No, the new cake-based engine runs on eggs, sugar and rainbow sprinkles, and it would damage the shiny expensive displays that Apple products come with if visualised…
Seriously, my take on the announcement is that the new ScXXX text engine is not markdown-based. It is a style-based engine, built on top of the same Textkit base but more expressly designed to separate content and presentation. Scrivener 3 is bespoke styles applied as a veneer on top of RTF, ScXXX will, I assume, be turtles styles all the way down.
As someone who exclusively uses Markdown output, I’m personally happy to not have to see it when I write. But with a styles-based engine, nothing should preclude you from writing the markdown yourself…
Last thing I want to see when writing novels is… code. That’s my day job. I fear what might happen if these two things overlap! (Then again, perhaps that’s how Scrivener happened…?)
My experience is the other way around. Dropbox is almost seemless in syncing. Whereas iCloud syncing has been beyond irritating and has seen me often resort to using
killall bird
in a macOS terminal session to kick iCloud into action again again. Things might be different now as I upgraded my Macs to Sonoma (14.1) over this past weekend but that killall command is ready and waiting to sort the mess out.
The screen shots and mention of Markdown look too much like Obsidian for me. Maybe the new app does some pretty printing of text but then again so can Obsidian.
Just to clarify: this is not a Markdown app, and there is no Markdown under the hood (so there’s no Markdown to show). @nontroppo has it right: it’s a TextKit, rich text app that takes some inspiration from Markdown in being more pure about separating content and presentation. (You will be able to export to Markdown, but it’s not driven by Markdown.)
In pure speculation mode (why can’t we just wait? I don’t know), I am guessing we have styles-driven rich text on the front end, but instead of going to rtf on the back side, it is probably going to xml.
And then for the compile-a-nator we’ll have some sort of yaml / ymml? / yummy? area to tweak the look of the output – including casting a different look on each style, if desired. It goes without saying that for this part, it will be set up to work for most people right out of the box without such tweaking.
I think my sweetheart is squarely in the target audience for this app, but I think I have use for it too. There is a readily separable portion of what I do that would easily benefit from this streamlined app.
Anyone who wants wholesale modification of the formatting will probably end up back in Scrivener. Where of course we will welcome them with open arms. The new app will not offer anything close to the level of output customization that Scrivener does.
The problem with “working for most people right out of the box,” in both Scrivener and the new application is that there are as many formatting preferences as there are authors. One person’s “standard format” is another’s unreadable disaster.
Alright, alright. This discussion has been going on for a while now, I thought that if I’d just be patient someone would end up being the daredevil to ask the question everyone wants the answer of but don’t have the guts to ask, … but no.
So fine, I’ll be the one to say it out loud.
Is it gonna make coffee or what ?
(8 years using Scrivener : I still have to take care of it myself.) (And yes, I’ve checked the options ; it ain’t there.)
