Please note that this blog is no longer being updated because it has been moved here:| Literature and Latte
This morning someone asked me how big Scrivener’s code base is, and I didn’t know how to answer - yet it’s something I’ve been wondering myself. It comes up occasionally, usually in two situations: 1) Someone writes to me wanting to know how much code it took to create Scrivener, because they have an idea for a program and wonder what’s involved; 2) Someone is insisting that I could port Scrivener to platform X or “just add” Y “easily enough” and is getting uppity that I’v...| Literature and Latte
Grr, Sky! Grr, Cornwall! (The sky I am referring to is the corporation owned by devil-incarnate Rupert Murdoch*, by the way, and not the most excellent canopy, the brave overhanging firmament, the majestical roof fretted with… Not the actual sky, I mean.)| Literature and Latte
Just to warn those who read this blog purely for Scrivener-related news: this post is only tangential to Scrivener, as it’s about my own fumbling attempts at writing (for which I use Scrivener, obviously), so you can safely tune out if you don’t like reading self-indulgent prattle.| Literature and Latte
So. The iPad. (You may have heard of it. It’s a neat little gadget Apple released last week without much fanfare.) There are commentators out there declaring it the world’s most expensive Etch-a-Sketch (unfair; it has no stylus), and others praising it as being as “magical” and “revolutionary” as Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive would have us believe. My own opinion on the device is somewhat schizophrenic (in the colloquial sense, obviously). I’m split between my thoughts as a user a...| Literature and Latte
(Note: Although I've moved most non-Scrivener related posts over to my Machine Dreams blog following a couple of users taking umbrage over my opinions on the objectively terrible Battlestar Galactica finale, I'm making an exception for this one. This is a re-post from the forums, and I feel it's justified purely because J.D. Salinger was one of the authors who made me want to write, and thus had a direct impact on the eventual development of Scrivener. Justification over.)| Literature and Latte
For all those scriptwriters out there, and for all those who don’t already know, Final Draft 8 was finally released not long ago. Final Draft is, of course, the industry standard of scriptwriting programs, and version 8 brings with it a raft of new features and an overhaul to the interface that makes it feel much more like a native Mac app than previous versions. I won’t go into the various new features - navigator, improved index card navigation, new interface, and so on - here; instead,...| Literature and Latte
So, in overhauling Scrivener's toolbar graphics and other graphic elements for 2.0, I noticed that a lot of OS X apps handle toolbar images a little more elegantly than Scrivener 1.x. Scrivener's toolbar looks fine when the icon size is set to normal, but if you set the it to use the small image size, the images get rescaled and don't look so hot. A lot of apps - look at Pages for instance - look great at both sizes, because they provide custom images for each rather than just allowing the to...| Literature and Latte
A couple of years ago I got all huffy about how Apple had withheld the Leopard beta released at WWDC '07 from developers who had paid for access to Leopard betas but could not attend WWDC, only finally releasing it to other Apple Developer Connection Select and Premier members about a month later - meaning a lot of developers who had paid up for early access to Leopard were unnecessarily left a month behind WWDC attendees in getting their apps Leopard-ready.| Literature and Latte
I've been receiving an increasing number of e-mails asking me if Scrivener is still in active development, which seems to be a result of people checking this blog and noting that my last post here was some time ago... So, yet again, I thought I'd best post a quick update to say that Scrivener is indeed alive, well, and in active development. (I've always said that the forums are a better indicator of the state of development, because I post on the forums nearly every day, but I do understand ...| Literature and Latte
I just have to boast about this.* I've been enjoying the excellent sixth series of Spooks on BBC1 (Tuesdays - MI5 in the US) - I've been a big fan of the show since the second series, and would get around to renting the first season on DVD were it not for the thought of seeing Lisa Faulkner getting her face burned off with boiling oil. It's a great spy show with interesting characters (though Adam has got to be the most obvious spy ever - his "disguises" as a gardener, builder, phone company ...| Literature and Latte
