Many thanks for reply. Sitrep received and totally understood.
(thanks also druid for those suggestions, I’ll take a shufti.)
I just posted this on druid’s “iPad as a research tool” thread but you might want to look into these apps for the iPad: iTeleport for iPad @ 19.99 Euro/14.99 GBP or LogMeIn Ignition @ 23.99 Euro/17.99 GBP (I had links here but they aren’t displaying properly).
Either allows you to remotely access your iMac/MBA/MBP & work directly on it. Might be an alternative to buying a Slate, leaving your manuscript on your primary device. AND you can even work directly in Scrivener!!
I write all first drafts of feature scripts and fiction in Scrivener for all the obvious reasons, then switch to Final Draft and Pages respectively for polish. Until the last two weeks.
Using a case that has a handy backstand and the Apple Mini Bluetooth keyboard, my ‘day pack’ is so greatly reduced that it’s like I’m not lugging anything. And I’m reading books and watching the latest episodes on the same device as well.
After just two weeks of usage, I think the iPad has been slightly overestimated as a ‘gadget’, but simultaneously underestimated as a ‘productive’ tool. That is, by the people that don’t have one. Because if you look in the App Store, it’s quite a different list compared to iPhone apps: Productivity apps (and news/media readers/viewers) are in the lead, instead of games.
And if you have a very mobile workday - meeting producers in the morning, directors in the afternoon, it sure is very handy not to have the laptop bulk to carry. And I have a MacBook Air, but the iPad is so much lighter.
Only problem is I don’t have Scrivener on it. I have Scripts Pro, which is compatible with Final Draft (and Celtx, if you don’t want to shell out) and Pages which compatible with…
So I export scenes from my Scrivener binder in .fdx format and import them over wifi or Dropbox to Scripts Pro. It’s just wonderful to sit down in a café or anywhere and start tapping away on the iPad - it lends itself extremely well to writing. I thought the screen would be too small, but the aspect ratio and the fact that you don’t have any interface - just the text (not unlike full screen view in Scrivener) makes it work really well.
And if you don’t want to pay for the Apple Bluetooth keyboard, just buy the Camera Connection Kit, and the USB adapter in that will make any USB keyboard work on the iPad.
So my problem now is that the iPad is so great as a ‘traveller’s typewriter’ that it’s disrupting my former workflow a bit. Because without Scrivener on the iPad, it’s a lot of hassle with the files in and out of Scrivener on the Mac. And now when Final Draft as an app in the making, I might have to go back to using FD from start to finish.
But I don’t w a n t to do that. I love Scrivener - it’s much more intuitive than any other writing app, especially for the early, more creative stages. The same stages that the iPad is good for, since it’s like a sketch pad and you can always have it with you. Especially good in story meetings.
At the same time, it’s difficult to have an app in one’s workflow that isn’t compatible with that flow. If FD has an app, and Scrivener doesn’t it might not be worth the while for me to upgrade to 2.0 of Scrivener, because I will start to use it less the more I write daily on the iPad.
Also, I think there is only going to be more and more productivity apps - especially from those who make them for the desktop. Already musicians have stuff compatible with Logic and ProTools. And with the Camera Connection Kit and the iPads ability to read RAW files, there will be light versions of Lightroom 
and the likes.
Especially when os4 come to the pad in September and gives us multitasking and file sharing/system.
Having said that, I would absolutely contribute to any collection of funds for coding. Because Scrivener on the iPad would not only be good for people like me, it would be a better writing app than Pages and the likes for most people!
This thread is dead, because Scrivener ain’t gonna happen on the iPad, at least not soon. Come on over to “iPad as a research/writing tool” where we’re reviewing apps and discussing workflow issues. You have a lot to add. Maybe you could repost some of this comment there. Thanks!
I have one. And when it comes to productivity… It has renewed my appreciation of my MacBook.
Fair enough - I’m certainly not trying to bend anyone’s arm into buying Scrivener. If it doesn’t fit your workflow you would certainly be better off going with a different solution.
It’s worth remembering that there is no rich text system available to developers on the iPad, and won’t be for at least another year (Apple used private APIs to create Pages). This may not be a concern to scriptwriters, but Scrivener isn’t just a scriptwriting program. It’s also worth bearing in mind that the iPad just is not capable of doing the main things Scrivener does. Other than lack of rich text, it doesn’t have the equivalent of the outline views used pervasively throughout Scrivener. Scrivener on the iPad would be a different beast altogether, but the beast I created is the one I want.
