Steve Jobs must be bummed out this week; his sales figures must have plummeted since Monday. On that day, the Windows version of Scrivener was released (be it only in public beta), and so hundreds of thousands of writers world-wide no longer face the agonizing choice of either buying a Mac or plodding on without this epitome of digital writing slickness. To give you an idea what a mind-bogglingly useful writing tool Scrivener is: I personally know quite a number of writers who went ahead and bought themselves a Mac, for no other reason than to be able to install and use Scrivener.

Scrivener is outlining, research, organizing and writing, all rolled into one. It’s index cards with brief notes or synopses that expand at a click into the underlying prose. It’s a virtual cork board for organizing the building blocks of your writing project. It’s all your research in one place, linked if you so desire to the corresponding sections of your project. It’s writing a piece from A to Z, if you’re so inclined, or jumping from chapter 3 to 17 to 8 to 31 and back to 1, if that’s how your mind works, and still keeping everything straight. It’s compiling your project into a single manuscript, with one click and without needing to spare a single thought for formatting. It’s the computer doing all the tedious work, so you can focus on the important part: writing!

Truth be told, Scrivener is a novelist’s tool (or a non-fiction book tool; anyway, best suited for longer work), but I’m going to go ahead and finish the short story I’m writing in Scrivener, just because, after years and years of growing ever greener with envy watching Mac-users enjoy themselves, I now can!

PS: Can you tell I’m kinda psyched about it all?