Apple does not work with the Chinese govt. it obeys Chinese law, as it obeys the law in every country it operates in.
I suspect you refer to Chinese iCloud accounts being required to be hosted in China. It applies only to Chinese accounts and the data is encrypted before it leaves the customer’s system. And if course they have been required to remove apps that breach Chinese law. You want them to say FU to the Chinese govt and have their supply chain and access to that market turned off overnight?
I guess you’d only be happy when Apple stop making and selling product and services in China because that is what would be necessary if they refused to follow the laws in question. Amazing how people spout crap about Apple yet remain silent about every other major who follow the same laws to be able to operate in China. Guess Apple is too successful and an easy target for some. Tall poppy syndrome we call it down here.
Apple is a ruthlessly effective company with many flaws but data privacy is most definitely not one if them.
thanks for the healthy discussion, this has turned out to be a very interesting thread. I do think the discussion here is the result of the thread about Bear on iOS, which in itself was a seperate thread from a discussion about updates on the iOS app. I’m completely not surprised Keith is talking about his rethinking of Scrivener itself, the philosophies of the software and what is it’s place in a modern software landscape, where I think many have started feeling Scrivener to fall a bit behind in the last years. And it is a philosophical problem, because Scrivener’s flexibility and power is both holding it back and gives it its main attractive qualities.
I just want to add my way of using Scrivener, knowing that this may very well be completely opposite to your other users. I hope this helps Keith to have at least one extra data point in his mental exercise of thinking about Scrivener, which I’m sure is a huge undertaking, even if everything stays the same.
I use Scrivener more as a brainstorming app. I write screenplays and work on other projects (some of them can just be sollicits, for which I use Scrivener). So what are my most used features? Being able to drop research in it, may it be video, pictures, PDF’s or audio. The corkboards. The metadata, in the sense of notes and synopsis’s attached to text documents. I use Scrivener to plan my stories. So I make text documents per component of my idea, about the structure, I have a whole template with folders for movie notes (which is notes about the visual design or soundtrack or editing), etc. …
I also like to use snapshots, and I’m a bit sad it isn’t in the iOS version.
I never write my final stuff in Scrivener. The last few years I have been using Highland 2, and it has served me well. Kind of markdown for screenplays. I love the design of the software, it’s speed, the cleanness of the UI, etc. I use Scrivener as a deposit to prep all my stories (this can take years) and then use Highland to start writing the piece itself. There should be an iOS Highland App later this year, which I am looking very much forward to.
All of this means that although my Scrivener projects can get very large (the biggest is 10GB), most work I do is just adding text to brainstorm documents, of only kilobytes. The projects have a lot of research in them, but that’s not what gets changed the most when I open the project every day, that is only in the beginning stage where I import a lot of things.
I also like Scrivener’s flexiblity. I can dump Files into a Scrivener Project, and if I need them I can just select on othe folders (on the Mac) inside the project, and just export those files again. They are not stuck into an unreadable database.
What has bothered me with Scrivener the last years? Like Login, I have noticed my habbits and world around me has changed, and Scrivener has stayed the same. That has it’s benefits as well, but to go back to the start of my message, I understand why Keith himself has been rethinking what is the place of Scrivener and it’s large code base in a fast-changing software (and mobile) landscape. To preface this as well: next to my iMac 5k at home that I still have and use a lot, I have replaced my laptop with an iPad Pro 11" lasts year. Lots of pro/con with that experiment, but some of it has fastened my criticism of the current state of Scrivener iOS. On to the stuff that bothers me most:
The UI of the iOS app. It was beautifully clean and powerful when it launched and it still looks nice. But it has fallen behind in multi-tasking and multi-window support. The whole clicking back and forth to have the Inspector open and close again as a pop-over window, is starting to become really annoying if you use it a lot. The open in Quick View feature works annoying since iOS allowed ‘real’ multi-window workflows (still with it’s own limits of course).
