Becoming obsessed with the idea of a mac

Posted by Graham Smith
Nov 24, 2007 at 03:42 PM

Matty wrote:

> Please tell me that they are not that great and I should stop
>fantasizing about switching platforms when really I should be writing.

Having been woken from my temporary hibernation from this forum and responded to a post from Stephen, I feel I should also comment on your original post.

If you have read my other post you will see that I am very impressed with Scrivener, and it has several features which make it the best tool I have come across for pulling together a paper or article. There are some similar tools for Windows such as liquid story binder http://www.blackobelisksoftware.com/ which I trialled at one time, but for reasons I can’t remember didn’t suit me - but worth looking at. I know it says its designed for fiction writing, but I wouldn’t let that put you off having a look.

DevonThink I am less convinced about. I bought DevonAgent at the same time, and in theory it should provide an all in one data management tool, and maybe it will if I put enough work into it. I was put off by its failure to import my emails as that was one of the reasons I bought it. The demo is limited to importing a small number of emails, which imported perfectly, but once bought and registered I discovered it crashed on anything more than a couple of hundred emails (Eagle Filer on the other hand imported them fine). Having said that I still think it shows promise, but I’m not convinced it has any properties that lifts it above the alternatives available on Windows. then again, I haven’t really explored it fully.

The other issue is that Macs are very different to Windows and as well as leaning Scrivener and DevonThink there is a steep learning curve getting up to speed with OSx. In spite of all the hype, Macs are not that intuitive for anyone with an in depth experience of Windows. But in general, while I find myself cursing windows rather a lot, in contrast, as I have become familiar with OSx, I have found myself repeatedly muttering “that’s clever” “this is good” “I like this” etc.

So I am certainly happier with the Mac than I have ever been with Windows, but whether its worth the money and effort to switch, I’m not sure. I wouldn’t switch for DevonThink.

Scrivener on the other hand is a bit special and if it suits the way you work, I doubt there is anything better. I am also finding the Mac a slightly better working environment than Windows.

Graham