Now that I’ve been using Scrivener a few months I am really loving it. The outlining tools haven’t lived up to what I’d hoped for but you’ve explained your decisions in previous requests.
You’ve also been less than enthusiastic about evernote, but I was wondering, so many sites and applications now provide content through RSS feeds, could you add a folder within Research for RSS feeds? If it would be an inordinate amount of work then it wouldn’t be worth it, but, in the context of Scrivener being the package to keep all of your writing material in one place, it would be very useful.
I often clip stories in the press for example, and one’s saved stories are usually available as an RSS feed. It would be nice to see them within Scrivener (and offline) rather than going back to the browser for them. (Or if you think space might start to be an issue, just keep the summaries and have them act as links back to the original material.)
First, you say that the outlining features haven’t lived up to what you expected. Could you give more feedback on that, please? I’m working on 2.0 right now so I appreciate constructive feedback; I can’t promise anything, of course, but I’d still like to hear where it falls down for you.
As for Evernote - I don’t think I’ve ever been “less than enthusiastic”! On the contrary, I think Evernote is a fantastic, well-designed application. All I’ve ever said is that Scrivener is a very different application to Evernote, and any superficial similarities only hide the fact that these programs have completely different purposes. Evernote is for collecting lots of material, gathering information, having somewhere you can keep it and organise it all easily. That, as I understand it, is the primary purpose of Evernote. For Scrivener, information collection is only a secondary purpose - writing and structuring the draft of a long text is Scrivener’s primary purpose. Information gathering is secondary to that; you can pull information in to refer to for that piece of writing.
RSS feeds would be a whole new ball game, involving Scrivener having code that hooks up to the internet, pulls in RSS feeds and interprets how to display them. This sort of goes against the way the binder currently works, where you have to pull in any information you want that is specific to the current project. It would be a big job from a technical standpoint (at least for me, as the route I have took means I have very little experience in hooking up a program with the web), but also I really think this sort of thing is left to apps that are dedicated to it - Evernote, or Mail, or whatever. Then, when there is something in an RSS feed that is relevant to one of your Scrivener projects, you can copy that information into the correct place in Scrivener.