Dropbox Syncing. This is because of multiple reasons. No, I never had problems with the reliability of Dropbox syncing, I even thought it was more reliable than iCloud. BUT. iCloud has more flexible plans. It works very integrated with your iOS devices. Since I replaced my laptop with an iPad Pro, I took all necessary backups and tried to put all my documents in iCloud. I was afraid to try it. But it all worked great. Syncing was fast (much faster than I remember it to be in the past), and having everything accessible on my iPhone and iPad integrated, really helps me in daily life. Dropbox also introduced a limit on the free plan of 3 devices, and there have been criticism in how the Dropbox app is actually a very low level hack in how it works on your Mac. As someone who is very conscious of privacy, and putting a lot of trust in Apple because of their focus on privacy as a feature and their track record, this is not unimportant. Scrivener is the only reason I need to have Dropbox anymore, since being so happy with iCloud. That’s not a positive thing. And, like Login, once you get used to other apps syncing so quick and reliable, it gets annoying when one of your most used apps doesn’t support it.
The feeling that Scrivener can’t keep up with the developments in iOS. We have pencil kit, we have multi-window workflows now, but Scrivener iOS still can’t put a highlight in a PDF even if the Mac version can do it and the Pencil would make it perfect. Some little annoyances with the pop-overs and search dialogs within Scrivener iOS. I see how Ulysses is updated the past 2 years, and it’s hard not to feel about jealous about how nice some of their updates have been.
As you can see my list of complaints, it’s not that large. But they start to annoy me a lot, and like Login, I have been looking at Ulysses lately, Bear, and Highland (the last I have been using for a couple of things now, and really love it. Sad that there is no iOS version as well, but that should change later this year, the company already has it working internally for a year or so).
The subscription discussion… I don’t like subscriptions for software. I try to avoid them. But if I really like the software, I can still decide what to do. Yes, I would pay for a subscription for Scrivener. I wouldn’t like it, I would get more critical of 3 years without feature updates, but I would pay it because it’s one of the 3 most used and important software packages on my system. Like Login, I do think Literature and Latte has always. been a very ‘opiniated’ company, which I like and has served them well. Good products come out of that (look at Steve Jobs and Apple themselves, they are the best example). To answer Keiths other question: ‘would you be a customer of a lighter version of Scrivener with iCloud Sync’?
I think I would, but it would depend on of course which features it has. When Scrivener iOS got released, I was actually happy that it has all the features I used (importing research, corkboard, notes and synopsis cards, a way of having split screen in the app). If for instance, Scrivener Light, hypothetically, doesn’t allow for research or doesn’t allow the corkboard, it would’t do what I need to do and I wouldn’t be a customer. And of course everyone has his own features he needs and likes (2 different things).
I think Keith can have a survey and see how his user base tilts in favor of which features for the future of Scrivener. I also think he has to look into his own heart (my god that sounds corny), to see how he feels about the current product and how HE sees the future. What feels right. He’s the creator and this feeling has guided him in the past. I do think his internal sense of it has to take priority over surveys and answers of users, but I also think the fact that Keith thinks about a survey is because he himself feels very divided over some directions for the future of the product.
A couple of folks have taken Keith’s post to suggest that he was floating the idea of a lighter edition of Scrivener without a research section. But I took his words to mean only that research files could no longer be stored within the project. So we’d still be able to import research files as shortcuts, tag and cross reference them as always, and view them where possible in a Scrivener pane. But Scrivener would be spared the overhead of synching each research file via iCloud or Dropbox; instead, the user could place synchable research on a virtual drive addressed by drive letter, for example. That was my interpretation anyway, though I also had a double-take on first reading.
Can I ask why, out of curiosity? Or is that too technical of an answer?
(Now, if I have file types that aren’t supported on iOS, they stay intact in the project, I just can’t view them inside Scrivener iOS. For instance, sometimes I make some graphics in Pixelmator Pro, but keep the Pixelmator Pro file inside the Scrivener project, next to an exported JPG or PNG.)
The long version is buried in the forums somewhere. The short version is that the diversity of file types is why Scrivener needs to use low level file upload/download commands to synchronize a project, and at this time only the Dropbox API exposes those commands.
The Facebook Scrivener user group currently has a thread where members are reminiscing about incidents related to handling computing punchcard decks. I think that puts them in the legacy bracket…
But, seriously… As with a system like Windows or an application like Word, if you have a few years of consistent, moderate growth in licensing revenue then, by the very nature of the timing of these revenues, the majority of your user base is in the ’ legacy’ category, remaining faithful to your product and brand, You don’t tend to have a sharply rising front-ended stream of (perhaps fickle) new users with niche apps like Scrivener.
