The L&L Blog
Spooks + Scrivener
I just have to boast about this.* I've been enjoying the excellent sixth series of Spooks on BBC1 (Tuesdays - MI5 in the US) - I've been a big fan of the show since the second series, and would get around to renting the first season on DVD were it not for the thought of seeing Lisa Faulkner getting her face burned off with boiling oil. It's a great spy show with interesting characters (though Adam has got to be the most obvious spy ever - his "disguises" as a gardener, builder, phone company man or whatever tend to be somewhat undermined by his perfect hair, cut-glass accent and the giant microphone protruding from his collar), a healthy dose of cynicism, 24-style split-screen shots and more tension than the Humber bridge.
All in all, Spooks has consistently been one of the best home-grown BBC programmes over the past few years, and you never know who they're going to kill off next.
But I've been getting an extra thrill from series 6 because the over-arching story was drafted in Scrivener and some of the episodes were scripted in Scrivener, too, by author Neil Cross (whose new novel, Natural History - which was also mostly composed in Scrivener! - has been getting some great reviews).
Now, if Neil has used Scrivener to kill of Zaf, I am going to be most upset - talk about turning your tools against you...
Scrivener + Leopard
I've been getting a number of concerned e-mails recently from Scrivener users who fear that I may have abandoned development of Scrivener because my last blog post here is rather old and was slagging off Apple, and because there is no mention of Leopard on the Scrivener product page...
I would just like to make it very clear that Scrivener is very much alive and in active development. Scrivener 1.1 is Leopard-ready, with a more "Leopard-esque" interface and a large number of tweaks for Leopard. As a paid-up member of the Apple developer program, I have been building Scrivener on Leopard for the past six months or so. I had hoped to get Scrivener 1.1 out yesterday, to coincide with Leopard's release, but there are a couple of things that have caused a delay (not the least of which being that my partner had to go in for an operation on her jaw yesterday; oh, and Tomb Raider Anniversary came out for the Xbox 360, too...). For a start, the release change list is so long that I need to simplify it, and I also need to update the project templates that come with Scrivener 1.1. Scrivener itself is ready and has gone through extensive beta-testing over the past few months.
If you are concerned or need the Leopard-ready version right now (although 1.03 should work fine on Leopard for now anyway), please go to the Beta Testing section of the forum. There you can download the latest Scrivener 1.1 beta (1.095), which runs fine on Leopard (note that there is a minor bug related to script editing and Edit Scrivenings that has been fixed for 1.1). Note that you will be prompted to update your project, and you must get rid of older versions of Scrivener.
At the same time as 1.1 is released as an official (and free) update, the website will also be updated. I have been working hard on that over the past week, as the old product page does not reflect the new look of Scrivener. I've also created a webcast for the page. Also note that as of 1.1, Scrivener's price will be increasing from $34.99 to $39.95 (except for students). The update will, of course, be free to registered users, though.
I'll post again soon about Leopard. Leopard is a great update, and Scrivener 1.1 looks and works great on it. Please be patient as I get the release version ready. It will be with you very soon, and I apologise for the fact that it was not out on time for Leopard. I just wanted to make sure it was perfect...
Oh, and Tiger users, rest assured that Scrivener will continue to work beautifully on both Leopard and Tiger for the foreseeable future.
Apple is not your friend
Well, if you've been reading my previous posts about Apple's tardiness in posting the 9a466 (or whatever it is) Leopard beta to developers who paid for ADC Select or Premiere membership, you'll know I'm not a happy bunny. WWDC attendees received that beta nearly three weeks ago now. And you know what? That beta is now available on torrent sites. Meaning that pirates out there are running a version of Leopard for which they have not paid, whilst legitimate law-abiding ADC Select members such as myself still have no access to that version of Leopard despite having paid Apple for the "latest" Leopard releases - in other words, we have paid for exactly that copy.
Do Apple care?
No, they do not.
I have written to them several times, with no reply. All developers received a general "you will receive the WWDC beta soon via ADC download" e-mail a few days ago. And when I e-mailed them to remind them that they had not replied to my earlier e-mails, they repeated the "soon" message to me.
