Just updated to 2.0 and well done on the eBook exporting! I haven’t tried the Kindle export yet, but I sent some stuff to my iPad last night and it was perfect. OK- here’s my suggestion. I know you’re not interested in doing Scrivener for iPad. I agree that the iPad isn’t really designed for composing and creating material, it’s really designed for consuming material. However, the thing that I would find really useful is to use an iPad to proofread and do basic mark-ups/notes on my work. I usually work like this: write a draft, then print out a hard copy to review, make a few notes, then do another draft. If I could review/mark up work on my iPad, I could skip the printing out step. This would save trees and save me expensive paper and toner.
And… yes I can. Thanks to the eBook export options, I can export the document, read it in iBooks and make a few basic annotations. Here’s the thing: 1) there are still a lot of cumbersome steps to get the scrivener document onto my iPad. I can’t figure out a way to do it wirelessly and having to hook up the sync cable and go through the iTunes interface is irritating. 2) There’s no way to get the annotated iPad document back into Scrivener.
Yes, there are potentially other options out there (export doc as .pdf and use an iPad .pdf mark up program like iAnnotate. That would probably work. Or maybe export as .rtf and use one of the many iPad notebook programs). But all of these options either require some clunky steps or result in formatting errors. I am a Mac user, which means that I prefer things to be elegant, easy and idiot-proof.
So- if you could ever be convinced to do a Scrivener for iPad, I think it should do this. It should basically work like the Apple iBook app (let you read, highlight text, add notes, add bookmarks, etc). If you want to go wild, you could even toss in a few editing mark up options. But the key thing would be to provide a much easier (wireless?) way to get the scrivener docs onto the iPad and then to get the annotated documents back into Scrivener to use as a reference during the rewrite process. I don’t care about the ability to write and edit Scrivener documents on the iPad. But the ability to read and mark up documents on the iPad would be fantastic.
Even better, IMO, is to do it to iPad apps like PlainText, iA Writer, etc, by creating an External Folder and syncing via Dropbox. These apps have much better and more manageable interfaces than Simplenote. All this can be done easily from the Sync item in the Scrivener File menu. I’ve set up an External Folder in the PlainText folder in Dropbox, and syncing to it works perfectly. Everything appears in the iPad immediately. I’ve also done the same with iA Writer. It’s just delicious.
This is a brilliant innovation in Scrivener 2, very elegant and dead simple to do. If you combine it with syncing to Index Card for iPad, you get a reasonable facsimile on the iPad of some of Scrivener’s main functions. The one that is missing, of course, is multiple panes, but this is an iOS issue and nothing to do with Scrivener. But it certainly makes it possible to work coherently with Scrivener on the iPad.
You can get all the nitty-gritty from the Help icons in the Scrivener windows that open up when you choose the Menu options. It’s all so great it makes you tingle all over with pleasure, I kid not.
The only slightly odd thing is the number that gets added at the end of each file title in PlainText… But, hey…
Yes, I think you’re definitely right. This seems to be the best way. I have a DropBox account and I’ve been playing around with different iPad apps, trying to find one that I like. I haven’t tried PlainText or iA Writer, but here are some thoughts on the ones that I have looked into:
iAnnotate (an iPad app to annotate .pdf files) I couldn’t get the app to recognize text in the Scrivener .pdf export. So, I couldn’t use any of the text mark-up features, only the drawing and note features)
Elements (iPad notebook/writing app): opening Scrivener exported .rtf file in Elements produces a lot of gibberish
Pages: Doesn’t have good mark up features and the fact that there’s no way to get files into and out of DropBox is a killer for me.
Good Reader: This is my favorite so far, but it has some limits. You can’t edit .rtf files (can only read them). However, if you export the script as a .pdf, all of Good Reader’s .pdf text mark-up features work very well. I then tried bringing the marked-up .pdf back into Scrivener to use as a “scrivening”. (Basically, I used the split screen view. I had the annotated .pdf on the bottom screen and I had the Scrivener draft of the script on the top screen. I was able to go through the annotated .pdf and use those notes as guides to make changes to the draft). What I found was that when I viewed the annotated Good Reader .pdf in Scrivener, not all of the .pdf mark-ups appeared. Notes worked perfectly (note icons appear on the .pdf and if you click on the icon, the note appears in the left margin of the document). Highlighted text appears correctly, as do drawings and cross-outs. However, the “replacement text” and “insert text” mark-ups do not appear on the Good Reader annotated .pdf when viewed inside Scrivener.
I’ll keep posting thoughts on other iPad apps as I try them, in the meantime, I’m definitely interested in hearing about what has worked well for other folks out there. Any favorites?
I just can’t do the dropbox thing. My data, my rules, so WebDAV or go home.
