FlowMate provides a simple editor interface for creating and organizing FlowMate scripts. While scripts can be editted in any text editor, FlowMate attempts to simplify the process. The main editor screen appears as:
!/static/images/flowmate/editor.png
The editor screen’s top bar provides controls for organizing, creating, and navigating segments. The Organize button opens a new screen for moving segments within the script, described further down in this page. The Add button simply appends a new segment to the script. The dropdown towards the right of the top bar allows navigating between all known segments.
When navigating, it is important to know that your work on the current segment is saved in memory when changing to the next segment. To make changes permanent and save to disk, the Save button, described below, must be clicked.
In this section, the name and length of a segment can be easily changed in the provided boxes. The estimated total length of the script is also displayed, though changes to the total length will not be reflected immediately when a segment length is changed. The Delete button will destroy and remove the current segment.
Below these simple boxes is the segment content editor. A small toolbar above the text box provides cut, copy, and paste operations as well as shortcuts for creating headings, bulleted lists, and links. The scripting language is described in greater detail later.
In the bottom right corner are the controls for saving scripts and returning to the FlowMate menu. The Save and Save As buttons save the current script to disk. Any changes made in any segment will be saved to disk when these buttons are clicked. The only place to save a script is in the script editor using these buttons; there is no option to save a script in the main menu.
The Back button will return to the main menu of FlowMate. Any changes the user has made to any given segment will still reside in memory regardless of whether the script was saved. The user can display these unsaved (to disk, that is) changes when the script is finally displayed from the main menu.
FlowMate relies on a simplified markup language called gemtext to save and display scripts. The language may be constricting to people more accustomed to Markdown or conventional word processors, but the simplicity is considered a feature in this application. FlowMate is metrely meant to provide a simple outline to the viewer to aid in the flow of, for example, their online stream.
Gemtext supports the following markup concepts by starting lines with special characters, listed below:
Any text lines that do not start with a special character listed above are treated as a standard text paragraph.
Headings start with two hashes. The language specification also allows single and triple hashes; however, single hashes are used by FlowMate to designate segments themselves and should be avoided in the editor.
Bulleted lists merely need to have a leading asterisk. Multiple levels of lists are not supported, though.
Links start with a leading equal sign and greater-than symbol to create a stylized arrow. The link syntax is either:
=> <URL>
which will display just the full URL, or, optionally:
=> <URL> Text describing the URL
which will display the text following the URL rather than the URL itself. For example, to link to this page, the syntax would be:
=> https://approximatrix.com/products/flowmate/help/create.html
or
=> https://approximatrix.com/products/flowmate/help/create.html Creating and Editing FlowMate Scripts
Quote blocks can be used to indent segments of text to make them stand out from normal paragraphs. Each line simply needs to be preceded by a simple greater-than symbol.
When the Organize button is clicked, the segment organizer screen is opened. A list of all segments is presented with up and down buttons on the rightmost side of the screen. The user can select a segment and use the buttons to move the segment up and down the list to reorder available segments.
When the Back button is clicked, the segment reordering is saved iun memory only, not permanently to disk.