40,000 downloads and is translated in eight languages. BBSCO is one of the seven cool little open source projects that stood out in 2016 in the e-book of opensource.com. Let's get one more technical. The actual version of BBSCO is the 1.5. BBSCO 1.x is a Java desktop application that is available on Linux, Mac, Windows. It's written with Eclipse RCP framework, but the user interface is written in HTML5 and JavaScript. For this reason, the next release of BBSCO 2.0 will be a fully HTML5 and JavaScript application. And I'll use the electron framework by GitHub to write the next release. Here there are some references to get in touch with the project. We have a website. We have a blog. We have a mail of the project. Personal mail. We have a Facebook page. We have a Twitter page. And of course, we have our GitHub repository. About me, I'm Andrafi Comandi. I'm 41 years old. I'm from Bologna, the north of Italy. And I'm a family man. And I love my beautiful wife. I have my two kids. I'm a passionate software engineer. And I'm a city owner of software house in Bologna. A lot of books, music, movies, TV series, basketball, and Lego. I have not yet written my novel. But, but, if it's true that a person is happy when he's able to fully develop his potential, I can say with certainty that BBSCO made me an happy person. That's all. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Andrea. I think we have some time for questions. So, can you take us? I see a hand over there. One second, and I'll bring the microphone over to you. Thanks. Okay. So, how can you use all your cards, like you described them in your BDF or something, as a graph, you know, and use like, I don't know, something like BDD, programming, you know, and auto generate, like, words, or using some adjectives, some, I don't know, some stuff about the characters and auto generate, like chapters or relationships between the characters and so on. Are you asking me about the relation of the characters? Yeah, I know it's possible, but have you ever thought of it and with your contributors, like? But at the moment, you can write it in the sheet or in the cards of the characters, but I'm thinking about, to set a mind map to map the character relation in the next release of the Bisco. Okay, now. Hi. Do you know of any success stories in using your software? Like, with actual books published. Okay. We have just, in the start of this year, we have started a blog to collect some success story and we are waiting for the success story of our users to publish and spread in the world. So, any other questions? See you at the end. Can I raise it over there? Hi. I tried to run Bisco on Linux distribution with OpenGDK and it didn't work because it seems that the Bisco Linux version ships with the Oracle Java implementation. Is it considered a bug? Because you mentioned open source a lot. Okay. I have two, if you open an issue on a GitHub, you can work on it, maybe. But it's, in the next version of Bisco, it's all full JavaScript HTML5 and so there is no JRR problems. Okay. So, I think we have time for one last question. If there are any, take us. So, in the project, have you ever received like funding or tried to get funding? Get found? At the moment, no. At the moment, no. We are thinking about it, but we are... So, what format do you use for saving the data in Bisco? Okay. At the moment, you are using a local database, H2 database is a local database in Java, but in the next release, 2.0, I think about using a simple JSON file to store everything. Will there be a hosted version? Hosted version in... In 2.0? I don't understand the question. I'm sorry. Will you post a version that everybody can access if it's online instead of downloading? Okay. Okay. I think about it, but I have to... It's difficult for me at the moment to have an hosting that do that. Okay. So, I prefer the people download on their machine. Confidentiality, because maybe some people they don't want to... Yes. Yes. So, this aspect... So, I'm sorry that's all the time we have. Andrea, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.
 I'm not sure if it works with MacBook, haven't tried it yet.  I'm not sure if it works.  No, I don't think it works.  OK.  OK.  And now it's not.  OK.  Can you please take off the sign there now?  I'll introduce you and then we can get started.  OK.  So welcome all.  Thank you for saying the last lightning talk of the day.  We have Andrea Fakermandi.  OK.  Talking to us.  Please give him a big round of applause.  And Florentius.  OK.  Hi, everybody.  I'm Andrea Fakermandi.  And let's talk about how to write a novel using an open source  software, Introduction to Bibisco.  The story of Bibisco started in 1997 when Bjork  publisher third album, Homogenic, the track number four  was the beautiful Bacchellorette.  At that time I was 22 years old and I used to watch the video  of the song on the new Bourne MTV Italy.  The video features Bjork as a Bacchellorette, a young woman  who finds a book buried in her garden that begins to write  itself.  