And none of the neat integrations with either plaintext, or index card, support WebDAV yet. I would totally buy a Scrivener-compatible iPad app if it did WebDAV.
If Pages manages to support RTF, that’d help, but it would still be missing the pretty corkboard outlining.
Anyway, if you put out a Scrivener-Mobile iPad app, that only had simple text editing and corkboarding with WebDAV, I’d drop 20 bucks on it, easy.
Oh, and did I mention Scrivener 2.0 is awesome! Seriously guys, great job there! Well worth the wait!
FYI, GoodReader will let you download/upload files via WebDAV. Also works with: mail servers, iDisk/MobileMe, GoogleDocs, FTP Servers, box.net, filesanywhere.com, MyDisk.se and, of course, DropBox.
Yes and no. You’re right that you can’t get Pages docs created on the iPad directly into Dropbox, but you can drop Pages docs into Dropbox on your Mac and open them in Pages on the iPad. You can send Pages docs from the iPad to iWork.com, iTunes, WebDAV, etc, and then to Dropbox, but not to Dropbox directly. Which is totally infuriating, as you say.
Great comments on the iPad apps. I agree with you completely. GoodReader is great, very sophisticated, and it’s interesting to hear what you managed to do with it. It’s a different kind of app, though, really.
The best Scrivener lookalike combination I’ve found is definitely PlainText and Index Card. Which is not surprising as the devs have worked together, and Index Card is inspired directly by Scrivener. PlainText gives you a binder-like list of files plus one open file beside it, while Index Card mimics the Corkboard. iA Writer gives you something similar, but the “binder” list is tiny and non expandable and the font it uses for the text, while great for the app’s specific purposes, may not hit the spot for everyone.
The lack of multiple panels is a real drag and prevents a fuller Scrivener-like experience, but otherwise the PlainText/Index Card combo does go a good way towards it. Remember to sync Scrivener to the External Folder in plain text, though. RTF is a no-no.
Not if you use Index Card, which is inspired by Scrivener, as noted in the previous post - so long as you use DropBox. What’s the problem with Dropbox, btw? It’s smooth, elegant, couldn’t be easier, and gets you over all these problems.
For me, the issue is the ability to add annotations. PlainText will let you edit documents, but not annotate them. GoodReader will let you annotate documents, but not edit them. I’m looking for a bit of both worlds. I want to be able to do basic editing on my iPad (fix typos, change a line or two, etc), AND I want to be able to create annotations to remind myself of larger issues. (The ability to highlight a sequence that isn’t working so that I can go back in Scrivener and fix it later, the ability to write a note to myself saying, “The whole plot arc with the chicken and the Ferrari doesn’t make sense. Fix it.” Etc.)
I bought an iPad specifically in the hope of revising a manuscript on it. Frankly the suckiness of the thing in this regard drives me nuts. You can faff around marking up a pdf in iAnnotate or something (and see every header). You can import an epub into iBooks and make notes there - but as far as I can see you can’t export your notes back in any way since they’re not saved with the epub file.
I see Scrivener now exports in mobi for Kindle too. Maybe there’s a way of getting access to your notes there. But how one earth do you get your mobi file onto the iPad Kindle to read it there? Reading it on other Kindles - Mac, PC etc is fine. But the iPad…?
I’m not bothered about serious editing - the thing’s useless for that imho. But you ought to be able to make useful annotations on it even if you can’t fix a typo.
I don’t trust my data to third parties. Rather than use a system where my important data is in the hands of a company and a black box architecture I can’t validate by source code inspection, I run open source tools on either my own hardware, or isp commodity hardware.
I’ll always be able to run WebDAV - the spec is there, and nobody can take it away. Dropbox, who knows what their corporate future holds.
Now, maybe if the drop box devs were as personable as the scrivener devs, I could get over my trust issues .
Yes, I see your point. That hasn’t been an issue for me yet, but could very well be. I guess the only workround is to keep a separate file for such notes to yourself. A hassle to have to hop in and out of it, especially if you have a long binder list, but unavoidable the way the iOS is set up at the moment. If you did this in Plain Text, it would sync back to Scrivener on your computer to be dealt with there.
Obviously, the PT/IC solution is only a rough mimicking of Scrivener. By the same token, you can’t have document and project notes, and a ton of the other features that make Scrivener what it is. But it works well enough to make the iPad an option if you need to work away from Scrivener for not too long. In this user’s experience so far, at any rate…
Well, for me Pages worked out with the whole WebDAV thing, and an external bluetooth keyboard (at least for “serious” writing sessions). Being able to drag the iPad around to lunch for quickie edits and thoughts, and taking out the keyboard when I’ve actually got a desk and table of my own around, and then being able to sync all that back so I can follow up on my macbook has been pretty good actually.
