Currently it plays nicely with SimpleText.ws. Check out the File/Import menu. From there just plug in your username and password and you can download texts from the service.
PubMed On Tap will let you do much of the above with Bookends.
http://www.referencesontap.com/
Notes and Writing: The InkyGirl review cited two apps that I decided to buy and try, Notably ($2.99) and My Writing Nook ($4.99). Both advance iPad note-taking interface and functionality. One review calls Notably “the Moleskine of iPad apps,” and Nook has similarities to Scrivener.
Notably has a good-looking skin: notes are on a cream-ivory “paper” set on a wood-grain “desk.” The app’s best feature is a choice of 12 fonts and sizes: Baskerville, Cochin, Palatino, Times New Roman, Gill Sans, Trebuchet, Courier, Helvetica, American Typewriter, Academy Engraved, Chalk Duster, and Snell Roundhand.
Notes appear in the right pane and an index/table of contents on the left. Each note has a date/time stamp, with most recent at the top. You can’t sort the notes, but the Search function helps you find previous notes quickly.
You type with full touch and keyboard editing, plus spell-check and auto suggestion. Notes may be in portrait or landscape. Saving is automatic, and you share via e-mail. (Additional export/synch options are coming.)
For three dollars you get a pretty way to work, and many writers on the forum say they are more productive when using a favorite type face, like Baskerville or Times. Notably is no Moleskine replacement, since you can’t create hand-written notes or diagrams. And in function it’s not that different from Apple’s Notes, which comes with OSX.
My Writing Nook works on iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android; the port to iPad is new. It has a superficial resemblance to Scrivener, in that the left pane functions like a Binder, where you may set up chapters or scenes to view on the right.
You may do the same in Notably, but in Nook you get bullet icons in 12 different colors to mark project bits and keep them sorted together—similar to the use of color bullets in xPad.
Nook includes 9 font/size choices, spell-check, and autosave. Additional features are a dictionary or thesaurus lookup, and (bravo) real-time word count. The index pane shows the word-count for each item. You share via e-mail or synch with a Nook web app, using a Gmail account address.
Both of these apps offer attractive ways to enter notes or work on segments of a writing project. A crucial limitation of both is the inability to import notes or chapters.
The developers ask for suggestions; my advice is to look at SimpleNote for its synchronized saving, web app version, and hooks to other programs, like Notational Velocity. Although SimpleNote remains “free,” it inserts ads, which you eliminate with a $3.99 one-time payment. For $8.99 a year you get Premium service, which eliminates ads and adds auto backup, a private address for mailing notes, and sharing via RSS feed.
Very nice review, Druid. I just bought both programs - to encourage the developers!
It’s relatively easy to import documents into the “MWN”: via their website. A bit cumbersome - I guess it’s easy to forget to synch the website and Scrivener, - but workable. I’ve just put the beginning of my book into it and it works nice.
Both programs have limitations (from my pov) that are actually addressed in Pages for iPad. Specifically, I write with an indent for each paragraph in my Scrivener; without it the writing looks messy. Neither of the programs allow me to indent. But I’m sure for many others this isn’t a big deal at all.
Having tried them both, I actually prefer the MWN as it seems more geared towards an actual writer. “Notably” is more of a pleasure to use visually; a shame it doesn’t allow an easy import yet.
You can’t really blame the developers for this - Apple didn’t make a rich text engine available to developers for the iPad, so most developers - and thus writing programs - are going to be stuck using plain text for the foreseeable future. (Rich text is necessary for indents, line spacing etc - Apple created their own rich text engine for Pages but didn’t make it available to third parties - so the bit in the Keynote where Steve said he gave the iPad to the iWork team just “to see what they could do”, implying that the iWork suite could just be built using the regular iPad tools, was a little misleading. 
) Beyond Pages and Office2 HD (not sure how they managed it, but they have a cross-platform suite), I doubt you’ll be seeing indents etc in third-party iPad programs for at least another year.
Best,
Keith
This is great thread, druid, and I have to say I’ve been in love with my iPad as a note taking tool since I got it. But I was surprised that in these ten pages no one has mentioned TaskPaper.
On the iPad I’m using the TaskPaper “show project” function to work with longer texts, like story drafts, kind of the way I’ve used Scrivener on my iMac or MPB. I know that TaskPaper is marketed as being for ‘simple task lists’ but being able to move paragraphs around, hoist sections, tag others, and it’s not that far of a conceptual leap to think of it as a powerful drafting tool. Simply managing revisions as sequential “Projects” lets me flip back and forth and see what the heck I was doing four revisions ago. I’m sure you can take the example and extend it to your writing situation. Of course I’ve had to learn how to get rid of all the indents and such in the core plain text files before printing, but that’s what WordServices is for, right?
