iCloud Sync

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
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Thanks, Katherine.

I am trying to balance out the attacks against other users and against the company.

Yes, no definitive roadmap. But Keith has talked about iCloud sync being possible and desirable on several occasions, so users shouldn’t be attacking other users for pointing out the same thing that Keith himself has said: it is possible, with changes.

And iCloud sync does work for Macs.

And yet comments on this thread wrongly imply that iCloud sync is impossible and that Keith doesn’t have the will or ability to develop his product. New readers to this and similar threads not only get the impression that the company isn’t capable of making developments, but they also see some users being harangued for making points that Keith has already made.

For me, these posts read like people defecating on the app and the company. Thoroughly wrong on so many levels.

For sure, I have given up syncing Scrivener with iOS and now use external-folder sync to get my work on to iCloud Drive. But I still need and want Scrivener to do well so that it is available to me and others in the future.

Roadmap or not, I have a firm belief that Keith will add full iCloud sync when such a move is possible. He has said he wants to, and until he comes along and says unequivocally that that will never be possible, I will continue to believe that his intentions remain as stated (even without a timeline attached).

It really doesn’t help to have people make dogmatic false statements and then set about disparaging other users on the forum.

I know Keith can do whatever he wants with Scrivener as he has the hard-earned security of its success to support him. But it would be a shame to lose possible new users through the false assertions made in this thread and the way in which those assertions are being made.

Your “no roadmap” statement is honest, clear, respectful, and hopeful. Other comments are false and, frankly, offensive.

With all respect to the entire L&L team

Merx

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Good grief. Still struggling with the truth.

Merx

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What about Keith’s subsequent post and Katherine’s that to achieve iOS synch at the present time would require a complete ground up re-write of Scrivener (and loss of functionality) do you not understand?

Until (or unless) there is a fundamental change in Apple’s iCloud implementation, unless Keith burns down Scrivener and starts from scratch there can be no implementation (and no promise to).

Keith has not promised to burn the house down, and at last look Tim Cook has not promised to re-write iCloud.

What alternative ‘truth’ are you drinking?

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I’m going to post a little clarification.

Would it be good if iCloud sync were available for Scrivener iOS. For some, yes.

For me, with a VERY in depth knowledge of iCloud and issues surrounding, (I could fill a short story with horrors I have dealt with/seen) I limit and carefully control iCloud syncing of ANYTHING. I have 2TB of iCloud courtesy of work that I use for some backups, syncing that cannot be avoided. (and some shit I don’t care about losing or have secured elsewhere)

I most carefully control what goes to the iCloud folder and take steps tp ensure syncing is indeed complete. (I also have a careful backup strategy for when iCloud might, on a whim screw something).

Given the complexity of Scrivener projects, even if iOS Scrivener syncing were available right now, I would not choose to use it until such time (if ever) I and many wiser than me were satisfied with iCloud.

That said, iCloud is getting better and millions use it without (too much) issue.

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Again, phrasing things in this way shifts Keith’s emphasis so dramatically as to be potentially misleading, and therefore undermines the very point you are trying to make. People will point to your statement and say, “Well, if they really wanted to, they could,” and use that to justify exactly the attacks you are trying to oppose.

We have not announced a development roadmap that would ultimately lead to iCloud synchronization. For technical reasons – many of which are in Apple’s control, not ours – we may not ever be able to do so. For business reasons, we might ultimately determine that the changes we would need to make would cripple the product in other ways. Any implication to the contrary is false. Any parsing of past statements that leads to a different conclusion is misleading. Please stop.

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I wonder if change is afoot. Quite recently, in August 2020, Keith was talking about coming to a software crossroads and of the sustainability of Scrivener in its current form. He also posed a question around adding iCloud support in some way (perhaps with a simpler version of Scrivener):

Suppose there were a simpler version of Scrivener - without so many options and perhaps with not many more features than the iOS version. But suppose this simpler version had iCloud support and could sync as seamlessly as other iCloud apps do (but also that this meant that it could not store research files inside a project because of the potential file size). Would that appeal?

And recently Ioa made an interesting point about change being necessary because tech changes over time:

There are periods of time where the colour of things change, and minor feature clusters are added or modified within a model, and then there are times of change when the whole premise must be rethought—because it’s been 15 or 20 years, and computers went from beige boxes belching hot air out the back and making cat scream noises over a phone line, to things you slip into a pocket, that pull the internet out of the atmosphere at a rate that would take a thousand screaming modems.

