Scrivener Windows Beta - makes we want alternatives

Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 5, 2011 at 05:37 PM

GeorgeB wrote:
>Alexander,
>TextRoom is a good find. I’ve been playing with it this afternoon and it’s
>a keeper. Thank you. gB

Textroom does look nice, but it crashed a couple of times on Windows 7 when I tried to use the flowchart feature (the buttons for which also didn’t show, BTW), without saving the text. So that’s not sufficiently stable for my liking. I’m still looking forward to the full-screen feature of Scriveners Windows.

My latest find in my quest for minimalist writing interfaces is iA Writer on iPad: http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/writer-for-ipad/ You probably need a wireless keyboard to make full use of it, however, it’s the closest I could get to the experience of writing on an old style portable typewriter. There is nothing to distract you. The font is beautiful, and there is a nifty feature where you can make it focus on 3 lines only and grey out the rest of the text. It creates .txt files and allows you to back it up on Dropbox or email it out. No formatting or any other distractions. Just like a typewriter. Okay, the iPad screen (with an external keyboard) would only allow you to display one or two paragraphs at a time, however, it can also be an advantage, as it forces you to focus on the paragraphs you are actually writing.

Apparently they are working on an iA Writer for desktop as well, but unfortunately only for the Mac at the moment. I’d love to have this on Windows.