Apple Design Awards - *sob*

[cyberbryce]

Now, with your success, it would best serve you to start attending these types of functions: The Biggest Party of the WWDC!

Politics my friend...politics.

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
http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/posts/Ar ... 1-06-10-00
That really excites the curmudgeon in me.

[F451]

That really excites the curmudgeon in me.

There were some very good people at the party that I know have the utmost integrity, and are very helpful.

[AndreasE]

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.

So, don't let your baby become a Griefener!

[KB]

Thanks for the support.

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.

Nah, they are worthy winners, but so am I!

Best,
Keith

[Amaru]

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.

[xiamenese]

Keith,

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.

Mark

[iGreg]

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.

[Juddbert]

[Juddbert]

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.

Lesser programs? MacJournal? LESSER PROGRAMS? Durrr (shakes head in utter amazement). Dan Schimpf may well disagree... I certainly do!

[KB]

iGreg, Scrivener supports Pages just fine. Perhaps if you have any issues in that department it would be a good idea to post them in Technical Support or Wish List. But then, given that you have "not tried Scrivener yet", I fail to see how you are in any position to judge how well Scrivener works with Pages. In many forums, your post would be considered what is called "flame bait". Fortunately we have a very sensible and mature user base here who are not baited easily.
Keith

[alexwein]

Quite right, Keith. Very glad to see that lack of flaming. I found the post a bit amusing myself. How could someone who has never tried Scr. assess its usability with any program, much less Apple's Pages? Perhaps that is why iGreg implies Scr. works better with Mellel than with other word processors. And Appleworks? I haven't even seen that program much less heard anything concerning it for well over a year now. Interesting that there are folks still using it. I found it to be even more limited than Pages for my usage, but then again, that's just me, I suppose!

Alexandria

[Typo]

What, "Delicious Library" has won the award? That's the thing I mentioned in the "Software you said goodbye to" thread (though v1 there). A very nice product. Nice and essentially useless. It may have bit more "Mac feeling" to it compared to Scrivener, but I don't think I could make a living with it.

[iGreg]

I was going entirely by what I read about the various word processors on this site in the information this site provided on exports to the various word processors.

If you are looking for the best word processors to use with Scrivener, based on features alone, Microsoft Word, and NeoOffice support the most features. After that Mellel is your best bet. Pages (‘06) offers very minimal RTF support.

This comes from your FAQ linked below, see III [5]

http://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=318

This FAQ was written by KB.

[iGreg]

BTW, regarding MacJournal, I was using "lesser" merely as regards to amount of features and uses it has as compared to full blown word processors such as Word, Mellel, Pages etc. MacJournal is a journal & note organizer with some features of a word processor, but most of us would not have just MacJournal without also having a word processor as mentioned above.

[AmberV]

iGreg, actually 99% of the FAQ has been written by myself. I have left Keith's signature on the document to lend it a certain degree of credibility, but have made it very clear in the preamble that it is maintained by me, and that there may or may not be inaccuracies in the document.

That said, the word processor research that I performed for the section you quoted did show Pages to have a less than adequate handling of RTF standards. So you are right to point that out. Where I think you err is in your implication that this is somehow the fault of Scrivener. Actually, it produces very standard RTFs. It is up to the word processor to handle these standards, and the fact of the matter is, Apple has demonstrated their lack of interest in doing so, not only with the basic RTF support package available to Cocoa developers, but with their flagship page layout program as well. As for AppleWorks, I wouldn't even know where to begin integration testing. I haven't seen a copy of that distributed since 2002.

The beta version of Scrivener has advanced its interoperability with these standards so that it now stands above most of the competition in regards to how much of the RTF standard it imports. As for exporting, I believe that remains the same, but I do intend to do another battery of tests in the near future. I've been somewhat holding off for iWork '07, which seems to slowed down. Mellel has gone through a large update, and Nissus has come out with a pro version of their word processor. So that section is due for an update.