Calling the Mac experts

**Banquo's Ghost** · 07-18-2009, 16:20

The battery should be new in a refurb, but you should nonetheless make sure you calibrate it. It's usually best to do this once a month as suggested, though for my MacBook Pro - which is on the mains more often than not - I don't bother more than once a quarter.

You can check your battery condition in System Profiler (click the little Apple logo at the far left of the menu bar, then choose About This Mac and then More Info - also go here to ensure your system is up to date with Software Update). A very useful widget (small applications that live in your Dashboard) is iStat, which will help monitor your battery easily. It's free (one can make a donation).

There's a collection of guides on the Apple site, that may be of use.

If your dock icons for applications don't seem to respond to your click, try going to System Preferences, Dock and select Animate Opening Applications. The dock icons will now bounce while they're opening. Note that in Sys Pref and many other OSX apps, there is no need to click "Apply" or "OK" as the change takes effect immediately you select it.

Spaces is a delight. You can assign applications to open in their own space - so you might have Safari in Space 1, Scrivener in 2, Excel in 3 and so on. You swap between them with Apple key + arrow keys. Much easier to flip between research sources. Add this to Exposé (which reduces all open windows on a desktop space to fit the screen, where you can select the one you want to go to) and working with multiple sources open becomes really easy. Of course, this may not be your modus operandi.

With Scrivener, don't overlook the full screen writing mode. Everything goes away but your words. It's very productive, and your research is only a click away.

**frogbeastegg** · 07-19-2009, 20:07

The battery has stabilised itself at between 5 and 6 hours usage now.

Originally Posted by Banquo's Ghost

With Scrivener, don't overlook the full screen writing mode. Everything goes away but your words. It's very productive, and your research is only a click away.

I stayed up past 1AM going through the tutorial and playing with features as they were introduced. I started it around 9PM; I couldn't tear myself away from my new box of toys.

I've been chopping my mammoth Eleanor manuscript up into rough chapters, colour coding them and adding a brief synopsis. There's over half the manuscript left to attack and already it's feeling far more wieldy. I was sweating when I told Scrivener to do a word count on the entire thing - it sat there with a little colour wheel spinning for nearly a minute. I feared I'd killed it, until it spat out a result. I've got enough words to make a 1239 page mass market paperback. Scary.

**pevergreen** · 07-20-2009, 06:04

Do I sense an Eleanor: Apprentice and an Eleanor: Master? (Sorry, I have the Riftwar on my mind)

**Lemur** · 07-20-2009, 16:06

Originally Posted by frogbeastegg

I stayed up past 1AM going through the tutorial and playing with features as they were introduced. I started it around 9PM; I couldn't tear myself away from my new box of toys.

Okay, fine, I give in. After hearing you and Banquo rave on and on about Scrivener, I downloaded the free trial and started working the tutorials.

Goodness.

I think this may replace no fewer than four applications I've been using. This really is good stuff. If I weren't so stodgy and stuck in my ways I would have tried it before.

Sure, it's not gonna work for the customized templates used by some of my corporate clients, but that's fine, I can still crank OpenOffice when I need to. But this is a mighty fine box of tools. I think I'm in love.

Somebody needs to port this app to Windows. Quickly. It's too fine to be restricted to Mac users.

**Banquo's Ghost** · 07-20-2009, 16:22

Originally Posted by Lemur

Somebody needs to port this app to Windows. Quickly. It's too fine to be restricted to Mac users.

Unlikely, as they are tiny team based in Cornwall, UK.

Originally Posted by L&L website

Will There Be a Windows Version of Scrivener?
This is one of the most frequent questions we receive. The answer, I am sorry to say, is, "No - certainly not in the foreseeable future." The reason for this is not that we are Mac snobs, but simply that Literature & Latte - as explained above - is a very small company, and we happen to prefer and use (and program for) the Mac platform. The Mac operating system (OS X) is, internally, very different from Windows, to such an extent that porting Scrivener to Windows would pretty much require programming it from scratch (not to mention me having to learn how to program for Windows). Programs that do run on both Windows and OS X tend to fall into two camps: those that have whole teams working on them who are thus able to create two entirely separate versions optimised for each platform (examples are Word, PhotoShop and suchlike); and those that are created using intermediary software such as REALBasic (the latter tend to stick out as not really looking or feeling "native" to either platform). Scrivener was created using the standard Mac OS X programming frameworks (known as "Cocoa"), so it is native to the Mac. Because of this and the fact that I do not have whole teams of programmers to port it to a different platform, a Windows version of Scrivener is very unlikely. Sorry. That said, if you happen to be a talented Windows programmer as well as a writer and you like Scrivener, feel free to drop me a line - I can't offer anyone a job, though!

Glad to see you are being seduced too!

**Lemur** · 11-08-2010, 16:33

Originally Posted by Banquo's Ghost

Unlikely, as they are tiny team based in Cornwall, UK.

Unlikely, but not impossible. Behold, Scrivener for Windows beta 3. I'll be locking my bedroom and holding all calls while I cuddle up with this sexy piece of software.

**frogbeastegg** · 07-20-2009, 17:16

Originally Posted by pevergreen

Do I sense an Eleanor: Apprentice and an Eleanor: Master? (Sorry, I have the Riftwar on my mind)

The story arc splits neatly into three segments, and I've had joking names for each for years. Part 1 is 'Nell and Fulk's Spytastic Adventures'. Part 2 is 'Uh oh ...' and part 3 is 'Wherein there is killing and stuff, also cleaning up'. Imagine walking into a bookshop and asking for a copy of one of those!

Originally Posted by Lemur

Okay, fine, I give in. After hearing you and Banquo rave on and on about Scrivener, I downloaded the free trial and started working the tutorials.

Glad that you've got some return for helping me

Somebody needs to port this app to Windows. Quickly. It's too fine to be restricted to Mac users.

If it had been possible on Windows then I'd have been thinking of the option Caravel mentions here: a normal laptop with vista nuked off of it and a decent OS installed. Whether I'd have taken that route or not is a different question; spending time cleaning junk off and setting the machine up in a usable fashion would have been more effort than I'm currently willing to spend. Getting this desktop back up and running took me a lot of time, for which I had other, more uses.

Have you seen page four? It's nice but it lacks some of the things I liked in scrivener's product blurb, and those tools were more useful to me than the ones page four has but scrivener does not.