I am intrigued by everyone talking about annotations and notes - I usually just make the fix in the text right away, but maybe I’m missing out on some useful workflow…I’ll poke around the Scrivener help and try learning more
But I did mince my words! You should hear what I really think! Actually the best solution for me, given that I deliver a final MS in Word, is going to be a Windows tablet. With Word (on a Windows tablet) you can scrawl with a pen and edit with a screen keyboard.
The Kindle also makes an excellent way to proof texts, particularly since the result looks so page-like. I’ve found that to catch some typos, you almost have to view it on a media other than a screen, but my (suspected) Scotch ancestry rebels against printing hundreds of pages to catch a few mistakes. Kindles allow paper-like proofing without the paper. If printing costs you 10 cents a page, proofing about 1400 pages would pay for a Kindle 3.
The Kindle also allows you to highlight passages and tag texts in a way that could be used for proofing. I’ve only got a second-hand Kindle 1, and it worked adequately for that, so I imagine later versions will work even better. And later versions have text-to-speech, which will let you listen for typos. Listening will often catch mistakes you don’t see on a screen or a page.
As with the iPad, there are a few negatives when proofing on the Kindle.
The user-interface and keyboard weren’t designed for this purpose and are clumsy. It takes longer than it ought to make a note. The tiny Kindle keyboard is a particular nuisance.
Books you’ve bought from Amazon synch bookmarks, highlights and notes to an Amazon webpage and to the other devices on which Kindle applications run. That would make editing those typos easier. But unfortunately books you’ve loaded yourself, including your own pre-pub books, don’t sych via Amazon. I got around that by viewing my correction notes on my Kindle and fixing them on my Mac, but having that information on one machine would be more useful.
Unlike the much larger iPad, I suspect the latest and cheapest Kindle (#3) isn’t big enough to view larger PDFs (A4 and 8.5x11). I’ve not got one to test on, but I also suspect that a normal-book-sized PDF would also be a bit too small for proofing anything more than general layout. And since Kindles still don’t display ePub, that means the only proofing you can do is subject to the limitations of the mobi/Kindle format. You can’t proof how a printed book actually looks, but you can proof the content.
Some of those problems could be fixed. Amazon is headquartered in Seattle, where I live, but despite 10 years of effort, I’ve yet to establish contacts there. (Amazon makes Apple look wide-open.) But if anyone does, you might suggest two things to them:
Have a registration scheme that would let publishers and editors distribute their own pre-publication books to their own Kindles via Amazon for testing and proofing in a way that the synching features work. Authors would find proofing easier. Amazon would benefit from higher quality ebooks. Win, win.
Amazon has a very useful way for creating a reference number that allows you to return to a passage no matter what device you’re viewing the text on. (My one check found that each digit equalled about 17 words or perhaps one sentence.) That’s something all ebooks need and there’s no reason for half-a-dozen schemes to develop to confuse readers.
It’d be helpful if Amazon released their rules for referencing and maybe open sourced the code determining just how those numbers are generated so other apps could use them. I think it’d be great if a reference number on a Kindle correlated with one inside Scrivener. Then we could take notes like “Fix the misplaced quote at 1047.”
There is one thing the Kindle does, regarding annotations, that is extremely handy, and with a little preparation can be very useful. When you plug the Kindle into your computer it will mount like a disk on your system. You’ll find a file called My Clippings.txt. This houses a complete record of everything you’ve bookmarked, highlighted, or typed into the device. Each record is timestamped and back-referenced to the source. Since it is an ordinary text file, it is trivial to open it up, extract your notes, and transfer them into Scrivener or what have you. Since it uses a predictable record split, you can even use Scrivener’s import & split feature to take them all in as individual chunks.
To make this more useful, you’ll want to periodically flush this file out once you’ve transferred stuff out of it. Otherwise it just grows and grows and gets unwieldy. My only gripe is that it is a central file. I’d like it better if each resource on the device had its own .txt file, but it’s not too bad since each record indicates where it came from.
Unlike Amazon’s online service, this works for everything, even the .mobi files you upload to the device yourself with the USB cable.
I find the Kindle fine for reading but too small for annotation work. Using the Kindle software on the iPad would be ideal but I can’t see any way to access any annotations you make. And if you use the Kindle service to convert your .doc file to a Kindle file it only appears on Kindle hardware, not on the iPad Kindle app (or at least I can’t find a way to do that). You can drag the converted file into the Kindle folder of a PC or Mac but that folder isn’t accessible on the iPad. Frustrating… I think the Kindle app would be perfect for this.
Dropbox runs on Amazon’s S3 architecture, or whatever it’s called. You can read about it on their developer wiki page. They dont maintain the servers. Amazon does.
.