Hiya, I’m a teacher, I run Jewellery making classes in the lancashire area of the UK.
I have been looking for software to put all my thoughts in a digital format in a quick and clean manner. A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across mindmapping so I have tried out several pieces of software (including MagicalPad, that is to say the least awkward to use, I’ve bought it for iPad & Mac, it is not the easiest app I have used, a bit disappointed in it, to say the least) one of them being Scrapple, this is very easy to use, it just works, quickly and effectively, very impressed.
I read on the reviews that Scapple can export to a piece of software called Scrivener, this looks interesting because it looks like I can formulate my classes in several different ways, so I have downloaded the trial and it keeps crashing, can any one help me out, before I take the plunge and buy it, I need to know its for me for £35.
I’d recommend browsing the 10.11 beta threads around here. Specifically there are two known bugs (one already fixed by Apple, so update your OS if you haven’t recently):
And of course, we make absolutely no assurances that Scrivener 2.6 can run on any beta operating system. Let alone Apple bugs such as the above, there may be critical issues in Scrivener itself that we have yet to locate. If you’re here to help beta test though, we do appreciate it!
I would love to beta test, but like I say I haven’t bought Srivener yet, I need to know if it does what I need it to do, I think it will, but £35 is a lot to lay out for software.
Ioa (AmberV) is talking about the El Capitan beta - you are using a version of OS X that is unsupported by Scrivener as yet (we’ll release a version that supports El Capitan just before it is released). You shouldn’t use OS X betas such as El Capitan on your main operating system - El Capitan is hugely buggy at the moment and not ready for use for proper work. You should install Scrivener on your non-El Capitan partition for proper use.
Ah, then you’re probably in for a rough ride for a while. You should never install beta software on your main machine. The El Capitan beta agreement explicitly states this when you sign up for the program:
I hope this doesn’t come across the wrong way, but if partitioning your Mac is out of your comfort zone, I would really recommend staying away from beta software. The whole point of betas such as the El Capitan beta is to help find bugs, and given that this is the first public beta, there are a lot of bugs that are going to scupper your work (text is even upside-down in some areas of the system, mainly pertaining to printing).
Also, Apple is aware of certain issues. On their beta guide page, they have this notice:
So, I would recommend proceeding with extreme caution. Given that you have already overwritten your system with an unstable OS, it’s going to be hard to go back, so the best you can do for now, while waiting for El Capitan to become more stable, is to make sure you back up all of your work religiously. If you haven’t done a full back up of all your critical files, I recommend doing it as soon as possible. Then back up anything you work on every day, or at least every week. All of the software you are using on El Capitan - other than system software, which doesn’t include Pages etc - has not been tested properly or updated to work properly on El Capitan.
OS X updates introduce changes, many of them sweeping changes under the hood. Public betas allow intrepid users to report bugs to developers and to Apple; developer betas give developers a few months to learn all the changes and update their applications to fully support the new OS before the updated OS is finally released. So it’s important to be aware that you are working in an environment that hasn’t been fully tested, where bugs are expected, and where many applications may suffer from issues ranging from instability to minor bugs while developers work to add El Capitan compatibility. Also, for many of these bugs (such as the Scrivener crashing bug) there may be nothing the developer can do because it’s an Apple bug, and we just have to wait for Apple to fix the bug in a future beta.
To get Scrivener up and running in Beta 1, though, you need to first download and install the supplementary update from Apple, then follow these instructions:
I’ve managed to downgrade back to Yosemite, bit traumatic, its taken all day, thought I’d killed my Mac, sussed it from Mac Forums and now just downloaded your trial of Scrivener.
Thanks for your help and assistance, it is greatly appreciated.
Glad to hear you got things up and running again. It is a bit of a trick to downgrade, from what I hear. I’d recommend a disk for Time Machine if you want to try the beta again the future. It’s a lot easier to step back to an older version of your computer that way, and plus it’s nice to have that safety net around as a general principle.