And Scrivener was released in 2007, some fourteen years ago.

And Keith indicated (in December 2020) that a lot of development had been going on behind the scenes (now for more than two years):

Just because we’ve been a little quiet on the update front over the past year or so, doesn’t mean that there’s not a lot of investment and work going on behind the scenes. But with Scrivener 3 not yet out on Windows, it’s difficult for us to talk about future plans beyond that.

Really looking forward to whatever Keith and L&L develop and release, especially as Keith was talking about iCloud sync as recently as August last year, though perhaps not with Scrivener as we know it.

Merx

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You really don’t give up do you?

A member of the L&L staff has said:

‘We have not announced a development roadmap that would ultimately lead to iCloud synchronization. For technical reasons – many of which are in Apple’s control, not ours – we may not ever be able to do so.(my added emphasis) For business reasons, we might ultimately determine that the changes we would need to make would cripple the product in other ways. Any implication to the contrary is false. Any parsing of past statements that leads to a different conclusion is misleading. Please stop.’

And yet you ‘wonder if change is afoot’.

We all get you have a fixation on iCloud sync for iOS, (you really, really, really want it so) and many have a similar desire, but seriously, do you think your crystal ball knows stuff the L&L team don’t. They have not even completed bedding down the recently released Win version, have endless demands for an Android release and you think Keith is about to turn around and start again from scratch?

At some time in the future perhaps there may be changes, but ‘afoot’? :crazy_face:

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Merx, you do understand that Katherine (@kewms) works for Literature & Latte right?

She has had ample opportunity to talk directly with KB (and provide input) about the future of Scrivener and understand the actual roadmap. Her grasp on this topic can be considered canonical, far beyond the scraps of comments that you are picking up here in the forums and trying to retcon a whole Rapture of the Words scenario from.

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We do not comment on future versions or unreleased features. Any conclusions you might draw from past forum posts are entirely speculative.

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I’m not sure anyone is having a ‘fixation’…
For my part, I love Scrivener and I have for probably a decade, but for the last couple of years my relationship with it has been on hiatus, because of the lack of iCloud sync between MacOS and iPadOS. I fully understand that the problem may not be solvable, but that doesn’t mean that the situation doesn’t make me sad, because Scrivener is great, the alternatives aren’t as good, but ultimately I would rather make do with the alternatives than install DropBox on my Mac at this point (Scrivener is the only app left that uses it). Every few months, or even every couple of years, I come here and lament this state of affairs (politely), then I try living with the Scrivener/Dropbox duo for a few weeks, then I am reminded of why I wanted out of it, and I disappear again. Whether my posts here are any use to the developers, who know perfectly well what they are doing, I don’t know – but I guess if they were fully uninterested in these comments they wouldn’t host a forum on their website.

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What specifically is the issue? I ask as a genuine question as I and thousands of others have no problems at all with Dropbox. It works reliably.

We/L&L may be able to assist to address the issue.

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I’ve had this discussion before with L&L, I doubt that the technical limitations (in iCloud) that they always mention have been solved since.
In short, Scrivener sync works without issue… provided that you press sync and remember to fully close the project, and give time for the changes to be uploaded, on each device, before you dare to open the project on the other device. This was a cutting edge user experience in 2006, but for years now it has not been how I (and many others) work in the real world.

In the real world, I’m typing on my iPad, then I may have to slap it shut quickly (say, my friend has arrived at the coffee shop, or my cab arrived, or whatever), and I may want to check on something in the project on my iMac that evening. The iPad is maybe still in my bag, or maybe I left it at work. Or I may even dare to have the project open on two devices at the same time! Perhaps accidentally, I forgot it close it on my iMac this morning and I’ve since left home, now I’m out and want to keep working on that project.
My point is just that the dropbox sync works if you are the textbook user, who is sitting down for a session of work, and then closing everything diligently, etc. Real life (mine at least) is way messier than that. Whenever I try to use dropbox and scrivener, I am soon in a never-ending loop of yellow conflict reconciliation pages, and it all just feels so slow and precarious.

Simpler apps than Scrivener can cope with this alright. In some you can have the same document open in many places simultaneously and watch it update in real time as you type on one of those devices. But of course, those are simple word editors I’m talking about, and Scrivener is a more complex beast.

