One Writing App to Rule Them All - Video Overview

Like many of you I have experimented with and used many writing apps to find the one or two that facilitate the most effective and efficient writing workflow. I keep coming back to Scrivener (now to stay) and this video shows why. It can handle everything from a short blog piece, podcast notes, articles and books in virtually any format you can think of. It also has available on the Mac and iPad a distraction free interface.

I found this particular video to be among the best I have watched on how to use and master Scrivener. It is comprehensive but long but well worth your time. Besides, it is produced by Elaine Giles who has a delightful British accent. :slight_smile:

I highly recommend that you take time to watch this video if you would ideally like to find the one writing app to rule and replace them all.

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Used to use Scrivener on the Mac but now my primary writing tool is Ulysses on an iPad.

When I was using Scrivener for several years I never really felt at home. Features and power galore on Mac Scrivener but Ulysses is just right **right

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I’ve been using Scrivener for I’d guess about 6 years now. I don’t use it for anything short, though. I have been making heavy use of it’s ability to organize notes and reference material within the project – I had been a big user of Circus Ponies Notebook for that and realized that Scrivener was actually more convenient.

My real difficulty with it has been getting my head around “compile” to export. You can go to great effort to format a document as you write it but the formatting gets overridden on export. It’s a good feature to insure consistency but it can certainly be confusing. I started with Scrivener 2 and the compile changed pretty radically for me from version 2 to 3, so I basically had to relearn it.

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I agree, compiling, while very flexible, can be confusing. The video has a good explanation of the compile process. While long, I found the video to be very helpful.

I just watched the video. Learned a lot about features I haven’t used – lots of capability for different needs. The section on compiling could have been 10 times longer! Lots of handwaving and little of the customization available (and at least in my opinion, necessary) was covered. Customizing compile formats and how styles are handled in compiling was missing, and a shame about the latter after she spent so much time discussing styles.

I compile to PDF, 6x9 paperback (as .rtf) and Kindle MOBI from a common manuscript.

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@Bmosbacker Thanks for the Scrivener video recommendation. She is very thorough and I learned a lot!

I’ll have a watch. The last time I used Scrivener was about 6 years ago, when I used the iPad version as pretty much a wiki, as I was trying to remember information on the go for an exam and interview and at the time there wasn’t really any wiki type software on the iPad!

I’m always open to new software - currently use Ulysses for some writing as it saves the image with the writing and exports nicely to markdown for my blog, but running in to issues (and Typora is quite nice, along with it’s save images in a subfolder ability).