Perhaps raw stats can help convince you? According to ComputerWorld, there’s going to be about 5 million Chromebooks sold this year. You may not call that a “large” number of users, but I would say 5 million users of ANYTHING would qualify as large. And mind you, that’s only sales in 2014; in 2012 there were 400k sold, and then sales skyrocketed to 1.75 million in 2013. That’s a helluva lot of units sold, and, to steal a bit from Douglas Adams: that puts Chromebooks in the same conversation as Linux and OSX desktops. Right now, it’s only in a ‘OS X and Linux have a large userbase, as opposed to Chromebooks’ way. But still in the conversation.’
Whoa, you’re coming over kinda high in the jerkish factor. Chill a bit, dude! Why not discuss the idea I was putting forth, not the vernacular I chose to use?
I never said that in this scenario the person wouldn’t have a different PC that could run Scrivener. I said the exact opposite in my post: I have a lot of computers, but I prefer to carry the Chromebook when on an airplane or riding light rail or heading to lunch between a few meetings.
Here’s the deal: I’m not saying I want a full online-service type product. I don’t want something that tries to re-create Google Docs. What I’m thinking of is basically a ChromeOS version of Scrivener. That alone would be awesome, but factor in that almost all apps written from ChromeOS run on most versions of Chrome, and you end up with a web-based version of Scrivener. That is what is on my wishlist.
I have to disagree. 5 million per year in a world or even US market is small fry. Opinion is divided as to the long term viability of chrome books with several mfrs already ditching the platform.
Of those 5 million buyers last year, how many would be writers looking for Scrivener. 10,20,100? There aren’t any figures out there to support a ‘surprisingly large number’. Not being nasty, just trying to be realistic.
Most are browsing, doing a little low end word processing, and little else if reports are to be believed.
There are enough MacBook Airs and ultralights in the sub $1000 area that are as light as a Chromebook and offer a full computing experience. You can even run Linux on them all if that’s your thing.
If I were a developer (I have written software) I would not be in a rush to devote resources to online or Chrome O/S as that market seems to focus on wanting free or almost free software. Great if something is your passion and you don’t need to make money, however for a commercial operation which L&L is, that market is a great way to tip money down the drain.
In your reply above when asked how much you’d pay for a full on line version you say that’s not what you want. That seems to suggest you want a stripped down free or almost free version which is hardly a viable investment for any developer. Am I correct, or misreading.
Probably the technically most difficult parts of Google Docs are the real time collaboration features. Any web-based version of Scrivener will need to have those, if only to protect users from themselves. “Real time collaboration” in this context includes having the same project open in two different browser windows on the same machine: from the server point of view the two instances might as well be on different continents, the technical requirements are the same.
And then add on top of that the many things that Scrivener can do that Google Docs can’t, but implement them in an environment that is like looking at your data through a pinhole camera relative to what’s possible with localized systems.
For a relatively small market whose willingness to pay for all of this is questionable at best.
(And yes, 5 million in a year is very small potatoes. The Windows world sells more systems than that in a couple of weeks.)
Even assuming that Computerworld is correct (and the worst sales estimates on the planet come from IT analysts), the question isn’t the number of Chrome sales.
It is a matter of how many chrome users there are who write academic papers/novels on Chrome (as opposed to their other laptop) and who are willing to hand over money for the service. The third point is quite important, because I wonder if it would end up being cheaper to just buy a standard laptop and a Scrivener license.
Even assuming that Computerworld is correct (and the worst sales estimates on the planet come from IT analysts), the question isn’t the number of Chrome sales.
It is a matter of how many chrome users there are who write academic papers/novels on Chrome (as opposed to their other laptop) and who are willing to hand over money for the service. The third point is quite important, because I wonder if it would end up being cheaper to just buy a standard laptop and a Scrivener license.
I did. I asked for the numbers to support you assertions.
And I asked if there are that many people who will do the same to run Scrivener, or will they simply take their Macbook Air/Dell whatever and run Scrivener on that. Your personal preference does not a market make, which is why I’m always curious about the numbers.
