It’s 4.0 because 1.0 was manual, 2.0 was Selectric, 3.0 was word processor, and 4.0 is specialized. See?
So, there I was with a Macbook Air 11 and a browser open to some random website (that I suspected of being malicious) that had a list of writing software packages. Looking through them, three choices stood out for me.
The most attractive choice was no choice, at least for a while, by which I mean, not choosing a novelists-specific software package. As I mentioned before, I had a major mental block against getting started, and simpler things were better. I almost decided to write in notepad, or whatever the mac equivalent is, textpad or something. But let’s call “Pages” the “no” choice for now.
Pages is Apple’s simple word processor that exists on both Mac and iPad but, lamely, is not very compatible between the platforms. That’s too bad because syncing would have been handy for things like review and editing (can’t type a novel on an ipad, obviously, unless you’re more masochistic than me). Pages was OK to use, though, and I actually spent probably a month writing on it before developing even the slightest desire to try something else.
But desire can get you into trouble and cost you money, and that was what happened with Dramatica Pro. This is among the most expensive writing packages out there, and arguably the most comprehensive. I wish I could tell you more about it in detail, and maybe someday I can, but I never got a chance to learn much about it. I installed it and barely got a chance to try it out, then upgraded Mac OS to 10.7: “Lion,” a.k.a. the big cat of homicidal incompatibility.
See, one thing I didn’t know in advance of the upgrade (and that the upgrader did not tell you, as it should have, in huge letters) was that 10.7 would break compatibility with a large number of older programs. I never bothered to find out the details. I’m sure there was some fabulous reason for this. But the result was that the program I had just paid big bucks for stopped working before I ever got to use it for real writing.
And at this writing, it is still broken: Dramatica Pro will not run on 10.7, so you have to be running a several-month-old OS that’s incompatible with most new stuff, in order to use it.
I don’t know whether to blame Apple or Write Brothers for this, but I felt pretty hosed by both. Write Brothers says they are not going to make the current version of Dramatica Pro compatible with 10.7, ever. Instead they will make their next major upgrade, 5.0 I think, compatible. Which almost certainly means I (and hundreds of thousands of others) will have to pay significant money to get that upgrade. That would just be the icing on the crap cake there.
In Write Brothers’ favor, a) I don’t know for sure that they will charge for that upgrade, whenever it may happen; and b) they did give me a free Windows version bundled with the Mac version. But I don’t want to write on a PC…although the reasons for doing so are mounting up.
So Dramatica Pro was a costly lesson, though I’m not sure what I learned. I just kept writing in Pages for a while. By the way, the reason I didn’t use Microsoft Word was that a) Word for the Mac is weird and awful for someone who’s used to it on PCs, although the latest PC version is weird and awful too; and b) all the bells and whistles constituted complexity, and I needed simple in order to not distract me and keep me writing.
One day for no real reason I decided to try Scrivener. I guess my page count was getting up there and I thought I could use some structural tools or something. Scrivener is a program with legions of rabid fans, much like the Mac itself. I figured there had to be something there.
And hey, these blog entries have been too long, so let’s split that off for tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment