‘Writing a novel’ seems to be one of the default items on most people’s wish-lists. Most never start it, and most of those who start it never finish it, but if you want to make a serious attempt, using Scrivener would definitely be the biggest favor you could do yourself. I must admit that the idea of specific software for creative writing stuck me as on odd one when I first encountered it. What’s wrong with Pages or Word? It was only once I tried it for myself that I understood. What Scrivener does is bring together in one place all the resources you are likely to need to plan, research, write and either submit or self-publish a novel. Outlines, pen-portraits of characters, web pages, photos, notes, PDFs absolute anything and everything that might help you create your opus magnum is right there all within a single app.

1. Scrivener Mac Vs Windows

The app is currently available for OS X (with a much-lagged version available for Windows), and there’s an iOS version in the works. I refer to it as an app for novelists, as that’s probably the most common usage, but it can be used for anything from a college thesis to a screenplay. Overview Scrivener is such a flexible tool, and so customizable, that it’s hard to even provide an overview without a dozen different riders saying “if you choose to” and “this is just one of several ways of doing this,” but with that understood, I’ll give an overview based on the way that I use it. The corkboard view is intended for planning, and for rejigging the structure when your plan doesn’t quite work out the way you thought it would.

By default, it looks like an actual corkboard, but Jony Ive threatened to come round to my place and confiscate both my Macs unless I changed it to something neutral. I’m not going to show you my novel, so this is just some nonsense I threw together to give you the basic idea. You write yourself some crib notes describing what happens in each chapter. You can drag-and-drop cards around the board to restructure things, and double-click on a card to open the actual chapter text. You may notice that chapters 2 and 3 show multiple cards – that’s because any card can become a folder, with smaller-chunk cards within them. The card titles are reflected in the left-hand column – what Scrivener calls the binder – so that you have an overview of the structure while you write. In this example, we also have a photo showing the setting of the scene.

This can be used both to put you in the right mood, or to show something specific that you need to describe in detail. And a closer view of the binder, on the left: That, then, is the basic idea. Do your outline planning first, on the corkboard. Break things down into manageable units (I have each scene as a separate document). Shuffle things around as required by simply drag-and-dropping cards. Then when you are writing, have that overview of where you are in the plot by having the binder visible on the left.

Need to remind yourself of what happened earlier? Just click on that scene in the binder, and flick back-and-forth between the two. Non-manuscript sections You can see beneath the manuscript itself are sections for characters, places and research. In there, you can put anything you like: notes, photos, PDFs, webpage grabs anything at all that you might need to refer to while writing For example, some people like to have photos of people they are using as inspiration for characters.

My novel is a technothriller, so I have a whole bunch of photos of equipment and aircraft that feature in the story, as well as PDFs and webpages with facts & figures. You can open any of these and have them appear in a column on the right, as in the above example, or as a floating window. Floating windows (which Scrivener calls Quick Reference windows) can be resized and repositioned as desired. Choosing how much or little to see at a time There are times when you only want to see the section you are writing at that time, clicking back and forth into other sections as required, but there are other times when you want to see how an entire chapter is flowing – or several chapters, or the entire manuscript. Scrivener makes this easy. Just select as many documents as you like in the binder on the left, and then click on ‘Scrivenings’ mode.

Scrivener puts a fading line between each section, so you can see where they begin and end. Note that sections viewed in scrivenings mode need not be contiguous: you might, for example, choose to put key scenes together to check for continuity – so there could be copy from chapters 1, 4 and 7 in one view. There may be times when you are referring back to something that happened earlier, and want to keep referring back to it as you write. No problem, Scrivener allows you to have two sections side-by-side (or one above the other, if you prefer). Both are editable, so if you change details in one, you can immediately do so in the other. It doesn’t have to be another section of the novel you display to the side: it could be character notes, a PDF, a webpage well, I’m sure you get the idea by now. Conversely, there may be times when you want to focus on the scene you are writing right now, without any distractions.

Again, no problem, just select Composition Mode, and everything fades away except the actual section on which you’re working. You can choose between plain black or any degree of transparency you like. Exporting your work You don’t need to worry about committing your work to some proprietary standard. While Scrivener pretends to save everything into a single.scriv file, this is purely for neatness: it is really a disguised folder with all your sections as RTF documents. You can also export your work at any time into virtually any format. This is, of course, also what you do when you finally complete your masterpiece. If you’re self-publishing, you can create your ebook right from within Scrivener – no need for any external converters – and can compile to both.epub and.mobi to cover both iBooks and Kindle formats.

