Septdeneuf

This Nanowrimo I've more or less spontaneously decided not to stick with „good" old Word 2003 anymore, mostly because its rendering of Monaco is horrible, and I've taken a recent liking to the cuddliest of monospace fonts.
So here's a comparison of those two writing tools. If you aren't a writer, there's no real interest in reading this, for you. But, I'm still alive, in case you were wondering. I have lots of nice photos to post actually, but I've gotten too self concious about them, so I haven't gotten around to that yet. But I will. Someday. And once I have a little more time I'll also try to get back to commenting and replying.

I started out using Ulysses, but since I read in the Nanowrimo Forums that so many people were raving about Scrivener, I decided to test that one as well. So here's my comparison of the two writer's tools. One would normally post this on a blog, but right now this is my only journal of the kind because I want to make a costum wordpress theme before starting to use it, and wordpress themes confuse me.

Anyway. What are the pros and cons of Scrivener and Ulysses?

Their general premise is pretty much the same. A tool, specifically for long writing projects, which does more than the usual wordprocessor and is more focused on the actual writing and eliminates many of the hassles normal wordprocessors have. Both are project based and both let you split up your draft into many little documents, that you can arrange in folders and the like.

Ulysses is one of the first Mac Programs to be aimend specifically at creative writers. Its party piece is semantic editing, which means, for instance, if you want something emphasized, you put it in Tags to emphasize it, and can see later, whether you want to bolden that, or italice it, or whatever else you fancy, leaving you to worry about what you want to say, first, rather than what it's going to look like.

Scrivener's party pieces are its outliner and its corkboard, two very useful features for arranging your novel and probably very helpful to make massive rearranging and editing, as my last nanonovel from 2008 needs, very easy.

Both have a fullscreen mode. Ulysses fullscreen mode, called console mode, was again one of the first of its kind, and I like it a lot. You get yellow Lucida Grande text on a black background, if you hover your mouse to the appropriate places a wordcount and a scrollbar appear. Simple, elgant, distraction free. You have to pay a lot more attention to what your writing, though, since spell check can't be bothered in fullscreen mode.

Scrivener's full screen mode is much more costumizable, but it looks fine the way it is, mostly. There, you have a whitish sheet of paper on a black or translucent black background. The settings bar that appears when you hover your mouse on the bottom of the screen has a word and character count, but it also has several other options, which I personally don't need. It has spell check while writing fullscreen, but whenever you change the window the corrections made in the other mode disappear, which is a little strange. While Scrivener's fullscreen mode is nice, because it has the same concept as Ulysses' it has one quirk that really annoys me. The text you're typing is always on the middle line of the screen. That's not really a big deal, but in Ulysses you're typing at the botton and in exchange you can see much more of the screen. But in everyday typing life it doesn't make as much of a difference as I originally feared.

Both are project based, but it Scrivener you can open several projects at the same time without any trouble, while in Ulysses your original project disappers when opening another one, and reopening the old one after that made my harddrive make a weird noise. And Ulysses crash.

The two programs utilize screen real estate in a rather different way. In Scrivener you can have your window contain all kinds of things at the same time, but usually it's only your text editor next to its file browser, the cutely named „Binder". Ulysses on the other hand has more elements on screen normally, such as document notes and info. I really like the way Ulysses looks, and I'd be sad to say its window was inferior to Scrivener's but I guess the way you can have Scrivener show you several documents at the same time along with many other things but never forces you to probably makes more sense for the tiny 12" iBook screen I'm testing both of them on. But Scrivener uses a much smaller default window than Ulysses, which is probably why I don't mind all the things on screen with Ulysses, but feel crowded when I activate them all in Scrivener.

Perfomance wise I haven't really had a problem with either. Both have a much better wordcounter than Word, that really is life. The one thing I've always loved about Word for Mac and that made me reluctant to swith was that it had a character count at the bottom of the page. Kind of disillusioning to see that that's done better everywhere else.

One thing that I don't know if it should bother me, is that the version of Ulysses I'm testing right now claims only to work on Mac OS 10.5 and up. The laptop I'm testing it on, however, only has 10.4.11. It's worked just fine so far, though. But Scrivener says that it's compatible with 10.4 and up, and somehow I find that more reassuring.

In the end, both are great writing programs and I have a hard time deciding between the two. I think Scrivener's outlining and planning features are clearly superior, but I really love Ulysses' semantic editing. Ulysses notes feature seems to be better than Scrivener's but I don't really use that one either, so it doesn't matter.