Well, you know what? I've lost interest. I won't pay for a Select ADC membership again, and I strongly advise other indie developers to think seriously before wasting money on it. Yes, you get hardware discounts, but the main impetus for coughing up for a paid ADC account is pre-release OS X versions. Given that Apple don't honour what you pay for, I strongly recommend not buying into this scam. Sadly, it will mean that users of my software lose out a little in future, in that if I do not pay for pre-release versions of the OS, then I can't guarantee that my software will run on the first release of any new OS upgrade. But if Apple don't make available the new releases of their OS to those of us who have paid for exactly that, then what is the point? The really sad thing in all of this is that I have got so p***ed off at Apple that I have not touched Scrivener development for three weeks now. When I finally get access to the new beta I will hopefully get my enthusiasm back, but as an indie developer, with Apple treating me as though I am worthless, it makes it really hard for me to get enthusiastic about updating a help file or adding a small tweak here or there.
There really are times when I wish I had chosen to develop for Windows. Surely Microsoft cannot treat developers as poorly as Apple do? Apple is not your friend. They make lovely machines and a great OS, but they care very little for users or developers, it seems.
In fact, it seems that the Apple developer model works something like this: 1) Pay hundreds of dollars for ADC membership and an "Early Start Kit" that gives access to latest OS versions; 2) Once you've paid, the latest versions will actually be withheld unless you pay thousands of dollars for a WWDC ticket and travel across the world to attend.
Oh, and if you can't attend, it's not just the beta that is held back, but also any knowledge shared by engineers.
I don't why I'm so surprised - I guess it's just years of Macheads telling me that Microsoft were evil and Apple were Good. When you finally switch to a Mac and develop for the platform for a few years, you soon realise that Apple are just as bad as MS - they just happen to be much smaller and less popular.
So: really, really poor. Please do think twice before paying for ADC membership.
Are Apple taking the proverbial?
No, but really, are they?
A couple of days ago I posted moaning about how Apple have not bothered to seed the latest beta of Leopard to paying ADC Select and Premier members who did not attend WWDC (despite the advertising on the Leopard Early Start Kit web page making it very clear that paying for membership entitles you to the latest versions of Leopard).
I am a very conscientious developer, I like to think. Whenever I come across a bug in the OS, I post it over at bugreport.apple.com. I have posted a number of bugs related to developer seeds of Leopard. Well, today I received an e-mail from the Apple bug reporting team telling me that they believe that in the latest - WWDC - seed of Leopard they have fixed one of the bugs I reported. They asked me to test it and get back to them on whether it is, indeed, fixed.
So I repeat my question: are they taking the ****? Because they haven't released the WWDC beta of Leopard to anyone who did not attend WWDC, so how on earth can I test this? I replied with a very terse e-mail asking them to keep the bug report open given that there was no way I could test until I received what I had already paid for - namely, the latest developer seed.
What really worries me more than anything in all of this is that I can find no evidence of other developers getting really riled by what I see as seriously questionable behaviour on the part of Apple. Surely there must be other developers out there who feel that Apple are behaving immorally in all of this? Apparently not. At most, other developers are sighing, "Oh, I've been through the release cycle before, it always takes them a month or two to get this sort of thing up on ADC," as though that makes it all okay. Oh well. I guess I just have an overdeveloped sense of justice / desire for Leopard / desire to receive from a company what I have rightfully paid for (delete as appropriate, I just don't know any more).
Leopard beta for the rest of us?
As you may or may not know (and whether you care is a different matter entirely), today is the last day of Apple's WWDC (World Wide Developers' Conference) in San Francisco. If you're an Apple buff, you've probably seen the keynote, showing off Leopard. Yes, the keynote was a little underwhelming. Leopard looks fantastic, but it does seem odd that after being told that it has 300 new features, of the ten that His Jobsness previewed, 8 had already been revealed at last year's conference. Still, it looks like the biggest release for a while, and unifying the interface is a Good Thing.
Mail 2.0-style split views
Just recently I've been invited to join a sort of round table discussion with several other UK-based Mac developers. It's been interesting so far, but I found myself moaning and bitching about the lack of frameworks available for common OS X controls. This, of course, is a career hazard of being a teacher - you end up moaning a lot. So I thought I ought to make amends.
Just recently I've been updating Scrivener's split views to look more like those in Mail in Tiger, as this seems to be the way that the Mac interface is going. I was a little reluctant to do this at first - indeed, I considered Mail-style split views when designing Scrivener 1.0, but decided against them because I liked the 16-pixel separation between binder and main text. But these days, after several interface tweaks, I feel the new splitters might fit. Besides which, I think that if I don't implement them, Scrivener may start looking dated if I'm not careful - maybe not yet, but it's good to get in there ahead of time. Or something.
