@Keith: The whole “notes from any application” sounds like VoodooPad’s new-ish “bucket” concept — something you may want to take a look at. In general, I share the lobber’s enthusiasm for the whole thing.
Curio, on the other hand, uses Evernote integration, which is a freaking awesome way to do even more. I don’t know if that kind of thing is above your pay grade, but, again, something to look at.
@Mary: Your notebook point is well taken, and I agree. But since I have never met a Way Too Expensive Solution I didn’t like, I’d also like to suggest LiveScribe’s Pulse pen. It does all kinds of amazing Jetsons-y things with audio, but it also lets you save individual notebook pages (or groups of pages) as PDF files, which you can then store wherever you want. Yes, it costs a lot. Yes, you have to buy their notebooks (although, speaking as a notebook snob, they’re quite nice).
So, imagine: You take your notebook with you everywhere, jot down what you have to, save it to Evernote, where you could call it up anytime you want in Scrivener. Feels like the future to me!
The script system I use is more byzantine that I admitted earlier, so I have included here just the two central Applescripts involved:
‘Commit to Journal’ – writes the currently open WriteRoom document to a designated text file and if successful, quits WriteRoom. The name and location of the designated file is just hardcoded into the script, so to use this script you will need to open it and customize the two property declarations in it.
‘Quit without Saving’ – Quits WriteRoom without saving (no dialog), just as you might expect.
What you will not have by having these files is some way to invoke WriteRoom or these two scripts via key commands. I use macro program QuicKeys for this which makes it easy to assign such key commands universally or on a per application basis. I have assigned Control-W to bring up WriteRoom and (within the app) the Enter key for (1) and the Esc key for (2).
What I have provided here also will not give you that fancy stuff about being able to use different key commands to bring up WriteRoom with different preset font/style settings. I don’t know if anyone was interested in this part specifically or not. The whole set-up comes to five macros (key commands for everything, also keeps track of which font/style setting was last in play), two Applescripts (you have here), two Automator workflows (for prefs file swapping), and two canned prefs files. (Plus a few extra macros that do things I haven’t mentioned–like opening the designated text file up into WriteRoom.)
I could provide any of these additional elements, too, if anyone is interested, but the macro stuff would only be directly useful to a QuicKeys owner, of course.