So the issue here is carrying your ‘old’ desktop PC/chunky laptop users (one-time install+licence, user pulls updates etc) with you on major feature updates or revised subscription models without upsetting them, whilst keeping your feature set and platform fresh enough to attract more contemporary users with smartphones, tablets, Chromebooks etc (= cloud/SaaS/recurring subs/push updates). I’m loathe to say the former are physically older and the latter are younger! There will of course be exceptions.
Wow, lots to go through here! Thanks all for the interesting discussion.
Actually, the answer isn’t so much technical as practical. You say yourself that you have a 10GB project, and that’s the problem - allowing lots of research files means that a project can grow huge. And an app with huge project files wouldn’t be a good iCloud citizen. Those using free iCloud accounts have only 5GB of storage, so lots of big Scrivener projects could end up costing you in iCloud fees. They’re also liable to cause more syncing issues and delays in projects showing up on other devices. All of this may be fine for a user such as yourself, with enough technical knowledge to know that dumping 100 PDF or movie files into a project is going to inflate the file size and eat into your iCloud storage and sync time, but such users tend to be in the minority. Most users will think Scrivener isn’t working with iCloud properly when it takes so long to sync, and will blame us when they run out of free storage.
Your use case is interesting, by the way, and something I hope to tease out more in my survey - how many users use Scrivener for planning rather than writing? Of course, it’s not quite how I intend Scrivener to be used, but that’s by the by if it’s still helpful!
Your interpretation is correct. I’d always want to be able to view research files in another pane inside Scrivener. But to play well with iCloud and improve syncing, they’d just need to be stored outside of the project.
I also don’t think the idea that some of the more niche tools are only available through the menus, either.
It’s something I do care about, and it’s one of the reasons I’m always going to prefer apps that you install (I find it bizarre that some people now find this old-fashioned). We have a couple of new competitors trying to nip at our heels these days, but they are web-based. Web-based apps make me nervous, though - your writing ends up on someone else’s servers. And I have seen from questions asked of the developers of these apps that they have access to all the writing done by their users. That would be enough to put me off ever doing serious writing in them. (I won’t name the apps because I’m not going to give the breath of publicity to apps that have pages on their sites dedicated to slagging us off and calling us out-of-date. Suffice to say that they think they are new but in fact follow paradigms I built Scrivener to get away from. Miaow etc.) We’d never want to be part of any subscription service that claimed even the smallest part of control over our users’ work. Much better to leave it to the user to decide which syncing services they trust.
While of course there are still many kinds of users and a generalisation doesn’t cover them all, it does seem to me that more and more users expect simplicity and fewer know their way around the computers they use every day - or at least have different expectations of them. (An ongoing issue for our support staff, for instance, is the “Save As” feature - many users are confused about how this works, and it leads them into difficulties. This is slightly baffling to someone like me, who learned how to use computers in the 90s and learned or was taught features like this first. I’m not blaming users, I hasten to add - but it does show how expectations have changed.)
That’s very kind, thank you. One thing to remember is that my aims now are no different from when I first set out: to make writing software I love myself. And all of the core things I wanted from that software fifteen to twenty years ago are still the things I want now. I just wonder whether we need to start looking at different ways of doing those things.
Ulysses is a very different beast, being a shoebox app rather than a document-based one. I believe Ulysses syncs every single text section separately (thus it has Versions available for every text). Scrivener is always going to need to sync a whole project, so I don’t think the Ulysses approach here would work. Also, if I started over, I really wouldn’t want to go in a completely custom direction. I’d want to use Apple’s standard document architecture (right now I override it at the lowest level, which cuts out a lot of the automatic behaviour, including iCloud-syncing). I’d want to do things Apple’s way, and thus get for free all the stuff they add each year, which is often a problem for us.
On this, we’re thinking along similar lines… Sort of. A full rich text system such as Scrivener uses requires a lot of controls - rulers, buttons, tabs and indents panels, and so on. And it means having the formatting baked into the text data itself, which means it’s not so easy to update. Changing all of this while still allowing the same flexibility of formatting (and keeping formatting in the editor rather than having all those Markup characters that I don’t like in my own writing) would require a very different text system, I think…
This is indeed the tricky tightrope we have to walk. We won’t please everyone no matter what we do.
Thanks!
