I’m currently overhauling a lot of things so that most of the uglier elements of Scrivener become real puh-retty. The one I have my attention focussed on at the moment is the project assistant. I’m giving it more of a iWeb templates-esque feel, with a categories list on the left and then a templates list pertaining to that category on the right.
These are the categories I’m thinking of putting in there off the bat:
Fiction
Scripts
Journalism
Academic
Poetry & Lyrics
Other
Any thoughts? Does this pretty much cover the main oeuvres of writing? I suppose it ought to be possible to define a custom category, though I haven’t thought of how yet. Also, if anyone has any academic, poetry/lyric or journalism templates out there, I’d love to see them so that I can incorporate them. I’m going to have to rebuild all of the templates as it is, so if there are any good templates that anyone feels like donating, please let me know.
That makes a lot of sense to me - just when you think there’s no way to make Scrivener better, you come up with another sensible addition that doesn’t add clutter! To define a custom category would be pretty important to some folks, I imagine - I am lucky, as my categories are included…
As for academic templates, here is one suggestion I posted over at the MultiMarkdown thread.
I don’t know if you’re planning to make it possible for people to save their own templates for use, but if so a My Templates category would make sense…
Where would non-fiction material go? That is a rather huge chunk of your typical library/book-store to just be calling it Other. Biographies, memoirs, history, technical manuals, science, etcetera. I suppose you could call it “Academic,” but to me that says thesis, paper, and so on—rather than “Knitting for Dummies.”
Or ship it with a basic set of categories, but enable users to make categories of their own … though that might be much more complex for you, of course.
Non-fiction! I thought of it today and realised I had missed out a huge swathe. I don’t want to include “Business” by default. I don’t want to see that word whilst I am working within Scrivener. Users should be able to define categories, though, so it can be added by users if needed…
jkr - thanks for the link to those projects. I’ll take a look when I get chance and possibly add them to the default templates if that’s okay.
I’m also planning to incorporate built-in templates into the the Scrivener package rather than have them installed in Application Support (user-created templates would still get saved in Application Support, though). This should make things easier to maintain.
There will also be a blank page .tif file available so that users can edit it to create their own image for their custom template…
What’s the timescale for this? I have a non-fiction template (of course) and a journalism one but to be honest I usually just use the default and customise as I go… I can let you have mine if it helps.
But one plea: not “My Templates”, please. It’s so patronising/Windows. I hate the way Mail has adopted it. “On My Computer”. What if it isn’t my computer? Feh… MY documents MY briefcase MY computer mine mine… “Custom Templates” is rather more grown-up, don’t you think?
It is, to be sure, but it’s also what Word uses. This doesn’t of course make it right, but I was thinking for the benefit of the (regular influx of) people who are switching from Word.
I’d definitely appreciate the templates if you don’t mind making them available. There’s no particular timescale… I’m working on this as a break from the bigger Compile Draft improvements, which still involve a lot of work. There’s a lot to do on 1.2 in general.
I agree with Michael here … While I’m not fond of “Custom Templates” either, it is not so ooh-look-what-I-can-do-ish and also would be a repository where one could put templates kindly provided by other users without immediately pretending they’re your own!
It would be good, too, if the custom templates category were at the top, particularly if you’re going to use a graphical category list. In general, my own “self-constructed” templates are the ones I use by far the most of the time; I am always irritated almost beyond forbearance by template selectors that offer 101 “professionally-designed templates” that I wouldn’t dream of using or ever finding a use for, but which I have to scroll past before I can get to the one I have created, the one that I want.
It doesn’t matter where the custom templates go (they would most likely go at the bottom, though) - as you can see, there is a “Set as Default” button. So all you would need to do is set one of the custom templates as the default so that the custom selection is open with that one selected whenever you open the Templates panel.
Ahab - no, that won’t be possible. It would be pretty much impossible given that templates can start out with any structure etc that you want.
Best,
Keith
Ditto that. (As in how the Project window works in Word.) So, glad to hear that we will be able to have the project asst in Scriv point to a category of choice each time it opens.
Users should be able to define categories, though, so it can be added by users if needed…
[size=50]mon cul…haaaa!..haa![/size]