Appropriately for software designed for writers, there's a great backstory to Scrivener. Imagine a writer who hunted around for Mac text editors to help him do his work. Then imagine that he couldn't find anything that did all the things the way he liked, so he decided to make one himself...

Scrivener is a labour of love by Keith Blount. It's not a page layout tool, it's purely a space for capturing copy, research and ideas and cobbling together drafts as you go along. It can be turned to producing novels, scripts, journalism, or any type of professional writing.

Blount has been highly diligent at providing updates and bug fixes for the application through his beta testing and initial release, and has built up a very respectable following in the process. Check out www.literatureandlatte.com/forum to see this in action.

Flexible working

The application that we can think of that's closest to Scrivener in terms of feature set and feel is PaperTools Pro, or, to a lesser degree, MacJournal. Both competitors enable you to record thoughts on-the-fly, and PaperTools lets you note research and load references as footnotes, but neither comes close to Scrivener in terms of flexibility when you import, compile or export the body of work.

For example, you can import whole web pages into Scrivener together with their dynamic links and save them as new folders in the left-hand menu bar. You can even store video content embedded inside PDFs, among other formats.

The layout is pure Apple with all the familiar OS level text support and Cocoa coding, such as the Inspector tool. But beyond using familiar building blocks, Blount has been clever at setting how navigation is managed, too. Presumably his career as a writer has brought a creative sense to bear that some other coders can only guess at.

The left-hand panel is a tree of fall-down menu tabs. The main top-to-bottom central panel displays text or a mixture of research and draft copy as you like. The right-hand panel is loaded with opportunities to add metadata to the elements, while the header bar gives you a simple palette of tools, ranging from a highlighter to different display options.