Scrivener 2 Preferences and Graphics

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

Hi

I’ve just moved to Scrivener 2 mid project, and I’m really impressed with all the new features. There was so much that took me a few days of exploring before I felt at home :slight_smile:

There are a few things that I noticed immediately and perhaps could be improved: There are so many preferences now (like some of my CAD programs!), that it might be an idea to put navigation on the left side of the Preferences window, similar to the way that Adobe does in Photoshop. Having to click back to the main Preferences menu before selecting another category costs an extra mouse click each time.

I also miss the understated Toolbar and Dock icon graphics of Scrivener 1. The colours of some of the Toolbar icons (Add, Trash, Inspector in particular) seem washed out compared to the old ones, and the new Dock icon is now the fattest looking icon in my Dock. The new icon looks nice on its own in a larger size, but my dock size is small, and the icon seems to look heavy against (in my opinion) more beautiful icons like those of Things, Papers and Aperture.

Many thanks for a great app.

/Brett

2

Thanks for the kind words. Icons are entirely subjective and there has been much discussion here with some users berating them and others loving them. It was the same with 1.x - we had users e-mail us to tell us how much they hated the toolbar icons, or the Dock icon, etc etc. Obviously we would never have gone with the icons we have unless we were really happy with them, though (the toolbar icons are very much modelled after the ones in Pages and so take a leaf out of Apple’s book) - you can’t please everyone, though, but as they have nothing to do with functionality I can live with that.
Thanks again!
All the best,
Keith

3

Hi Keith!

I don’t know if it’s the right place to post it, but I noticed a difference between two projects of mine (2.02): in one of them, the icons are pretty pale and, in the other one, the icons are pretty colored… It seems to be the same ones…

Some hidden preference stuff?

All the best!
Pale icons.png
Strong colored icons.png

4

Most likely you have View > Use Label Color In > Icons turned on for the first one, with lots of white labels tinting the colours.
All the best,
Keith

5

That was it!

Thanks a lot!

6

Brett - You can choose to hide the icons or use small icons within Scrivener, if that helps your sense of aesthetics at all. Right click on the toolbar to adjust the settings. Also, if you’re really passionate about it, you could break Keith’s heart and go edit the icons yourself so they’re brighter. :wink: Just don’t tell.

Re: the preferences, you can use the arrows to jump through each pane. I realize that it won’t entirely help you, since you’re limited to going forward and back, rather than jumping immediately to the pane you want, but for most people, these settings are something you do all at once right at the beginning and then afterward only tweak occasionally and probably only in one pane (e.g. changing full screen settings when you’re bored with your setup or procrastinating on your writing), so I think for most users this is probably not a huge burden. I can see that initially it might feel like you’re spending more time clicking around, but after you’ve gotten set up and have been working a bit you probably will cease to notice.