I guess I just haven't found a compelling reason to upgrade from Win7 to 10 (besides being put off by the bully techniques of forcing the upgrade and then spying on users even when they had repeatedly opted out of telemetry).

Paul Korm wrote:

Same here. I've found Windows 10 to be pretty stable -- having used it
since day one of its release -- Windows 7 was fine also -- the
transition from 7 to 10 was seamless.

Pierre Paul Landry wrote:
Dr Andus wrote:
>>Yet almost everything I read about Windows 8, RT, 10 encouraged me to
>stick with Win7...
>
>I moved to Windows 10 just before the end of the free upgrade. Works
>like a charm and I wouldn't go back to anything else.
>
>Pierre Paul Landry
>IQ Designer
>http://www.infoqube.biz
>

I guess I just haven’t found a compelling reason to upgrade from Win7 to 10 (besides being put off by the bully techniques of forcing the upgrade and then spying on users even when they had repeatedly opted out of telemetry).

Same here. I still have Windows 7 on my main development PC. Windows 8 was a hideous kludge. We have Windows 10 on our media PC and it seems fine, apart from the fact it is so nosey.

--
Andy Brice
http://www.hyperplan.com

Scrivener 3 for macOS will be released on Monday, 20th November 2017. Scrivener 3 is a major—and paid—update to Scrivener...

Scrivener 3 will cost $25 for existing users of Scrivener for macOS (Scrivener 1 or 2 macOS licences are valid for the update pricing). Anyone who purchased Scrivener 2 on or after 20th August 2017 will receive the update for free.

Because of its extensive modernisation, Scrivener 3 requires macOS 10.12+ to run.

The remaining 90% of us will have to wait until sometime in 2018 to get Scrivener 3.

xtabber wrote:

The remaining 90% of us will have to wait until sometime in 2018 to get
Scrivener 3.

If you're impatient, you can get an (early) beta on Monday.

Scrivener 3 (Mac only) is now released and available for sale as of noon ET U.S.

Their beta for windows which will stop working on 23rd December is buried in their forum below:

http://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=40621

After 23rd Dec their next Win beta should be available to download. I wish they could charge less for current users.

They said in their blog, that their Scapple (Mindmap) for windows will get an update but might be next year probably.

washere wrote:

I wish they could charge less for current users.

$25? Others charge more than that for an annual subscription. And I bet we'll be able to use Scriv3 for years - without subscription.

Along with Scrivener 3 (Mac) there is an updated v1.3 for Scapple (Mac) that has some minor UI tweaks and compatibility fixes for High Sierra.

Interesting one of the release changes is "A “Scapple” folder now appears in iCloud Drive" -- and iCloud is now the default save-to destination for new documents.

Perhaps this means eventually a Scapple for iOS will be coming along?

I rarely used Scrivener before. I never passed a few minutes of playing with it. I didn't see much advantage over Tinderbox.

Playing a bit with the new version last night, I find the **Bookmark feature** very neat. It is a kind of nice system to collect all the related pdf files of an article there without importing them.
Tinderbox can also link them. But, for 15 relevant articles, I need 15 attributed assigned to that article. It is a kind of weird to assign 15 attributes of URL to a single note. Furthermore, the Bookmark in Scrivener has a nice internal preview: could be used to just have a glimpse (reminder) of the associated note without open it.

If it's any help, just to say that I don't see Tinderbox and Scrivener as being particularly interchangeable. Scrivener originally came on to the market as a tool for drafting "long-form" (i.e. >5,000 words) pieces of writing, with the idea that you'd subsequently prettify the draft in a traditional word processor such as MS Word. Very few, or no, applications existed then (c.2007) specifically for that purpose; Word itself was seen mainly as a tool for writing business letters and reports, and was fairly notorious at that time for corrupting long-form pieces of work. (Its reliability has now probably improved.)