I’m using TaskPaper (both iPad and Mac) for note collection and arrangement. It’s wonderful for quotes, or phrases you want to use, just like shuffling around cards in Scrivener (chunkification and de-chunkification 
). I also keep my research lists there, books and article I need to pull when I get to the library, Project = Area of inquiry, Tags = In which facility they are located. etc…
Now I’m thinking about being in DropBox and being able to open text files on my iPad in TaskPaper (and or WriteRoom someday), and I have to say, I think my trips down to Poets House will be much more productive, especially since I’m not dragging the old laptop along.
…and the native syncing of TaskPaper files into Scrivener (via SimpleText.ws) works effortlessly.
So, of course I’ll still use Scrivener for the big stuff, it is without parallel, and I think I’d rather do that on the monster screen of my iMac, not the iPad, but for the text noodeling that makes for the raw material of the big stuff, I’m having trouble finding fault with the iPad.
Doug
I do not own an iPad but a few days ago I came across “MyTexts” which for a short time I tried out on my mac. The app gives you a list of text documents not entirely unsimilar to Scriveners binder. I am curious wether anybody has tried this and maybe could elaborate on the experience.
I keep hearing good things about TaskPaper. I don’t have an iPad, but you can you elaborate a bit about what makes it superior to say, TextEdit or Pages on the Mac for note organizing? A step by step account of how you use it might help those of us who don’t actually have the app yet.
I have read that TP works well between iPhone and Mac, too. For syncing Mac notes with my iPhone, I just use SimpleNote, although I do have WriteRoom and SimpleText and could use them instead. How TP + SimpleText would improve the situation?
In both cases (iPhone and Mac), I move notes from TextEdit (or Bean) and SimpleNote into Scrivener.
Of course, I realize that our uses differ and what works for you may not for me and vice versa. thanks!
I’d download the desktop version of TaskPaper and play with the demo a while to see what the buzz is about. The iDevice version is fundamentally the same, though in my experience it is a little less elegant to work with in terms of data entry. The biggest handicap is that rows cannot easily be changed strictly with the keyboard. In the desktop version, a very simple syntax drives the structure. Lines with a colon on the end make it a project; lines with a dash in front make it a task; lines with neither are notes. That’s it. On the iPad you have to change the mode via a three-tap menu command. I wish it could just derive style from syntax.
That weakness aside, the rest of the it is quite similar to the desktop version. It is very easy to drag things around to re-organise them; easy to check things off; and the tag and project filtering is as elegant, but not nearly as powerful as the desktop version, which supports some advanced query syntax. Neither of those are as interesting to people using it as a way of writing out ideas though—those are more interesting to people using it as a GTD implementation, though they are not completely useless in the “augmented text editor” realm of things.
So to compare it briefly with something like Pages or TextEdit: the key thing that makes it more useful for note collection and idea brainstorming is that it has a core model built around the outline metaphor. Paragraphs are equivalent to outline entries, though it does without the headline+note method and just runs it all together. Headlines are notes because there isn’t a visual or data restriction on length. You can type 1,000 words into a line and it doesn’t look weird—whereas that would look weird in OmniOutliner. That is where it ends up feeling more like a text editor than an outliner. Where it ends up feeling more like an outliner than a text editor (like TextEdit) is that it is supremely easy to move things around and form hierarchies of information. No more or less difficult than OmniOutliner. It really does straddle the line between text editor and outliner, and I think that is what generates a lot of the buzz. Ah, one other main difference between TP and a more standard outliner is that it doesn’t support disclosure. Everything will always be in front of you—however this can be mitigated by filtering—which in outliner parlance would be akin to hoisting (though non-linear in nature).
Then once you add in its other features, such as tagging, overstriking entries, and filtering, that increases its ability to function as a quasi-todo list as well as a text editor.
I’m not as entirely thrilled with the mobile version to be honest. I really like the desktop version. I think its one of the most fluid environments for lists of notes and simple todo lists. The type contortions on the mobile version though make it feel a bit hindered, to me. Like I said, I wish it would just derive type based on what you input. Taskpaper uses the exact same sync protocol as WriteRoom, so if you are familiar with that you already know how Taskpaper works.
