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Scrivener by far had the most positive, while StoryMill ranged from exceedingly high marks, to very frustrated and disillusioned users. Most challenging however were the range of very mixed reviews. Scrivener and StoryMill were the most obvious choices and both seemed to have a solid set of features. #Storymill 4 review full#Although StoryMill provides an impressive array of features to help you write and track the details of your story more effectively, none of them are required! StoryMill is incredibly flexible: it can simply be a no-nonsense place to write and revise using its distraction-free fullscreen and powerful annotations, or a complete database of every character, location, and scene that makes up your novel.įrom inception to publication, writing a novel has never been easier.Īs a writer moving away from using multiple tools to create a composition (usually a combination of omnioutliner, MS Word, and a folder full of clippings) I started researching writing tools with some enthusiasm. #Storymill 4 review for mac os#Built from the ground up for Mac OS X, StoryMill offers an innovative way to channel and fine tune the creative writing process. #Storymill 4 review professional#StoryMill introduces aspiring authors to multi-level writing methods of tracking characters, scenes, and locations, while professional writers will appreciate StoryMill's timesaving ability to oversee and manage the full creative process with Smart Views. Part word processor, part database, StoryMill 4 provides every author with the tools essential to writing a best seller: everything from project-wide annotations to centuries-spanning timelines, an industry first. StoryMill is ideal for the aspiring novelist. If your platform of choice is the Mac, Scrivener is a better program-and costs less, to boot.Note: StoryMill is no longer under development, but it is still available for download. StoryMill is flashy and full-featured, but interface troubles and, more seriously, instability, mean that the app isn't quite ready for prime time. This is a serious problem for a program that is designed to be the one home of your novel and all the notes, outlines, and spreadsheets. Losing your work is a writer's biggest nightmare. The program crashed my system twice-once while switching from Chapter to Scene mode and once when exiting full-screen mode. Though the system isn't top-of-the-line, most programs work fine on it, with the exception of StoryMill. #Storymill 4 review mac os x#I tested the software on an Apple G4 (500-MHz) tower running Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) with 1.25GB of SDRAM. After hunting around, I discovered this is done with the Esc key.Īpart from lacking a way to import files, StoryMill has another major flaw: It was unstable during testing. And there is no intuitive way to get out of full-screen mode using your mouse. While this may satisfy the nostalgia of those who fondly remember the days of WordPerfect on OS/2, most Mac users will probably find it simply annoying. You can switch to a full-screen mode to get rid of the extras, but when you do this, your screen morphs into white text on a blue background. All the menus and buttons in StoryMill's complex interface are distracting. However, StoryMill falls short of the other Mac OS app, Scrivener, in terms of ease of use and design. The Chapter/Scene and Actors sections are the easiest and most enjoyable to work with. Each section lets you add metadata such as draft number, location, and so on. When you add chapters, you can demarcate scenes and deal with them separately. Once you have the basics down, you can start to make associations between the elements. The features are broken up into seven categories: Chapters, Actors, Scenes, Locations, Tasks, Research, and Current Tasks. StoryMill's structure is based on scenes, and all other elements (locations, characters, timelines, and outlines) are tied to this foundation. But writers who already have a project under way (and, frankly, who doesn't?) will have to go through the tedious process of cutting and pasting chapters, character bios, outlines, and so forth into the program. If you're starting a new novel or screenplay from scratch, the lack of this function probably won't bother you much. The company says it's working on that for the next release, but, currently, this is a major drawback. One problem you'll notice right away is that there's no procedure for importing a Word doc into StoryMill.
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