Code Story: Code documentation, redefined.

Hello, it's a great pleasure to introduce Code Story to you. Code Story is a desktop application that was designed to help you document your software projects in a totally new way. Code Story has the capabilities you can expect from a note taking application: rich-text, image, links, etc... but its killer feature is the ability to embed live views from your source files, right into your notes. Live means that what you see in your notes are not snippets: they are direct, always-in-sync views of your code. Actually, you can even do small code edits without leaving your documentation. Make sure to watch the video to get the idea ! I’m obviously totally biased, but it *really* changed my life as a developer. Why ? Well, I think I didn’t like the fact that, — when working on a feature or even more when fixing bugs — I always wasted so much time figuring out what the relevant portions of code / configuration files / etc were, instead of actively coding. And inline comments are absolutely useless in this regard. My attempts to use a separate documentation failed. With a wiki for example, you can enjoy the rich-text, the illustrations, etc… but you don’t have the code in front of your eyes. You can copy/paste snippets from your source files, but it’s tedious and gets obsolete as soon as your code changes. So, I then started to experiment with a way to be able to write notes where rich text and live views from my codebase could be interleaved. The trick was to insert small, unique tokens into the code (as comments) which were used to connect the documentation notes to the code. And it turned out to be awesome ! Not only you can write very useful notes that gather all the relevant (but physically disconnected) code on the same page, but the tokens that you insert into your code turn out to be very helpful as well, because when you see one, it means there is something noteworthy (I also created Atom and Sublime plug-ins so you can open the relevant notes right from your code). In the end, you can use Code Story to describe the inner mechanisms of you app, write deployment procedures, or simply expose a dirty CSS hack ! Make sure to visit the website to learn more. I’ll be happy to answer any questions ! Dominique.