But even though I love Ulysses, I'll probably end up getting Scrivener, because the time when you really need an advanced writing tool is when editing, and Scrivener is much better suited for that. Both are great for writing.
Also Scrivener is 50% off for Nanowrimo winners, and since I already crossed the 50k mark, it's very cheap for me.

On April 6th was my 3 Year deviantART anniversary, and I've decided to pronounce that the occasion to finally renew my subscription, so say hello again to my horrible CSS (unless you haven't seen it before, in which case you're welcome to just say hi.)

Recently I did a Thumbshare Thread because I'd noticed that I had so little comments (around 800 at that time) which was a shame, because I really like commenting on people's work and do my best to leave meaningful comments, too. But I am a little lazy. In the Thumbshare thread I asked for people to give me stuff to comment on, and they did. I wrote over 400 comments in the first two days alone  and kept on commenting for quite a while after that too. I'm ashamed to say that I still have some responses to wade through, but I'm determined to get to those, too, even if not right away. I guess it's my own fault for commenting three of everyone's pieces that I progressed so slowly.

But it was a lot of fun and I really like commenting and exchanging thoughts with other artists, so I'm really excited about the critique feature. Haven't used it yet, though. Anyway, in the process I discovered some amazing talents that I added to my watchlist, and some of those have way too low a pageviewcount (at least they used to, one of them had a DD in the meantime, but I'm gonna feature her anyway, because I promised.)

So I decided to feature those that I wrote down (I hope I didn't miss writing some down), and here they are in alphabetical order:

aiyoshi

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Aiyoshi is a photographer from Indonesia who really impressed me with her use of colors. All of her compositions are spot on, without superflous things and with a beautiful contrast between elements. She captures some beautiful nature scenes as well.

asieybarbie

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Asieybarbie is the one who got a DD just recently, and she really desevered it. She does some great drawings in a unique style and I love how she colors her images. Apparently some of the characters she draws are fanart, but I don't know the stories they're from. I'm sure you can appreciate them more than I can, if you know that, but I love all of her stuff nonetheless.


BeckyFTW



BeckyFTW hasn't been on dA for too long, and her pageview count reflects that, which isn't at all justified, because her stuff is simply amazing. Her coloring looks very natural, and her drawings have a kind of childlike, cute style that I find absolutely endearing without ever being too simplistic.

Long-Pham

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I'm a huge fan of Heavenwill's artwork. His work is mostly about space and science fiction and he has some really amazing drawings among those. I'm always mesmerized by the cosmic colors he uses. And he's also one whose pageview count is way too low for his incredible artwork.

Birgitte-Gustavsen

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If I had to recommend her to someone personally I really wouldn't know how to prounounce her name... Anyway, Maverchare has some really impressive drawings and paintings, and I think she has some quite interesting historic themes in her artwork that make for a unique and beautiful style.

I actually had one more on my list, but she seems to have erased her gallery... that's a real pity. Anyway, those are my newly watched that had a pretty low pageview count when I went there to comment, so check them out, they all really have potential. I might do a feature of those that are a little more fortunate in their pageview numbers later, because I found some great artists of that sort, too.

Happy Easter everybody.

So, this is the last time I'm writing a journal entry while I'm 17. It's probably also one of the last things I'm writing at all, in my childhood.

It feels a little weird actually, that just like that, my childhood is over, even though I'll doubt I'll feel substantially different in about half an hour, but the thing is, from then on out I'm offically and legally an adult. That definitely has its perks, one of the major ones being allowed to really drive on my own (in Germany, if you want to drive at 17 you can only do it when your parents accompany you). Also I now get to drink as much alcohol as I want (of course not in connection with the other privilege!). I doubt I'll use that privilege too much, but it's nice to have it.

The whole 18 - adulthood thing is kind of an arbitrary line, but it does feel nice to finally cross it.

The prospect of becoming an adult made me think back on my childhood. Of course, anything I can think back on is inevitably my childhood, so when I do that I just look at my life so far (been nice, by the way), but it's interesting to think that from tomorrow on (or the few minutes it's still taking to become tomorrow) I won't be able to add to that.

Okay, I was gonna write some more, but I was rambling and decided not to. I guess once I'm an adult I'll find all the enlightenment in the world and be able to not ramble but instead always relay insightful revelations of wisdom. At least I hope so. Cross your fingers for me!