Just having a peek around here will tell you the real writers use your program, whereas, although I guess one might when slumming, there really isn’t likely to be a real web developer going to use either of the winning programs.
And I think that’s the clue - it’s unlikely that the judges are either webbies or writers, but they’re likely to be scared by HTML. Anything that makes web pages easier to construct is always going to get a leg up. Whereas, writing, to the uninitiated, is something anyone can do in Notepad, right?
As someone who used to write (not that I’m any good) my stories in Word, I can tell you honestly that your program and especially the interface, has changed my writing life. Every time I think about replacing my iBook with a Win lappie, I think “But Scrivener won’t work!!!”.
I entered a computer contest back in high school. It was one of many contests covering a variety of subjects, and was entitled simply “Computer.” Pretty open, right? Well, my entry was a collection of complex Photoshop projects, 3D modeling projects, and photo tours of my experience in fixing computer hardware. I didn’t even get an honorable mention.
What did the three prize winners have? All three were the same - simple programs written in RealBasic or something like that (one of them was even nothing but the age-old “Hello World!” dialog box popping up).
The reason? The judges of the “Computer” contest were all programmers.
what are contests and prizes? Did the wheel-inventor ever win a contest? I basically dislike contest that separate winners and losers, everybody is a winner and a loser in a way. So, no respect to decisions in contests.
Cheer up, have a pint of beer and enjoy a growing user community and – not at least – some pounds filling your bank account.
I question whether you want to allow yourself to be judged by Apple’s design standards. I don’t think the judges were anything like those in Khadrelt’s high school computer contest in this case…
IMHO, you’ve managed a much more stable and highly functional program than most tools are even at 2.0. And it is just beautiful enough not to distract me from the work at hand.
I don’t mean to be crass, but I felt like sarcasm might best capture my point more fully, and yet disarm you of any sense that my intent is malevolent: I’m not sure if it’s possible to apply again, but if you want to apply next year, you might want to make it so that we navigate horizontally among our Scrivenings using Cover Flow, and when you click on a Scrivening it floats up, flips over gracefully and aligns itself with a 3-D virtual typewriter drum that really rotates as you type (using Core Animation).
For good measure, put those new Accordion type things all over the front page of this website. On second thought, don’t bother…
PS: Steve Jobs spent how much time using Cover Flow in … his Applications folder? That was his demonstration that Cover Flow will revolutionize the Finder. It was fun to see the big icons zoom by. I think this could be a useful tool, but somehow the priorities were way off. Are end users going to be so forgiving?
I have absolutely no use for any of the design winners, but I use Scr. daily for hours at a time, happily and thanking my lucky stars. I’m sorry you didn’t win, but please accept the deep gratitude of hundreds (or more???) happy users!!! Scrivener is the only program I’m still not eyeing replacements for!
A big part of these awards is more about which apps make the OS look great, and which use the coolest OSX features. It’s a bit of a showcase for Apple using broad appeal apps.
Scriv is absolutely great, but it’s not about showcasing OSX–it’s about writing. In this day and age… it’s not sexy enough to push sales…
Edited because I’m an idiot and didn’t click through to the right page…
Actually, Coda is proving very popular, and with good reason. And there’s no shame in losing to Panic, one of the longest-running and most innovative Mac indie developers around.
Keith, bad luck for not winning, but losing this award to Panic is a bit like losing the Embassy World Final to Ronnie O’Sullivan. And as others have pointed out, those of us who use Scrivener know that it’s a real winner
If I were to enter a contest like this, I would want to know what the judges were looking for. Polished appearance? Intuitive user interaction? Sophisticated or clever program language? Does it do something more or less fresh? (e.g., “not another program launcher is it??â€
An artist scorned today is tomorrow’s genius. It’s obvious the judges weren’t writers, or they have recognized a masterpiece when they saw it. Fortunately, you have many friends who are writers and they do recognize what a great program Scrivener is. Apple may not think you’re number one, but we do and I’d trust our judgment over theirs any day.
Apple is looking for software that splendidly shows off their latest operating system. If you look at the history of the awards they waft gently toward intrinsic merit and then swing firmly back to system promotion.
Think where you were (where Scrivener was) a year ago, and where you are now. This might give some indication about where you could be within a year from now.
For many of us wordprocessors and similar applications are more or less the centre of our computerized world. For the vast majority of computerized people, instead, they are not. Most people don’t give a damn about wordprocessors (because they don’t give a damn about literature and writing), but have instead a lively interest in web designing, in site developing, in photoshopping, and so on. That’s why I would have been almost astonished if a wordprocessor-like program like Scrivener would have won a similar contest.
