About Scrivener 3

Surprising to see negativity. Scrivener 3 sounds like it addresses the concerns I have with version 2 (style sheets!!), so I’m going to be an early adopter.

If I knew the moment L&L’s website would start taking payments for version 3, I’d set my alarm clock for any hour to get it on the instant of release (with style sheets!!!).

Hmmm… If I set an alarm for every hour I could get V3 as much as a half-day quicker. Twenty-three more wind-up Big Ben alarm clocks, that’s the answer.

Tick-tick-tick-tick…

Sound points. I find Scrivener 2 does a whole lot of stuff that no other software does, and does it well. My only problem is when users say things like “Oh, that’s a bug caused by Apple, which will be sorted out in Scrivener 3” or “Can’t wait until S3 is released!!” If my entire software life was based upon Scrivener, I’d upgrade to Sierra, but I NEED Dragon Dictate and can’t afford the newer version, and I use iTunes 10 a LOT. Admittedly I can use Photoshop CS6 and could probably upgrade to CC if I wanted to, but I can still use iPhoto and Elements 6, and don’t use Office anymore.

I also don’t agree with Keith that “users seem to like the annual release of Mac OS”. It’s one of the commonest complaints online among both users and experts. They DO seem to like the annual release of iPhones and iOS and I understand that. As for MacOS, now it’s moved exclusively to 64-bit (the original premise of Snow Leopard), all it needs is a touch interface which it could achieve via a Magic Trackpad, or the new supersize Macbook trackpad (… perhaps that’s what it has in mind … ?) and it would be pretty much perfect in terms of modern users interfacing with social media.

Microsoft brings many fewer upgrades to Windows (there was no Windows 9, so 10 is the 9th ) while there have been 21 for Mac and High Sierra will be 22.

To be fair, you’d also need to count Service Packs and feature upgrades (like the Windows 10 Creator’s Update), which would bring it a lot closer to parity with MacOS.

I only buy software from companies that have a philosophy of “helping the user use the software,” not “helping the user work under the software.”

PCalc, HoudahSpot, and Scrivener are such products and I evangelize them all.

I’ve never felt L&L abandoned me. They’ve always stepped up.

I’m baffled, too, anyone would think otherwise.

Oh, and time marches on. You gotta go with the flow of software or use Word.

When you consider System 7.1, 7.5 and 7.6 were quite big upgrades, as were OS 8.1, 8.5 and 8.6, 9.1 and 9.2, and OS X 10.2.8, 10.10.3 and maybe one or two other “point” upgrades, that puts Mac still well ahead.

No. Windows 10, and OS 10, sounds like they are on parity.

My apologies for provoking you. It was an assumption on my part that hardware was the reason for not upgrading past Mavericks. Which leads me to wonder what software is keeping you at Mac OS 10.9, and why they haven’t updated their software as well?

Ok, I’ve already listed these but I don’t mind doing it again:

1. the expense of upgrading Dragon Dictate 2.5 WiFi to version 3 or later which needs to run on 10.10 or later.

2. the current ability to run Snow Leopard Server in Parallels 10 - a later version of Parallels would be needed if I went beyond 10.9

3. the inability to run iTunes 10 beyond OS 10.9

4. I can still run Pages 4 and iPhoto in 10.9, though I believe there are ways to do so in the earlier iterations of 10.10, but no later.

That about covers it. Oh, and the fact that I’ve never owned an iOS device (though I intend to buy an iPad today). Oh, and also because Mavericks does pretty much everything I need, as a Mac user since 1994.

Excuse me but isn’t this discussion going in two different directions?

1. You wanting to be able to continue to use v 2 as long as you decide to remain on a legacy system. No one questioned this.
2. Hypothetical new v2 customer in a distant future. Why should L&L want that?

If you argue for 2, why not demand that L&L begin selling v1 licenses as well? The logic would be the same, right?

I haven’t argued for 2. That was someone else (unless you mean someone who cannot upgrade to Sierra and wants to buy Scrivener? Those would HAVE to be able to buy v2 and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t - it’s either that or no Scrivener at all, and L&L wouldn’t want that.).

You just argued for 2. It would be fun, but unrealistic.
I have a 2002 white iBook running Jaguar. It would be fun if I could upgrade all software on it to the latest possible (Tiger?) but unreasonable to expect all software companies to maintain back copies of all versions of all software.

Since we have no way to verify a user’s operating system, any proposal that involves selling new v2 licenses equates to option #2.

Katherine

I don’t know why you can’t sell a v2 license to someone who can’t use v3?

