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NYT Magazine covers Scrivener, other OS X writing apps

An Interface of One’s Own

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.

ChrisR's picture

Scrivener, Google Docs, and XPad

I discovered Scrivener when I was about a third of the way into my last book and it helped enormously not only in organising and writing the thing, but in making incremental backups easier. Every day I just exported the whole project--drafts, research, everything--to a network drive and I was done. It hardly interrupts the flow. I've also discovered that you can open and edit Google Documents or Zoho documents in Scrivener and then copy/paste text created 'off-site' into the main document, or vice versa.

Let me add praise of XPad (http://getxpad.com/) too. It's freeware and I find it one of the cleanest, most distraction-free tools out there. I find that my writing flow is very dependent on the tools I use and that different pieces seem to demand different applications. Scrivener is excellent for long-term projects; tools like XPad are ideal for that quick 500-word piece you put together after lunch.

I love the idea of Word as Gloria Swanson: 'It's the documents that got small.'

 
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