Cody Fauser

Have you ever wanted to write something, but felt so bogged down by the tools that you gave up? Even worse is if you don't even have the option of giving up. When I was writing RJS Templates for Rails using the O'Reilly Word template there were many moments when I thought that I may end it all. Thankfully, that didn't happen.

I have a profound hatred for Microsoft Word. I feel like its entire codebase exists solely to make my writing experience miserable. Capitalizing everything I need lowercase, formatting my paragraphs in ways that I don't want, just messing with my document to ruin my weekend. I'm sure it is possible to make Word do what I want, but I just don't feel like it is worth the effort. I don't want to waste my time figuring out how to make Word work for me, when what I want to do is really simple. I just want to write text. Is this a lot to ask for?

Thankfully, Tobias Lütke let me know about Scrivener. What can I say? Scrivener is fantastic. Scrivener not only gets out of my way when I'm writing, it actually has features that help with the process of writing. Scrivener helps in all the areas where it counts when it comes to writing. Organization, taking notes, keeping lists of reference material, storing research documents right in the project. Scrivener feels like a combination of a simple text editor with the power of an organizational tool like Omni Outliner built right in. You can create an outline in minutes, reorganize by dragging sections around, look at high level views of a section in a cork board view, and then turn off the entire UI when you're ready to get down to writing by entering the full screen typewriter mode.

There are many, many more killer features that I won't get into here. Do yourself a favour and get the demo. Better yet, just buy it. It only costs $34.99, which is less than you're going to spend next week at Starbucks anyway. You can get up to speed with all the features in less than an hour with the included tutorials.