You’d do like many software companies do, and you’d have v3 as the main version for sale on your Home page. There it would outline the minimum requirements (hardware and software i.e. OS). In small print - as many companies do - you would refer users who don’t meet the minimum requirements to a ‘legacy version’ for which you would still charge of course. I’ve seen this so often, I don’t see why it should be an issue?

Users running Sierra or later wouldn’t even see or look for that small print and would purchase v3 as a matter of course. But obviously L&L would want to sell licenses to those who can’t use v3 - it makes no commercial sense not to, and involves very little effort.

Ah, but it’s not obvious, hence the whole conversation. L&L seems to not want to sell further v2 licenses once v3 is released, otherwise they would have planned to. And we are not privy to the financial reasons (and other reasons) why they have come to this decision.

And while you are correct that merely selling the license may involve “very little effort”, it is almost certain that supporting such users could be drastically more expensive.

No support is required. All the software suppliers that provide downloads of legacy software have a strict condition that it’s sold on the understanding that no further upgrades will be provided and that any support is provided on a limited basis. For S2 this would be either through the user forums, or via the usual ticketing system if no v2 user has an answer to any problem (and as the user response will generally be “This is a known Apple bug which is resolved in Sierra and Scrivener 3 - in version 2 there is no further solution sadly”, a ticket would be a rare thing indeed).

If it’s a general Scrivener query/confusion common to any version, these forums will be able to answer.

By now this question will appear to be off topic ( ) but: somebody mentioned a test at the beginning of this thread…? Any idea when we will see the beta?

To provide a formal update on what our policy will be going forward: no, we aren’t going to sell Scrivener 2 licences specifically. I know a few here feel otherwise, but we don’t think it’s good idea to sell software with no intention of revisiting or releasing at least bug patches for. Even if you state that in the fine print. And I don’t agree that such is incredibly common practice. I have never seen that done myself, which doesn’t mean it isn’t out there, but at least among the software stores I’ve been through in the past few years: they sell what they are developing, not older versions of it that they stopped developing years ago.

But, this is something we’ve been thinking about for a while now otherwise. There are two issues to consider:

1. Windows, although made available as a beta on day one… will be a beta. Those wishing to work cross-platform or to collaborate with Windows users may not be able to use 3.0 immediately for that reason. Not everyone wants to dive straight into a beta.
2. It is a hard cut off at a present-tense macOS version. I’ve seen the 50% number thrown about a bit here, but I wonder what that number looks like if you count the last two releases? Given the support information and crash report tracking we have available, it is increasing rare to see anyone on anything less than last year’s macOS release. We get scattered few 10.9 users, rarer few from 10.7 and .8, and long, long stretches of time go by between 10.6 users asking for help (and this despite it having some of the worst AppleDecay problems—among one of which makes PDF viewing 100% utterly broken, you’d think we’d be hearing a lot about that if lots of people still used it). I think, these days a huge chunk of Mac users are on the two more recent versions. But it is still a near cut-off and Apple has recently made it so older hardware is more recently made unsupported.

So here is how things will be: if one purchases a copy of Scrivener 3 from the new site they will find that they can download a copy of Scrivener 2 from our legacy link, plug that serial number in, and it’ll unlock the software. If in two years they get a machine that can run Scrivener 3, they’ll be able to take that same licence number and unlock it. So they won’t be buying a mothballed 2.8—they will be buying Scrivener 3, with the added capability of being able to use 2.x for whatever reason, as well, or instead of.

We certainly don’t want to leave anyone out in the cold—but as it has been explained in this thread before, we had to move on because Apple keeps moving on, and making it increasingly difficult to support these older systems. The amount of code overhead it takes to support older systems is definitely not the sort of thing you want to perpetuate into major upgrades if you can at all avoid it. 3.0 will be clean, modern and ready to serve as a platform to build off of for years to come.

Test, as in, you will soon have Scrivener 3 and will want to know how to use it: so read up.

Great call. Very glad you’ll be keeping that legacy download available to those who license Scrivener 3 for Mac. I expect comparatively few new activations of 2.8, but almost all with some good reason to do so.

Tip of the hat to ScriverTid, whose “ill-considered” (by me) comment got the question out there!

Rgds - Jerome

I will need to have have my head examined-- it took me a scary amount of time to parse the meaning of that statement.

Does this mean that there won’t be a beta? And also, any ideas about a release date?

There won’t be a public beta of the Mac version. Saying “this will be on the test” is perhaps a colloquial way of saying you better jot down these things in your notes because you’re going to need them in the future. Not for beta testing, but for getting real work done.