This seems rather backwards. I’m not sure what your sales are like for the 2 versions but the potential audience of Mac users is dwarfed by those of Windows. I’ve compared a lot of different authoring programs and I was attracted to Scrivener’s feature set after watching a bunch of tutorials for various applications. However, as a user of Windows, I find it somewhat off-putting that the Mac version has so many more features and I have to jump through a bunch of technical hoops using a virtual machine to get those features. For those who are less technologically savvy, I imagine you’re probably losing a large number of potential customers because, once they get here and find out they’re basically getting short-changed on Windows (it’s just not a good look), many of them are likely going straight to your competitors.
You realize the Mac version has been available for years longer than the Windows version, right? And that discrepancy means the Mac version has more features? But that they’re working on bring the Windows version up to parity with the Mac version?
Yes, I looked up the application’s development history. However, the Windows version was released in 2011. If it hasn’t been brought to parity yet, when will it be? Another 5 years? It just looks kind of odd for what appears to be a business. After this long, the Windows version shouldn’t look that inferior and still be the same price. I’m working on getting my Mac OS virtual machine running tho.
It’s not the same price, the Windows version is $5 cheaper.
I ultimately switched to Mac when it was time for a new computer, but I happily used the windows version for several years with no complaints. I certainly don’t see anything wrong with the look of it.
So, it is. I was sleepy when I was checking it out earlier and missed the price difference. I just like to have the best.
And while I’m not KB or affiliated with L&L, the answer is really simple.
KB, the guy who designed, built and developed scriviner, owned a mac and not a windows box. Only makes sense to use what you have.
I should know better than to take time away from writing and life to comment, but what the heck…
My take on the question… that’s life… complex, often doesn’t go the way one expects or wants and turns out to be other than what one assumes.
As someone who started on mainframes, progressed to minicomputers, then cut my teeth on CP/M and DOS Intel based microcomputers, and made my living for decades in the Wintel (Intel processors, Microsoft Windows operating systems) world, I’ve been pretty much an anti-fan cynic with regards to Apple and what I perceived as its pretentiousness, preciousness and inflated prices. But I’m coming around, having had decades to watch Apple’s progress in the real world. I now own an iPhone and iPad (waiting anxiously for Scrivener for it this year (currently in internal testing)), in addition to an 8 core Windows desktop PC, and am now beginning to consider purchasing a Mac (ideally a Mac OS X tablet if such happens, but possibly one of the laptops). And I look back and wonder how much farther along I might be relative to writing and app development if I had gone Apple a lot earlier in my personal life.
Apple does something, that is hard to pin down precisely, that attracts creative arts folks… and that encourages them to undertake development of creative art apps despite often not having prior app development interest or expertise. Whether it is just ‘reality distortion’, better/different app development framework, focus on aesthetics or what… I don’t know. But it is real… and results in things such as Scrivener being created first for the Mac because an author (KB here on the forums) decided to write Scrivener for himself on his current computer, which was a Mac. If we don’t like that, we’re free to go create our own or purchase some other app. Given the experts we all think we are, should be able to knock out something as good over summer break 
While it is true that the current Windows version of Scrivener lags the Mac version somewhat, and likely always will at least a little bit due to its creator preferring and developing on a Mac, I’ve yet to find anything better for me, in the Windows world.
And it appears that this year we’ll see the following:
- Scrivener for iOS (iPhone/iPad) with DropBox integration/sync
- Scrivener for Mac updated with DropBox integration/sync
- Scrivener for Windows updated to rough parity with Scrivener for Mac, with DropBox integration/sync
An Android version presumably will follow.
There’s some truth in the old saying “it’s the artist, not the tool”. But tools do make a difference. In my case, Scrivener for Windows got me over the hump that paper, notecards, corkboards, generalized word processors and other specialized writing apps didn’t… to the point of being able to write and finish lengthy fiction. Would I like to have the additional features currently offered in the Mac version of Scrivener? Sure. But truth is I’m still not up to even fully using the features in the Windows version. And I wouldn’t know what those extra features are, without digging into the Scrivener site, so their absence is neither obvious or a deal breaker for me.
As to whether the market for Scrivener in Windows is larger than on the Mac or on iOS (or Android sometime in the future)… remains to be seen. Apple’s market valuation passed Microsoft’s back in 2010… The raw numbers of machines running Windows vs OS X vs iOS vs … doesn’t tell the entire story.
Fortunately, we have or are getting robust Scrivener on pretty much every major platform.
Why do car designers engineer for F1 and then port to Lada?
Why do fashion designers design haute couture and then port to Primark?