Alternatively, if you plan to submit to an agent or publisher, you can select Paperback Novel to output in the correct format (double-spaced, wide margins and so on) and choose between printed output and a bunch of different document types: If you’re writing a screenplay, choose Script or Screenplay from the first drop-down and then Final Draft or Fountain from the second, and you’ll get something which is both correctly-formatted and editable in the two main screenplay-writing apps. All compile options allow you to choose exactly what gets included.

By default, it’s everything in the Manuscript folder (so excludes character notes, research documents and so on), but it’s all configurable. Progress tracking If you have set yourself a particular goal – writing so many words a day, or week, or completing your novel by a particular date – Scrivener will track your progress for you. If you give Scrivener a target wordcount, a deadline and tell it how many days a week you are writing, it will automatically calculate the wordcount you need to hit each session to meet the deadline.

In this example, the target wordcount is 145,000 (technothrillers are long, but I intend to cut it down a lot in editing), the deadline is the end of February and I only write on Wednesdays, so Scrivener has calculated that I have 11 writing days left and thus need to write 979 words each session. When you hit your session target, it pops up a notification. Everything is customizable There is almost no limit to how much you can customize Scrivener to suit your needs. I don’t want to show content to the world, so I’m blurring things here, but compare the default Scrivener view here: with my (blurred) actual novel here, with my chosen customizations: and you’ll get the general idea. I’m a very visual person, so I use color-coding: green = a completed section, orange = section in progress, yellow = notes for the section written, black = major sections or dividers, red = more research needed or a section with a problem I need to figure out.

There’s much more There’s much more I could write. For example, most writers can procrastinate for a good ten minutes naming a minor character. With Scrivener, you pull up Writing Tools, choose male or female, optionally choose a nationality and then let it generate a bunch of names. Choose one and you get straight back to writing. But writing more about the app starts getting into tutorial territory, and there are lots of those around – starting with the one included with Scrivener, which is itself a Scrivener document. Conclusions I’m a huge fan: I wouldn’t even think about writing a novel in anything else.

It keeps everything you need in one place, is a brilliant planning tool, allows you to restructure at will and allows you any view of your novel you could possibly wish for – from a clutter-free writing environment through a clickable link to every section in your novel. Although it’s a massively-capable app, you can get up-and-running with the basics in half an hour. You are then free to use as few or as many of the features as you like.

I’m a power user compared to many I know, but I still reckon I’m only using about 30 percent of its capabilities. The big test for me is this: I’ve recommended it to many other writers, and every single one who has tried it is still using it. (By the way, if you end up recommending it to Windows users, be aware that the Windows version lags a long way behind the Mac version in terms of both polish and features – it’s still good, but not the same.), which might seem a little pricy compared to some apps out there, but it’s worth every penny. There’s also a, which is valid for 30 days of actual use, not just one month, so if you’re writing once a week it will last you 30 weeks! More than enough time to decide whether you want to buy it.

Once you do, download the paid version and just carry on from where you left off. If you’re serious about writing that novel, Scrivener is, to me, a must-have app. I use Scrivener all the time. I wrote my entire 350 page dissertation using it and I use it for articles and everything. It is a fabulous application.

It doesn’t fully eliminate the need for MS word but it comes close. For an academic the ability to have your notes, endnotes and everything else right on the side bar is amazing. Not to mention you can import literature into the application as pdfs and bring up a two pane view. Scrivener gets at 10/10 from me.

Only improvements I would imagine are on the graphics inclusion side. But beyond that it is great.

If it doesn’t have an iOS app though, it’s not that useful for me. I find Scrivener a little too precious also, the inclusion of pictures especially. The card metaphor is also great for when you are just planning the thing, but once you start the actual writing I find it quickly loses any utility. I think it’s a program for people to.plan.

to write a novel but never ultimately write the novel because you can use the software to muck around planning for years. I use Mellel on OS-X which is a far superior version of the same kind of “planning” thing, but it’s focussed more on non-fiction and scholarly work, so it doesn’t work for novels much. For novels I use Pages on iOS because to write a novel all you really have to do is keep writing and the focus and ever-presence afforded by the iPad can’t be beat for that IMO. Ben: There is a technical error in your review.