She takes the book to a publishing house and the book becomes  so popular that everyone in the city start reading it.  Ever since I was a child I've loved reading, but the video  impressed me so much that an urgency to write came over me.  In that period I spent so many nights in front of my text  editor, this one writing one word after another following  the idea of the story I had in my mind.  But every time I read what I'd written I felt a deep  disappointment.  I didn't understand why, but it didn't work.  So after several attempts I gave up and dedicated myself to  finishing my study of computer engineering to reading and to  being a 20 year old guy.  But many years later I happened to watch the video again on  YouTube and that urgency to write came back over me.  But I decided to study a different approach.  So I started to study dramaturgy and everything became  clearer and I learned some important lessons.  Lesson number one, the idea of the novel is to write guided  only by the sacred fire of inspiration is quite naive.  Lesson number two, the most important, the conflict of each  character is the driving force of every novel.  But what is exactly a conflict?  A conflict is a desire to be realized is a reaction to an  external situation.  It is a linear need.  Conflict leads a character to action and to change the  condition of things.  So a novel is the story of a change in the condition of  things and of the evolution of characters during this  process.  There is no novel without conflict.  That's it.  So it's all about characters and novels only work if their  characters are believable.  Charters that are completely good or completely evil are  stereotypes and for this are not believable.  Charters are believable when you can understand the complexity  of their human nature, their qualities, their defects,  their contradictions.  So how can create a believable character?  The only way is to know everything about them, behavior,  physical aspects, sociology, psychology, all their life before  the novel begins.  With these lessons learned, I decided to get to know my  characters through a long series of questions such as an  interview.  So I prepared a character sheet on a simple text document,  like this.  When I started to fill in the form, the characters gradually  took shape, became real.  It was wonderful because they were telling me their stories  and I just had to listen and write down what they said.  When I completed filling the forms, I was ready to write the  first scene of my novel, but soon I found myself lost in a  mountain of text document files.  I tried to organize everything in folders on my notebook,  but wasn't enough.  What I really needed was a novel development environment,  a unique program in which they find the architectural elements  of the novel to know my characters, to write my themes  with a fully featured text editor.  I looked for a software like this, but I couldn't find it.  So I decided to make it myself because I thought I'm a developer.  I have the superpower of creating things.  I soon realized that the project was complex and ambitious,  but at the same time was extremely exciting because it was  my project.  And I felt a deep sense of well-being and fulfillment in  seeing my literary soul and my computer soul,  which I have always considered as opposed to merging in the  construction of something new.  I used to work at the project in the free time I had after my  family and my professional activities, and my mantra becomes  what have you done today for Bbisco?  After two years of work, I released Bbisco 1.0 in the  April 2014, a licensed Bbisco under the GPL 2.0.  The project was well received, and the help of the early  adopter was crucial.  They helped me to find bugs.  They suggested me new features.  They translated Bbisco in their own languages.  They supported the project with post-send articles.  They supported me with beautiful messages I had never  received as a computer consultant.  And this is the magic of the open source community where  people from all over the world, without knowing each other,  work together to build something beautiful for the  benefit of all.  OK, let's have a brief look at the application.  Bbisco is divided into sections, each one accessible from  the main menu bar.  In the project section, there are some useful tips of  the  project.  In the architecture section, you can define the  architectural elements of the novel.  There is the premise that probably contains the entire  architectural sequence.  Then we have the settings, the description of place, time,  and social context where the story is developed.  Then we have the narrative strands, each one connected to  the development of one specific conflict.  Every card has its status flag to indicate the status of the  work.  By default, it is red to do, but you can easily change it to  green or green for complete.  You can define your architectural elements using the  Bbisco text editor.  It is a fully featured text editor with all the usual  commands for bold, italic, underline, and for the other  formatting needs.  