[MW Forums]

If you rarely write more than letters or business documents, stick with Microsoft Word or Apple’s Pages. But if you’re planning to write a novel, script, short story, or research paper, Scrivener 1.03 was made for you. more

[Jason Snell]

I moved my novel manuscript into Scrivener last month and it's been a pretty enjoyable experience. There are indeed a few interface quirks, but generally it's been enjoyable to have my story-planning tools combined with my manuscript.
There are a lot of cool new writers' tools out there for the Mac, but Scrivener is my favorite -- so far! /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

[GeorgetheFlea]

People looking for the perfect writing aid should also check out Avenir. Although Scrivener is nice for general writing, Avenir is much more geared towards writing fiction and has several advantages over Scrivener (notably an easier-to-understand interface and far better annotations).
Of the creative writing software out there, Avenir and Scrivener seem to be the main contenders; which one you use really depends on which one fits your writing style, and they both have free trials.

[KMB]

Hello - and wow. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif
Thank you very much for such a positive review.
Jason and Nathan - I would love to hear your feedback about any interface bugs you encountered. Feel free to e-mail me either direct at contact@literatureandlatte.com or by posting on the forums at www.literatureandlatte.com/forum.
Just a couple of points that might help your workflow if you are planning to continue using Scrivener (I hope so /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif ):
"Its easy to assign custom labels for chapters, concepts, character sheets, and such, or set a statusfirst draft, rewrite, final draftfor individual draft items. But you cant do so for multiple documents at once, which can prove annoying."
Actually, you can assign labels to multiple documents quite easily. You don't do it via the inspector, which is is kind of a built-in "Get Info" and thus only shows info for (and affects) one document. Instead, just ctrl-click on a multiple selection in the binder, outliner or corkboard - in the contextual menu you will find a "Label" and "Status" submenu that allows you to batch-assign a label or status to all the selected documents.
"...however, Web links must be entered manually, after which a copy of the page is downloaded and storedan admittedly minor hassle for an otherwise useful feature."
In 1.03 you can drag web pages in from their URL in Camino, but not from other browsers. In 1.04 - which should be out in a week or two - I have fixed it so that you can also drag in web pages from the URL field in Safari, so hopefully this will be less of a hassle in future.
"Nearly every element can be customized, though I wish I could specify a different font for full-screen mode."
I wish I could add that. Unfortunately the Apple text system only allows temporary visual changes to the text colour, not the font. I guess it makes sense, as in a rich text system you can have multiple fonts, so in theory you could be editing your text and then find that the fonts were all over the place when you exited full screen. (Thus, plain text editors such as Ulysses can allow font change in full screen, but rich text editors such as Scrivener cannot.)
Anyway, I just wanted to give you my sincere thanks for such a positive review. I'm really glad you liked Scrivener. And please do pop by the forum or e-mail me if about any bugs or issues you have.
Thanks again and all the best,
Keith
Scrivener developer
P.S. George the Flea - actually, Scrivener was 100% designed for creative writing, just as Avenir was (yes, Avenir is great too), and I utterly disagree that S. is better for general writing than for fiction writing - that sort of thing, as the review rightly states, is better done in Word, Pages, Nisus or Mellel. Indeed, the majority of my users are fiction writers and screenwriters - including several published novelists and experienced Hollywood screenwriters - who would also disagree with you. As you say, it is just down to a personal preference for which program "fits". Oops, I seem to have got a little hoighty-toighty. Didn't mean to, honest. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

[Brettcamp]