It is minor, but important: a Scrivener project (a.scriv file) is not a zip file (there is no compression involved). It is a.package., which is simply a folder that the operating system presents as a file (only available on OS X — on Windows it appears as a plain folder).

If it actually were zipped, Scrivener would not be able to edit the contents, so it is an important distinction. Otherwise, this is a great overview of what Scrivener is and what it can do!

I also use Scrivener and I do like it. My biggest gripe is the fact it offers no easy way to compare past and present versions of what one has written. It does offer ways to save and compare versions of individual writings, but not the whole outline and all it encompasses. Many people will say otherwise, and then they explain how this is done and it’s a mess with the risk of old versions being saved as the newest version if one letter is changed.

I believe this is a limitation of the way the software was designed to start with, and I wish more focus would be placed upon correcting this by the design team. They would benefit from finding a way to improve this instead of adding new features. It is a very serious flaw to the usability of the software, and it’s one I believe they do not respect enough, or show enough concern for. It will always be the white elephant in the middle of the room which they are choosing to ignore, and it will continue to leave room for another company to start a similar app from the ground up which does not have this flaw.

It is a big enough flaw that a new company could remedy this, talk up this remedy, and go on to supplant Scrivener to a large degree! Of course I prefer they change this themselves since I do like and respect them, and I would like to remain a loyal user. So Ben!, How do you choose an older version to revert to when it is difficult to go back and look at older versions?

Especially since it will save an old version as the new one if you accidentally make a space or add a letter anywhere while you are looking at it! You can save copies to a different folder, but that is confusing, shouldn’t be required, and if you are not careful you may mess everything up. This may not be important to you, and I never said it was.

It’s important to me, and I have seen many people asking about how to do this when I have been on the forums discussing Scrivener. Scrivener is designed for more than one person, and I am glad you like it, but many people seem to care about this. Glad you wrote an article about it since it an excellent program, and I hope it thrives, and addresses this issue!:). Iol2 - 4 years ago If you open a backup to look at it, and you move even one character anywhere while you are looking through it, which is bound to happen, then it will change the opened back up to the new version when it saves. You may be looking at something a year old, and only wanting to look at it, and Scrivener will make it your newest version as a result.

The more you look at old versions the more you may change a character and have old versions saved as the newest. You will end up with a mess of epic proportions, and there is no defense for the program working this way. You are defending this simply to defend it, and not because it is defendable, because it is not. It appears you have rarely tried to go back and look at old versions so you are unaware of the potential problems and limitations. If you don’t understand it or have experience with it then how can you defend it?

Iol2 - 4 years ago Sounds simple enough, but with so many versions saved and only dates separating them, this can become confusing and messed up in a heart beat. Many people are also not as adept as some at understanding folders and saving processes, and can mess their projects up as a result. For myself and some other users Scrivener needs a better way to organize this effort and not leave people to fend for themselves in such a disorganized manner. You will never agree and this has been clear from the start. Many people simply feel their opinion is the only one that counts, and don’t see where their is room for other people’s.

Others have matured and respect the opinions of others. Great thing about living in this country is we both get to have our opinions and others can decide what theirs are. I have seen other people also express concern over the lack of an organized way to go back and safely look at older versions of their writing, so clearly I am not the only person to not care for how this works. It still is a good article and I appreciate the fact you wrote it. I have been using scrivener for a complex non-fiction book, and it is marvelous. I love attaching research to specific chapters, the floating notepad, the snapshot function, split screen, and I keep finding new things it can do all of the time.

If there is a downside, it is that there can be a learning curve which can sometimes get in the way of your work. It is well worth it, though and after a few days it does all come together naturally.

There is an iPad app called Textilius, which I believe handles scrivener files. It might be of some use until scrivener for the iPad is released. I’m writing a first novel (as a hobby) and wondering about Scrivener. I’ve messed around with the trial version but I’m not sure whether I want to load my whole document into it. I’m mainly concerned with what Mr Grey and Israel Anderson have said, because I can see how Scrivener would be very useful in writing a novel — endlessly. It gives you so much to tinker with, adding notes on this and that, ordering things in folders, pinning cards to cork. In the end, though, your product has to work as simply one long text string.

So far I’ve just stuck to Pages. Pages seems fast and perfectly stable with quite a long document, and it hasn’t really been a big problem finding things.