I won’t lay claim to any numbers expertise, per se, because ultimately there is only one number that matters to me: one. Meaning, me.
My next laptop will be a Chromebook. I’ve played around on them, love 'em, and intend to have it replace my 4-year-old Asus Windows 7 laptop when I make the switch. (And please, don’t bore me with ‘yeah, but, it’s not a real computer’ arguments… I know the abilities and limitations and know what I want and what I’ll be buying, thanks.)
That said, I am a working novelist. And I do plan on getting a Chromebook soon. And yes, it would be ideal to be able to use Scrivener on Chrome OS. Sure, I can accomplish that via Chrome Remote Desktop (my desktop is Windows and that won’t be changing anytime soon). But it’d be far better to be able to run my favorite writing software.
Whether that’s accomplished via an online version, or a native ChromeOS app, I don’t really care. I just know that a Chromebook fits what I want to do with my next laptop. I’d rather not waste space on my Chromebook installing a dual-boot system to run Linux, either, personally.
That being the case, if L&L choose not to make an online or Chrome OS version of Scrivener, it’s sad but no great loss: I can still write drafts in Google Drive/Docs, and transfer the progress into Scrivener on my desktop when needed. It’s not that hard; barely even a hassle.
But would it be nice to run Scrivener native on Chrome or as a Web-based app? Yes. Yes, it would.
Finally, in relation to the section quoted, you’re guilty of exaggeration; the list of developers for Chromebooks is expanding, not shrinking. As for manufacturers “abandoning the platform,” that’s also just plain incorrect on the whole.
Yes, Samsung ceased production to the UK… but only to the UK. Their Chromebook 2 is doing quite well in the US and Asian markets and there’s already talk of a Chromebook 3 being developed for 2015.
In early 2014, only about 4-5 companies were even making Chromebooks; now there are about a dozen. Newcomers in 2014 include big names like Lenovo, Dell, Toshiba, and Asus, to name the bigger ones. And HP entered the market last winter, I believe. So it’s not just niche companies, either.
Study up.
Except your’re not being realistic, Amcmo. You are playing VERY fast-n-loose with the numbers yourself.
As a working novelist, I know lots of writers. I hang out with others of my ilk, both online and sometimes in person. I know/have contact with hundreds of writers each year, and into four-figures if you add up all the different writers I’ve met in, say, the list three-years-plus alone, since moving to Oregon. Not counting any I met/knew in Minnesota before coming here.
There’s a reason why I’ve met so many: I’m active on writer-oriented chat boards, writer-oriented activities such as NaNoWriMo and ROW80, and I also do book formatting (print and ebook) as a side-job to my own writing.
So, I can tell you that your snarky “10, 20, 100?” comment was pure SWAG on your part and no more accurate that “a surprising number of writers.”
I can also say that ChromeOS/Chromebook comes up a lot in writers’ circles; almost as often as Scrivener, though Scrivener is, of course, far more popular, as apps tend to be what writers care about more than OS-talk.
I can also confirm that a commonly-expressed thought on the subject is, “I’d get a Chromebook in a hot second, if I could use Scrivener on it.”
That said, S&S has no obligation to serve that wish unless they choose to. I, for one, hope they ultimately choose to, but frankly, my shorter-term wish is for Scrivener for Windows to update/advance to 2.0 in 2015, catching it up with the Mac side on features. (And hopefully giving Windows users a way to output Kindle ebooks without configuring a “helper app.”)
But your numbers are no more based in direct experience than the number of the fellow you’re responding to. If you aspire to be “realistic,” that is.
As for your claim that “most are doing browsing and a little low-end word processing,” you’re off-base on that, as well. MS Office is now available on ChromeOS, as is Adobe Photoshop. It’s clear that would be news to you, but it is true.
Your bias and misinformation are showing, Amcmo.
First of all, only a Mac elitist would say “sub-$1000” makes MacBook Air an acceptable alternative to sub-$400, sub-$300, and sometimes even sub-$200 Chromebooks.
