WriteMapper 4 is out for Mac and Windows

Posted by satis
Dec 13, 2023 at 10:37 PM

MadaboutDana wrote:
> Hm, talking about writing apps, this is an intriguing announcement by
>Scrivener:

For years the dev Keith Blount - who admitted a decade ago he’s not a programmer - has essentially been riding a successful tiger he can’t control, based off a hobby project he wrote after a few months learning Xcode. He offloaded development of a Windows app to a programmer who has a profit-share deal with him because he didn’t have the expertise himself, but Scrivener Windows users typically get features long after Mac users, and Windows users have dealt with a lot of bugs over the years.

The iOS Scrivener app is an oddly-designed subset of the main app. Blount made the same type of business deal with an iOS developer but the result was subpar and now he has a single iOS dev person on staff for the iOS/iPadOS platform.

Development is a bit of a mess overall.

If suddenly we’re talking about a new cross-platform app I’d bet it’s an(other bloated, relatively slow) Electron app with that framework’s attendant security issues (especially if it’s not regularly and quickly patched when compromises are announced and addressed). Blount can use it to maintain a single codebase, eliminate the costs with outside developers, and be able to push out updates simultaneously. But I don’t have much hope that it will be a fast app or a pleasurable one to write in, or one that takes advantage of each platform’s UI and included functionality. (A major problem with Electron apps.)

Literature & Latte has eight employees, I think, and most aren’t full-time. Hopefully this new app ends up being useful and successful, but I don’t think I want to go anywhere near it for the first couple of years after release, until it proves itself.