On Line Version??

Scrivener Wish List
121

The technical reasons have been explained by KB several time. As have the business reasons. You raised the financial/cost issue. Hence my suggestions for addressing that specific issue.

I would question your assumption on “the way people are working today”. There is certainly a high “consumer” adoption and the SMB space leverages SaaS to remain competitive. My experience, and it is likely biased, in the content creation/origination space, is that local storage is what is wanted to ensure “security” of unpublished content. Look at all the threads on this forum about protecting CW using virtual drive space (dropbox, carbon copy, etc).

For the record I think the desire for a SaaS version of scriv is reasonable. I would like one as well. The problem is that the exposure to the SaaS provider is, in my mind, unacceptable. Local execution is the only way to protect content.

122

It was a good faith question. If I were budget-constrained, I would buy a smartphone first, then a cheap laptop. I’d dump any extra money I might spend on a tablet and Kindle into getting a more capable laptop. So I was a bit puzzled by your choices.

As for “the way people are working today,” well… I’m not convinced that your opinion is any more accurate than mine. Certainly Chromebook sales are dwarfed by sales of tablets, conventional laptops, and even the dinosaurs known as desktop computers. Don’t assume that the way you would prefer to work is the way the larger market is going.

I also answer enough support threads about mangled projects in “cloud” storage to say that most writers should maintain a local storage option for their work.

Katherine

123

I’ve run a small business. With small businesses, it’s never a matter of “and”, always “either … or …”. It’s always a matter of choices; going ahead with one thing means dropping or damaging or freezing something else.

Just sayin’.

124

I’ve just bought the C720 a few days ago (£179 from PC World). After a few experiments with loading Crouton alongside Chromeos, I’ve wiped the whole drive and installed Bodhi Linux on it, which has a version specially catering for the C720.

Suspend and hibernate work out of the box and the keyboard layout has been pre-installed to work with the C720’s keys. It uses the Enlightenment desktop environment, which is a bit different, but fine once you get used to it. It’s very quick and responsive and the keyboard isn’t bad at all.

I haven’t so far opened up the box to fiddle with the BIOS write screw (I presume that’s what you mean by needing the screwdriver) but no doubt the temptation will be too great shortly…

Scrivener (the 32 bit version) installed easily enough, with one minor dependency failure, which just needed a new packaged downloading. Once installed, Scrivener seems to work very well.

The biggest problems I’ve had is with tweaking the touch pad and keyboard to my liking. I always get rid of the Caps Lock key on any keyboard and install an extra control key instead. Bodhi uses the caps lock key as the ‘Search key’ (as it is used in ChromeOS), so it took a fair amount of tweaking to get the right incantation for my preferences (answer is a combination of xmodmap and xbindkeys…).

One thing I haven’t found a way to do is to implement Control-Home/End as Beginning / End of Document, so if anybody knows a way to do that, I’d be grateful…

125

Hi all,

I am a newbie in Scrivener and I have fallen in love with several functionalities, the workflow and the basic paradigm. Actually it is impressive for any type of writer.

I say writer and not writers since I cannot put it into production. I’m part of a research team which is used to work with online document editors in real time. Real time collaboration and transparent version control is just too useful and thus we cannot stop using it

I’m sure that a standalone SaaS scrivener is a huge and risky project. However, I wonder if it is possible to create a bidirectional bridge from local scrivener to a google document and returns. In this case, every contributor would edit and work with the scrivener sub-documents. maybe scrivener could import a subdocument from google doc, compare changes and commit the proper ones, and update the google doc.

Possibly my scenario is not perfect, although I hope that it is possible to implement it with the proper modifications and trade-offs.

I find scrivener awesome for individual work. Until, say, 8 years ago it would be perfect. But teams are used now to collaborate in real time and transparently, and a lot of people cannot give that collaboration features up regardless of the usefulness of the new features of a different, local tool.

What do you think, people?

126

I’m still wondering how much folk would be willing to pay for a subscription.

Or would folk expect it to be a free service?

127

Sure, people have been working on documents together for as long as there has been writing. Monks were collaborating long before we even had the printing press. This is nothing new, nor is it taking over the entire world. Some things need it, some don’t. Scrivener is for those that don’t—it’s very simple, and it’s not at all a limiting factor as there are plenty of people out there that do not need real-time collaboration (I would wager a substantial majority).

Scrivener already has something like this with its folder sync feature, and Google might have some way of working with it via their “Drive” thing. So long as their webpage editor can read and write RTF files without mangling them too much (dropping comments, images, footnotes, etc.) then it should work okay.

128

Speaking for myself as a writer, rather than as an Official Scrivener Support Person ™… You ever hear the saying about how too many cooks spoil the stew? That’s the way I feel about real time collaboration.

I’ve worked on projects involving as many as eight different authors at three different companies. In my experience, having a designated “scribe” who goes off and produces a draft, submits it to the other authors for comments, and then rolls the comments back into the second draft is MUCH more efficient than having everyone trying to manipulate the same text at the same time. Different writers approach writing and editing in different ways. Forcing them to work on the same things at the same time is a good way to force the process down to the least-common-denominator level: low quality text produced via massively inefficient wasteage of everybody’s time.

Yes, modern technology offers many new and different ways for teams to collaborate. But just because a technology can be used, that doesn’t mean it should be used. I expect that once the “new” wears off, real time collaboration will be just another tool, and the basic task of writing will remain as solitary as it has been for centuries.

Katherine

129

I would pay for several subscriptions. No doubt about that, the advantages of scrivener are decissive

However, people, you are wrong about the usefulness or popularity of real time collaborative document editors. Or, if you want, the popularity of google docs.

In medium and high levels of education, Google doc has obtained a resounding success. Several big companies, and a lot of small ones, relies on Google docs for collaboration. And there are more and more examples.

