Comparing to how others do it -- Scrivener releases, etc.

Scrivener Windows Beta (Archived)
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As many of us, I’m pretty busy with attending to needs here in the present circumstance, but it’s helpful also to think about other things.

I just had a view on another constantly-developing app, of comparable complexity to Scrivener 3. This is Affinity (Serif) Publisher, also twinned (tripleted??) with its magicallly embedding Draw and Photo partners.

It’s a great program, highly usable, and in fact now able to import with complete success a complex-enough Adobe InDesign document I’ve used to prove it. If you know InDesign, you’ll know the achievement.

The true picture, though, for apps such as this and Scrivener, is ever multi-dimensional.

What looks like working great for some, will so often have deficits remaining for others.

That’s what we have at this advanced state of readiness – but not complete – of Scrivener, and that’s what they have in Publisher, which follows its release points always with heavy work on what isn’t there yet.

You can see what I’m talking about, and how many the repairs, here: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/58-publisher-beta-on-windows/

Even, that the app well into release actually didn’t handle large (novel-size) documents – and its fix, in this thread. It should look familar of type, I suspect: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/107354-556-is-still-so-slow-its-unusable/

To close, it might be worth noting that Publisher is in its own two-week beta cycle, to get out the following release…

Good cheer, respect, and appreciation, we should have, and share here, I think.

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Hey! That was a great share, thank you for talking time. It does put things into perspective :slight_smile:

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Synth, thanks – glad you enjoyed it :slight_smile:

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That’s a great looking set of applications, albeit only from what I saw from their website. I always like seeing alternatives to the Adobe subscription model.

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I’m with @JASONB. I gave up creative cloud because it was just too expensive for my needs. I use OpenSource now: GIMP, Inkscape, and Scribus. Are they more frustrating at times? Yes. But they are nowhere near $700/year!

Thanks for sharing.

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For anyone that’s interested, Affinity have just dropped the price of Publisher by about 50% …

:slight_smile:

Mark

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I was so impressed by this that I bought a copy of both Photo and Publisher. (As commercial replacements for GIMP and Scribus—which I’ve used occasionally, and found to be very useful, especially for being free, but also found to be a bit awkward to work with.)

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Affinity software is great. It’s also true that Publisher is a brand-new product, whereas Windows Scrivener users have been waiting for years for the official release to catch up to the Mac version. Affinity also doesn’t lock their users out two or three times a month. Let’s make the comparison fair.

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That was snarky and totally unnecessary, plus an outright lie. Grow up!

.

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Liz, it doesn’t entirely help Affinity that Publisher is new – it regularly gets feature or import querys against venerable Quarkxpress.

I think you have to give up on this ‘lock out’ thing, for very reasonable reasons that have been fully expressed here.

By their method, Affinity support has to field reports from out of date betas. They are a lot bigger in staffing than Scrivener, but do this mainly by being quite held back as to what they actually reply to. Where they do reply, to current beta issues, they are very good. Release notes, as here, cover the fixes vs. any age of issuesvery well.

Scrivener has many fewer staff, and very fervent posters.

I think that by backing off to consider this, one can see that we are all made happier, simply, by responsibly doing the updates, and being appropriately grateful for the Scrivener team’s excellent performance.

And that, to me at least, is fairness.

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I know nothing about this group Affinity. All I know about it from reading the posts here is that they put out some good software, and all I know about it from reading this particular post is that they don’t know how to run a proper software beta… they’re basically just getting away with putting a flawed product out there by using the word ‘beta’.

Being that I am only going by the criticism in this particular post, I hope I am judging them too harshly.

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You probably are. There is no one right way to run a beta test. If their company is happy with how they run it and their users are happy enough to buy the product, that’s probably a good fit for them.

Same with L&L – they have enough happy users buying their product that they’re not announcing radical changes to the beta test process.

Different processes for different people and products. All hardware and software is the result of design compromises, so find the flavor of compromise that works best for you and support it.