Although this is definitely better for the user, I think this still has the same problem as subscription for the developer: to keep the user invested in coming back for return payments, you have to keep adding more and more features. What I’m really interested in is cutting features and sticking to a core feature-set. (The problem in Scrivener has always been that the lines have been a bit blurred, which opens the door to expectations of almost every possible feature that has appeared in any other writing app.) That’s the beauty of one-time-payment software: it’s not a promise for the future, but instead asks you to buy based solely on what the app does now. Updates can then focus on stability and refinements, ensuring the latest OS technology is incorporated and so on - something I’ve been having difficulty keeping up with because of the size of Scrivener. (We will shortly be advertising for a second developer, though - we hope to get on top of all of this over the coming months.)
Anyway, that was a long one, and I have to go and cook dinner now so I have no time to proof-read and correct the inevitable typos and missed words - please forgive any that appear. Apologies to anything I missed above.
Which raises an immediate support issue when – as will inevitably happen – a user manages to break the link between the two and thinks the research files are “gone.”
Without trying to be offensive, that is an ageist answer that takes a comment made and arrives at the desired answer.
I, and I several of the other ‘old’ PC/chunky laptop users here are consistently at the bleeding edge.
Yes, I am old (69), and started on the very first personal machines and the likes of IBM 1 prior, but I have maintained the bleeding edge to today. I wanted an iOS version when Keith was not convinced. I saw the potential of iPad from day one (does that make me ‘old’ and ‘contemporary’ at the same time?). I also explored Chromebook and saw its glaring failings that still remain. Chromebooks have been modestly successful for one reason only, price, and the primary success has been education with giveaway pricing. In Aus we are seeing a move away and back to Win/Mac/iOS even in that market.
I have also explored SAAS and likewise seen its glaring shortcoming. Yes, it may be where we are being forced by corporations who want to report record quarters every quarter because of short term thinking Wall Street traders. The very same ‘experts’ who claim SAAS/subscription is the only answer are the same ‘experts’ who have predicted Apple’s demise and Google/Android/Samsung/Win Mobile domination in various forms every day since Dell told Apple to close shop and hand the money back. We’ve seen how all those predictions turned out.
I’d remind you also that SAAS predates the PC with IBM, NCR and many who no longer exist using that same business model, so it is even more of an ‘old’ (discredited?) philosophy than PC.
Though I have my own company, I also work for a major multinational in the tech field, leading, training, developing support teams. We do see generational differences, one of them being ‘.old’ customers freely admitting when they know little. As with all mgrs, I listen daily to multiple calls, make outgoing calls to resolve major issues that remain outstanding and even take incoming calls, just to keep the hand in. Subscription/SAAS features highly in the ‘problem’ calls, and ‘contemporary’ users amongst the most ‘challenging’. Despite differences overall, generation has no impact on understanding of tech and understanding of it’s potentials.
Summation, I don’t agree the future has to be SAAS/Sub. I like the current Scrivener not because I’m ‘old’ (not so subtle suggestion, stuck in the mud, set in ways?) but because it is an elegant solution across multiple platforms that combines the features I most want to see in a long form writing solution.
Thank you for that Keith. Scrivener is your vision and no doubt we ‘old’ people will continue to follow, even if it develops in a different direction than we prefer.
An interesting and wide-ranging discussion, indeed. I really appreciate all the well-expressed thoughts and opinions that have gone into it.
I’m small-time, when it comes to Scrivener usage. I started on Scrivener 1 for Windows, and I’ve been using the Scriv3 for Windows Beta since about Beta 16.
So far, similar to sidderke, I’ve used Scrivener as a vehicle for collecting and documenting the many aspects of various writing projects. Scrivener’s facility with structuring and organizing makes it an ideal tool for me.
I have lots of thoughts, notes, what-ifs, and research stashed in Scrivener projects.What I’m lacking is, you know, much real writing. I’m still months away from having an appreciable amount of writing worthy of first-draft status.
But, that’s OK. Scrivener gives me the means I need to, I hope, try to find coherence among the piles in my warehouse of stuff.
I’m writing this post now because some things that Keith said have resonated deeply with me. Small-time status aside, I wanted to share them.
Music to my ears. I can’t tell you how much this kind of philophical underpinning means to me. It means so much because it’s not just academic philosophy. This kind of thinking is very relevant and real to me in today’s world Any software tool that places this kind of concern that MY important work remain in MY hands, period, becomes my favorite tool.