As for the “full computing experience,” you’re outdated on your info on the capabilities of ChromeOS, which have grown by leaps and bounds even in the last year. Don’t insult the collective intelligence of members of this board. I know a lot about Chromebooks, and clearly know the market for them far better than you.
Now, I used to be a Mac-head. And a proud one. So proud I used to subscribe to Guy Kawasaki’s MacEvangelist email newsletter, back when that was a thing in the mid-90s.
And I clearly remember the days when the VERY SAME charges were made by Microsoft against MacOS.
“Oh, it’s a nice little boutique OS if you’re in publishing or education, but if you want a full computing experience, you really need to be on Windows.”
Are you old enough to remember those days?
So, I would expect a Mac fan not to engage in such disingenuous OS-bashing as you’re doing here with ChromeOS.
Guess what: Only ONE company makes MacOS hardware, and that hasn’t exactly hurt the MacOS or its mobile cousin, iOS.
Stop the demagoguery.
Same stuff here. This is a carbon copy of the sort of BS Bill Gates used to sling at MacOS… even while he was cribbing notes and recreating Windows 3.1 into Windows 95, which a sales rep for Microsoft once bragged to me, in a training session, was “exactly like a Mac. Except better, because it’s Windows.”
I mean, really: Microsoft used to discourage people away from Macs because “You can’t run Windows on one.”
Duh! That was the friggin point, and yet John Carmack nearly ruined Apple before Jobs came back, trying to prove Gates wrong, trying to force Macs to run “Windows emulation software.” (And ghosts of that mentality linger even today in MacOS.
Yes: you can’t run Windows software or Mac software on a Chromebook. You also can’t fire up a Boeing 747 with the keys to a Toyota Prius, but so what?
If you want to spend your time bashing anything that’s not Apple, you don’t appreciate Apple’s history, and you’re not doing a very good job of sounding informed in the process.
But, nice try.
At least we agree that whether L&L want to bring Scrivener to either an online version, or a ChromeOS version, is their decision.
I’ll be getting a Chromebook either way. I’d love a native version of Scrivener to run on it, but if one is never made available, it’s so easy to move stuff from Google Drive/Docs to Scrivener when I need to, that it’s hardly even worth talking about it like it’s an end-all/be-all thing.
It’d be nice. But it’s not critical either way and won’t change my decision to make my next laptop a Chromebook either way.
P.S., I noticed in the thread an honest question was asked about "how much would you be willing to pay for an online or ChromeOS version of Scrivener and, so far as I can see, no one’s given a straight-forward answer.
So I will:
If Scrivener for ChromeOS were made, and available in the Chrome store, I’d be willing to pay the same price for it as the Windows license I purchased when I got my Windows version.
At the time, retail of the Windows version was $40 USD and I was already considering it. Then, there was a one-week sale on Amazon and I was able to pick it up for half-off. So I was willing to pay $40, and ended up lucking out and paying only $20 USD. (And I expect to pay again when the Windows version jumps to 2.0.)
Just as I would expect to pay that if I had a MacOS device that I wanted to add Scrivener to. I own Windows, but if I bought a MacBook Air, I know I’d have to pay $45 or whatever it is priced at at that time, to get Scrivener on a new Mac device.
In that same way, I would expect to pay $40-$45 for a ChromeOS version, unless I lucked into a temporary sale and got a significant discount on it. (Such as the NaNoWriMo winner discount.)
So, I’m just me, but I’d be prepared to pay the standard price for a ChromeOS license, just as I did for my Windows version.
The charge that “all Chromebook owners are only interested only in free or almost-free software” is spurious and misleading.
the larger problem with any of the linux variants in the “poor man” class is the same as the windows tablet problem: there are too many cpu variants to be “practically supportable”. This argument can be made toward Linux in general, but most “desktops” are running a 100% standardized CPU core (x86 based).
For the currently unsupported linux scriv to be supported on all possible hw combinations for chrome (which is just linux) would require a huge financial investment for hw, builds, technical support, and code remediation.
