Hi, Keith,
Like gasparschott, I was inspired by the thread of screenshots–possibilities that I didn’t realize existed. I am a radically non-linear thinker, and almost any structured space and line is paralyzing, especially at the beginning. Speaking for myself, now that I’ve found layouts, I’ve broadened my use of Scrivener considerably. The layout does seem finicky (which is what led me to track down this thread). I have three that behave as expected, but my favorite one for starting a project, behaves badly. It’s a set up that shows just the corkboard, with the binder, the inspector and the toolbars hidden. I can put whatever strikes or what I remember, or a url form something that I looked up on an index card. I only use a few commands to add, move or delete cards.
Eventually, I might open up the binder because the cards are starting to diverge; I move them around in the binder, hide it again and go back to shuffling a subset of cards. They work like a storyboard. I’ll get to a point where I use klcorridan’s (Post your Scrivener screenshots here!) left-hand “column of cards” (without the binder showing), and then I might hide and unhide just the inspector, adding notes, links in the editor, and document references as needed. After that, I have about three different layouts I use depending on the material to be added in order to finish what eventually will be a document (an article, a syllabus, someday a book). This eases a lot of stress when I’m writing, and allows a lot more of the unconscious work to be harvested. And I much prefer the index cards on a screen than mind-mapping, whether on-screen or by hand; it’s too slow, too terse.
So all this is to say, I accept (boo-hoo-ooo…) that layout won’t be in 2.0 (but I’d be happy to have it there even in its finicky form), but I would love to see it back in a 2.x as soon as possible. I suspect if you have a page set up for people to study users’ screenshots, that many would learn lots more of Scrivener’s features, and Layouts would probably get more use–possibly even becoming one of the most important programming pieces for users to manipulate to suit their own styles of writing. It may be that once people had a couple of layouts set up, that it could become a big selling point because they would be able to better imagine how they could use it. . . . Do you think that I could continue to use 1.54, at least for the first two steps, and then move my projects over to the 2.0 version (assuming that we could keep both versions on the same computer)?
I’ve used Scrivener off and on for a few years (and talk it up to my students), but it feels new all over again, and for the last few weeks, it’s been running most of the day, creating a frictionless invitation to work even in a little 5 or 10 minute gap of available time.
I want to say again, thanks for such a great program.
atb,
linn
