When you’re done, you can synchronize your data back to your Mac using Dropbox. Color coding makes it easy for going back later and making edits or re-writes. This is easy to implement for a writer and super-useful. One feature that made it over from the Mac is color coding document sections. You can put both research and text on the screen at once and I’ve been writing legal briefs and working on a new book in this new version of Scrivener with no problems. I will acknowledge, however, that’s a relatively low bar but the developer got it right. That, for me was going to be the make-it-or-break-it feature in bringing Scrivener back into my life. Research, which is one of my most important features in Scrivener, syncs over just fine. Indeed, I was a little surprised at how many features did make it over for the first version. Scrivener for iPad and iPhone does nicely in striking this balance. The question was how many of those features need to get over to the iPad to make the application useful while at the same time not making it overwhelming. There are a lot of features in Scrivener for Mac.
One of my big concerns about creating a version of Scrivener for iPad was striking the right feature balance. The application is universal and works on both iPad and iPhone. You can get Scrivener in the iOS App Store for $20 ( App Store)( Website). And now Scrivener is on the iPad and iPhone. It not only allows you to write and organize your words for your big writing project, it also holds your research as well. Now that Scrivener is on the iPad, I can show up at a coffee shop and work on my latest legal brief or book and know confidently that I have access to all the resource documents I need for the project. This convenience is even more notable on iOS where getting documents out of cloud storage isn’t alway easy. This is really handy as it saves you the trouble of digging in the Finder, Evernote, or wherever else you use to keep support documents for big projects. So when you are working on a big project, using Scrivener you can have all of your research in the same file as your words. Scrivener can take just about any file type you throw at it (including PDFs, images, and Word documents) and make those available for review while working inside the application. One of its killer features for me is the ability to hold my research data in the same file as my scrivenings. It lets me organize blocks of text and it keeps track of my progress. With Scrivener, I can take on big writing projects in a way that I simply couldn’t before. So why do writers get so excited about Scrivener? I’ve written about it before but Scrivener is the first application that I used as a writing tool, as opposed to word processor.
I’ve been using it and syncing my book files between the two platforms and it sure is nice to be home again.
The story behind getting Scrivner on iPad could probably be the subject of its own interesting novel but this week, after so many years, my beloved Scrivener found its way to the iPad and iPhone. I’m currently outlining an episode of Mac Power Users on big writing projects and we’ll be comparing and contrasting these two apps so stay tuned for more on that. While Scrivener is once again my weapon of choice for big writing projects (particularly those including research), there are still some projects for which Ulysses is the right choice. Most notably is Ulysses, which is similar to Scrivener but also different. I’ll call those my wild years.ĭuring the wild years, I started using several alternative apps that are iPad friendly. Initially, I had all sorts of bizarre workarounds where I could edit and work on my Scrivener files on iPad ranging from weird partial text syncing to VNC but none of them were really that good and as the years went by and Scrivener did not show up for iPad, I moved on. So I guess you could say I’ve been looking forward to seeing Scrivener on iOS for awhile now. (At the time, the iPad wasn’t available in the UK.) I was hoping he’d get addicted to the iPad and immediately put all effort into developing an iPad application. Within an hour of using my first iPad, I remember thinking, “Now I need Scrivener.” How badly did I want Scrivener? So much so that I acted as errand-boy for the Scrivener developer and bought an iPad (with his money) and mailed it to him. Scrivener was my original “White Whale” app for the iPad. In searching the archive, I found my first review of Scrivener on MacSparky in 2007.