Apple Design Awards - *sob*

[janra]

Scrivener’s .doc file export isn’t a true word doc file, it’s an RTF renamed as .doc - MS Word will silently and correctly open it, and it doesn’t confuse people who know only Word.

[cyberbryce]

@Amaru

I don’t know about other users, and I’m probably alone here, but I need to produce manuscripts that follow certain guidelines, and that cannot be done in Scrivener. Scrivener is a wonderful writing environment–minus a couple of features that would be nice to have–but it is not a page layout program. Therefore, I need to use another program to print my documents. It just happens that, for my budget, Pages is the best tool.

Look the only limitation of Scrivener’s interaction with Pages–lack of transportability of footnotes, annotations, and embedded images–is driven to a large extent by Pages own limitations, namely its limited support for the published standard format, RTF. When Apple chose to support only the binary DOC format, they knew that this would limit compatibility with third-party developers who rely almost exclusively on RTF, for good reason. Would you want Scrivener (or, e.g., Mellel) to support the binary DOC format if that meant a price increase of $30 and years of development effort (i.e. Apple apparently purchased Schemasoft for this purpose), just for the sake of compatibility with Pages?

Anyway, something tells me the awards committee wasn’t trying to transport footnotes and images into Pages, so this whole discussion should really be relocated to the Pages forum.

discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=777

[Amaru]

@cyberbryce

Would you want Scrivener (or, e.g., Mellel) to support the binary DOC format if that meant a price increase of $30 and years of development effort (i.e. Apple apparently purchased Schemasoft for this purpose), just for the sake of compatibility with Pages?

Sure, I’d gladly pay $30 to have an option to export DOC files from Scrivener. But it’s not only for “sake of compatibility with Pages”–it would have saved me hours of despair when I was trying to assemble my dissertation, and I’m sure it will save me many hours of frustration with MS Word in the future. Yeah, sure, I would pay for features that make my workday easier and more enjoyable, in the same way that, were I not an Apple user, I would fork the money to get a MackBook in order to use Scrivener.

[Rayz]

Bear in mind that the design showcase award is exactly that - a showcase. What they will be looking for is the applications that make the flashiest use of Apple technology which is entirely different from having the best ‘user experience’.

Now unless you make turn the editor into a Core Animation of a book with a quill that floats across the page and scrawls the words as you type, then you might have won … and everyone would have stopped using Scrivener.

Why get so worked up about subjective stuff, especially with such a large and supportive user base?

[KB]

Just to clarify I’m not really worked up. I was just posting my initial boo-hoo reaction. The supportive user base I will take over awards every time. You should be used to me by now, Rayz - I’m not exactly “professional”; I just post away quite blithely and then realise ten posts in that it may not quite have been the good idea it seemed several beers in the week before.

Oh, and Amaru - Scrivener does support DOC export. Yes, the DOC files are renamed RTF files with the creator codes changed, but this is valid for MS Word (if not Pages) and is exactly how Nisus Writer does it (I found out how to do this from Nisus, in fact ).

Best,
Keith

[vic-k]

Keith,
I expect this should be in one of the more esoteric forums, but, since were here now: Im trying to find the bit in the binder that says "Click here to print out a worldwide best selling Booker/Whitbread etc. etc.-award winner.

I can`t find it, where exactly is it?

Take care,
Vic