I want to use an application for book writing, I got my first iMac this Christmas and find EVERYTHING different. Anyone used Story mill, or can you suggest something better? I did find something in the Apple store but cannot remember the name and now can only find Story Mill
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Story Mill - Aid to writing
- Thread starter Geordie Lass
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Beautifully typeset books can be written with LaTeX. But there is a learning curve which is well worth it. Try it. www.tug.org/mactex
Try Scrivener. I think it's the best one out there and it's affordable too.
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php
I was using Storymill with mild success. I just downloaded Storymill 4.0. It's absolutely terrible. It crashes randomly and I end up losing precious writing data. They really need to clean it up before I can take it seriously. The last version never did this. They might have rushed it to production.
I've been very loyal to Scrivener and must recommend that the most.
I could also make a strong case for Storyist. Granted, it took me a long time to "get it" as far as figuring it out (user-wise), but now that I've learned more, it's quite good.
All three are good, but I would give the edge to Scrivener, simply because it's the compete package. Great organizational tool for writers, as well as a lot of little features to make writing more of a pleasure and helpful for motivation as well.
One note: I think the best way to compare Scrivener to Storyist for me, is that in Scrivener I organize first, and write after; whereas with Storyist is to write first and organize after (actually Storyist intuitively helps with that organization). I guess it all boils down to your process. Wow, after putting it that way... Storyist might be just as good as Scrivener. The jury's still out for me.
I've been very loyal to Scrivener and must recommend that the most.
I could also make a strong case for Storyist. Granted, it took me a long time to "get it" as far as figuring it out (user-wise), but now that I've learned more, it's quite good.
All three are good, but I would give the edge to Scrivener, simply because it's the compete package. Great organizational tool for writers, as well as a lot of little features to make writing more of a pleasure and helpful for motivation as well.
One note: I think the best way to compare Scrivener to Storyist for me, is that in Scrivener I organize first, and write after; whereas with Storyist is to write first and organize after (actually Storyist intuitively helps with that organization). I guess it all boils down to your process. Wow, after putting it that way... Storyist might be just as good as Scrivener. The jury's still out for me.
I thrashed on StoryMill 4 a bit... to their credit and honor, let me say they are doing a great job with their "support" team to address my concerns.
Scrivener. I can't recommend it highly enough.
I did try StoryMill first, but I didn't really 'get' it. It seemed to have a learning curve, or an ideal way it was 'supposed' to be used that I couldn't figure out. It put too many tools, widgets, and whatsits in my face and made me feel like I oughta be using them. So I tried Scrivener, and it just worked for me, no distractions, no trying to figure things out, I can just start writing and all the tools I need are there when I need them. From memory, the free trial for Scrivener has extremely generous terms, so that you can give it a REALLY good try out before making your decision. (I ponied up the $$$ long before my free trial expired, and I haven't so much as opened StoryMill since the day I transferred my work from it.)
Scrivener 2 came out recently. I haven't upgraded; I'm still happy with the old version. The new version brings a lot of new features, though, including a reasonably straightforward way to sync with an iPad, character name generators, more sophisticated goals and deadlines tracking and the like.
I guess the question is, what do you want/need from writing software? What are you hoping to get out of it--what features do you need that aren't in, say, TextEdit? Having a clear idea what you're looking for should help you identify the right software choice for you and the way you write.
I did try StoryMill first, but I didn't really 'get' it. It seemed to have a learning curve, or an ideal way it was 'supposed' to be used that I couldn't figure out. It put too many tools, widgets, and whatsits in my face and made me feel like I oughta be using them. So I tried Scrivener, and it just worked for me, no distractions, no trying to figure things out, I can just start writing and all the tools I need are there when I need them. From memory, the free trial for Scrivener has extremely generous terms, so that you can give it a REALLY good try out before making your decision. (I ponied up the $$$ long before my free trial expired, and I haven't so much as opened StoryMill since the day I transferred my work from it.)
Scrivener 2 came out recently. I haven't upgraded; I'm still happy with the old version. The new version brings a lot of new features, though, including a reasonably straightforward way to sync with an iPad, character name generators, more sophisticated goals and deadlines tracking and the like.
I guess the question is, what do you want/need from writing software? What are you hoping to get out of it--what features do you need that aren't in, say, TextEdit? Having a clear idea what you're looking for should help you identify the right software choice for you and the way you write.
Another vote for Scrivener. I've been on it for 2+ years. For a large project, it's unbeatable.
I think it's unbeatable for small projects, too - I needed to massively revise/rearrange a 7000 word piece of fiction that existed as a Word document. I broke it into sections, put each section into Scrivener separately, and what would have been a doable but difficult task in Word became very easy.
The price is right, tech support usually comes from the guy who wrote the code, there's a good user forum, and so on.
I think it's unbeatable for small projects, too - I needed to massively revise/rearrange a 7000 word piece of fiction that existed as a Word document. I broke it into sections, put each section into Scrivener separately, and what would have been a doable but difficult task in Word became very easy.
The price is right, tech support usually comes from the guy who wrote the code, there's a good user forum, and so on.
It's really about what kind of process you want. Scrivener is all about organizing and integrating. It makes it very easy to dump a lot of ideas together, and then move them around until things start fitting. I started using it for long projects, but now anything I'm going to have to think about and re-write repeatedly starts in Scrivener.
On the other hand, Scrivener is indifferent to formatting and layout, so you will eventually have to transfer the text out to a word processor. So if you need something to do that kind of thing, look elsewhere.
On the other hand, Scrivener is indifferent to formatting and layout, so you will eventually have to transfer the text out to a word processor. So if you need something to do that kind of thing, look elsewhere.
I might be misunderstanding your comment, nastebu, but Scrivener transfers text out quite easily. It has a "compile" option and I use it often. You tell it what you want written out, and it writes it out in rtf or doc or docx and other formats also, although it's happiest writing out in rtf.
Point is that transferring to a word processor format is easy and quick. I just had to send a 12 chapters to a reader and I doubt it took me two minutes to write them to rtf and then use Word to write the rtf out to a docx.