I notice a disturbing trend. Scrivener user (real, putative, or potential) requests feature F. Keith and his doughty band say “Okay,” or “We’ll think about it,” or “Already in the works for X.0.” That means ever more features, powers, embellishments added to the basic program. (Forgive the archaism. I began using Scrivener when that’s what it was, a “program.”)
With each new f/p/e, Scrivener becomes, well, bigger. More powerful. More desirable. More seductive. (Sorry, losing focus there.) Anyway, bigger. And as it gets bigger, it gets more versatile, more potent. (Oops, there it is again.)
But. More, bigger, better. That must equate, sooner or later, to costlier. You can see the danger. Dare we suggest that the K-Band ignore requests for imaginative and heretofore unimaginable features? Of course not.
Yet those of us reared in a writing milieu consisting largely of paper and typewriter, with a dictionary nearby, are at risk. Scrivener, the delight of our golden years, could inflate beyond our poor power to afford, comprehend, or fit on a hard drive.
What are we to do?
Here’s my idea. We establish a wish list, not of additions to Scrivener, but of subtractions from it. Which features, powers, embellishments ought Keith to eliminate, in order that Scrivener may remain a modestly-priced program (sorry, that word again) which will fit on a 1T drive?
A few suggestions:
1./ I could do without Autopunct. I say, if you can’t hear where the commas belong when you read a passage, you really ought not to be allowed to write.
2./ That list of agents’ cell phone numbers is all over the Internet, and besides, it changes too often. (Binky’s had three new numbers just since 2.0.)
3./ The plug in which explicates a character’s motives through verb sequencing is a good idea, but calling it Char Anal disguises its real function, and I doubt it’s ever been fully implemented by most users.
Okay, there’s a start on the new wish list. What other f/p/e can Keith safely jettison?
ps