Excellent review. I'd add journalists to your list of users who can benefit from Scrivener. I've been using the app in beta and 1.x for about six months, and it's helped me enormously in writing several dozen stories (from 750 words to 4500 words) for a variety of national and regional magazines and newspapers. It's particularly terrific at helping organize and manage large volumes of research snippets -- info clipped from web pages, emails, articles, etc. It combines the best features of an info manager like DevonNote (which I used for a year before discovering Scrivener) and a writing program. And its build-a-story-piece-by-piece method facilitates writing in scenes, whether for fiction, film, theater or journalism.
Scrivener is intended as a drafting program that sits between info managers like Devon and Yojimbo, on one hand, and word processing and formatting apps like Word and Pages on the other, and that clear focus has enabled it to avoid bloat. But for me, it's actually replaced those other apps as well as the excellent OmniOutliner. (Admittedly, I almost never require major formatting as I just email rtf files to editors rather than printing.) Scrivener's annotation and footnote features seem powerful enough to allow me to use it exclusively in writing a historical biography that will have hundreds of sources.
What really amazes me is how intuitive and simple Scrivener is despite its power. I have yet to RTFM (though I did run through the excellent short tutorial), yet I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to do something (including things that no other writing app, and I've tried most of them, could do), and Scrivener does it -- in precisely in the way you'd expect. It's the most Mac-like app I've ever used -- even more so than some Apple apps! You can tell it was designed by a real, working writer. Add to that an unbelievably responsive developer (many of the best features came from user suggestions) and supportive online forum community, and you have the best application I've ever used. I'd urge any writer to try it.

[Jason Snell]

Macworld is making a concerted effort to review as many of these creative-writing apps as we can over the next few months -- stay tuned.

[hmurchison]

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Macworld is making a concerted effort to review as many of these creative-writing apps as we can over the next few months -- stay tuned.

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Jason, and I will be making a concerted effort to read your reviews. Glad to see the Scrivener review hit the site. Perhaps a review of Avenir is queued up?

[KMB2]

Second that Avenir review request. I tried out Scrivener, Copywrite, and Avenir a few months back and ended up going with Avenir since the whole corkboard thing felt a bit gimmicky and contrived to me. Since then, I've been wondering if I was too hasty (given Avenir's own interface issues and a nasty failure to save bug).
I expect to be giving Scrivener 1.04 a whirl soon to see if I want to change my supporting writing & organization app.
Full-screen mode doesn't matter to me at all personally, since I prefer to use Pages' two-up mode to display two full pages side-by-side @ 116% (which fills my screen) anyway.
But again, thanks for the attention to these fine apps.
-Kennedy M. Brandt (the other KMB)

[Inkling]

Let me add my praise of Scrievner to the others. I write, edit and publish books using InDesign. Until recently, I did almost all my work in ID because the alternatives (i.e. Word) seemed so much worse. But ID isn't designed for all the messiness and data/text management tasks that writing requires. Scrievner is. I won't say it's perfect, but it's as close as perfect as I've seen in a writing tool and, at version 1.03, it can't help but get better as it moves toward 2.0.
If you publish with LaTex, there are already some handy tools (using Markup) that'll let you control the final formatting from inside Scrievener. I'm hoping to develop ways to make it equally friendly with InDesign.
--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle

[Coffee]

As a working screenwriter, I want to echo (and, in fact, amplify) the praise for Scrivener. It's the app's versatility that appeals to me most -- the fact that Scriv accommodates any kind of writing I want to do at any given moment, and keeps it all in one place. I can free write, mess around with fragments, peruse my research, make character notes, and the whole time, my very structured main draft remains untouched and ready to go whenever I am.
And screenwriters, rest assured, Scrivener provides very simple, intuitive, and correct formatting. Final Draft keystrokes are burned deep into my muscle memory, but I was able to adapt to writing in Scrivener in about 20 minutes. It's an ideal first draft solution for screenwriters (think of all the hours you won't have to use the abominable FD!)
I also want to mention, as someone else has, the Scrivener forum community, and the astonishing responsiveness of the developer. If you think Scriv is powerful the first time you use it, wait until you have a question, a comment, or a suggestion! (I almost took this last paragraph out, as I am sure the Scrivener community is about to explode, and Keith is only one guy. I don't want to over-promise based on someone else's time and energy.)