For me, ultimately I prefer to sacrifice some functionality to have a synced app that I can rely on. But I know I’m in the minority here, of course

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This specific scenario is why the auto-quit function exists.

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A post was split to a new topic: What software do you use to write with these days?

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I understand, however my real world has been discipline whenever working with tech for 40+ years. the auto close mentioned by @kewms is always the backup for a fail to close on Mac in the very few cases when I’ve been multi-tasking and forgot about the Scrivener window in the background. As for iPad, I’ve never felt that rushed when friends/cab/etc arrived that I’ve had to slam the cover shut and not hit Synch.

Different work flows I guess. I can see that any non-automated process doesn’t work for everyone.

Lighter note, I retired from Apple last week, so perhaps my disciplined approach is about to go out the window. Funnily enough, while I find Dropbox just fine for my needs, you won’t find it on Apple internal systems. Only a couple of companies made the grade.

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Four years later, that prediction hasn’t come true.

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225

Congrats!

This thread has been going on for a decade, for reasons that utterly baffle me. And it has nothing to do with “why hasn’t Mark done this yet” because that is the wrong question.

When I read the docs about Scrivener, in no place does it ever mention being an instant sync, open anywhere application. It talks about features that no other writing tool has. It has a defined market serving defined needs. Backup of your files is one of them. “Open anywhere instantly in sync” is not one of them.

It is clear that you want a tool which syncs anywhere, instantly. There are dozens of such tools available, and you can use them. They don’t have Scrivener’s features because they are aimed at a different problem. They utilize file update mechanisms unsuited to Scrivener’s use case.

So when you reduce it, the problem here is that you want two different apps, written for two different sets of needs, to solve two completely different problems for you at a fixed, one-time price. The fact that no other application exists which can solve both problems is perhaps a hint why the continued bashing on Mark is old and tiring.

Yes, I’d like a dog walker who ironed my clothes and tuned my car too. There are reasons why these skills don’t manifest in the same human at a price point I’m willing to pay :smiley:

But what really makes this so completely impossible for me to understand, is that there are SOOOOOO many apps which are really good at the instant sync bits. I have one I use for this. When the bits become coordinated enough for a story I’m working on, I copy them into Scrivener and start knocking out the text.

Use the tools for what they are good at. And enjoy only having to pay a small fixed price once a decade. It’s like $3 a year if you do the math. I pay that much every month to the app I use for the instant syncing.

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“Open anywhere instantly in sync” isn’t possible in any Internet setting. Folks who believe iCloud can do that are deluded. I have used iCloud to sync between iOS and Mac Scrivener, and it was very far from instantaneous. iCloud and the iOS Files app — both written, maintained, and hosted by Apple — took several minutes to update a Scrivener project, and it didn’t give me a clear indication of when it was done.

It’s a good thing, not a bad one, that Dropbox isn’t more trusted than it is.

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The ironic thing here is that the “instant sync” writing software that is often seen as the most direct competitor to Scrivener (Software That Must Not Be Named, or STMNBN) gets the same kind of flack that Scrivener gets, but from the other side:

“When are you going to give up Markdown?”
“We need rich text!”
“What about a corkboard feature?”
“Why don’t you have more/eliminate Dropbox support?”

These are posted in their App Store reviews as STMNBN doesn’t have a company-hosted forum (they probably got fed up with it.)

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I’ve seen iCloud take 45 minutes to an hour to figure out how to sync a single-word edit in a simple .scap file. I’ve seen it silently obliterate conflict versions in .txt files—and that was just with me creating a quarantined temporary account in order to test iCloud on. How anyone trusts it with their work is beyond me; I would never enable it on an active account, let alone use it.

There are a lot of complaints about sync malfunctions as well, everywhere, no matter the underlying technology. It’s almost as if there is something tricky about the usage of complex synchronisation systems that cannot be solved by high level client software sitting on top of them. Hmmm.

Whatever the case, the grass will always be greener everywhere else. As for Scrivener’s approach—it was deliberately designed the way it works with the full knowledge that it would never be ideal for those that value syncing without buttons. We knew that back in 2016, and went with it anyway as a calculated move. That people are still remarking upon how it doesn’t work for those that cannot stand buttons is unsurprising.

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