And not only that, but Dark Mode was folded into the beta and will be part of the 3.0 release—that is without a comprehensive operating system-wide infrastructure for doing so. There will be some necessary post-3.0 updates to catch up with a few of the additions made to Scrivener since the 3.0 release for macOS, but a lot of them have been likewise folded in or are planned to be.
If you really want to know what has been released for the Mac since 3.0 then download its user manual and flip to Appendix E, in the “What’s New” section. All of the notable changes are documented there—and those who know anything about the beta will recognise a number of them.
By my quick tally (which is meant more to convey a rough estimate, I didn’t spend an hour on this), here are the results:
- Notable macOS refinements and additions since 3.0: 27
- Of those improvements that are completely irrelevant to Windows, or represent removals/lateral changes (like shortcuts being shuffled around): 7
- Those improvements that have already been added to the Windows v3 beta: 14
So out of the roughly 20 improvements that we considered notable enough to make mention of in the appendix of the user manual, 14 of those have already been implemented in the beta, or are planned to be included in 3.0 for Windows, meaning only six notable changes will be added after 3.0 is released—assuming they won’t anyway, or that I missed a memo about one of them being on the list.
To give you a taste of what some of these six are, among them are:
- A weird “Kindle optimised” ePub variant that was designed to work with IngramSpark—which turns out to not work that well (they reject it).
- Inserting media timestamps with a shortcut while transcribing. Pretty cool—for 1% of our user base.
- Find duplicates: a project search mode that looks for exact duplicate items in the binder—also pretty niche, but handy if you need it.
To be fair there are some neater things in that list as well that we’ll be excited to bring to Windows:
- Focus mode, to zero in on the context you’re writing and fade the rest out.
- Improved screenplay layout for better on-the-fly proofing, like dual dialogue and MORE/CONT’D markers.
And also to be fair, there a still a lot of things that need to be done to reach the full 3.0 specification as well. I don’t mean to completely minimise the differences, and this simple list here is by no means intended to be a complete to-do list. But in a Thread of Wallowing like this, it is sometimes useful to inject a few facts into what is otherwise a discussion of feelings, senses, and vague misunderstandings of where the beta is, and just how far the Mac version has really progressed since 3.0. Facts like how the Windows development team has more staff, or how there have been 17 releases in the same time period there have been five for Mac, or how the relative feature addition within that same time span is hardly comparable—in that the real Windows “score” isn’t a mere 14, but probably more along the lines of well over a hundred notable additions since beta 1, some of which represent extremely complicated and difficult to implement features. Facts like how it took five years for the Mac version to go through its full cycle of development, to get to where it was at 3.0.
I see people here posting with less than a dozen total posts, most of them spent in this thread. Maybe get out of this thread and into the beta forum—download it, see where the project actually is, and then form an opinion based on that, rather than a bunch of hearsay and Game of Telephones (and we all know how badly that can end).
In short, as someone else said: write on. Truly, jokes aside, I am sorry to hear some of you are disappointed, for whatever your reasons may be. We’ll continue working as hard as we have been bridging what was once an enormous gap, and is now narrowing down quite satisfactorily.
Speaking of which, I’m going to get back to work actually helping to get this stuff done.
