Literature & Latte was founded in 2006 with the sole purpose of creating software that aids in the creative process of writing long texts. I used to say that Literature & Latte is not a software company. I said this because I didn't set out to run a software company; I was just a guy with lofty writerly ambitions who had just happened to develop a piece of software that helped me in my own writing processes (I know that makes me a geek, but that's something I have to live with). I felt that claiming to be a software company would imply that I was about to release a flurry of other products, but that's not the case. Scrivener and the discussion of literature and writing are the only concerns of this site. Other OS X software may appear sporadically, but only as a side effect of working on Scrivener. That is why, instead of using nomenclature for this site that conjures up images of sweaty programmers sitting in rooms cluttered with discarded hardware, I went with a name that I just had to use somewhere: Literature & Latte. I always said I wanted a bookshop-cum-cafe with that name, and this is the closest I'm going to get...
Things change. I am now forced to admit it: Literature & Latte is a software company. It turned out that I wasn't the only writer (or would-be-writer) out there who felt the need for a program like Scrivener in his or her workflow. So from one person developing Scrivener out of his own needs, we are now a two-person team working to make Scrivener the best solution for writers of all kinds who need tools to get a grip on the structure of their first drafts before they get to a traditional linear word processor.
And I still haven't written The Novel.
Literature & Latte is based in Truro in Cornwall, England.
Who we are
Development and design is the remit of Keith (that's me). I coded Scrivener and am responsible for ongoing development. If you have a support query it will usually be me who answers you.
David handles sales, marketing, accounts and general tea-making. He will answer all of your sales queries (just as soon as he's made the tea; yes, we know, he should really be making latte).
Although David joined Literature & Latte in 2008, we have known each other since 1973 (before which, I didn't exist anyway).
It's all about Scrivener
It's only reasonable, if you are thinking of buying software that you might use every day, to ask after its future. We may only be a two-person team, but in fact many shareware companies are run by only one or two people. More importantly, as its developer, I am first and foremost a user of Scrivener. I developed Scrivener because I felt I needed a tool to help me really get a grip on my writing, notes and research, to organise it and start putting it all together like a jigsaw. The upshot of this is that Scrivener has a future so long as I use Mac OS X and try to write novels (and I can't see myself giving up either). This has two main implications: 1) Scrivener's future is bright (I used to say, "despite it not being my day job" - but now Scrivener is my day job). It is my main writing tool and it is therefore in my own best interest to ensure it is the best tool it can be. 2) As Scrivener becomes more feature-complete and bug-free, my priority won't be adding features but using it myself. But that links back to 1) - I will continue updating it as I use it, and all feature suggestions will be seriously considered and evaluated.
It's not about the updates
Literature & Latte is committed to making Scrivener the best piece of writing software possible. But "best" is subjective, and some people will prefer other packages (see the links page for a selection). That's fine - and good, because one of our underlying philosophies is that Scrivener should never try to be all things to all writers. Instead, Scrivener has a well-defined general feature set, and the aim is for this feature-set (based around outlining, referring to research and composing a first draft) to be as solid as possible, and as refined, user-friendly and intuitive as it can be. Feature requests will always be seriously considered, but just because another application has it, it doesn't mean that it will necessarily fit into Scrivener (Scrivener's low price is not an indicator that it is wanting features; we just don't want to price out struggling writers). Although some people do buy shareware programs as an investment in what those programs will become in the future, this is not what Literature & Latte is about; we are about creating an unbloated and stable writing environment. When considering your purchase, please base it solely on the current featureset of the software. (Of course this does not apply to bugs - all bugs will be tracked down and eliminated as soon as possible after they are reported.)
Will There Be a Windows Version of Scrivener?
This is one of the most frequent questions we receive. The answer, I am sorry to say, is, "No - certainly not in the foreseeable future." The reason for this is not that we are Mac snobs, but simply that Literature & Latte - as explained above - is a very small company, and we happen to prefer and use (and program for) the Mac platform. The Mac operating system (OS X) is, internally, very different from Windows, to such an extent that porting Scrivener to Windows would pretty much require programming it from scratch (not to mention me having to learn how to program for Windows). Programs that do run on both Windows and OS X tend to fall into two camps: those that have whole teams working on them who are thus able to create two entirely separate versions optimised for each platform (examples are Word, PhotoShop and suchlike); and those that are created using intermediary software such as REALBasic (the latter tend to stick out as not really looking or feeling "native" to either platform). Scrivener was created using the standard Mac OS X programming frameworks (known as "Cocoa"), so it is native to the Mac. Because of this and the fact that I do not have whole teams of programmers to port it to a different platform, a Windows version of Scrivener is very unlikely. Sorry. That said, if you happen to be a talented Windows programmer as well as a writer and you like Scrivener, feel free to drop me a line - I can't offer anyone a job, though!
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Literature & Latte Ltd.
Registered Company No. 06240207
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Keep Updated
For news and announcements, please be sure to check out the forums. For the occasional snippet of information on the development of Scrivener, check out the Literature & Latte blog, which features an infrequent developer diary along with irregular irrelevant rambling.
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