Scrivener for Mac

5.0 stars

"From a professional writer: EXCELLENT!"

January 7, 2012  |   By bigbang

Version: Scrivener 2.2

Pros

Feel, stability, predictability, organization and workflow integration.

Cons

Not cheap, but for me, it's been very well worth it. Especially with how quickly I've received technical support when I've needed it.

Summary

I'm the author of a 992-page book that's used in a lot of college courses. I'm now working on the 7th edition. I read several journal articles a day and do countless browser searchers, and need a program to organize my research. I also do a daily 90-second radio broadcast that is research intensive. So I spend several hours each day collecting and organizing information.

I've tried just about everything including MacJournal, Circus Ponies Notebook, Devonnote, Evernote and Together, SOHO Notes, and more. I found each of these to be excellent in its own way, and I well understand if one suits your style and needs better than Scrivener. If fact, if you do a lot of writing, I'd strongly encourage you to try each one and find the one or two that you are most comfortable with.

For me, Scrivener has provided the most intuitive and best feeling environment. Maybe that's because I started writing back in the old days, when one used 3x5 cards and a typewriter. Perhaps that's why I've done better with Scrivener than the others.

I've honestly had no loyalty over the years to one of these programs or the other. Shamelessly, I'd consider switching tomorrow if an organizer came along that felt even better, so the fact that Scrivener has kept me happy for the past 18 months says a lot.

(I'd especially switch to a new app if I could find software that helped me feel less resistance to the process of writing in general--but I've found no apps with this kind of miraculousness attached. Writing remains a challenge for me, even though I'm successful at it and make my living from it. I still dread having to do each new project. I've also found that no program can do the hard work of entering the information I need to enter in a way that's most useful. That's ultimately up to me. Damn.)

The two times I've needed to get technical support with Scrivener, I've heard back within 6 hours. Both times, they were able to solve the problem.

Another thing to consider is the stability--each note in Scrivener is kept as a separate text file in the project folder. This means that there's no database corruption to worry about. No question, databases have their advantages, especially for easy back up, searches, and perhaps for cloud storage. But as long as my hard drive is working, there is no way I'll ever lose the notes I've put into Scrivener. I just make sure I do daily backups to jump drives that I swap out and store in another location.

On the other hand, I don't need to download directly to a blog or other media from Scrivener. I have no idea how well Scrivener works for that, nor am I syncing between laptop/smartphone and desktop. All I can tell you is for my particular purposes as a writer--which might be different from yours--Scrivener is the program that I've settled on to collect, collate and process my work.

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