Oh brother…
But I’m glad that page links to this post (I had read and forgotten about this) and celebrity discussion about “delicious” trends in Apple software rogueamoeba.com/utm/posts/Ar … 1-06-10-00
That really excites the curmudgeon in me.
Keith, you get your awards for Scrivener here. A whole forum full of it. Your users are a far more important and competent jury, I’d guess…
I had a look. Seems to me this award is for software that let a Mac look good. Okay. But honestly, I prefer a software let let my novels look good. I doubt a program with a lot of twisting and whirlings somethings would be helpful for that aim; it is instead Scriveners wellconsidered understatement that appeals to me.
Scriveners biggest advantage is to achieve that from time to time I completely forget the software, the computer, everything - and stay focused on my writing instead. This is how it should be.
I should hasten to restate that I don’t begrudge the winners one iota - they look like great pieces of software and I can very well see myself using Coda for writing web pages if, as I suspect, it will allow me to write HTML and check how it looks in a web page all at the same time - great!
No, I was just bemoaning my losing, not their winning. And the guys at Karelia have had their ideas “stolen” (quotes to avoid a lawsuit ) by Apple a couple of times, so they deserve some acknowledgement.
Keith, You’ve created a piece of software that, to my mind, is changing the meaning of the computer as a writer’s environment. Although I agree that awards not always chose right, it would have been great for you that Scrivener had more exposure. But I believe that Scrivener doesn’t need an award to entice its users. Let the grieving happen, but then put it behind, because the best writer’s environment in the industry needs you.
You are a winner … you don’t need one of those awards to tell you that, no matter how nice it would have been. And I think of it this way, awards and competitions are looking for specific things. Scrivener may be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it clearly didn’t meet the specific thing that the awards were aimed at … perhaps OS-X “bling!”.
A true story of precisely that:
I don’t know if it’s still running, but in 2002 a French software company that produces a mathematics modelling program organised a national competition for universities here in China, in which the competing teams had to produce a toolbox extending the capabilities of the software. The competition — or contest, as they insist on calling them here in China! — was organised at this end by the Mathematics Department of Tsinghua university, in most people’s estimation, and most certainly in their own, China’s top university.
A bunch of 2nd year Computer Science undergraduates with a 3rd year as the group leader was one of the teams that entered from Xiamen University. To the immense fury of Tsinghua, they were one of the two winners of the competition along with a team of graduates from the Aeronautics University in Beijing. Tsinghua entered a considerable number of teams, all of them graduates in Mathematics or Computer Sciences.
So how did this happen? The Tsinghua teams all wrote tool-boxes based on solving the problems that they were working on for their dissertations. My Xiada chums — three of them have become good friends — wrote a GUI for what up till then had only had a command line interface. That was the sort of thing that the competition was about, creating a toolbox that would be widely useful, not just one that served your immediate needs.
At the awards ceremony at Tsinghua, the head of the Mathematics Department, who had chaired the organising committee, went up to my friend in a fury that his postgraduates had been beaten by a bunch of undergraduates from an inferior university, and said amongst other things, “I bet you don’t dare enter again next year!” On the other hand, one of the judges from France told Lao Da that he had immediately installed the GUI on his own machine and was now using it himself.
Teams from Xiada did enter again the next year, including one led by one of the members of that winning team. What happened? They won again. This time they wrote two toolboxes, one making it possible to run the application over a LAN, when to date it was a standalone app, and another toolbox to let you access it over the internet using a standard browser as the interface. Tsinghua had still not learnt the lesson that you have to know what the competition is really about.
So Keith, don’t feel down about not winning … it was perhaps not the right awards competition for you. Let me qualify that … If these awards were really about software that will bring people over to OS-X, then the committee missed a trick, 'cos Scrivener can pull people over from Windows, 'cos Windows has nothing to match it. No matter how worthy the winning apps were, they don’t strike me as being things that will convert Windows users.
And as Juddbert, I think it was, said in the Sensible Windows thread: a Windows user will say “Look how cheap my hardware/software was!” whereas a Mac user will say “Hey, look what I’ve been able to do on my Mac!” … i.e. bling! Scrivener is a great app for people who want to get on with their writing and enjoy the process, but it’s not about that kind of bling! But it seems to me that that is more what the awards were likely to have been about.
I have not tried Scrivener yet, but let me suggest the reason Apple ignored it was Scrivener’s minimal capabilities with Apple’s two primary word processors, Pages and AppleWorks. I use Pages for final work, and other lesser programs like MacJournal & Text Edit for initial drafts.
If Scrivener integrated better with Pages &/or AppleWorks I bet you would have a better chance of at least being a finalist. Apple is not about supporting the word processors of its competitors such as Mellel etc.