I've been getting a number of concerned e-mails recently from Scrivener users who fear that I may have abandoned development of Scrivener because my last blog post here is rather old and was slagging off Apple, and because there is no mention of Leopard on the Scrivener product page...| Literature and Latte
Well, if you've been reading my previous posts about Apple's tardiness in posting the 9a466 (or whatever it is) Leopard beta to developers who paid for ADC Select or Premiere membership, you'll know I'm not a happy bunny. WWDC attendees received that beta nearly three weeks ago now. And you know what? That beta is now available on torrent sites. Meaning that pirates out there are running a version of Leopard for which they have not paid, whilst legitimate law-abiding ADC Select members such a...| Literature and Latte
No, but really, are they?| Literature and Latte
As you may or may not know (and whether you care is a different matter entirely), today is the last day of Apple's WWDC (World Wide Developers' Conference) in San Francisco. If you're an Apple buff, you've probably seen the keynote, showing off Leopard. Yes, the keynote was a little underwhelming. Leopard looks fantastic, but it does seem odd that after being told that it has 300 new features, of the ten that His Jobsness previewed, 8 had already been revealed at last year's conference. Still...| Literature and Latte
Just recently I've been invited to join a sort of round table discussion with several other UK-based Mac developers. It's been interesting so far, but I found myself moaning and bitching about the lack of frameworks available for common OS X controls. This, of course, is a career hazard of being a teacher - you end up moaning a lot. So I thought I ought to make amends.| Literature and Latte
Well, the first week of Scrivener going on a 1.0 release has gone way better than I could have hoped. Thank you to everybody who has purchased a copy or just taken the time to give me feedback so far. Notable events of the past couple of weeks include:| Literature and Latte
Well, Scrivener finally got to a 1.0 release yesterday, and I would like to sincerely thank* all of those users who have beta-tested both Scrivener Gold and then the Scrivener 1 betas over the past couple of years. You have all helped make Scrivener a much better application, truly. When I released beta 1 several months ago, I thought it was pretty much ready for release. I was mistaken, to put it mildly. The feedback was positive, but there were a lot of rough edges that made navigation a li...| Literature and Latte
Well, as of today I am putting the finishing touches on Scrivener's Help file (though it needs proof reading; it is very fortunate that the users of Scrivener are writers - a naturally pedantic* bunch, meself included).| Literature and Latte
Phew. After just over a month of very focused work on Scrivener, I'm ready to release the new beta... I'm looking forward to hearing what the beta-testers make of it. Even more than that, though, I'm looking forward to importing my work into it and using it. I've just finished writing the new tutorial, so it's now just a matter of writing the new readme file and creating the DMG. Not sure whether it will go up tonight or tomorrow, but it will definitely be up before tomorrow night (excepting ...| Literature and Latte
As promised, a couple of screenshots of Scrivener's new full screen mode. It's not finished yet - I mainly just have to hook everything up - but these should give you a good idea of how it's going to look. The first screenshot shows how full screen mode when you launch into it, with no extraneous elements visible. And don't worry, although this is the default appearance, all colours are customisable, so you can always get that retro green-text-on-black look if you really want. The second scre...| Literature and Latte
(Note: It's late and I can't be bothered right now to go through and check for spelling errors and missing words, so please excuse any poor grammar.)| lit-n-lat.blogspot.com
The new Scrivener interface is coming along nicely. All that remains now is building the full-screen window and control panel. After that, I am ready to start bringing in all of the “brain code” from Scrivener Gold and the never-released Scrivener 0.3b. That will take a couple of months, but once it’s done and the bugs have been ironed out through beta-testing, 1.0 is ready for release.| lit-n-lat.blogspot.com
I’ve long been intending to add some technical, coding-related content to this blog. I’ve always admired the blogs of other developers who share some of the coding problems they have faced and solutions they have reached, and in developing Scrivener there are a number of issues that I’ve come across and found solutions for that I’m sure could be useful to other developers. So, this is the first more techie, coding-orientated post to make it to the blog. Those with no interest in Cocoa...| lit-n-lat.blogspot.com