NYT Magazine covers Scrivener, other OS X writing apps
Submitted by Merlin on January 6, 2008 - 1:57pm.
I was delighted to see my favorite OS X writing app, Scrivener, turn up in today’s “The Medium” column of the New York Times Magazine. I reviewed Scrivener about a year ago, and still use it whenever I have to research, plan, and draft anything more complicated than a blog post. In fact, as luck would have it, I was actually working on my upcoming Macworld talk in Scrivener when I took a break to read the paper and saw this article. Kismet or something.
Columnist, Virginia Heffernan, notes the app’s beloved full-screen capability:
To create art, you need peace and quiet. Not only does Scrivener save like a maniac so you needn’t bother, you also get to drop the curtain on life’s prosaic demands with a feature that makes its users swoon: full screen. When you’re working on a Scrivener opus, you’re not surrounded by teetering stacks of Firefox windows showing old Google searches or Citibank reports of suspicious activity. Life’s daily cares slip into the shadows. What emerges instead is one pristine and welcoming scroll: Your clean and focused mind.
High fives to other great apps mentioned in the article, including Ulysses, WriteRoom, and Nisus Writer. Slightly lower fives go to Microsoft Word, which, once again, takes its usual drubbing as The Application Everyone Wants To Get Away From™. Poor Microsoft Word, the mascara-smeared Gloria Swanson of word processors.
In the year since I wrote my own review of Scrivener, I still find myself relying heavily on it for housing the research, braindumps, and very early draft shapes of most longer pieces I do. Falling somewhere between OmniOutliner, DevonTHINK, and the aforementioned WriteRoom, Scrivener is still, in my opinion, the go-to app for all-in-one research and writing.
As ever, YMMV. This app is absolutely not for everyone (especially if you don’t have the need for lots of complicated research and organizational hooks), but if you struggle to find a writing environment that maps to the way your own writing brain operates, I still highly recommend checking out the free Scrivener download.
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Proprietary data store? Academic writing?
What advantage is there to having one application manage different kinds of data? I’ve tried and given up on various kinds of shoebox applications before, in favor of just relying on the Finder and searching. I have also long been in favor of the Mac/Unix approach of using many narrowly focused applications, rather than big behemoths. Why is Scrivener an exception to this? I mean, why do I need a program other than Preview for PDFs? How is having a Scrivener project better than just having a project folder?
I am not trying to be combative— I really want to fall in love with something like Scrivener, if only I can get over my hangups.
And how good is it at legal/academic writing, which relies very heavily on footnotes that must be formatted just so? And does it export to Word with styles?