So, I rolled my own solution. I enhanced the NSSplitView subclass that Scrivener uses so that it could be drawn with a single-pixel divider (and, as of 1.03, I also added functionality for it to state-save to file rather than just to user defaults so that split view state can be saved as part of the document, which is often desirable for document-based apps). I also wrote my own grab-handle class, SCRSplitViewResizer (by "grab handle", I mean the grabber that you click on in the footer view in mail to resize the split view). My class only handles the resizing of vertical split views, but then, outside of Path Finder, I haven't seen any apps that use grabbers for horizontal split views anyway. My grabber does have to handle resizing regardless of whether it's placed on the left or right of the splitter, though.
Now, lots of folk have rolled their own grab handles and single-pixel split views, I know. But, to my knowledge, the only one publicly available is RBSplitView. So, to make amends for all that bitching I mentioned, here is mine:
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/downloads/SCRSplitViews.zip
This is the code that Scrivener 1.04 is using. It works pretty well. If you have the need of a Mail-2.0-style split view, feel free to use it however you wish.
And the sad thing is that I am posting about the most ephemeral of phenomena - code classes - when my favourite author of all time died only two weeks ago. I didn't even blog it. I did shed a tear, though. God bless you, Mr Vonnegut (though I don't think that Vonnegut believed in a god any more than I do). My life changed for the better when I read Slaughterhouse 5 at nineteen. This really doesn't belong shunted at the end of a post entitled "Mail 2.0-style split views". Ho-hum.
From MacBook woe to MacBook Pro
Well, the final straw came last week that broke the bond between me and my MacBook. Not that I ever felt very bonded to it in the first place. I bought my white 2.0Ghz MacBook in the first week they were released, and boy, was that a mistake. Everyone said, "Don't buy a first generation Mac product," but did I listen? I did not. Listen: "Don't ever buy a first generation Mac product." Will you listen? I doubt it. Anyway. I wanted an Intel replacement for my beloved iBook, given that I was developing Scrivener and wanted to ensure that it was fully "universal" (that is, ran properly on both PPC and Intel Macs). Or, at least, that was my excuse to my other half. Really, I just wanted a shiny new iBook replacement.
Scrivener first week, 1.01 and Xbox 360 distractions
Well, the first week of Scrivener going on a 1.0 release has gone way better than I could have hoped. Thank you to everybody who has purchased a copy or just taken the time to give me feedback so far. Notable events of the past couple of weeks include:
Scrivener makes 1.0
Well, Scrivener finally got to a 1.0 release yesterday, and I would like to sincerely thank* all of those users who have beta-tested both Scrivener Gold and then the Scrivener 1 betas over the past couple of years. You have all helped make Scrivener a much better application, truly. When I released beta 1 several months ago, I thought it was pretty much ready for release. I was mistaken, to put it mildly. The feedback was positive, but there were a lot of rough edges that made navigation a little unintuitive (remember how you could keep ending up with a blank corkboard because the modes weren't automatic?). My own ideas and vision got Scrivener part of the way; feedback from real world users got it the rest of the way. It is much better for it. So: thank you.
A big thank you too to all of those who have already bought Scrivener - I am genuinely surprised at the number of copies purchased in less than 24 hours - and to those who have taken the time to write such rave reviews on VersionTracker and MacUpdate.
For those who haven't checked out Scrivener 1.0, it is available on the product web page at:
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html
There are a few minor tweaks and features I hope to add over the coming months, and of course, there will no doubt be another small development push when Leopard is released to ensure everything is compatible and to take advantage of new OS X features, but really, it is now time, at last, to turn back to the writing (i.e. actually using Scrivener myself). Now that is daunting. Developing Scrivener has really been the most amazing form of procrastination. So, hopefully in future this blog will cover both the ongoing development of Scrivener and my struggling attempts at writing The Novel...
Thanks again!
Keith
*Pedants: yes, certain grammar freaks would say this is a "split infinitive", a misunderstanding that comes from Latin infinitives. This is the perfect example of why split infinitives are actually meaningless in English: "sincerely like to thank" would suggest it's my liking that is sincere; "to thank sincerely" is probably more correct but sounds hideous. Mind the Gaffe is a great book that really lays waste to nonsense such as split infinitives. Hmm, "pedant's corner" seems to be turning into a regular part of this blog...