But what happens when Scrivener gets to the point where, because of its ‘bloat-free’ design philosophy, there no longer becomes any supposed ‘need’ to add any more? I guess my fears straddle in the fact over whether bloat-free-ism ultimately leads to the stagnation of innovation; to the woebegone tenor of complacency; this is something that, I have certain reservations for, from all that people have been saying.
One thought I had was to make Scrivener have the power for users to create extensions for it much in the same way Google extensions or Safari extensions work…I haven’t the faintest idea how this would work, but I think it would be one way to keep the flow of innovation, without making sacrifices to the bloatedness of the source product.
Why would you possibly want to do this? If you add extensions, you add all kinds of possibilities for new bugs, security issues, incompatibilities every time scrivener or the OS gets upgraded, and the likelihood that your workflow will become dependent on an extension that the developer abandons. The market will be tiny and there will be little opportunity for monetization and little incentive to keep code updated.
Exactly. A Swiss Army knife is for little urgent jobs that come up, not for continuous hard use, unless of course you’re trying to survive in the Swiss Alps…
I think it’s interesting that folks are looking to the future of Scrivener and what it’s going to add (styles – which is going to be a HUGE labor savor for L&L if nobody else, look at all the posts in the forums from people who are trying to update existing text by updating existing presets) but are forgetting WHY Keith is adding many of these features…to help simplify Scrivener’s code, usability, and feature offerings. Keith isn’t the kind of guy to just bolt code on to the application and move on to the next feature request. We already know that 3.x is going to be revamping and re-integrating a lot of code under the hood as a side effect of having to rewrite it all anyway (32 to 64-bit shift, switch to modern APIs, etc.). There will be new ways of doing old things in order to reunify and reuse code all over the place.
I think there is going to be a bit of shake-up, and some old-time users are going to have some grumbles. Some will adapt and say, 'Hey, this works better," some will say, “This doesn’t work as well for me anymore,” and us newbies are going to be saying the same things as well.
As for the whole Swiss army knife thing, guys, that’s a strawman. The Swiss army knife’s purpose isn’t to replace all the tools it emulates. It’s to give you just enough functionality for when you’re AWAY from those tools. Do you want to drive three dozen screws with one? Heck no! Can you? Yes, if you have to – it will take a lot more time and your hand will be sore, but you can get the job done if you don’t have a better tool to do it. All of those features that people like to rag on in Word and Office – they are there because business around the world use them and rely on them. Casual home users haven’t been the target audience for Office for a long time, but Microsoft’s not dumb enough to ignore that market because hey, that’s what people know. Just because you don’t understand or need to use a particular feature set doesn’t mean it’s a bad feature set – it just means you’re not in that use case.
Master craftsmen have their preferred tools, but they can make it work with just about anything. And usually, they’re too busy just getting it done to waste a lot of hot air bemoaning their fate.
All of this is to say that I, for one, welcome our new 3.x overlords.
Because sometimes innovation can help you streamline your process, or give you a new way of doing something you couldn’t do before, or make you rethink a particular problem from a different point of view. Nobody is so efficient that they can’t use some help along the way.
But that isn’t innovation “for its own sake”, and Scrivener has not suffered from lack of innovation, as those of us who have been using it since v. 1 for Mac back in 2007 know. I personally like that kind of slow and purposeful innovation, and I’m really looking forward to v. 3. I’m sure it will streamline my working, even though I know I’ll have to learn some new ways of achieving my ends.
I am confident that whatever changes KB is making to the UI and workflow will be well thought out and implemented … just look at the tour de force that is Scrivener for iOS!
Sorry, technology junkie here… Yes, I do find innovation attractive for its own sake or I wouldn’t have followed the career path I did. My house, Mac hard drive, and iOS app list are littered with stuff that was at one time new, innovative, seemed to address a percieved need, but which ultimately failed. So when I sit down to write (or rather, stand up – early standing desk adopter ) I use Scrivener because it’s the best tool for the job that I’ve found yet. Keith has so far kept it honed and on top of an (aspiring) pro’s needs. I don’t find it perfect, but everything else I’ve looked at so far is less so.
And of course I’ll keep looking, because it’s what I do.
I think this is a matter of viewpoint where “for its own sake” is going to parse differently for different people. To me, it seems to be speaking to whether innovation is a key principle of the project (aligned with the other key principles) or only something you do when dragged kicking and screaming into it because you’re going to lose customers. But definitely agreed that Keith and L&L are managing this balancing act very well.
There’s also a difference between “innovation” and “adding new stuff” which might be helping increase the disconnect.
Please see the post I was responding to, where the user was lamenting some hypothetical future in which Scrivener has ‘no need’ to add anything more, presumably because Perfection had already been achieved.
Holy crappers, this discussion is way too intensive for the casual user like myself of this forum…so I’m going keep my comments short and simple in the hopes that others speak more; clearly a lot of people are passionate about this topic one way or another.
I guess to help streamline this discussion let us all come to some understanding of the word ‘bloat’. What qualifies as bloat? Is that even the right word for what we are all arguing about? Has bloat come to mean differently to different people?
That’s actually a GREAT question. To me, software bloat is something that: actively interferes with what I am trying to do (although I don’t use scriptwriting mode, forex, to me that is not bloat because I know other people use it extensively but it doesn’t get in my way at all); drags in additional third-party code that I don’t need/want in such a way that it interferes with other applications on my system; causes UX clutter that makes it hard to find and use features I do like; or otherwise affects the stability of the system.
I agree. Scrivener did everything need and want it to do many versions ago. It contains a great many features that I don’t use but which don’t bother me at all because they’re hidden away in the menu system where they do no harm, or are removable from the very customisable toolbars / layouts.
I don’t know if this is part of some fundamental design standard that LL adheres to, but it seems to me that Scriv tends to include features that are either useful to pretty much everyone, or completely transparent to those that don’t use them. Any feature that you can hide can’t be considered bloat (unless – to go back to one of yosimiti’s original hippopotheses – it’s mere existence puts strain on the ol’ chipset).
Seems there are in fact two concepts being discussed: complexity versus bloat. Two examples immediately come to mind. Photoshop, for instance, is a very large, very complex program. People devote their entire careers to mastering PS and still learn new things about the software. It is resource-intensive, but that has a lot to do with the file sizes it has to handle. And Adobe has done a reasonably good job of servicing the code base as well as maintaining/updating features or chucking them. Still, there are many longtime PS users who feel it has become bloated.
Quicken, OTOH, is the poster child for bloatware. An ancient, sprawling code base on which dubious feature after dubious feature has been piled like a wobbly Jenga tower, even as previous features still don’t work correctly years after being introduced; an ugly UI, a counter-intuitive UX; poltergeist bugginess, and not uncommon fatal crashes which wipe out acres of a user’s most sensitive data.
O.T. and of little consequence (the pedantic afflatus is upon me): your join date and number of posts actually mark you as a pretty prolific user of this forum.
Yes, I do find innovation attractive for its own sake or I wouldn’t have followed the career path I did. My house, Mac hard drive, and iOS app list are littered with stuff that was at one time new, innovative, seemed to address a percieved need, but which ultimately failed. So when I sit down to write (or rather, stand up – early standing desk adopter 
) I use Scrivener because it’s the best tool for the job that I’ve found yet. Keith has so far kept it honed and on top of an (aspiring) pro’s needs. I don’t find it perfect, but everything else I’ve looked at so far is less so.