Scrivener review « The BEST Apple Hardware and Software Reviews

Written By Editor November 29th, 2009

Author PageRead More

• 
• 
• 
• 

Scrivener is designed to help Authors, Writers & Bloggers – anyone who creates lengthy books, articles, essays or blog posts.

It does this by taking notes, storyboards, assets, anything at all, a kind of virtual cork-board-note-editing-super-app, including documents, notes, images and more!

As Scrivener themselves put it:

Scrivener is aimed at writers of all kinds—novelists, journalists, academics, screenwriters, playwrights—who need to refer to various research documents and have access to different organisational tools whilst aiming to create a finished piece of text that can be exported to a word processor for final formatting. Scrivener is a ring-binder, a scrapbook, a corkboard, an outliner and text editor all rolled into one. It is intended to be a kind of “writer’s shed” for those of us who don’t have a spare shed.

The Project Screen

Creating a new project

This is the Cork board view

Each note is linked to a section, which contains documents and notes. On the left, you’ll see the ‘Binder’. This gives you a general overview of your project. Initially there are 3 folders:

• Draft
• Research
• Trash

The Draft folder allows you to store files that need to be exported, Research contains media files and Trash works very much like the OSX Trash folder, in that files are not completely deleted until you choose to do so.

In the right-hand pane, you have the File Editor.

Scrivener will also import images, web, QuickTime and PDF documents. To import documents, use File > Import > Files…

In the left pane you’ll see your files. Scrivener suggest you could use these use these different documents for different chapters, different scenes, different ideas, articles, characters, whatever you want. This is a great feature of Scrivener. Your not forced to make do, working with pre-defined or default features. Rather, you make the app work as you want. Very clever.

With actual font-editing features such as Full Screen mode, character count and even the ability to yourself a target, Scrivener doesn’t scrimp on Writing features in anyway shape or form.

Sum-up

To sum-up, I think Scrivener is a very clever app, that will work great in any writers work flow. If your considering writing a book or a huge essay, this app is going to be a serious relief – who wants to be buried in mounds of sticky notes? Highly recommended, a truly great app to keep your writing organized even over long distance.

Scrivener is available for $39.95 from http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html. Go ahead and try the free trial. You’ll love it!