Greetings and thanks

First of all, Thank you for creating such great software. I have been a Windows user for around 25+ years now (all the way back to DOS) and have recently starting trying out the mac. It was actually this software that got me to dare to try to switch.

I know windows inside out and backwards. I used to write software for Windows, but over the years I started gearing myself to be the user rather than a developer. So, I started writing. No I am not even close to being published yet.

I tried just about every piece of Windows software out their. If you can name it, I probably have at least tried a trial version. The closest I came in my search was a program called Liquid Story Binder. What a piece of junk. You can’t even drag and drop between windows and forget about importing. Then someone suggested Scrivener. Not knowing anything about it I started searching the net. I must have spent nearly two months looking for a Windows version. The videos on the website looked very much like what I was looking for. I even started writing my own “copy” of scrivener based on the videos (just as intellectual exercise). Finally I broke down and got a mac, just because I wanted to try this software that badly.

Sure I could have stepped into the mac store and tried it out that way. But I need time to evaluate software, usually about a week or so to really get a feel for the way it works, flows, and to learn yet a new way of putting stuff together to create something else. Its kinda of like writing software in a various languages. You need to learn a whole new way of doing things just to get the same job done.

Not true with Scrivener. Everything just kinda flowed together. I did watch the videos and loaded the example when I first ran the program. But really it has been very painless. So much so that I now use my mac for just about everything. (I do have some software that I have to run on windows for my job)

Am I a writer? No. Am I Mac? I don’t think so, time will tell. What I am is very happy that I have decided to give this new endeavor a shot (much to the chagrin of may of my Windows colleagues).

So, once again, Thank you for creating such a great piece of software.

Thelgord.

Hi Thelgord,

Many thanks! It’s great to hear you decided to give a Mac a shot just to try out Scrivener - I’m glad it hasn’t disappointed. Hopefully you’ll enjoy using a Mac, too. I switched nearly six years ago myself, and after a couple of weeks of being a little bit bewildered and thinking OS X seemed like a toy when compared to Windows, I soon fell in love with the system, and realised that what had seemed “toyish” was really just a much easier way of doing things. And from a developer’s perspective, I never could quite get my head around MFC or C++ in the same way as I could Objective-C and Cocoa.

Anyway, thanks again for the kind words about Scrivener, and for buying a Mac just to use it!

All the best,
Keith

Personally I have never liked MFC or C++, which is part of the reason I know so many other languages. For now at least, I am just happy being a user. Perhaps as I learn more about how all this works I will delve in to that region.

I know this is an old post, but I wanted to add that I love the retro look that MFC gives to Scivener. It reminds me of the time when software was reactive - i.e. you clicked something and would get an immediate result. Please don’t even think about moving to a WebApp.