Amber for macOS

A better place to build your story

Novel writing and story planning, together in one workspace for macOS.

Give your manuscript room to grow. Organize chapters and scenes, keep your story details close, and move between drafting, planning, and review as your book takes shape.

In development for macOS

Bookshelf

A home for every work in progress

Keep your books together in a visual library. Group projects into shelves and return to the manuscript you want to work on next.

Inside Amber

Draft, read, and shape your book in one place

Draft Mode

Write with the rest of your story close by

Settle into a scene with your manuscript outline beside you. Keep its synopsis, point of view, location, and word target within reach, along with your characters, places, notes, and research.

Flow View

See how your scenes read together

Flow View brings several scenes into one continuous view. Read across scene boundaries and follow the movement of a chapter while keeping the individual scenes visible in your manuscript structure.

Outline

See the shape of your manuscript

Step back from the prose and look across your chapters and scenes. The outline brings synopses, word counts, targets, and draft status together with point of view, story threads, locations, and dates. See what’s taking shape and where there’s still work to do.

Structure View

Your whole book on one screen

Scenes run left to right in reading order, grouped under their parts and chapters. Rows sort them by a field you choose, such as POV. It answers questions a list of documents can’t.

See the shape of the story

Who carries the book

Rows by POV show whose chapters run long, who disappears for a third of the book, and where the voices cluster. In the sample book, Jack fills most of it, and the Giant’s Wife gets one scene.

How plot threads are woven

Rows by Thread show where a subplot goes quiet too long, or where two threads never touch.

Where things happen

Rows by Location show settings you return to too often, or leave too soon.

Pacing at a glance

Scenes can be drawn wide or narrow by word count, so a bloated chapter or a run of thin scenes stands out. Planned scenes take their target length, so a half-drafted book still looks to scale.

Progress

Rows by Status or Label show which parts are drafted, being revised, or still only an idea.

The timeline

The strip below the grid plots every scene against its story date. Flashbacks, jumps forward, and stretches where months pass in a paragraph all show at a glance.
Hold a dot to zoom in to six months either side of it. Hold again to zoom back out.
Drag a dot up or down to change that scene’s date in sensible steps (days with ⌥). It’s one undo step.

Rearranging by hand

Move scenes. Drag a scene left or right to reorder it, even into another chapter, and the binder follows.
Change a value. Drag a scene to another row to change it, for example to give it a different POV.
Several at once. Drag a selected group to move them together, as one undo step.
Because the drag shows the result, you can try a different structure and look at it before committing to it.

Built on your own data

It reads the same custom fields you fill in through the inspector and outliner, so there’s no separate planning tool to keep in sync.
New novels come with POV, Thread, Location, and Story Date set up, so Structure view works from the first scene.
Export the grid as a PDF to print or share with an editor or writing group.

The overview of index cards spread across a floor, on one screen.

For writers who plan, and writers revising a draft that has grown hard to hold in their head.

Draft. Read. Shape. Compile.

From first draft to finished manuscript

AI Assessment

A fresh perspective on your writing

Request an AI-assisted assessment from inside your project. Choose an assessment, review the request before sending it, and keep the response alongside your writing workflow. Amber’s assessment panel gives you a place to examine the feedback and decide what to revise.

AI assessments use external providers. Provider API charges apply.

Page Mode

Give your words a different perspective

Switch to Page Mode to see your writing in a page-based layout. Chapter headings, typography, and page boundaries give you another way to read the work you’ve been drafting.

Compile

Bring your manuscript together

Choose the material to include, set your formatting, and preview your manuscript before compiling it. Amber brings content selection, section formatting, and page setup into one place, so you can prepare your writing for its next reader.

Amber is taking shape

Amber is in development for macOS at ActiveRational Management Corporation. We’re building a workspace for the work of writing a novel, from organizing the first scenes to preparing a manuscript for review.

We’ll share more as development progresses.

Screenshots show a development version. Features and appearance may change.