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NYT Magazine covers Scrivener, other OS X writing apps
Merlin Mann | Jan 6 2008
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:
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. 24 Comments
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 Scrivener--Excellent for academic writingSubmitted by Jottce on January 7, 2008 - 3:33am.
yesno, contrary to your assessment, Scrivener absolutely excels at academic writing for me. I am an academic writer and switching to Scrivener just saved my current book project, or at least cranked up my productivity on the project to a point where I can actually finish it in time. I love the way Footnotes and comments show up in-line in Scrivener. I used to rely heavily on styles, but have found that I spent much more time worrying about formating in the drafting stages that way, time that would have been much better spent doing the actual writing. I use four custom styles in Scrivener now and they are enough for my book--which of course relies heavily on footnotes as well. Formating is the least of my concerns. I can pay someone to do the formating if I'm in a pinch--but the writing I have to do myself. And Scrivener excels at that as no other program I have tried does. Contrary to popular belief, academic writing IS creative writing, just creative in a slightly different way than a novel or a short story would be. But, as with all creative tools, Scrivener is not for everyone and does not need to be. It just hits the sweet spot for a lot of creative writers— journalistic, fictional or academic. And we tend to be quite passionate about it too. :-) Just my 2 ¢ (Euro). J UPDATE: I should have clarified that relying on styles and fiddling with formats is not necessarily causally linked. Just the programs that do have full support for styles (such as Word or Pages) encouraged me to do such fiddling. I intend to use Multimarkdown in Scrivener for my next project. » POSTED IN:
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