[WereBear]

Speaking as a fiction writer, Scrivener is the best program I've found yet. It has a great full screen mode to let me pour out text, yet can shift gears to let me rearrange it into a coherent flow of story.
The split screen function lets you see two different documents and drag and drop text between them. I've always wanted to do that! And I've found it exports into Word without a lot of fiddling on my part. Once you have Word set up with your manuscript format, the text flows into it, and all you need add are your page breaks and numbering.
How impressed was I? It was the impetus for finally replacing my 366MHz iBook with a laptop that will run Tiger. I just had to combine my favorite hardware tool with my favorite software tool.
I feel it fits my writer's brain. I urge anyone who writes to give it a try.

[markxm]

I now use Scrivener exclusively for one of my main activities, editing Chinese --> English translations done by Chinese speakers. The fact that I can have the text I'm working on in one vertical split of the screen and the original text in the other vertical split, with a notes area always available and a scratchpad that floats above any apps that are open available as needed, saves me an enormous amount of time, effort and desktop clutter. I can't think of a better application for translators.
I also plan to revise all the teaching materials I prepare for my classes, and you can be sure I will do the writing part of that in Scrivener.
A great app.
Mark

[rich_ratzan]

Scrivener is a good program and a standout amongst the many "creative" wordprocessor/project managers (I've tried them all - from Ulysses to Avenir to Jer's Novel Writer to Z-Writer to CopyWrite to WriteRoom to Smultron and TextMate; steer clear of Supernotecard - too buggy and dreadful support) and combo wordprocessor/sketch-outline programs (like Curio, OmniGraffle, NoteTaker, VoodooPad, and NovaMind) and sui generis apps like Tinderbox, a uniquely powerful pluripotential program with an equally daunting learning curve.
But if you want a creative wordprocessor/organizer app, and if you are like many creative writers - at least I am such an one - then you are probably making connections with existing texts, pages of notes, web pages, snippets of information and images from your own personal toolbox. Which is why I do not use Scrivener any more but rather DEVONthink (I actually use DEVONthink Pro, DTP). At $39, DT is roughly the same price as Scrivener. Although DT is a few dollars more expensive than Scrivener, it is unfair to compare the two costs as the price of two wordprocessors since once you own DT, you have a lifelong, smart, scriptable repository of virtually infinite capacity (10,000 files for DT and much more for DTP) within which one can dump virtually any text format of any length (I've put entire books into DT), any web page format, any image format - and then later access, arrange, and cut and paste them into one's creative effort. (I have not done any screen writing so cannot attest to its use for such). Full screen editing is also a feature. If one wants multiple windows open and in a certain arrangement, a la Scrivener or Ulysses, one can open as many windows as one wants, place them in desired spots on screen, tick off "Open windows that were open on quit" in Preferences and they will open in same location you left them when you reopen DT. One of the many additional advantages of DT/DTP are the incredibly powerful search, classify, "see also" (for similar passages or items in database), and other properties of this unique program. And the word processing is clean and simple but all you'll want or need for writing most genres. There is also an accessory search program, DEVONagent, to complement DT/DTP. The user forum community and program admins are quite responsive, helpful and polite.
For smaller "quick and dirty" projects I prefer Smultron (donationware, with almost hourly upgrades) and TextMate, using its project feature (a little more pricy than Scrivener at 39 euros). The bad news is they have fewer bells and whistles than Scrivener. The good news is that they have fewer bells and whistles than Scrivener and are therefore, for me at least, much easier to use. (I find corkboard options in Scrivener cute but of no utility - clearly personal preference.) Smultron also sports split windows. And of course for writers/programmers - their primary audience - these two programs have many, many other features.
By the way, the best version-comparison app (since DocuComp in the old pre-OS X days!) I have found is Mariner Write, using the Window->Cleanup feature which allows one to tile many open files (in their own windows) horizontally or vertically, quite useful for texts in which the actual physical layout/appearance is important - in my case, sections of poems with word/line arrangement at stake.

[robinco]

the corkboard thing is a bit cornball for me too. Can it be turned off, or can a "less graphic" option be selected for the same notetaking accessory?
R.