Scrivener has since spread its wings and "moved up the value chain", as management consultants say, so that you can now pretty much self-publish from the application without actually spending cash on another piece of software, and, as a writing tool with some database-ish characteristics, it can now also be used for several other purposes (ranging from, apparently, game-strategising to journalling). But its USP, or key raison-d'être, and the thing that it's better at doing than anything else in my view remains being able to securely and reasonably easily handle the writing process of long-form.

In contrast, I wouldn't want to try to write long-form in Tinderbox - ever! The definitions of what Tinderbox actually is are several and varied. I like to think of it as a sophisticated means of arranging thoughts and ideas and establishing the relationships between them. Of course, outliners and concept maps or mindmaps have similar purposes to those of Tinderbox - and Tinderbox can certainly be used an outliner or concept map, prior to writing long-form. But Tinderbox can do a lot more than that, being versatile, nuanced and "smart", and capable of helping to identify "emergent structure" (which sounds faintly sinister, but isn't). Whereas Scrivener, although it too has an outliner as part of its package, certainly does not aspire to what Tinderbox can do in that area.

Hugh wrote:

In contrast, I wouldn't want to try to write long-form in Tinderbox -
ever! The definitions of what Tinderbox actually is are several and
varied. I like to think of it as a sophisticated means of arranging
thoughts and ideas and establishing the relationships between them. Of
course, outliners and concept maps or mindmaps have similar purposes to
those of Tinderbox - and Tinderbox can certainly be used an outliner or
concept map, prior to writing long-form. But Tinderbox can do a lot more
than that, being versatile, nuanced and "smart", and capable of helping
to identify "emergent structure" (which sounds faintly sinister, but
isn't). Whereas Scrivener, although it too has an outliner as part of
its package, certainly does not aspire to what Tinderbox can do in that
area.

I totally agree on your characterization of Tinderbox.

As you said, Scrivener has now spread its area. With the addition of Scapple, they might actually thinking of making the Scrivener environment a full system from mapping ideas to drafting and publishing. There is certain overlap between the two systems (Scrivener+Scapple vs Tinderbox).

For me, one reason I don't find Scrivener that much attractive is mainly due to my own setup: I have to publish my work using Latex ultimately. I am not going to do all the heading, compiling stuff inside Scrivener. I do the formatting in the Latex (Texstudio). As such, sending some short drafts from Tinderbox to TexStudio has been my main workflow for a long time now.

if you are to publish in a word or similar format, I agree with you, Scrivener is definitely be very useful for formatting.

But, I find the Bookmark feature pretty attractive. I was using Tagging in combination with Smart searches in Devonthink to do a similar collection of project files. The steps in Devonthink are more extended and a bit cumbersome:

a) add project tags on the selected files
b) setup a smart search to collect the files with those tags
c) remove the tags whenever the file finished its task; function; to simply

The bookmark in Scrivener is simple drag and drop.

Because they've significantly improved metadata handling and filtering in Scrivener 3, there are definitely certain classes of tasks where Scrivener now overlaps much more closely with Tinderbox than it used to.

There is also a lot more overlap with DevonThink as well.

Tinderbox integrates well with both (though there are some bugs with Scriv3 support right now), so we have quite an embarrassment of riches. For any complex, novel research project that involves teasing out unknown relationships between material/ideas, there still aren't any really serious commercial alternatives to Tinderbox. Buying Scrivener 3 is a no-brainer on top of that -- the price is a bargain for what you get, and Tinderbox is not a great writing environment, whereas Scriv3 truly is fantastic for that. The switchable workspace layout feature alone is something you tend only to find in specialized, vertical market software. It's wonderful to have that now available for general writing.

If the next version of Scrivener adds a timeline view, rather than just the new "narrative threads" view (which is pretty innovative, actually), I can see it further gobbling up a lot of tasks that lend themselves to Tinderbox.

I don't buy annual subscription softwares. Even MS Office is suffering as people go to LibreOffice more and more. A few others are like the Russian Freeware Kit Scenarist linked in this forum are building up god platforms. Annual subscription softwares usually stagnate and die anyway due to a few reasons, not just commercial but also mainly mindset & attitude-wise. If you think they should charge more than $25 or have annual subscription, I'm sure they will be happy to hear your suggestions.

washere wrote:

>I wish they could charge less for current users.

