I see this product has now been launched on the App store and wondered if any of you had test driven it yet and had an opinion? I can’t find many reviews yet online, but it looks like it could be a good lightweight blogging App, possibly good for starting to build larger pieces of writing if you can quickly jump between entries / notes within the editor.
You might want to look at Typed, which seems to be similar in many respects.
It’s not in the App Store, and it does offer a trial version. I don’t need another writing app, but a couple days with the trial version almost sold me anyway.
Just as well, then, that I never asked Typed to provide inspirational quotes. AR would have put me off it right away. The only writerly quote I keep in mind is the one that was on Elmore Leonard’s T-shirt: “Not now, I’m writing.”
[EDIT]
To be fair to Realmac, who developed and market Typed, I went back and salvaged the trial mode – still a day left on it. Clicked “Inspirational Quotes.” And re-clicked and re-clicked a dozen times. Never once did Ayn Rand appear. Hemingway, Doctorow, Flaubert, Sarton, Chekhov, Mann, Eliot, Johnson, Steinem, Heller. It’s apparently some generic list, and Rand will probably appear sooner or later, but she was neither the first nor even the tenth.
So, because it doesn’t have a trial mode, I have a question you might be able to answer; how does it handle images? Do you have to upload them outside of Desk, and then link to them, or will it upload a local file to your blog’s image library and modify links to match the online url?
Well, as I say, I’ve not tried it yet but it’s on my list of things to do next (along with moving lock, stock and five large hounds to a new farm deeper into rural Norfolk, so ‘next’ might be relatively distant) - but here’s the app’s own blurb:
"Images
To add an image, all you have to do is drag-and-drop the image into the editor window
To resize the image, simply select the image and drag the corner
You will be able to see the pixel dimensions as you drag the image to your desired size
You can add a link to the image by selecting the image and pressing the button to add a link
You can also add alignment to the image by selecting the image and choosing the desired alignment setting. By default Desk uses ‘None’ for image alignment"
Sounds good, but I’ll report the proof of the pudding as soon as I can.
I can confirm that images are simply drag and drop into your post.
Using this App for a week, it’s really nice for making blog entries to Wordpress with wysiwyg text formatting and hyperlinking.
I am interested in adding and improving features so have made some suggestions to the developer’s community site and will be interested to see what the next iteration brings. Being a team of one I’m guessing he has his work cut out at the moment, but he is responsive on the forums and maintains an interesting dev blog as well.
I’m John, the developer behind Desk App ( http://desk.pm ). Thanks for sharing and commenting and I just wanted you to know that I’m listening in here so I can provide assistance and guidance!
Desk has gotten some great press recently related to being awarded a “Best App of 2014” from Apple ( http://blog.desk.pm/best-app ) but the app is certainly not as mature or as experienced as Scrivener! So, I’m just getting started (and need a lot of help and support from the community)!
My plan is to create some trial version this coming year as I have more time.
Thanks! You guys are amazing… and as you can see, I’m also a Scrivener user myself… bought it almost 2 years ago and I love using it for some more long-form book-ish ideas that I’ve had (none have ever matured beyond drafts).
It’s nothing to do with the design, but with the content (or lack thereof). The video and overview are interesting marketing, certainly on par with Apple’s approach of making you feel good about the brand. But the overview is very light on details, and there’s no apparent place to get a more in-depth view of how the software works. For instance, I’ve used blogging software that uploaded html-formatted text, but never have I had software that would upload images to a blog’s photo album (or whatever they call it). I wanted to know, for certain, that I could drag an image into my post as I composed my words, and that the image would be correctly uploaded to Wordpress and linked to, but there weren’t any details or demonstrations that showed someone posting an entry with images in it. No guides, no how-tos, no demonstrations that illustrated just how easy it is to set up and publish.
I’m spoiled by Lit & Lat’s approach, which is to start with fairly clean, pretty marketing, then provide progressively more detailed explanations of what the software can do, and how you can do it. This approach culminates in the ability to try the software out for 30 days of non-consecutive use, to make sure the user has had a thorough introduction to the software, no matter how long ago they downloaded the demo. By the time I clicked “buy” on Scrivener, I knew it was worth the price to me. I enthusiastically clicked that “buy” button, rather than reluctantly, as I must do with app-store-only applications with websites that are pretty, but lack information.