<a class="zem_slink" title="StoryMill" rel="homepage" href="http://www.marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=127">Storymill</a> is one of the veteran Mac writing apps. As Avenir it was around before Scrivener and picked up a lot of fans. I bought it and upgraded to Storymill 3 when it changed its name and was acquired by Mariner. There must be a Mac writing app I haven't bought but I'm not sure what it is.

I found Storymill 3 attractive in many ways. Simple to learn and use. Visually attractive. But I always stumbled over two things. It had a timeline feature which, try as I might, I couldn't get to work for me. Much worse I found it difficult to work with collections of scenes. It seemed to want you to write them separately and deal with them separately too, lacking Scrivener's facility for viewing manuscripts very easily at both micro and macro level.

Now Storymill 4 is out. I don't have the time to review it in full but I've had a brief look. How much has it improved?

<!--more-->A lot I think. First, that problem with viewing scenes in a selective, continuous fashion has been fixed.

<a href="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/chapter.png"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-7829" title="chapter" src="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/chapter-640x681.png" alt="" width="635" height="675" /></a>

Scenes can be grouped into chapters and viewed that way. The slightly odd thing is they still stay as a separate list of scenes in the sidebar too, as they did with the previous version. Which duplicates things a bit, or so it seems to me. But it's not hard to get used to. I imagine that scenes folder will stay closed most of the time.

The individual scene view for writing is clean and easily understandable.

<a href="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/scene.png"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-7830" title="scene" src="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/scene-640x359.png" alt="" width="635" height="356" /></a>

Elsewhere you have separate sections for characters, tasks, research, locations and the like.

<a href="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/actor.png"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-7831" title="actor" src="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/actor-640x598.png" alt="" width="635" height="593" /></a>

And that slightly awkward (for me anyway) timeline feature has been tweaked to look a lot easier.

<a href="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/timeline.png"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-7832" title="timeline" src="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/timeline-640x305.png" alt="" width="635" height="302" /></a>

But you know what? I don't care. Most of my work doesn't really need a timeline feature, and I'm a great believer in ignoring stuff that's not required. When I have pined for time control it's usually been in twin era stories and on a brief look I'm not sure this would work for that. Or that it should really. Timelines are for other people so my opinion is irrelevant.

Oh, and it has a trash too, and a feature that follows Scrivener's snapshot idea, allowing you to take a copy of a scene before working on it so that you can go back to the original if required.

Interesting stuff all round. There are a lot more new features, of course. <a href="http://www.marinersoftware.com/products/storymill/storymill-whatsnew/" target="_blank">You can see the full list here.</a> It seems reasonable value for $49.95. None of the fancier bits of Scrivener, such as the ability to export to epub or Kindle (all the usual suspects though, including Word). But if you don't need them it could be worth a look.

I have an unbreakable rule that I don't switch writing software halfway through a project. I'm halfway through a book in Scrivener right now so there's absolutely no chance I'm going to take a close look at Storymill, at least for a few months if ever. So there may be huge gotchas or incredible new features I've missed here. Don't take my word. Try it for yourself. There is, of course, a free demo download, though why Mariner insist you give them your email address <em>and</em> go through the palaver of an email confirmation before getting the file is beyond me.

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