There are also specific commands and shortcuts for the  dialogue symbols.  On the bottom right, you have a running word and character  count.  On the bottom left, you can change the status flag.  This is the character section.  The character section is divided into main character and  the secondary characters.  A main character has a conflict, a driving force of the  plot, while a secondary character does not have a  conflict, but is useful for the story development.  Let's go inside a main character's detail.  Here, you can find all the cards that you need to know  everything about your character.  Every card has its status flag, and we also have a card for  the attachment of the images of your character.  Each card has a series of questions that let you know  your character through an interview.  If you don't like an interview mode, you can describe a  particular aspect of your character using a free text  mode.  In the location section, you can describe the location of  your novel, and you can attach images at every location.  And this is the character section.  The character section contains the character, of course, of  the novel.  And every character has its card with its status flag and  its count badge.  And you can use drag and drop to reorganize the character  inside the novel.  Let's go inside a chapter detail view.  Here, we can find a card to indicate the main purpose of  the chapter and a card for the notes.  Then, you can create the chapter by creating the  individual scenes.  Every scene has its card with the status flag and word  count badge.  You can use drag and drop to reorganize the scene inside  your chapter.  BBSCO saves all the revision of your scene that you can  always view or restore a previous version.  When you write your scene, you can always view the  architectural elements of the novel, characters, location,  and chapters we have already written in a box next to the  text editor.  It was extremely useful because it's one program, the  novel development environment.  You can also tag the scene with the name of characters,  point of view, location, time, and narrative strengths.  If you tag properly the scene, you can use this section.  It was very interesting because the analysis section  show you where and how often characters, location, point of  view, narrative strengths show up in your story and in  exactly what chapter, all in a visual way.  For example, here you can see the character distribution  in the chapters of your novel.  And here you can see the chapter length graph.  Finally, in the export section, it's possible to export the  novel in PDF, RTF, or as archive.  Some numbers.  At the moment, BBSCO has more than 40,000 downloads and is  translated in eight languages.  BBSCO is one of the seven cool little open source projects  that stood out in 2016 in the e-book of opensource.com.  Let's get one more technical.  The actual version of BBSCO is the 1.5.  BBSCO 1.x is a Java desktop application that is available  on Linux, Mac, Windows.  It's written with Eclipse RCP framework, but the user  interface is written in HTML5 and JavaScript.  For this reason, the next release of BBSCO 2.0 will be a  fully HTML5 and JavaScript application.  And I'll use the electron framework by GitHub to write  the next release.  Here there are some references to get in touch with the  project.  We have a website.  We have a blog.  We have a mail of the project.  Personal mail.  We have a Facebook page.  We have a Twitter page.  And of course, we have our GitHub repository.  About me, I'm Andrafi Comandi.  I'm 41 years old.  I'm from Bologna, the north of Italy.  And I'm a family man.  And I love my beautiful wife.  I have my two kids.  I'm a passionate software engineer.  And I'm a city owner of software house in Bologna.  A lot of books, music, movies, TV series,  basketball, and Lego.  I have not yet written my novel.  But, but, if it's true that a person is happy when he's  able to fully develop his potential,  I can say with certainty that BBSCO made me an happy  person.  That's all.  Thank you very much.  Thank you very much.  Thank you very much, Andrea.  I think we have some time for questions.  So, can you take us?  I see a hand over there.  One second, and I'll bring the microphone over to you.  Thanks.  Okay.  So, how can you use all your cards,  like you described them in your BDF or something,  as a graph, you know, and use like,  I don't know, something like BDD, programming, you know,  and auto generate, like, words, or using some adjectives,  some, I don't know, some stuff about the characters  and auto generate, like chapters or relationships  between the characters and so on.  Are you asking me about the relation of the characters?  Yeah, I know it's possible, but have you ever thought of it  and with your contributors, like?  But at the moment, you can write it in the sheet or in the  cards of the characters, but I'm thinking about,  to set a mind map to map the character relation  in the next release of the Bisco.  Okay, now.  Hi.  Do you know of any success stories in using your software?  Like, with actual books published.  