iterativelearning

After fooling around with it, I’ve decided to switch to Scrivener for all my serious writing projects. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a word processing software designed for the Mac, but in my view it’s so much more than that; not so much because of its features (although it’s got a ton of them and many that I find particularly nifty), but it’s really designed for people who have to do serious writing projects like academics, screenwriters, and novelists.

I may write more about other features in future posts, but I thought I’d point to a couple of real standouts.

First, I really like how it accommodates modularity and makes it very easy to move and arrange chunks (e.g., sections and chapters) of a major writing project; you just click and drag whatever you want to move.

Another feature that immediately caught my eye was Snapshots. All too often on past writing projects, I’ve deleted a sentence or paragraph that, at the time didn’t seem very important or relevant, but then later realized it would have been better to keep. Instead of trying to reconstruct that specific passage from memory or use some kind of kludgy software hack, Scrivener’s Snapshots allows you to quickly capture that text in a separate holding place that can then be recaptured with a simple keyboard command (CMD+5) or via a pull-down menu option.

The more I’ve used Scrivener, the more I’ve realized that the maker, Literature & Latte, genuinely understands what it’s like to tackle a major writing project. If you’re a Mac user and find Word too Windows-like and Pages not quite robust enough for your big projects, I recommend giving Scrivener a whirl. They offer a free, 30-day trial, but in my trial run with it, I think it took all of a week or so to realize that the $39.95 price tag was more than worth it. L&L also offers an educational price of 34.99.

ProfCast stands out as a nice audio-visual presentation tool that’s especially geared towards those Mac users who just can’t do without their Keynote. It’s very easy to produce (just drag, drop and record). As I see it, one of its best strengths is compression; it does a nice job of keeping the file size manageable. You can also export it in a wide variety of formats (e.g., .mov, .mpeg). You can also upload it to iTunes and configure it for RSS.

You can try it out free for 15 days and then after that it’ll run you $29.95 with the qualified educator’s discount and $59.95 for the regular price; although I think even the $59.95 price tag is more than reasonable if you plan to produce a fairly regular series of presentations for your students.