So yes, try the desktop demo. That will give you a good feel for how it is different than a standard text editor.
douger and hatsuyuki, thanks for the news on TaskPaper and MyTexts. I downloaded MyTexts and will say more after I’ve tested it. TaskPaper does not come up in a search of the Apps Store, at least for iPad apps. I gather it’s an iPhone app that will run on iPad. (found it at HogBay; suddenly $30 for a writing app seems a lot!–$5 discount if you watch the screencast)
I’m interested in what douger and Amber say about working in TaskPaper. I used Hog Bay Notebook and Mori long ago and thought they were good outliners; the minimalist approach of TP left me a little cold. But on the iPad, that may well be a virtue.
Since I also own EverNote and Things, I may tinker with them awhile to see if they are useful as research/writing apps between desktop, laptop, and iPad. Both synchronize very easily.
Dear druid, thanks for trying this out. 
No need to rush the review, but I am looking forward to hearing how it measures up.
Thanks as always to my fellow bilge rat Amber for the lucid explanation. It sounds like I need to give TP a try. I have outlining already in OmniOutliner (though I haven’t used it in years) and now Pages. And I’m just not sure I need TP’s other features enough in my workflow to justify the price tag. But when I get a chance, I’ll download and test drive the demo. And I’m always happy to hear from others on the subject. thanks again!
I found Notebooks for iPad by Alfons Schmid to be the app that works best for my writing. It imports almost any file, syncs over the cloud and by wifi to my Macbook, and has an iPhone equivalent. The developer’s philosophy seems to be to offer/add on as many features as possible. To my taste, with it’s brownish theme the app lacks a bit in the aesthetics department. But as it works wonderfully this is a minor complaint.
I think amberV, as usual, has nailed it.
I believe my use of TaskPaper came from a bit of “scarcity is the mother of invention” situation. Without a tool that could fold and hoist (key aspects of outlining) on my mobile devices I tried using TP for longer stuff and behold, it worked like a great text editor.
“The iDevice version is fundamentally the same, though in my experience it is a little less elegant to work with in terms of data entry.”
Agreed. There is lot of tapping to get to edit a paragraph and that is an annoying aspect of the tool.
“It really does straddle the line between text editor and outliner, and I think that is what generates a lot of the buzz. “
…and this plasticity of use is the thing that emerges as you begin to use it more extensively. Lists turn into paragraphs, notes become scenes, quotes are rolled into text, and TP has this flexibility to move from one to the other.
Like many on these boards I’ve used OmniOutliner, it’s a very powerful product, but eventually I’m out of the app and into another because the text chunk has transformed. (I’ve also gone back from text into OO to re-sort things out at times too, but it’s the in-and-out of the app thing I’m after here) TaskPaper for me seems to move along with my evolving work, which works as far as that goes, until I need to graduate to Scrivener where the heavy duty assemblage and idea processing takes place.
“in outliner parlance would be akin to hoisting”
…which is what got me thinking about using TP as a text editor. Here was a tool that took my text flow and with a little coding (adding a full colon for headings) lets me isolate and jump to specific parts of my text. Before, I kept chunks in separate text files. Now I find myself keeping longer pieces in one file because I can manipulate them in TP with some ease – as amberV notes, with more ease in the desktop app than in the iversions.
But I think this gets to the topic: writing stuff, smaller, short clips, to be used perhaps someday in chunks is wonderful on the iPad. I used to do it just on my iPhone, first in WriteRoom for iPhone, then in TaskPaper. Because of the TP functionality of tagging and hoisting, I began to write longer stuff, and because of the seamless syncing I was keeping it in the tool longer – before making the jump to long form editing, augmentation and consolidation in Scrivener.
The fluidity of lists (like clauses), to thoughts (more like phrases) to ideas (more like paragraphs) and on to a work (like a text) coupled with my abject hatred of transcription (if I write it in my Moleskin, it will forever be there, and only there) has me capturing ideas in the iPad and then working them through to Scrivener over a rather seamless line.
(But isn’t the social aspect of all this fascinating? I mean, I go into some venues, usually filled with writer types, and if I pull out anything other than the Moleskin people look at me like I had just stolen the king’s jewels. In other venues, like web 2.0 conferences, if I don’t whip out a device that casts some kind of fluorescent glow on my face I’m banished to the back row of ballroom chairs.)
I’m a big fan of text files, as we’ve talked about on these boards before. The architecture of TP and WR is an application working against a data set of text files, rather than producing captured data as a remnant of an application (as is the case with apps like MyText and Evernote) and while that conversation gets very propeller head geeky very quickly, it gets to the heart of my work flow, and it gets to why I love Scrivener because it lets me collect all those text files I’ve written over time and assemble them into a cogent whole. I’m finding TP on the iPhone/iPad as a great tool for creating the text files.