Okay.  We have just, in the start of this year,  we have started a blog to collect some success story  and we are waiting for the success story of our users  to publish and spread in the world.  So, any other questions?  See you at the end.  Can I raise it over there?  Hi.  I tried to run Bisco on Linux distribution with OpenGDK  and it didn't work because it seems that the Bisco Linux  version ships with the Oracle Java implementation.  Is it considered a bug?  Because you mentioned open source a lot.  Okay.  I have two, if you open an issue on a GitHub,  you can work on it, maybe.  But it's, in the next version of Bisco,  it's all full JavaScript HTML5  and so there is no JRR problems.  Okay.  So, I think we have time for one last question.  If there are any, take us.  So, in the project, have you ever received like funding  or tried to get funding?  Get found?  At the moment, no.  At the moment, no.  We are thinking about it, but we are...  So, what format do you use for saving the data in Bisco?  Okay.  At the moment, you are using a local database,  H2 database is a local database in Java,  but in the next release, 2.0,  I think about using a simple JSON file to store everything.  Will there be a hosted version?  Hosted version in...  In 2.0?  I don't understand the question.  I'm sorry.  Will you post a version that everybody can access if it's online  instead of downloading?  Okay.  Okay.  I think about it, but I have to...  It's difficult for me at the moment to have an hosting that do that.  Okay.  So, I prefer the people download on their machine.  Confidentiality, because maybe some people they don't want to...  Yes.  Yes.  So, this aspect...  So, I'm sorry that's all the time we have.  Andrea, thank you very much.  Thank you.  Thank you.
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I'm not sure if it works with MacBook, haven't tried it yet. I'm not sure if it works. No, I don't think it works. OK. OK. And now it's not. OK. Can you please take off the sign there now? I'll introduce you and then we can get started. OK. So welcome all. Thank you for saying the last lightning talk of the day. We have Andrea Fakermandi. OK. Talking to us. Please give him a big round of applause. And Florentius. OK. Hi, everybody. I'm Andrea Fakermandi. And let's talk about how to write a novel using an open source software, Introduction to Bibisco. The story of Bibisco started in 1997 when Bjork publisher third album, Homogenic, the track number four was the beautiful Bacchellorette. At that time I was 22 years old and I used to watch the video of the song on the new Bourne MTV Italy. The video features Bjork as a Bacchellorette, a young woman who finds a book buried in her garden that begins to write itself. She takes the book to a publishing house and the book becomes so popular that everyone in the city start reading it. Ever since I was a child I've loved reading, but the video impressed me so much that an urgency to write came over me. In that period I spent so many nights in front of my text editor, this one writing one word after another following the idea of the story I had in my mind. But every time I read what I'd written I felt a deep disappointment. I didn't understand why, but it didn't work. So after several attempts I gave up and dedicated myself to finishing my study of computer engineering to reading and to being a 20 year old guy. But many years later I happened to watch the video again on YouTube and that urgency to write came back over me. But I decided to study a different approach. So I started to study dramaturgy and everything became clearer and I learned some important lessons. Lesson number one, the idea of the novel is to write guided only by the sacred fire of inspiration is quite naive. Lesson number two, the most important, the conflict of each character is the driving force of every novel. But what is exactly a conflict? A conflict is a desire to be realized is a reaction to an external situation. It is a linear need. Conflict leads a character to action and to change the condition of things. So a novel is the story of a change in the condition of things and of the evolution of characters during this process. There is no novel without conflict. That's it. So it's all about characters and novels only work if their characters are believable. Charters that are completely good or completely evil are stereotypes and for this are not believable. Charters are believable when you can understand the complexity of their human nature, their qualities, their defects, their contradictions. So how can create a believable character? The only way is to know everything about them, behavior, physical aspects, sociology, psychology, all their life before the novel begins. With these lessons learned, I decided to get to know my characters through a long series of questions such as an interview. So I prepared a character sheet on a simple text document, like this. When I started to fill in the form, the characters gradually took shape, became real. It was wonderful because they were telling me their stories