International Mac Podcast

Like most people born after the 70s, I’ve spent a great deal of time using a computer and, up until the past few years, the majority of that time was spent in a word processor. Although I don’t clearly remember the event, I do recall my third grade teacher taking us down to the computer lab for our first actual computer assignment.

Previous to then, all we would do was play educational games in Windows 98. You guys remember “Reader Rabbit”? Yeah, that was pretty much all that we did. But I digress. I remember the first thing we were instructed to do was navigate to the start menu and open WordPerfect 2000, that was the word processor that I used for the following 3 years.

In 2004, when i was in the 6th grade, my dad setup a computer for my sister and I to use. One of the programs running on this Dell machine was Word 2003. And compared to what I had been using before, this was a tool of the gods.  I mean, it had spell check. SPELL CHECK. As an eleven year old kid with terrible spelling, those little red line were truly amazing things.

I used Word 2003 for every document that I created (apart from school, where I was still stuck with WordPerfect) for the next 3 years.

Then again, in 2007, my sister and I got a new shared desktop. However, this machine was running something different. This machine was running Word 2007, as was the Acer notebook that i purchased a few months later. This marked another monumental moment in my computing life. The ribbon UI made everything seem so much prettier then any Windows application that I had used before. But even then, it was still cluttered, still to overcomplicated.

Now this is where the story gets good. On December 17th, 2008, I switched to the Mac. As part of this transition, I moved from MS Office to Apple’s iWork suite. Again, this was a beautiful transition. The interface in Pages was so simple and elegant. It completely blew my mind that a piece of writing software could look this good. But no matter how good Pages was, it still succumbed to the universal problem of word processors.

The problem with almost every word processor available on the internet is that they written to work the way that programmers think. The vast majority of modern (and ancient) word processors are designed to be completely linear. A new document starts of with a blank page, and simply adds more blank pages as you go along. This isn’t the way that writers think.

There is one word processor that I have discovered that does work the way that a writers brain does. This is Scrivener.

Say your working on a novel. When you create the document, you start off buy choosing a template, in this case the “Novel Standard Manuscript Format”.

Once you’ve started the manuscript, you can pound out different chapters in different sections using the iTunes style sidebar. And for those days when you just need to get the words out of you head and onto the “page”, there’s a handy fullscreen mode.

But by far, one of the most useful features of Scrivener is the Corkboard View.

Overall, Scrivener is probably, no, definitely the best word processor that I have ever used, and is a fantastic tool for writers of both fact and fiction.