At various times in my life, I’ve found occasion to stop in the middle of a fairly routine task—researching a story, or laying out a publication—and ask myself: “How the fuck did anybody do this before computers/the Internet/etc.?” I have a feeling it won’t be long before that’s the common attitude among writers about Scrivener, which my friend P.J. was touting to me a while back, and I’ve only now gotten around to taking for a test drive. It doesn’t actually do anything super revolutionary, it just makes it incredibly easy to organize all your research materials—PDFs, audio files, webpages, whatever—in one window with an outline of the project you’re working on. If you do long-form writing that involves large amounts of research material, check it out.
Scrivener
April 24th, 2007 · 3 Comments
Tags: Random Cool Link
3 responses so far ↓
1 David J. Balan // Apr 25, 2007 at 8:08 pm
Didn’t Richard Dawkins create a word processing program or something called Scrivener? Is there any relation?
2 Sam M // Apr 26, 2007 at 7:13 pm
I think about this, but in other contexts. For instance, how did people DRINK? I mean on weekends. Before the age of ATMs and debit cards. Seriously. Did people go to the bank every Friday afternoon and drain their accounts, just in case a bender was in the offing?
I asked an older friend this question. And you know what? He couldn’t really remember. I guess that speaks to the people I hang out with.
Another older friend recalled that people wrote a lot of checks.
At the bar? Imagine that. The handwriting must have been bad.
3 c // Apr 29, 2007 at 7:44 pm
I remember going to the ATM with a friend’s parent when I was 7 or 8–about 20 years ago. This leads me to believe that these invaluable devices have existed since the dawn of time.