Over the past year, there have been a number of enquiries about the possibility of a Mac version of PageFour. My response has always been that the probability of releasing a version for the Mac is very low. I’m a Windows developer, and have been for many years. Despite having a lot of respect for the Mac software community, I have never been tempted to join. My training and working life have been focused primarily on Big Business software - an area that tends to impinge little on Mac users.
Every time someone queries me on the Mac, I point them to Scrivener, a neat piece of software, written - like PageFour - for creative writers. For many months, Scrivener was available as a free beta, as the product was still undergoing development, but version 1.01 of the completed version has just been released.
Definitely worth checking out if you’re a Mac user, as it does share some features with PageFour (the use of Snapshots being the most obvious). You can download it here, or check out the authors blog here.
March 9th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Just a note- I’m a very satisfied Scrivener user on an Intel iMac desktop. My notebook is a PC, however, and I’m evaluating PageFour after learning of it on Jon Franklin’s WriterL discussion list. It’s close enough to Scrivener that I feel quite comfortable with it already. Wouldn’t it be nice (!) if the two developers discussed the feasibility of a “conversion” tool that would allow us hybrid users to move Scrivener files to PageFour and vice versa? Just a thought– I’d be happy to donate to the cause.
March 10th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Hi Eric.
There is an element of crossover already, in that PageFour files are stored as RTF, and Scrivener can import and export to RTF. Simply exporting as RTF from both programs, and importing into the other should work.
The areas where the two programs would be incompatible would be in areas that are unique to each product or work in a different way - for example, the notes in Scrivener and the password protected pages in PageFour (which are encrypted).
Worth a thought though.