Franz Grieser wrote:

$25? Others charge more than that for an annual subscription. And I bet we’ll be able to use Scriv3 for years - without subscription.

Last post was in reply to Franz Grieser.

The new main feature seem to be (on Win Beta 3):

* UI & Layout
* Modernizing the GUI components
* Floating Cards (which only Mac version had before)
* CSS modding for proper ebook export, mainly Amazon mobi probs from ver2
* etc

Being "Outline" I am using the old Outline 4D more and more. I also use a few text (code) editors which let me outline text via code folding.

From there I can do virtually anything by importing them into 15 or 20 or so softwares I use in my toolchain. Each project is different, but a several pieces are usually used. scrivener is not always one of them. For bits and pieces scrivener was aways used but now I use a chopper to separate my Android ColorNote files or Android & Windows outliner apps. Rightnote lets me search them (hundreds or thousands) fast and lists them nice, better than Scrivener could ever. Zotero is better for footnotes & Biblio too. After some months I can basically convert anything (Outline & Tree structure-wise) from indented .txt/.tab major tree apps, or basically anything to anything now.

I still use Scrivener a lot though. Scrivener's been given a new lease of life now with version 3 and lets hope it does not stay the same for another several years. Even Final Draft is trying to get better and is experimenting with Index Cards. All softwares have to evolve and get better or die, except Outline 4D probably, it is still uniquely useful, what the hell is that guy doing anyway if not updating his code? Unbelievable lunatic. I hope he is still alive.

A dark horse to watch out for is the "Aeon Timeline" which can sync with Scriv too. It has great potential, but it would become another genre of software altogether if it went a certain way but would be a masterpiece if expanded it's features. It is cool too.

washere wrote:

If you think they should charge more than $25 or have
annual subscription, I'm sure they will be happy to hear your
suggestions.

In the Lit&Latte forum, people often suggest charging a higher price. Maybe Keith Blount is happy about that, I don't know. But he keeps saying he does not intend to raise the price, and he does not intend to switch to subscription.

A friend of mine has been beta-testing Scrivener 3 for the past few months, and he has now blogged a review of it, which some of you might find interesting: http://www.garygibson.net/2017/11/scrivener-3-my-review.html

As a user of the Windows version of Scrivener, I can't wait for the new version. The upgrade price strikes me as very reasonable (but then I would happily pay that much for a good quality fountain pen friendly A5 notebook).

Yours
Lawrence

Franz Grieser wrote:

washere wrote:

>If you think they should charge more than $25 or have
>annual subscription, I'm sure they will be happy to hear your
>suggestions.

In the Lit&Latte forum, people often suggest charging a higher price.
Maybe Keith Blount is happy about that, I don't know. But he keeps
saying he does not intend to raise the price, and he does not intend to
switch to subscription.

Scrivener is a demonstration of the economic principle that you can sometimes sell disproportionately more if you charge somewhat less. (It was even more dramatic ten years ago when Scrivener launched and when writing apps could cost as much as $100. I remember thinking then that if I was still teaching economics as I once did, I'd have tried to use Scrivener as a case study - of "the price elasticities of demand".)

There is an updated version of the Take Control book for Scrivener 3.

https://www.takecontrolbooks.com/scrivener-3

The Take Control books are helpful, additional "missing manuals" -- although, the manual for Scrivener 3 is itself 847 pages, so an additional book is probably TMI.

I bought a new license for Scrivener 3 the moment it was available. I found a couple of glitches that were fixed that day.

My purchased download was maybe an hour into Version 3's life, and was 3.0(58) - or something close to that. A couple of things didn't work quite right, but nothing major. Just UI irregularities and the "check for updates" function returned an error.

A second download that afternoon got 3.0(75), which is still what's there as of now. I can't find anything not working per documentation.

There is one oddity, but it's not a bug so much as it's a wrinkle in mouse and keyboard event handling. This may be due to inheritance structuring in Scrivener's code, or it may be a MacOS thing.