I like the fact that Pages shows me the hard truth of how much text I’ve written, and doesn’t pad my apparent progress out with all my notes and plans. For notes and plans, I just use other Pages files, and they’re all there on iCloud. I’m beginning to wonder now, though, whether I might be ready for Scrivener after all. I did get a 135,000-word first draft done in a year, so maybe I’m not at such high risk for getting bogged down in endless tinkering. But for the second draft I decided to shorten the book’s first half and revise the third quarter drastically.

This is turning out to be as big a job as writing the whole first draft, and it’s quite a different job, because I’m cutting up and reworking an existing book, instead of just expanding onto blank pages. Pages is in some ways awkward for this, but on the other hand, I have to tinker now, so the danger of getting bogged down in tinkering may be greater. Many of my second-draft revisions are about pumping up boring characters, so it might be useful to have character notes attached to my project; but I’m less sure about this.

My task is to make the characters really be interesting in the story, and not just say that they are. I have to remember that my reader will only read my story, not my notes. And I can always just open a short Pages document in a second window. Then again, I’m changing some things but keeping lots of other things, so keeping my characters consistent isn’t entirely trivial, especially for minor characters who aren’t central but still shouldn’t be stupidly inconsistent.

Where I think Scrivener might mainly be helpful is in letting me shuffle scenes around and in and out. My book is an action adventure, so it’s basically a long series of scenes. I need to look at a lot of individual scenes and decide whether they’re pulling their weight or should just be cut. I need to eliminate a couple of chapters and redistribute their good scenes among other chapters.

I need to compare different revised versions of scenes, and I have a number of new scenes and snippets that are experimental; I have to see how to fit them together, and decide whether they really fit the rest of my story. If that sort of scene shuffling is the main point of Scrivener, and it does it really well, then I might be sold. The cost isn’t the obstacle here, but rather the effort in cutting up my long Pages file into Scrivener scenes. That’ll be a pain, and I’d be grateful for any advice as to whether it would be worth it.

. Pros Beautiful and clean interface. Excellent selection of distraction-free modes. Tracks writing goals. Filters help organize content. Can publish directly to WordPress.

Cons Now sold as subscription. Requires some learning, especially for those unfamiliar with Markdown. No audio file uploads. Bottom Line Ulysses is the most elegant distraction-free writing app for Mac. It's ideal for writers who prefer a minimal interface and total flexibility, rather than a lot of structure and hand-holding. What Ulysses doesn't offer is a prescriptive experience. For example, it offers plenty of tools for organizing your writing, but it doesn't tell you how to sort the various drafts of your novel, nor does it tell you that you need a title page, contents page, foreword, and so forth.

For that kind of hand-holding, is a better app. It's also an Editors' Choice. Additionally, Scrivener is available on Windows (as well as macOS and iOS), but Ulysses isn't. Both Ulysses and Scrivener are top apps for writers, but they are very different, and for that reason, I spend a fair amount of time in this review comparing them. While these two apps are quite capable for writers working in a variety of genres, screenwriters will find that Final Draft remains the industry standard for them, and thus, it's also an Editors' Choice. What Is Markdown?

One of Ulysses' signature features is the use of Markdown. It's essentially a way to apply basic formatting to text without using menus and buttons.

If you've ever used underscores to create italics or asterisks in to make text bold in a chat app ( like this or. like this.), that's essentially Markdown.

With Markdown, you use characters to apply styling to text, and you're limited to about two dozen options. When you export a file from Markdown to html, PDF, or any other commonly used format, the Markdown language translates cleanly into the proper style. Ulysses and some other writing apps use Markdown because it eliminates the need for formatting menus, the kind found in word processing apps in, which many writers find distracting. If you've ever lost an hour of writing time because you were browsing typeface options, you might give Markdown a try. Price and Platform.

The biggest change to Ulysses as of version 12 is how it's sold. Formerly, you bought the app from the Mac App store for a one-time fee and owned it for life. Now, it's sold as a subscription with a recurring fee. Ulysses costs $39.99 per year or $4.99 monthly. Students can apply for a discount to pay $10.99 for a six-month subscription. If you previously purchased a copy of Ulysses for Mac or iOS before version 12, you still own the old software and it should work as it always has, but you won't get any new updates.

Ulysses offers a mobile app for iOS as well. Many writers choose software that has a companion mobile app so that they can make changes or notes directly on their writing files whenever an idea strikes. Previously, Ulysses' iOS app sold separately from the Mac software, so you had to make two purchases for a grand total of about $70 if you wanted them both. Now, if you have a subscription to the Mac app, the iOS app is included. You download it for free, and as long as you are signed into the same Apple account with iCloud enabled on both devices, your files should sync.

