I’m starting to rely heavily on Scrivener beta, but one thing makes me nervous each time I open up the program–the little message telling me when the program will stop working entirely. I plan on buying the finished product, but in case I can’t get to it for a few weeks, I’ll end up with files only accessible through TextEdit and a murky file/folder structure.
I’d like to have the next beta version still expire in a timely fashion, but only in terms of editing Scrivener projects. I still think I should be able to open up any project in Scrivener and export individual documents or drafts forever.
I’m sure this isn’t high on your to-do list, but it would certainly help my peace of mind, especially if it’s a quick thing to code in there.
Also, this may sound a little harsh, but you should not be relying heavily on beta software to complete your work. The Scrivener beta is pretty much feature complete, as far as I can tell, and pretty much bug free, but it is still a beta and we should all be aware of that.
After all, you might go and see a beta version of a newly built house to check out the architecture and features, but you would not pay your money and live there…
Also, bear in mind that Scrivener Gold was in beta for a long time (which was just called Scrivener back then) before it got made into Scrivener Gold, and in the year that the various versions of Scrivener have in beta there has NEVER been a period where there has not been an active version. So - there will always be a downloadable active version. Unless I get hit by a bus, of course, but then that wouldn’t do much for the future of Scrivener anyway. And actually, I was hit by a bus last year, and even that didn’t stop me, so there.
Anyway, after beta 3, the focus of beta 4 will be incorporating the eSellerate engine ready for selling, which allows for activation and all that stuff…
And actually, I