Not a realistic option.
On the other hand, a used intel based laptop, a 4gb USB stick (for the linux installer) and you have all the power of chrome (if you want to limit yourself) on a full linux platform that can run scriv. I can do that here for $us50 from a hw recycler.
The $$ argument is a red-herring. No more valid to folks like me than you think the “user base” argument is.
Actually, most PCs currently are x64-based, not x86.
The change to 64-bit computing earmarked that market shift.
My Win7 machines have two “program folders.” The regular one (for x64-based apps) and the x86 programs folder, for older 32-bit Windows apps.
As for “dealing with all the hardware variants,” most Windows programmers have common libraries to handle such subroutines and customization; and it’s not even uncommon in Mac development as there are the older Motorola-PowerPC-based Macs and the newer Intel-based Macs.
I’m sure there would be similar “standard libraries” around that deal with this, taking much of the work out of it.
Of course, we all know 90 percent of the work in programming is sweating the details of the last 5-percent of making a program work.
But programmers are used to that.
Again, that said, it’s a decision that rests with L&L alone, and no amount of cheering or booing from either side ultimately matters.
They’ll make Scrivener available on the platforms they choose, when they choose.
This will be my standard response whenever a programmer tells me something is difficult from now on. “Just use the Standard Libraries,” and “you programmers are used to that.”
Thank you for making my point. There is no standard in this world if you are dealing with multiple manufacturers.
If you look at the low end hardware you will see that it is NOT standardized (in my stable we have, ARM7, M3, x86, and amd64). For a 2 man linux shop, it is not realistic to build, then package for each core and os variant. And distributing source code is not an economically smart decision in this case either. Supporting more than the major desktop variants just doesn’t make sense.
But the debate on whether one should promptly zap their new Chromebook with Linux, turning it into a $300 computer, is one I’ll gladly make popcorn for.
It “sounds” good except for the arch problem (which I know you know so I’m talking to the ethers here). How many people other than garpu really want to build everything from source at every turn? That’s the entire reason I moved to OSX in the first place. No more building of thing (except of the avr junk I keep getting myself into).
Make that most new PCs. Maybe. But there’s a whole lot of low-end and legacy hardware out there. Much of it in use as “second” computers or hand-me-downs that people use just for, say, writing.
Microsoft, for example, helps game developers out by offering “standard code libraries” such as OpenGL, Silverlight, .NET Framework, and whatever else they offer.
Sony does the same thing for PlayStation development. A common item available was the code to generate an explosion effect in a game. There were lots of other such code libraries out there for all sorts of other effects. They developed it not to limit developers, but to save them time. Some developers would still go ahead and create their own explosion-effect-code anyway, just to stand out… but the standard code library was there if they wanted or needed it.
Lots of other examples of this sort of thing.
I’m not suggesting it makes coding trouble-free or fast, per se. But can the disingenuous garbage. I don’t know if Google has a subset of code that can be used in development to deal with that specific item per se, but I do know they have excellent support for developers and an item like that might be available to make such work less labor-intensive since the base code is there, even though it needs to be integrated in and customized to a degree. The “last five percent” of code-development that takes up 95 percent of development time.
But if you prefer to troll and belittle, that’s your choice.
My intention is neither to troll or belittle. It was to mock slightly, but that’s because that’s my sense of humour and it seemed from your previous posts that you had a sense of humour and could take it in good spirit. Think of it as good natured banter. Like this:
I wonder if Keith and Lee know that Sony have made some explosion effect code readily available?
Or
I feel the same way about authors of books. They’re all complaining that it’s soooo difficult, but there’s this whole dictionary of words readily created for them to use, handily cross referenced in pre-packaged thesauri and backed up with a standard library of clichés and idioms to deploy.
But underneath that mild mocking was a very serious point (one that I suspect will be appreciated by the programmers out there).
If a developer told me that he was 90% done and the program still wasn’t working, I’d tell him to scrap it and start again because the design is wrong.
