I learned to word process in 1987 on Word Perfect 4.1 for DOS. PC logic lives deep in my bones. But today, for the first time in twenty years, I felt jealous of a person with a Macintosh laptop. She had a program I wanted and couldn’t have, a program just for Macs, a program for which I have yet to find a parallel.
The program, Scrivener, does a lot of what yWriter, the novel writing program I use, does plus a few bits more. And, it has an elegant interface that looks like an actual corkboard. The index cards look like index cards and things move around all WSYWIG and lovely. I was smitten.
Luckily it was just a crush. It passed. I’m not going to go buy a MAC – yet. I still love my IBM thinkpad. But for a few moments today, the earth stood still.