Things an iPad version couldn’t do:
• Create, edit or maintain rich text (all bold, highlighting, italics, line spacing etc would be destroyed going back and forth between the two)
• (Thus no comments or footnotes.)
• Have adjustable split views.
• The interface would need to be entirely different to fit the iOS screen design.
• Probably no “Research” folder owing to memory and disk space concerns.
• It would not be able to support the .scriv file format.
• No outliner or hierarchical view on the iPad means this would need designing from the ground up and probably could not be synced with another outliner or corkboard view.
• You would never be able to see as many synopses on the iPad because of the iOS screen size restrictions.
• And inspector view wouldn’t really work in the iPad context for various reasons.
When you start breaking it down, some of the core things I built Scrivener for - Edit Scrivenings, corkboard and outliner integration, the ability to assign synopses and view them alongside documents or alongside one another to get an overview of the whole, the ability to view research documents next to your writing - would have to be severely compromised on the iPad. The iPad is a completely different device to a traditional computer, and it therefore probably needs a different solution for these sorts of things. You just cannot take Scrivener’s interface and capabilities and plonk them on the iPad.
Scrivener for the iPad is not ruled out, not at all. In the future we may look into what a solution on the iPad would really entail. But really, if users prefer using the iPad for their writing then I guess they don’t need Scrivener in the first place, given that Scrivener really is a desktop/laptop solution, and requires something with the power of OS X or Windows to run it.
Ultimately, although Scrivener is a commercial concern, it’s also the tool I use and love myself, so I’m not prepared to abandon it for months on end only to provide a compromised version that can’t do all the things I designed it for, just because a certain proportion of users find themselves better served by the iPad. My priority has to be existing and future Mac customers. My philosophy has always been that I don’t want to try to persuade people to use Scrivener who don’t really need it; and if you can do all of your writing on such a stripped-down OS as iOS, which just isn’t capable of doing all the things Scrivener does, then you probably don’t really need Scrivener in the same way that I do and did when I created it. I created Scrivener because I needed it, because I’m a messy writer and wanted something with the various tools it has; if you can do all of your writing in iOS then I certainly envy you, but I never would have developed Scrivener on such a device in the first place. (And those who believe the iPad is capable of doing all the things Scrivener does have probably over-estimated the iPad’s capabilities - iOS is not an OS X replacement.)
On the other hand, although I just don’t like the iPad for content production (I like the device itself, I just cannot imagine ever writing extensively on it), I do understand why some users would want to compose on it while out and about and away from their computers. For those, as I’ve said elsewhere, Scrivener 2.0 will come with Simplenote sync for the editing and creation of simple documents while on the go. This probably isn’t very helpful to scriptwriters though.
So: any putative future version of Scrivener-for-iPad (not ruled out, not in the works) would not be complete Scrivener solution, no matter what - for the reasons given above - and a desktop version would always be the hub.)
I hope this all makes sense. I’m not being awkward and have nothing against the iPad per se, but if some users decide to abandon Scrivener or not to upgrade because they are moving to the iPad, I can do no more about that than I can about users who have decided to move to Windows or Linux.
Good luck with whatever solution you choose!
All the best,
Keith
P.S. I’d also say that it’s telling what applications won the Apple Design Awards - not a single productivity app.
The only “iPad-backend” that would make sense I can imagine would be a tool to help proofreading. The workflow would be like this:
- You write and re-write on your work (novel or something else) in Scrivener as usual.
- You compile it unto the iPad.
- There your work-in-progress appears as a beautiful ebook.
- You leave your desk, take your iPad to your couch, sit down there and read what you have written. Due to the changed shape in which it appears, you suddenly see a lot of possibilities to improve what you have written. Whenever you stumble across a word that’s not right and you likle to change, a sentence you want to delete, or whenever you like to make an annotation, you just do it in the “book” you are reading.
- When you’re done, you somehow tunnel back all your annotations into Scrivener, where all corrections, deletions, annotation simply pop up as if you made it there.
- Proceed from point 1 until deadline arrives…
If this workflow would be possible, I’d buy an iPad the same day. But I doubt seriously this will ever happen in my lifetime.