Note that the first sync takes some time, and new users should plan to give the apps a few minutes to initiate communication. Almost no other writers' apps sell via a subscription model, the exception being. People who use Adobe Story, however, tend to have a specific need for it, as it's designed to be used by television and film screenwriters and the producers of their work. Adobe Story is collaborative and contains tools that relate to production-level concerns, such as shoot locations.

If you're a solo writer trying to make your first break, Adobe Story not what you need. Other software that's more comparable to Ulysses costs in the range of $75 to buy both the desktop app and mobile app, which are often sold separately., for example, costs about $74 when you add the price of the iOS app to the Mac app.

Scrivener costs about $65 for both the Mac ($45) and iOS ($19.99) apps, although one benefit of using Scrivener is that you can install it on as many computers in your household as you like for no extra charge. Scrivener has an app for Windows, too. If you want to install both the Mac and Windows versions of Scrivener on your household computers, you need to buy both apps, although there is a package discount ($69.95). Another class of apps known as 'distraction-free writing apps,' costs in the $10 range, but they have less functionality. Distraction-free apps are pared down to be simpler and thus less distracting, but they also lack functionality. And WriteRoom ($9.99) are two examples.

At the high end of the price spectrum is Final Draft ($249.99), which is what you should buy only if you're actively working in the screenwriting business. Final Draft has an edge over these other apps in that it formats scripts to meet highly specific industry standards. Beyond simply using all capitals and center alignment where necessary, Final Draft has settings for conforming to either traditional Cole and Haag style or Warner Brothers studio format. It has an excellent range of templates, too, such as a one for a Dramatists Guild Musical, a half-hour sitcom, a one-hour TV drama, and even a few for different types of graphic novels. Key Features and Structure Put head-to-head against Scrivener, Ulysses offers a completely different experience.

To be perfectly blunt, Ulysses has a lovely interface, and Scrivener is ugly. The other key differences are 1) Scrivener is available on Windows and 2) Ulysses is sold as a subscription. When you launch Ulysses for the first time, you had better set aside a good 15 minutes to read the bulk of the tutorials, because otherwise you won't know how to access many of the app's capabilities, including the cheat sheet of Markdown characters, which surfaces by way of a keyboard shortcut. To be fair, there is a toolbar option for it, too, but if you're new to Markdown and see the toolbar without any sort of preface about what it is, you'll be completely lost.

That's the flip side of minimalism. With Scrivener, you get an interface that puts function over form. Buttons are explicit.

Menus and toolbars are not restrained in the least. You quickly understand that you'll have a wealth of formatting tools at your disposal, because even the tutorial content uses two different serif typefaces. Is it all a bunch of interface clutter, or is it a series of signposts that make the app easy to learn to use? The answer depends on your preferences. Both Ulysses and Scriver have a library on the left side.

The library is nothing more than a visual list of all the files you create. Files can be nested into a larger group. You could set it up so that you have a book, and within the book are parts, and within the parts are chapters. Or you could have a film, and within the film acts, and within the acts are scenes. Alternatively, you could have one enormous file that is a single work.

The benefit of having a library, however, is that you can easily rearrange files by dragging and dropping them. For example, if you are working on a screenplay and decide that a certain scene should appear before another, you merely move the file to a new position in your library. There's no cutting and pasting of text necessary. It's worth noting that most writers' apps have a library, although some distraction-free apps do not. Ulysses gives you filters for organizing your writing. Filters operate like tags (the language of writing apps is a little different from that of other ).

Scrivener Mac Vs Windows

Applying filters to sheets that are within the same group lets you sort them later. For example, let's say I'm writing a novel told from multiple characters' points of view. I might create a filter for each narrator's name so that I can quickly see all the parts of the story as told by a certain person. Or say I'm writing a book that includes a lot of foreshadowing. I might create a filter about every element that's foreshadowed so I can quickly find and reread the appropriate earlier chapters while working on the later ones.