As a very practical example (not mine, from another writer buddy) one could write chapters (or scenes) in TaskPaper as “Projects” (which means the title ends in a full colon) and then tag paragraphs (which means add an ampersand (@) with a tag, yep, it’s that easy) for characters or environment, then use either the project focus to isolate chapters, and/or the tags to see what you heroine has been up to while you were off drafting her future love interest.
Another example, this one really mine: I keep a list of stuff I need at the library…
Project = Area of interest like Literary Theory:
- Book name @bobst
- Book name, call numbers, @NYPL
- Book name, call number, @NYPL, @fogelman
Project = Another area of interest:
- Book name @bobst
- Book name @NYPL
I can search and isolate the list by project, “Lit Theory” and by location, “NYPL, not fogelman” (and get it even more complicated if I want, to the point where I’ve outsmarted myself with complexity.)
Just as Scrivener is just a bunch of index cards we are moving around, TaskPaper is just a bunch of text chunks we are moving around. It’s that simple, and that vastly complex.
I accidentally fell into using Task Paper as a front-end for Scrivener, too. A former user of Hog Bay Notebook and Mori (until it went moribund when the developer sold it to whatever the opposite of a developer is), I tried Task Paper as a simple todo list manager–buy milk, mustard pickles, new chainsaw chaps, finish September column–with outlining capabilities. Somehow, with realizing how it happened, I was writing the bones of magazine articles in it, and building a freeform database of useful quotations.
It’s deceptively powerful. That it seems to do nothing is precisely its strength.
It would be more powerful if it was able to keep notes together with tasks. Then you could move chunks around and create short texts this way.
So, playing around further I realised that some of the things I said earlier are now incorrect. I’m pretty sure it used to be that typing in syntax (like the ‘:’ on the end of a line) did nothing to change the line type, but now it does. Either Jesse fixed it, or I inadvertently changed a setting. What this means is that you can type in a line, add a colon on the end, and it becomes a “project”. If you type in a dash, and then start typing, it becomes a task.
Okay, on the matter of grouping items together: One important thing to understand with TaskPaper is that it is a hierarchal editor, just like an outliner. To associate notes with a task, they must be indented beneath you. There are two ways of accomplishing this: the first is being mindful of the fact that TaskPaper is just a text editor. To indent something, you press Tab and start typing the child. The second method is retroactive: just tap and hold on an item and then drag it to the right spot—only make sure the target indicator indents beneath the intended parent. You’ll know the drag was successful if the item is indented off of the original. Now, try dragging the parent and you should see all of the children notes disappear along with it, and when you drop, they will all be moved to where the parent is dropped.
There is one small issue remaining: with the keyboard dock you cannot start a new entry by simply pressing return. You have to tap the ‘+’ button. However, you can type naturally once in edit mode. Making a new line entry while entering data is simply a matter of pressing return.
Another neat trick, while editing you can press Shift-Tab to jump straight to the filter search.
Thanks, douger. This is very helpful; I appreciate the use of specific examples, as my inadequate brain has trouble going from abstract discussion to concrete application of an idea to my writing process. In fact, even this isn’t quite specific enough for me; clearly I need to play with the TP demo, though I’ll probably wait until I have an iPad, since I’m perfectly happy writing with Bean and SCrivener (and occasionally Pages when I need to use footnotes and comments and change tracking) on my Mac and am still having trouble seeing where TP could improve that. (Basically, my thinking is, if it’s too small to outline, I just use Bean or TextEdit. If it needs an outline, I use the Binder in Scrivener. I could use Pages if I want a real outline, I guess. I’m still trying to grasp how TP fits in between those categories (in my work at least) somehow.
Nevertheless, one more question: what happens when you import the chapters you wrote in a single, hierarchical TP document/project on your iPad into Scrivener on your Mac, via (I presume) SimpleText? I’m assuming that the value of this arrangement is that the chunks (tasks?) in TP are easily converted to chunks in a SCrivener project, yes? Because the alternative, I suppose, would be writing a bunch of separate notes in SimpleNote or WriteRoom (which is what I do on my iPhone now), and each note would become a Binder item in Scrivener. I never do that kind of long form, hierarchical writing on my iPhone, but I bet that’d change quick if I had an iPad, especially since I already have the little apple bluetooth keyboard.
Ah! That’s good. Thanks for the hint!
You guys are killing me. I just spent $38 on Tree, and JUST posted a thing about how much I like it. Then I read the TP posts and thought “Hm. I have TaskPaper. Maybe I should try it for outli… oh. And you can click command-shift-return and… oh. But it doesn’t have tabs, so… oh.”
Damn.