Green Tea Ice Cream

Read/WriteWeb’s article on alternatives to Office reminded me that I haven’t raved about Scrivener here.

Scrivener is basically a Mac-only text editor for writing and tracking multiple drafts of complex documents whilst managing and integrating many different sources and fragments. As an editor, it’s joyfully simple – for example, the full screenview (see screenshot from Scrivener site) is just that, a full screen of nothing but a blank page and no tools or buttons. I’ve written two papers on it so far and it kept track of about a hundred different sources for the second one, enabling me to associate each one with which ever fragment of a particular draft I was working on at the time. You can also save snapshots of either a section of a project or the entire working environment and roll-back as necessary.

It’s also blazingly fast, supports importing from sources such as pdfs and exports into well-formed HTML amongst other formats. It quite explicitly doesn’t assume a “published result”, focusing on providing all the mapping, tracking, summarising (check the pin-board view below) and version control features involved in actually being productive. Export into word or rtf for the final formatting touches if you’re fussy. One way to visualise one of the many ways of working it supports is to imagine a Finder or Explorer view which automatically opened any of the documents you click on in a edit window. Scrivener also autosaves by default, seemingly word by word. I haven’t noticed any latency this might cause (probably due to the file format – UNIX packages, which means that even a corrupted file can probably be rescued).

For people with a more mindmap style of working, Tinderbox might be worth a look. I used it for a while but Scrivener simply suits my current way of working much, much better. On the other hand, Tinderbox is fabulous for exploring large quantities of unstructured notes (or even highly structured ones) and I’ve used it for IA work with some success a few years ago. Looking at the Tinderbox site, it seems to have moved on a long way, integrating a set of web 2.0 connectivities and a nice Aqua interface (note to self – must find excuse to play with the new version…)

There’s a review at MacUser and 43 Folders are also fans. Anyone know of anything better?