If you hold the option key down while you click and drag a title from the binder to the editor's header, it opens a second edit window called a copyholder, but the mouse events have to be in the specific order, and actually option-drag is the wrong way to look at it. The mouse event to generate is option-release.

Option-click-drag-release opens the dragged document in the copyholder and also jumps the editor to the selected new document. Click-option-drag-release works as expected, leaving the main edit window open and opening the new document in the copyholder. In other words, click in the binder before depressing the option key.

I'd call that a rough edge, but it doesn't crash anything and no data is lost.

Scrivener Version 3 looks pretty cool to me.

I'm truly impressed by version 3.0. It's a lovely, subtle but comprehensive rework of an already very powerful app.

I've been playing with the trial version, having barely used the earlier Scrivener 2.0 despite having had it for years.

The speed and precision of the whole thing has improved exponentially (okay, I don't know if it's actually exponential, but it certainly feels like it!), especially in terms of accessing research documents (Word, PDF files etc. etc.). The search function is extremely fast and highlights text in a variety of file formats. No hanging about - just wham, blam, instant find!

Hey, listen, I'm an inveterate user of Ulysses, but this is in an entirely different league. Not that I'd necessarily want to use Scrivener for some of the things I use Ulysses for. But hey, maybe I will as I become more familiar with the platform, who knows?

For the first time, I really feel that Scrivener is the perfect platform for writing one's magnum opus. That's not to say it's entirely straightforward - there are so many features lurking beneath the surface that you could spend many hours just reading through the tutorial/extensive user manual. But it all feels so much more lively, and the user interface is so much friendlier!

I shall be investing in the Mac App Store version so I can use it easily on different machines.

A tiny, barely noticeable feature in Scrivener 3 that told me this was thoughtfully crafted software: on macOS the icon on Scrivener 3 files now show the author's name and name of the manuscript in tiny type. Not something one would ever notice unless they were looking for it, but someone cared enough to make that happen.

Cool! I hadn't noticed that, either, but now you've pointed it out, I'm even more impressed!

Good grief, Scrivener goes WAY beyond just being a writing tool - it's a complete knowledge management system. What with the extensive possibilities for modifying labels, keywords, status etc. of every item, creating links between them, creating new "Collections" from searches for items (using any of the above-mentioned criteria), using multiple window panes for interacting with items as editable notes, outlines or card indices, it's astonishingly powerful. Not totally unlike ConnectedText, in fact.

I can see why it overwhelms people (I was overwhelmed by version 2.0), but having now spent some time getting to know it (and bringing to bear experience gathered with other very competent writing/info management systems like Ulysses, Outlinely, Bear, Firetask etc.), I am beginning to realise why people spend their entire time in Scrivener. I'm currently experimenting with transferring my personal task management system to it, and so far, it's blown me away; I now have two sets of task in outline format side by side (Personal + Work), with "copyholders" below each of them, linked to each outline so that the text/notes in a given (i.e. clicked-on) to-do item in the outline appears in the copyholder immediately below the relevant outline. This arrangement means you can write extensive notes for a given item, and if you use a folder other than "Drafts" as the basis, you can also store all kinds of documents alongside/as sub-items of your to-do items. Or link to documents in other folders, of course.

Hem! ANYWAY, moving on... I'm very impressed, especially now that the search function works so fast. I'm contemplating moving my personal journal and other research databases over to Scrivener as well, although DEVONthink is a close contender as the ultimate research repository. But the sheer flexibility of Scrivener is difficult to overstate.

And that's before I even attempt to write a book with it!

Cheers,
Bill

Another thing that impressed me and shows a lot of care for detail/product quality is that Scrivener for iOS actually shipped with support for Scrivener 3 styles, months before the actual Scrivener 3 release. This feature was entirely hidden (you couldn't access it from a Scriv2 project) but the programmers spent the time putting it in anyway just so that everything would work instantly once Scriv3 was available, without having to wait for a separate iOS Scriv feature update. A small little thing, but shows that they care about not disrupting users and have a long term plan they're capable of executing on even when the public can't see it yet.