The success recipe is quite simple: true real-time, useful document history and chage control and a very imaginative commenting workflow.

Enterprise-grade writing is a very difficult art: you have to produce crystal-clear, ordered, compelling texts always against the clock. And the clock is your enemy, because there is always the danger of commit mistakes under the pressure of the lack of time. Before real-time collaboration, there was an always messy exchange of emails with different document versions, and obscene amounts of time were lost because of the previous email workflow schema.

If you can save the time needed for merging and validating a text produced with different versions, you can use that time for reviewing and commit the final, precise and elegant changes. After all, writing for business customers is really demanding: they have to feel satisfied of their investment, which is never cheap.

Therefore, real-time cloudish collaboration is a first order resource for a lot of stable or dynamic work teams. Combining this with al the features and ideas of resource would be a damn killer application for team work in business, academy and any other organization.

I’m not sure if my sugerence of using Google Doc’s API (or office live, or Zoho writer, or whatever), is feasible for literatureandlatte.com. But I’m more and more convinced that the combined tool I am mentioning offers a difference so decissive that, if you don’t implement it, sooner or later somebody will do that and will obtain the reward

130

In my limited experience (I run two small businesses which have collaborative components, one dealing purely with text, the other text and music - and for both corporate and academic clients ) I have found that serial rather than parallel collaboration is much preferred by the participants and is perceived (accurately or no) as less error prone. For those purposes organised project swaps to DBox and suchlike work well.

All of the ads for realtime collaboration make it appear essentially vibrant and sexy and young, so maybe being none of those gives me a slightly different perspective.

131

A useful distinction. I spent fifteen years employed in an organisation where collaboration on long-form projects was the fundamental, expected method of writing. Even so, I’d estimate that a minimum of ten per cent of those recruited couldn’t hack it in any shape or form; a greater percentage felt uncomfortable with it, for all sorts of reasons. Of the remainder, the vast majority could only cope with ‘serial’ collaboration - “You finish your section overnight and I’ll have a look at it and rewrite it first thing in the morning.” A tiny percentage - fewer than five per cent - could successfully handle ‘parallel’ collaboration - “Let’s sit down at that desk over there and crack this section together”.

The sense of satisfaction that could be derived from a successful collaboration of the parallel kind was very considerable. But it required, among other qualities, patience, tolerance, great clarity of thought on the part of both parties, talents for planning and mutual communication, and above all a willingness to suppress one’s minute-to-minute ‘writing ego’ in the wider interests of the joint project. It wasn’t surprising that so few writers could work that way.

‘Serial’ collaboration is perfectly feasible with Scrivener as it is. I guess that one has to ask whether there really are enough users who could successfully make ‘parallel’ collaboration work on long-form projects using an online version.

132

Based on what I’ve seen out in the world, the vast majority of enterprise writing fails to meet these objectives, with or without realtime collaboration. Nor do the vast majority of enterprise writing customers, internal or external, have the ability to judge performance against any of these objectives except deadline compliance.

Katherine

133

Just wanted to add my pennyworth to this conversation, the only subscription type I have is office 365 for Mac a one off payment and four years subscription, I thought that was worthwhile as I am guessing I might change my lap top in four years or maybe not even use one who knows, it included Skype calls every month as well , it was an exceptionally good deal, but I don’t like the idea of a monthly payment for any software, it works out expensive and is the reason I don’t use the adobe package .
I would not subscribe if Scrivener went to that type of product and would be saddened at the thought of losing the use of such a fine software package.

134

Don’t worry, we don’t like subscription software either! :slight_smile:

135

What about suscribing for a non-subscription-model Scrivener? :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

136

Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no interest in typing multiple drafts of deadline-sensitive magazine articles, and nothing particularly interesting in the way of writing software, I bought a newfangled program that seemed to have been designed by actual writers to be used by actual Writers, and not secretaries or businessfolk or other admirable but decidedly different-thinking people.

With this elegant new tool Writers could collapse and expand complicated outlines, spell-check common everyday words, move great hunks of text around with ease, and rewrite and edit and rewrite and edit and rewrite and edit until our turgid prose incandesced with clarity, our White-Out and Highlighters calcified, and our Post-It notes stuck together in their own damp, drizzly Novembers.

And then, during a full-point upgrade, this Writer-friendly program began to change, adding features, embracing new users: repurposing itself from a tool for Writers, by which I mean novelists and essayists and playwrights and similar economically unnecessary warts on society, into a full-blown suite that promised something for everyone and provided, in the end, nothing much for anyone, at least not anyone from my small tribe.

With each advance of our once-favorite working environment, we Writers grew increasingly grim about the mouth, involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses and bringing up the rear of every funeral we met; and it required a strong moral principle to prevent our artistic selves from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking a businessperson’s hat off.

And then Scrivener appeared, and we writers once again had our very own tool, designed by a writer for Writers, and we could leave Microsoft Word to the business world.

But soon the calls began–can we have this, can we have that, all the business world works this way, why can’t Scrivener, too?

Simply hearing all this talk of “enterprise” writing makes one want to take to the ship, as a substitute for pistol and ball, which I understand are frowned on these days, even as metaphors.

137

And good luck to them.

I’m not sure how another company making money means that L&L has somehow failed. I could just as easily say that unless L&L makes a spreadsheet app or an electric car then they’re leaving money on the table.

138

Indeed.

After all, Microsoft Word remains the market leader by a wide margin. And yet L&L is thriving.

Katherine

139

I just installed Scrivener for Linux on an Asus i3 Chromebox that attaches to the Vesa mount on the back of my monitor. Dead silent, fast and oh what a bargain. Everything syncs to Dropbox. To me this setup is way preferable to an online version.
chromebox.jpeg

140

May I asked what the name of this program was?