I've been using Scrivener since it first came out as a modest shareware package three years or so ago. I've written four or five books in it and loved the thing. As I wrote earlier Word 2010 caught my attention earlier this year with some Scrivener-like features. Also, to be honest, once you've spent so many hours inside the same application you do feel like a change for a while.

So I shifted to Windows and never touched Scrivener. But nothing stands still. Scrivener for Windows is now out in beta. And Scrivener for Mac has come out with version two, a huge rewrite still being sold for the ridiculously low price of $45.

<!--more-->You can read some of my thoughts on Scrivener <a href="http://davidhewson.com/tag/scrivener/">in this articles series link</a>. Version one was a quirky, one-man-band shareware offering. Version two is an astonishingly rich virtual operating system for creative writing that can handle text, outlining, collaborative working, syncs to external proofing system on tablets such as an iPad, reference, character and location management and lots more I still haven't discovered.

If you write and own a Mac you owe it to yourself to try this thing for free, go through the fantastic video tutorials, and try to work out whether you shouldn't just devote your creative process to working inside this thing, entirely or with an external information manager (I still prefer the latter but that's the way my head works).

Having made one abortive start on a new book in Word 2010 I'm now trying a new one, rather more successfully in Scrivener, learning its new features as I go. I'd like to say Scrivener made this second stab at the book easier. I'm not sure that's true. It's just a better idea all round. But I am thoroughly enjoying using it at the moment.

Congratulations to Keith and all those involved in Scrivener. The Windows version will be much more like the version one on the Mac when it's released next year. But at some stage it will catch up with the sophistication of version two. When that happens authors everywhere, Windows and Mac, will realise there's more than one way to write a book.