and I just had to listen and write down what they said. When I completed filling the forms, I was ready to write the first scene of my novel, but soon I found myself lost in a mountain of text document files. I tried to organize everything in folders on my notebook, but wasn't enough. What I really needed was a novel development environment, a unique program in which they find the architectural elements of the novel to know my characters, to write my themes with a fully featured text editor. I looked for a software like this, but I couldn't find it. So I decided to make it myself because I thought I'm a developer. I have the superpower of creating things. I soon realized that the project was complex and ambitious, but at the same time was extremely exciting because it was my project. And I felt a deep sense of well-being and fulfillment in seeing my literary soul and my computer soul, which I have always considered as opposed to merging in the construction of something new. I used to work at the project in the free time I had after my family and my professional activities, and my mantra becomes what have you done today for Bbisco? After two years of work, I released Bbisco 1.0 in the April 2014, a licensed Bbisco under the GPL 2.0. The project was well received, and the help of the early adopter was crucial. They helped me to find bugs. They suggested me new features. They translated Bbisco in their own languages. They supported the project with post-send articles. They supported me with beautiful messages I had never received as a computer consultant. And this is the magic of the open source community where people from all over the world, without knowing each other, work together to build something beautiful for the benefit of all. OK, let's have a brief look at the application. Bbisco is divided into sections, each one accessible from the main menu bar. In the project section, there are some useful tips of the project. In the architecture section, you can define the architectural elements of the novel. There is the premise that probably contains the entire architectural sequence. Then we have the settings, the description of place, time, and social context where the story is developed. Then we have the narrative strands, each one connected to the development of one specific conflict. Every card has its status flag to indicate the status of the work. By default, it is red to do, but you can easily change it to green or green for complete. You can define your architectural elements using the Bbisco text editor. It is a fully featured text editor with all the usual commands for bold, italic, underline, and for the other formatting needs. There are also specific commands and shortcuts for the dialogue symbols. On the bottom right, you have a running word and character count. On the bottom left, you can change the status flag. This is the character section. The character section is divided into main character and the secondary characters. A main character has a conflict, a driving force of the plot, while a secondary character does not have a conflict, but is useful for the story development. Let's go inside a main character's detail. Here, you can find all the cards that you need to know everything about your character. Every card has its status flag, and we also have a card for the attachment of the images of your character. Each card has a series of questions that let you know your character through an interview. If you don't like an interview mode, you can describe a particular aspect of your character using a free text mode. In the location section, you can describe the location of your novel, and you can attach images at every location. And this is the character section. The character section contains the character, of course, of the novel. And every character has its card with its status flag and its count badge. And you can use drag and drop to reorganize the character inside the novel. Let's go inside a chapter detail view. Here, we can find a card to indicate the main purpose of the chapter and a card for the notes. Then, you can create the chapter by creating the individual scenes. Every scene has its card with the status flag and word count badge. You can use drag and drop to reorganize the scene inside your chapter. BBSCO saves all the revision of your scene that you can always view or restore a previous version. When you write your scene, you can always view the architectural elements of the novel, characters, location, and chapters we have already written in a box next to the text editor. It was extremely useful because it's one program, the novel development environment. You can also tag the scene with the name of characters, point of view, location, time, and narrative strengths. If you tag properly the scene, you can use this section. It was very interesting because the analysis section show you where and how often characters, location, point of view, narrative strengths show up in your story and in exactly what chapter, all in a visual way. For example, here you can see the character distribution in the chapters