A few years ago, I broke away from my very long-term accounting app, Quicken, precisely because they went “new”-multi-platform cloud-syncing, and subscription-based. This was not an easy decision for me. It would have been a lot easier just to stay put.
For years, Quicken’s technique of “scraping” and collecting data from financial institutions by signing on and pretending to be me had bugged the sh*t out of me.
Their insistence that I would lose functionality unless I “upgraded” their software regularly, whether I needed the new features or not, and whether or not I did not want the new problems that the upgrade presented, was bad enough. Now, it was going to be every year, or else. And their track record at software quality control and customer support was, in my view, abysmal.
I didn’t just WANT to break away. I needed to, for their corporate strategies made themselves felt and grated away at me every damn time I used the software.
However, just as with writing software, finding non-web-based accounting software is becoming harder and harder these days. Accounting software developers are all rushing to live in the cloud, it seems. The thought of my accounting data running around on other computers, quite away from my control, makes me twitch uncontrollably.
But, I did manage to find one (MoneyDance, FYI) whose founder expresses similar concerns, both for my data and for my software, as does Keith. All MD data is kept locally, including passwords and sign-on information, and software versions do not time-out, lock-out, or hiccup when new versions become available.
The cost, of course, is convenience. Quicken is the runaway market leader. Because of this, many financial institutions make sure that flow of their data to and from Quicken is provided. Also-rans, such as MD, are a distant afterthought, if that.
So, many important accounting functions are automatic and easy for Quicken users. Update this, download that, press a button. Other users may be comfortable with, or unaware of, the fact that such automation and convenience comes at the expense of their ceding of large and significant aspects of control over to the cloud participants, but I’m not.
I don’t begrudge these users for their choices. I’m sure those new features are spiffy and neat. I just don’t like the accompanying price I’d have to pay for these features.
Writing and accounting. Two apps that I’m adamant about maintaining control over. I apologize for the Quicken screed. And, I didn’t intend my post to be a commercial for any other software. I’m sure the pressures on Scrivener and all developers to go cloud will continue and increase. I, myself, might even be convinced to go along some day.
In sum (I can hear readers saying, “Finally!”), I find it so rare and refreshing to see founding principles of the guarding of my data and the preserving of my access to licensed software that I wanted to chime in with the parallel. Carry on, L&L. I like what you do, and the way that you do it.
When I first saw Scrivener in about 2005-2006, the thing that struck me about the program, the “point of difference”, to use a phrase that I don’t much like, was “Scrivenings” mode. It was exactly what I needed, and exactly what no other program had. To me, it has remained the core of the program, and it is at the core of any writing I do. Organising the material is crucial to what I write, and no other program I have come across allows me to play around with the sequence of ideas, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs with the ease that Scrivener facilitates. I use very few of the other features: labels, statuses, synopses, bookmarks, research, corkboard, templates – some of these I have never used, and probably never will. I have hardly ever used outline view, partly because I see the Binder as my outline. Research material I keep in Bookends and DEVONthink – because any of the material I have collected since about 1990 might be relevant to anything I am writing at any moment. I can link to it easily and find it at any time, so I don’t feel I need to cram it into a Scrivener project. And new apps like Hook offer further possibilities for linking. Split editor I do use a little.
But Scrivenings mode – that, for me, is what the program is. Heck, you even invented a term for it! If the program had no other feature at all (well, apart from footnotes!) I would use it. (It was the reason I started using the program in the first place.) Because I can’t really write without some way of moving ideas around easily. The rest is nice to have, and nice to know it is there if I need it – but most of the time I find that I don’t need it for what I do, though clearly others find other features very helpful to them.
Thank you, Keith. Though you didn’t know it, you made an important contribution to my doctoral thesis, which I wrote entirely in Scrivener! I wish you all the best on the next phase of the journey. In the years I have been watching this forum, I feel it has changed, and it seems that the people who frequent it now do ask different questions and have different kinds of knowledge and expectations. My thesis dealt with the problem of adaptation to new circumstances – I know it is never easy! Good luck with it.
Why should Windows users believe you? And if you do really release it, how many more years will it be?
Last August Lee said “a few more weeks, not months.” The one year anniversary of this whopper is less than two weeks away. It looks to me like finishing this upgrade is way beyond the abilities of the Windows developers.
I almost wish you would go to a subscription model. That would make it easy for me to totally ditch Scrivener.