Design and View Modes When apps are spartan in their design, little touches go a long way. For every project or sheet you create in Ulysses, you can choose a custom icon to appear alongside it. A goal tracker, which keeps tabs on whether you're hitting your desired word or character count for a sheet, changes color from blue to green to red as you creep toward it, hit it, and exceed it. When looking at the library of your work, you see a little colored dot indicating the goal status for every sheet that has one. The panel that contains the goal setting has a few more tools, such as a place to store notes, images, and keywords. You can view or hide this information panel at any time while writing. Many writing apps have some kind of 'focus mode,' in which your active writing file fills the entire screen, and everything else disappears so that you can focus on the words on the page.

When you enter Full Screen mode in Ulysses, you see only your active sheet on a dark background. All other elements of your computer interface vanish. In the upper right corner, however, there's that small colored dot again indicating your goal status. Click it, and the panel appears, so that you can reference your notes without flipping back to your normal desktop view. This design allows writers to stay focused while still giving them access to essential information they may need to write.

Scrivener has a similar feature, Composition Mode, that sweeps you into a view of only your active sheet. But by sliding a dark-light adjuster, you can choose to see as much of the desktop as you want. Drop your cursor to the bottom of the screen, and a toolbar with more viewing options appears. Are these options useful or distracting?

Again, it depends on your preferences and writing habits. Another view option in Ulysses called Typewriter Mode locks the active line at the top, bottom, or center of the active window so that you don't have to scroll while you're composing. Typewriter mode is commonly found in other writing apps, too, including, Byword, and iA Writer. In Ulysses, the Typewriter Mode also has settings for illuminating only the active line, sentence, or paragraph in full brightness, while all the other text becomes darkened. Export Options. Getting your precious words out of an app and into the proper format for sending to editors, publishers, or agents is of the utmost importance. The Preview function lets you see a sample page of your document in a few different export styles before it compiles and generates the file.

Some of the styles use bigger fonts than others. Some use color.

Some include your notes and annotations. What you choose to generate will depend on who's receiving it. I really like the Ulysses gives you an option to check how it's going to look before it spits out a PDF.

Other export formats include Word DOCX, HTML, Epub, and plain text. If a site is a final destination for your text, you can configure directly.

Missing Pieces As mentioned, Ulysses doesn't hold your hand or coach you in any way. It's up to you to figure out how to use the app.

That's not the case with Scrivener. I don't want to overstate how much structure Scrivener offers, but you do get templates for different kinds of writing projects, such as novels, novels with parts, short stories, works of nonfiction, BBC taped dramas for radio, screenplays (with export support for Final Draft), and others. These templates provide a small amount of structure and guidance for people who need it. As mentioned, Final Draft has a wealth of templates for a variety of genres, but the app really remains positioned for screenwriters.

Another app, provides sample scripts, such as Die Hard and Good Will Hunting, in lieu of templates, and throws in a complimentary glossary of terms for writers, too. With Ulysses, you can find templates online to import or make your own, but it takes work, and it isn't obvious that you can do it, much less how you would. Ulysses lets you upload and store image files, whether to use in your work or for more general research or character development. In previous versions, you couldn't actually see the images in preview in the editing window, but as of version 12 you can sort of. The images are rendered as thumbnails and are shown in grayscale, with the thought that it would be less distracting that way.

It isn't ideal, of course, for writers who are referencing the color of charts, graphs, or even photographs. While Ulysses does support file uploads, it doesn't support audio files.

Scrivener does. There are other little things that could be better, such as more ability to customize how much interface clutter you actually want to see. For example, in any group, you can pull up statistics regarding how many sheets it contains. I'd like to see the sheet count right in the library list, all the time, but it's not an option. From testing other writing apps, I've run across few novel features that aren't mind-blowing but that some writers might see as little perks, and which aren't offered in Ulysses. In iA Writer, for example, a syntax button lets you see in color-coding different parts of speech, such as all your verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. That would be a fantastic tool for writers trying to improve their writing in specific ways.

Scrivener has a neat split-screen view, which divides the active window in half horizontally to show a mirror view of your file. That way, you can edit one part of the file in the top window while reviewing the rest of the text in the second window. A unique aspect of the Mac-only app Focused is that it contains a selection of lyric-free soundscapes and white noise tracks to play while working.

The Best Mac App for Distraction-Free Writing Ulysses is the Editors' Choice among Mac-only writing apps, and specifically for those who want a distraction-free experience. If you prefer a bevy of tools, templates, and WYSIWYG formatting, however, you're better off with Scrivener, which is also an Editors' Choice. Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness.

She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital formats. She is also the creator and author of ProductivityReport.org. Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for.