The trouble would be getting the notes back in. With Scrivener 2.0 you can export to epub and therefore view your work in iBooks easily enough, but there isn’t any way to take notes and have said nonexistent notes come back into Scrivener.
Best,
Keith
re taking notes on iPad … I’d say EverNote. It works great on iPod Touch… I’m using it for all kinds of things. With multitasking it should work. Wondering if EverNote opens ePub… hmmm should go check.
Notes will sync with Simplenote, as I say. No plans for Evernote right now, as that works in the opposite direction - Simplenote sync will make it easy to take notes from a Scrivener project to the iPad and then have them back in the Scrivener project again when you return to your computer.
Best,
Keith
Actually, that sounds ideal to me. I don’t need to corkboard or adjustable split views or all manner of fonts and styles (beyond the basics). I think an app like this might be viable simply as a single-chapter viewer. If you could manage multiple chapters in the left pane, and writing area on the right (a la Simplenote), even better. But much more than that would be overkill. “On the go” should be the aim, not feature-by-feature parity (which would drive any developer bonkers!). This plus a painless sync back to the Scrivener hub on the Mac.
So, yes, I’d definitely be interested in something like this. Scrivener Lite, I’d buy that.
That’s the cutest avatar on the planet, by the way.
Scrivener 2.0 will in fact have Simplenote sync, so you will be quite well served for this sort of basic editing until we can explore iPad possibilities in more depth.
Best,
Keith
And Hog Bay’s PlainText app (which I just saw) is looking exactly like the app I was describing. All it needs (yeah, there’s always the clause) is bold and italic.
Ha, you won’t be seeing that in many iPad apps for the next year or two - even any putative Scrivener-for-iPad wouldn’t have bold or italics. This is entirely down to Apple not making rich text capabilities available on the iPad. They’ve used private APIs to achieve it with Pages; Office2 HD have managed it, but goodness knows how; but I doubt you’ll see rich text apps coming from other developers for some time.
Scrivener 2.0 should also be able to sync with Hog Bay’s PlainText, though.
Best,
Keith
If it had bold and italics, it wouldn’t really be called PlainText then, anyway. 
Amazing. And I know I shouldn’t have expected as much from an app called “PlainText.” Still, Apple’s is a frustrating omission for those of us who want to do more than write Notes, but who have no use for wrapping text around a giraffe’s neck.
I remember in the early 1980s when I got my second computer, an Apple IIe, capable of displaying both upper and lower case letters. It seemed like a real feat then, just as API-enabled RTF support will be (hopefully) in upcoming iterations of iOS. Until then I may have to notate italics thusly.
I know you’re not considering developing one for iPad/iPhone 4 right now… but I’d buy it if you produced it. In a heartbeat.
I was out and about the other day, had an idea for a project I’m working on. It would have been wonderful to just whip out my iPhone and go. I actually had it out of my pocket before I remembered that the best I could do was WriteRoom.
In 2.0 you’ll be able to add a note in Simplenote or Hog Bay’s PlainText and have it import or sync with your Scrivener project really easily.
In the meantime, you can of course just use a notepad or e-mail yourself your ideas - I know many people think Copy and Paste is akin to using a mangle these days, but it does still work.
Great quote!
How about an iPad/iPhone version that would work in conjunction with another app, such as Documents to Go?
I was thinking of getting a netbook running linux for writing portability, then I got hooked on Scrivener and am reluctantly considering a used Macbook Air. I can’t see doing lots of writing on an iPad, but my Dad has one and it’s certainly portable maybe for light editing or using with a keyboard.
I currently use Documents to Go for my iPhone and I love being able to keep all my writing files on my phone. It’s just a matter of exporting my Scrivener files to .doc format and the folder they are in automatically syncs to my phone. I certainly can’t use the phone for writing or editing, but it’s really handy to have that list of characters or draft of the last chapter I’ve been working on if, for instance, I’m sitting in a doctor’s waiting room and want to brainstorm or plan ahead. I’d love to be able to push a button and sync all my Scrivener files to my phone without converting individually, but I understand the challenges involved. But if it would build upon an already existing app–Documents to Go or something similar–would that make it more doable? I might even consider an iPad intead of a Macbook air if I felt I could use it for that. I still think Apple missed the boat not making a netbook, though. It’s hard to get excited about a device that is basically a bigger version of my phone without the phone part.