of your novel. And here you can see the chapter length graph. Finally, in the export section, it's possible to export the novel in PDF, RTF, or as archive. Some numbers. At the moment, BBSCO has more than 40,000 downloads and is translated in eight languages. BBSCO is one of the seven cool little open source projects that stood out in 2016 in the e-book of opensource.com. Let's get one more technical. The actual version of BBSCO is the 1.5. BBSCO 1.x is a Java desktop application that is available on Linux, Mac, Windows. It's written with Eclipse RCP framework, but the user interface is written in HTML5 and JavaScript. For this reason, the next release of BBSCO 2.0 will be a fully HTML5 and JavaScript application. And I'll use the electron framework by GitHub to write the next release. Here there are some references to get in touch with the project. We have a website. We have a blog. We have a mail of the project. Personal mail. We have a Facebook page. We have a Twitter page. And of course, we have our GitHub repository. About me, I'm Andrafi Comandi. I'm 41 years old. I'm from Bologna, the north of Italy. And I'm a family man. And I love my beautiful wife. I have my two kids. I'm a passionate software engineer. And I'm a city owner of software house in Bologna. A lot of books, music, movies, TV series, basketball, and Lego. I have not yet written my novel. But, but, if it's true that a person is happy when he's able to fully develop his potential, I can say with certainty that BBSCO made me an happy person. That's all. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Andrea. I think we have some time for questions. So, can you take us? I see a hand over there. One second, and I'll bring the microphone over to you. Thanks. Okay. So, how can you use all your cards, like you described them in your BDF or something, as a graph, you know, and use like, I don't know, something like BDD, programming, you know, and auto generate, like, words, or using some adjectives, some, I don't know, some stuff about the characters and auto generate, like chapters or relationships between the characters and so on. Are you asking me about the relation of the characters? Yeah, I know it's possible, but have you ever thought of it and with your contributors, like? But at the moment, you can write it in the sheet or in the cards of the characters, but I'm thinking about, to set a mind map to map the character relation in the next release of the Bisco. Okay, now. Hi. Do you know of any success stories in using your software? Like, with actual books published. Okay. We have just, in the start of this year, we have started a blog to collect some success story and we are waiting for the success story of our users to publish and spread in the world. So, any other questions? See you at the end. Can I raise it over there? Hi. I tried to run Bisco on Linux distribution with OpenGDK and it didn't work because it seems that the Bisco Linux version ships with the Oracle Java implementation. Is it considered a bug? Because you mentioned open source a lot. Okay. I have two, if you open an issue on a GitHub, you can work on it, maybe. But it's, in the next version of Bisco, it's all full JavaScript HTML5 and so there is no JRR problems. Okay. So, I think we have time for one last question. If there are any, take us. So, in the project, have you ever received like funding or tried to get funding? Get found? At the moment, no. At the moment, no. We are thinking about it, but we are... So, what format do you use for saving the data in Bisco? Okay. At the moment, you are using a local database, H2 database is a local database in Java, but in the next release, 2.0, I think about using a simple JSON file to store everything. Will there be a hosted version? Hosted version in... In 2.0? I don't understand the question. I'm sorry. Will you post a version that everybody can access if it's online instead of downloading? Okay. Okay. I think about it, but I have to... It's difficult for me at the moment to have an hosting that do that. Okay. So, I prefer the people download on their machine. Confidentiality, because maybe some people they don't want to... Yes. Yes. So, this aspect... So, I'm sorry that's all the time we have. Andrea, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.
about how to write a novel using an open source novels only work if their characters are contradictions. So how can create a believable long series of questions such as an interview. So in which they find the architectural elements of themes with a fully featured text editor. I beautiful for the benefit of all. OK, let's have social context where the story is developed. Then for complete. You can define your architectural need to know everything about your character. novel, and you can attach images at every chapter by creating the individual scenes. Every has more than 40,000 downloads and is translated cool little open source projects that stood out in 2016 in the e-book of opensource.com. Let's application that is available on Linux, Mac, you can write it in the sheet or in the cards of