New to PA and blown away by it so far! I find Scrivener too complicated and Ulysses too basic for a full-blown novel. PA seems to have the perfect balance.
Feature request?
One feature I love is the ability to use your own image as the pinboard background. I use an image that is relevant to my current WIP and I find it inspires me. But I was thinking: if you could assign a background image to each scene or chapter then you could have an image for every location. That really would be an amazing feature and an instant visual reminder of where your characters are at any point.
That’s right. It might seem a frivolous request to some but I could really see it being useful in giving you a visual cue. For example, I currently have a group of characters down on a barren planet surface and others on the bridge of a spaceship and I have found images that roughly correspond to what I have in mind for those locations. I think it would help to focus if those images were automatically used as backgrounds when you linked them to those scenes. I don’t think it is technically that difficult to implement. I would imagine you can add a right-click context menu item in Navigator so when you click on a scene or chapter there would be an additional option > Add Pinboard background. It would call a similar dialog to the one used to change the background in settings. The chosen image filename would be stored just like other data for the scene. On selecting a scene or chapter, if an image filename had been stored it would be used to switch the Pinboard background, otherwise it would be left (or changed back) as the globally selected background.
At the very least I would hope to be able to have a different background image per project. I have several different projects on the go and would really like to have a different pinboard background for each one, for example the cover image. The way I would do it is when you choose a background image a dialog asks if you want to set the image as global or for the current project only. If the latter is chosen the filename is stored within the project settings. When a project is loaded, if no image has been specified it simply reverts to the global setting.
I have a background image I use on my laptop and my desktop, and behind every page on my web site. It’s become to feel like “home” to me. I would dearly love to have that as my pinboard background, too.
We can change the background of the page, why not the Pinboard?
craggie’s idea of swapping backgrounds depending on the scene is super cool. Not something that’s built in right now, and I think it would need changing a few moving parts to work smoothly. But we’ve taken note of it!
It’d be really useful to have different pinboard backgrounds for different files. Mainly for 2 reasons -
A. When working simultaneously with more than 3 projects, switching the mental state would be easier (I usually work with 7-10)
B. Difference between the main file and different kinds of associated files would be visually more apparent. Less chance of mix ups and confusions on a busy day.
