Cognitive Friction

The real joy of owning a Mac is having access to some of the best-designed software on the planet. I’m thinking principally of the products of small software vendors, such as The Omni Group, or even the work of micro-ISVs. These developers bring real passion to their work, turning out elegant designs that can be sheer bliss to use. Yesterday, I found another of these Mac software gems in the shape of Scrivener, which I can best describe as an IDE for writers.

What is Scrivener?

Scrivener is the product of one man, Keith Blount, a teacher, writer and Mac software developer. Keith, if you are reading this, thank you; Scrivener is just what I was looking for. What’s so good about it? Well, I have always wanted an application that does a number of things for me when I’m researching or writing, Scrivener is the first application that I have found that offers all of these things in a form I feel I can work with. Here's my wish list:

• A writing environment that allows me to focus on just the words when I am trying to write.
• An outliner, that enables me to sketch in the parts of a text, move them around at will, and get a useful overview of the whole thing.
• A way to collect and organise research materials, annotations and references from all kinds of sources in all kinds of formats, and associate them closely with the document.
• A way to create a document as separate chapters, sections or whatever, assembling them all into a complete document when I need to. Back in my tech writing days, Adobe FrameMaker gave me this capability and I miss it when writing long documents.

These are the main things, although I’ve seen many more features in various applications over the years that are also on my wish list. I’ve tried to find these features in other applications, in fact I have a collection of partly satisfactory solutions in my Applications folder.

My long search for the right writing environment

I have been looking for something like Scrivener for a long time. As a result, I have a collection of Mac software that at one time or other served as my mainstay for fact collecting, note making and writing. For example:

• OmniOutliner Professional: Great for taking notes and outlining text, but I find I use it for little else, despite its great potential. I'm not sure why.
• DEVONThink: which promised to be my paperless office, but never won my heart.
• NoteBook: I use this a lot as a project notebook and scrap book, but I don’t like it so well for writing, especially writing long documents.

This is to say nothing of the many other applications that I have coveted, but managed to resist buying so far, such as Yojimbo or Curio.

How Scrivener meets my needs

When I stumbled across Scrivener yesterday, therefore, I was intrigued but a little skeptical. It promised much, but I wasn’t sure what it would be like to use. So I downloaded the demo and gave it a go. Scrivener made immediate sense to me as I worked through the included tutorial. Within an hour of installing the thirty-day demo, I had purchased a license. Here’s how the key features tick all of the boxes in my wish list:

• Scrivener’s full-screen mode is not unique, but is very nicely implemented. When all you want to do is write, this strips away all distractions.
• Not only does Scrivener include a useful outliner, it also provides a view of your document as index cards pinned to a virtual cork board. I have read of people outlining documents with index cards, I’m not sure how much I will use this, but it is a very interesting approach.
• Scrivener organises your project in a virtual binder, which includes the various documents in your draft as well as a research folder. This enables you to store almost any research document, image or web clipping as part of the project. Add to this an annotation feature and a way to link to referenced documents in your draft and you have a very well integrated writing environment.
• Your draft folder contains as many text documents as you require for your draft, one per chapter, section, scene or whatever division you use. These can be combined and viewed dynamically while editing, and when it comes time to output a draft, you have fine control over what’s included and what format is produced.

There are many more excellent features in Scrivener, but best of all the whole thing comes wrapped in a very well designed user experience. Keith Blount created Scrivener principally because he wanted to use it himself, and the consequent attention to detail shines through.

Scrivener isn’t meant to replace all of your other writing tools. For instance, you wouldn’t use it to create a blog post or knock out a couple of pages of text. But when writing long documents, were project management, research and writing all come into play, Scrivener seems ideal.

Don’t take my word for it

If you write on the Mac, you owe it to yourself to check out Scrivener. There is an excellent overview of the features of Scrivener on Keith's website, Literature & Latte. Even better, Keith has created a very good screencast demonstration of Scrivener, which provides a clear impression of the application in use. As I said, there's a thirty-day demo of Scrivener available for download too, so you can give it a whirl, gratis. Best of all, if you decide to buy, Scrivener is only thirty forty dollars. At that price, what’s not to like?

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