Scrivener 3 is on the way…

Posted by Hugh
Sep 24, 2017 at 02:30 PM

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
What writing app do you use in Windows instead of Scrivener?
> >In my experience, Scrivener for Windows is a pretty full-featured
>writing suite in its own right. Yes, compared to the Mac version, it
>isn’t as feature-rich, but I haven’t found a better single-solution
>writing app for Windows.
> >Steve Z.

I think it’s true to say that most of the reasonably well-known author-users of Scrivener on the Mac came to it and first successfully used it for (published) books when it was significantly less capable than Scrivener for Windows is now.

The problem for Scrivener’s Windows development is that it started at least five years after Keith Blount had started work on the Mac version, and by and large despite considerable efforts by the (two-man) Windows team, the Mac version remains more advanced.

Why did Keith start on the Mac, not Windows? The arguments have been rehearsed on this forum previously. But if I remember correctly Keith has written that the Mac developing environment was simply more encouraging. In particular, the “frameworks and tools” that he needed (I take it this means “off-the-shelf pieces of code”) were available for OSX (now macOS) at little or no cost, and they simply weren’t available at all for Windows. He’d have had to code them himself, and that would have taken far longer.

That I believe is the reason that Scrivener was first launched on the Mac, despite economic logic perhaps suggesting that it was the wrong thing to do. (I hope I haven’t misquoted Keith.)

Now, I believe the circumstances have changed. Keith has written several times that Scrivener for Windows is skipping its Version 2 and is aiming for a Version 3 launch which will have “feature-parity” with Scrivener for the Mac at some point during 2018.