Nor does market valuation, as that includes the revenue from iTunes, where Apple is undoubtedly the 900lb. gorilla in the category. Although both companies do hardware, software, and media – they do them very differently, in different proportions. And although computing functions have converged over the years, they still meet different needs and niches. For example, as a professional IT pro I’d hate to have to maintain a business network of tens or even hundreds of thousands of Macs, even to this day, because their enterprise support is so far behind where Microsoft’s is (because that’s something Microsoft has invested decades of work in).
At the end of the day, you find the software you want and you find the hardware that runs it. All of this size comparison religious war stuff is boring and wasted energy. EVERY software program and hardware device is the result of design compromises. You find the flavor of compromise that you can live with.
Absolutely. But can I point out to the OP that the Windows version is not a ‘port’ of the Mac version, it has had to be programmed from the ground up using different frameworks, which is why the Windows version is still not at parity with the Mac version, which was already at v. 2 before the Windows version was even released as a beta.
Mr X
Indeed. Parallel development from two different teams, if I understand it correctly, not a shared codebase. It take a while to catch up from that long of a standing start. And the perfect is the enemy of the good.
If you can call one person programming the Mac version a ‘team’ — the Windows version has LAP, who called in Tiho_D to help, but I don’t know if Tiho is full-time or only part-time … a minimal team all the same!
Mr X
The only thing I found approaching it is WriteWay. On the development issue, though, the disparity between the two versions reveals an inefficient engineering effort. If the time was taken to create extensive UML diagrams to map out every aspect of its intended features & functionality, it wouldn’t make any difference which language was used to write it. The actual process of doing so would be relatively quick and simple. I suspect the development lag is a product of the person developing the Windows version being forced to reverse engineer and translate the Mac version, rather than simply write code that’s mapped out by proper diagrams. I imagine the original creator wasn’t thinking about all that when he initially developed the software but it’s probably time to do so now.
Perhaps not technically a port but the concept is the same.
I don’t think so. This is immensely complex software, developed lovingly over the course of better than a decade with continuous criticism from writers, professional writers, and silly persons who have good ideas. You do NOT create something like this from programming methodologies; nor do you back-analyze something so complex in the hopes that you can then create a version for IBM 360/70 users. What you do, as Keith has, is find people who share his vision, provide them with counsel and shared libraries, develop a shared view of what’s possible on the different platforms and execute. If it takes years so be it because pasteurizing the original vision will pervert it beyond recognition and that means enthusiasts on platforms other than the original are just going to have to wait.
Dave
That’s simply not true. Any piece of software can be mapped out in infinite detail to its most basic components in a language-independent fashion. Such diagrams could even accommodate situations where one may need to build several versions of certain parts of the functionality to accommodate technical needs or limitations of specific hardware or file systems. However, even where such variations are necessary, the majority of programming will involve functionality that remains the same no matter the language (example: performing operations on strings or arrays). Even if the application was written in a procedural rather than object-oriented fashion, it could be diagrammed like this. If one is using best practices, one would actually do this first. For example, if you need to collect strings in an array and then store them in a data structure, the only difference from one language/system to another is the syntax. Proper UML diagrams don’t specify the syntax, they simply map out the functionality as well as usually providing the names of the functions, objects, etc. so you don’t have to think of them on the fly as you’re programming. In fact, when writing code from good diagrams, the syntax is really the only thing one need worry about. However, when this program was initially developed, the author probably didn’t realize where it would eventually go and how big it would get. He also doesn’t appear to have been a professional software developer, so he’s probably been playing catch-up ever since it started. I’m simply saying if they take a pause to map everything out, it will be much easier to develop in the future. It will also be much easier to bring the disparate versions to parity.
I should have known better than to get involved and reply to the original post.
To be clear, I did not write the “I imagine the original creator…” line attributed to me above.
Scrivener is a major multi-platform real world accomplishment, with more major accomplishments coming in this and future years.
I use it, because nothing else comes even close for me. I respect it and its creators, their real world expertise and track record… I am a fan.
This will be my last post in this thread.
That was dafu’s doing…see the last post on the previous page. I quoted you correctly a couple of posts above that one on the previous page. dafu appears to have been attempting to quote my post but didn’t clean up the text properly. In the first post on this page, I simply quoted dafu’s post which contained the incorrect attribution to you.
Regardless of who said what, at the end of the day, your question has been amply answered: Keith is a Mac user and wrote a Mac program he could use, one that others found useful as well.
The happy circumstance that he has been able to parlay that into enough success over the years to want to take on the burden of bringing his program to us surly, often demanding, and always entitled Windows just shows what a heck of a nice guy he really is.
Burden? God, have you been snowed! He’s not doing this out of the goodness of his heart. He’s raking in money hand-over-fist. If you read the “about me” section of the site, it says he never even completed his novel and strongly implies he devotes full time to Literature and Latte. That’s not from a desire to be generous…it’s from a desire to make money.