Full Screen Wishes

[chumbake]

First I want to say that it's great to be able to have the Project Target open during Full Screen mode. Would it be too hard to either dim the floating window, or integrate it into the bottom menu bar? With the black background that white window just stands out like crazy.

I don't even know if it's worth it to spend the time on, but it is a "wish list" right?

[KB]

Yeah, this is something I am pretty happy with about my full screen implementation. Most other programs won't let you bring up panels in full screen, but I thought it was very important to have this capability. The trouble with dimming the windows is that it would become inconsistent. That is, I *could* add the feature to the panels that are specific to Scrivener (though it would be a little awkward), but I couldn't add it to Apple's own panels - such as the font panel. So I kind of think it's better for all panels to glare rather than have an inconsistent UI...

[chumbake]

Sounds good to me. I'm just glad you were able to make it work in Full Screen mode!

[ambimb]

Here's another full screen wish: Make all controls for full-screen view available *in* full-screen view. I like the way CopyWrite does this. It gives you two sliders -- one for text size and one for the width of your text column. Scrivener allows you to change both settings, but you set the text size via a popup menu (which is ok) and you have to set the width in the prefs -- meaning you have to click out of full screen view to change that setting. Can you add a "change width" control to the full-screen pop-up control window?

[KB]

The reason I didn't take the same route as CopyWrite on this is that, 1) I decided a word/character count was more important than what you suggest, and 2) width is a one-off setting. Once you have found the width at which you like to work, why would you want to change it?

Scrivener full screen is already pretty cool compared to the competition, if I do say so myself, for the following reasons:
1) Try hitting Cmd-F in CopyWrite, or any of the other apps that offer full screen, and you get a system beep. Try it in Scrivener (er, actually there is a bug in the version that you have whereby it appears but does nothing, but this is fixed in the beta that will be released within the next couple of days ).
2) After making lots of edits in CopyWrite and exiting full screen, try undoing your edits. You can't. In Scrivener, you can.

The one thing CopyWrite has that Scrivener doesn't is the ability to change documents from within full screen. But this is easier for CopyWrite, because it has a straight list system of documents with no folders or subfolders, and it only allows text documents - in Scrivener things get more complicated as you would have to swap the entire view from, for instance, text to an image. Besides which, I think if you hit full screen, it is because you want to focus on the document at hand; if you are switching between documents a lot, it is far better to be doing this in Binder view...

So, I'm quite happy with the implementation as is... Sorry.

[Mike Partridge]

I currently use Ulysses and what attracted me to that programe was its implementation of full screen mode. I particularly like the flexibility in text size, font and background colour. This is a tool for writing, therefore, in this mode the software should be as unobtrusive as possible. For clarity of text in full screen Jers novel writer is also good (though would prefer not to have the restrictive page margins). Unless I'm missing the obvious there does not seem to be any way to increase the font size in Scrivener full screen mode. That would be a major minus for me, since on my 12 inch powerbook the default font is way to small for comfortable use. The many other features, especially outline and cards look very well implements and useful though.

[KB]

I think you are indeed missing the obvious. (Actually - maybe not, as I don't think I explained certain changes well enough in the tutorial to the new beta, and I believe you only started beta testing from 1.2, so what you are missing I think may just not have been explained well enough - mea culpa.) To enlarge the text in full screen:

In full screen mode, move the mouse cursor right to the very bottom of the screen. After about half a second (the delay is so that this never comes up by accident), a control panel will appear. The control panel allows you to change the zoom % of text and to switch between documents, as well as to check your word count. (It also allows you to alter the scale of image documents when viewing those in full screen.) Note that you can also use the shortcut keys, Alt-Cmd-Up or Alt-Cmd-Down to enlarge/reduce text size in full screen mode (or, for that matter, in normal mode).

Scrivener was certainly not the first to implement full screen, but right now I think it's implementation is amongst the best.

Cheers,
Keith

[Mike Partridge]

Yes, simple when you know how! My instinct was to look at the full screen tab in preferences. Your implementation is very easy to adjust when the eyes get tired and I like the way you can navigate the whole document without the need to exit full screen mode.

[KB]

Glad you like it - I will make sure I make this clearer in Tutorial.scriv and elsewhere, as I now realise that it is something that could easily be missed.
Thanks!
Keith