More on Scrivener

The jury is in.

I’m buying it.

If you have a Mac and you have any kind of writing projects at all, you should download the demo and play with it.

I’m buying it on the strength of its pretty research corkboard but am sure I’ll be loving other features, too. I just haven’t gotten deep enough into my new project to use the other features.

Here is a pretty (small) image of a portion of my research corkboard right now. I don’t want it to be large enough for you to actually see much detail because these are images that I saved for my own inspiration and use but don’t have permissions to post and such, so I’m hoping you can get the idea but I won’t be abusing any artist’s rights or anything:

In addition to the images — four of characters, two of locations, one of period customs — you can see what looks like two 3×5s with typing on them. That’s the way they show up on the corkboard, but what they actually are are webpages that I’ve imported. Now when I find research on the web, instead of bookmarking and returning to it when I have web access, the actual webpages are saved as part of my research in Scrivener.

Here is an example of one of the above cards when I open it:

Unlike the first image, you can actually click on that one and see what shows up in my Scrivener program.

I can also save video and audio files there, so that any time I need to refer to them, they’re at my fingertips.

This is just so cool.

So if you have a Mac, check it out. Unlike a lot of similar programs out there, this demo is fully functional. You can create and save stuff. Unlike a lot of similar programs out there, this one is only $39.95 if you decide to buy it.

And it has a good forum with helpful people to provide answers if you don’t bother to read the documentation or do the tutorial need extra assistance.

And to top it off, there are also links to software programs for writers who use Windows. (Scroll down to the bottom.) That is because the gentleman who developed Scrivener is English which means he is by nature helpful and polite.

Colour me sold.