No, wait, probably I haven’t explained my thoughts because of my poor english. First of all I love Scrivener; but I just love my iPad too, and I love the fact it gives me the opportunity to write my stuff everywhere, more easily than with a lapbook (yesterday I had my iPad in my messenger bag and I wrote a chapter sitting on a mountain meadow).
And I can manage my writing with that Pages-email-Scrivener thing, I know. I just find it quite annoying, and I would really like a more automatic way to keep my stuff synchronized. For instance, if I re-read a chapter and I change a comma, I have to re-send it. Furthermore, the novel I’m writing is based on short chapters, no scenes. If I’d be’ writing a more complex novel it would be a little more difficult send dozens of emails for any chapter…
This said, I’ll keep on writing this novel with Pages and email it to’ Scrivener 
Okay, I understand better. It sounded like you were saying you’ve started switching to a writing program you like less, because they might do something for the iPad. 
Yes, I do myself definitely get the iPad part of the equation. I like writing on mine, too. It’s probably the first thing I do every morning. I wake up and write down my dreams on the iPad. I usually do this in Simplenote, because it is really easy to get it later with Notational Velocity and move it elsewhere to wherever it needs to go. I’d consider something like that for yourself. It’s a free program, and you don’t have to worry about the comma problem because all of the Simplenote compliant programs can stay up to date with a central source. The bonus there is that Scrivener will be able to do likewise.
I guess another thing that makes it different, and why I wasn’t understanding why e-mail is annoying, is that I always used it for a last-minute transfer. I never e-mail anything to myself until I’m actually changing machines. So if things revise and change in the meantime it doesn’t matter. The e-mail stage is only there to actually move the stuff from one computer to another, and it immediately goes on living at the next station. So you could try that if you prefer not using Simplenote. After all, there’s little point in e-mailing stuff to yourself if you are still on the trip.
Ha! 
In all seriousness, I think you’ll like the sync features in Scrivener 2.0 - as long as you are happy to use Simplenote or PlainText (when it’s out), they will make it a breeze to take your documents with you or to create new ones while you are out. When David has the video done, we’ll hopefully post it before 2.0 is out to give you a taster.
Best,
Keith
P.S. This was intended to be in response straight away and has been sitting here unposted for a while - as I haven’t read the other replies yet, it may now be irrelevant. And yet here I am clicking on “Submit” regardless…
I’ve downloaded Simplenote and it seems useful. But I’m using Pages now and I will keep on with it, I don’t want get things confused! And anyway it still doesn’t work together with Scrivener, does it?
Yes, but I’m paranoic about loosing my dates so I do prefere “save” them in the email as soon as I can 
Not a bad idea to stick with what you know, while in the middle of things! You are right, Scrivener does not yet work with it, but it will. There will be back-and-forth syncing to Simplenote in the next version. This of course doesn’t help you out right now, but was second reason for suggesting you give it a shot. It’s future proof. The other reason is that it does offer a more elegant solution than Pages, since everything you write it in is automatically saved to the server and available to any other computer you hook up to your account (Notational Velocity is free, also, and a great little note-taker as well). It also has an e-mail feature so you could save out notes. The only major disadvantage, one that you will find with nearly everything except for Apple products, is a lack of rich text. There’s just no good way around that problem as of yet. Apple cheats and uses methods that would get anyone else banned from the App Store!
Also, not a bad idea. Especially with an iPad on the road, which can’t really be backed up easily.
There are a lot of things that could be discussed in there. As for the various methods I use, e-mail is one of the swiftest! Keep in mind, I still write down most of my thoughts and ideas into a notebook. With a pen.
Why? Because there is virtue in processing things. When transcribing something from longhand (or shorthand as be the case for me), it rarely ends up the way it was written down. As I type out my thoughts, I expand on them and revise them. It’s a valuable step in the process. Using methods of transferring files, like e-mail, or copy and paste, also gives you an opportunity to skim and see what is transferring as you do it, though with much less interactivity. In fact, I’m doing that right now. I’m not typing in the web browser, I’m typing in a text editor, generating BBCode from it, and pasting it into the forum.
See, I don’t just manually process things between computers, I do this all of the time between programs, too. A thought might start out as a short, one-line Inbox item in my OmniFocus database. Several times a day I go through that and process these items. Things that are ideas, not really activities, get rewritten and expanded into small files that get pasted into my archive software. If it is a new idea, I give it an ID number. From that point onward, any new idea I have in relation to that original idea, be it an expansion or a clarification, or even a complete backtrack, it makes a similar journey, ending up in its own file, and cross-referenced back to the root idea.
Periodically I go through these active root ideas one by one, and analyse their activity. Since everything is tied back to the root ID in its text content area, it’s trivial to run a search and collect everything that refers to this idea; the whole cloud of it! Has there been much added or changed about it lately? If it’s become dormant, I collect all of these individual idea-files and rewrite a summary document binding them all together into a cohesive argument or proposal and then file it away as dormant. I apply this philosophy to many areas of archival. If I look up something, I write a new entry about the fact that I looked it up, why I looked it up, and what new things I learned about the original thoughts. Now my archive has two entries about the same thing, increasing its visibility.
I do the same thing for my diary entries. They are an onion-skin of small parcels, bound together by ten-day summaries, in turn bound together by 40-day summaries, which are in turn bound together by 200-day summaries. If you can see the merit in doing this, than you can surely see the merit in looking at something more than once as it moves from computer to computer.
This continual process of recycling and processing and moving information around by hand allows ideas to grow and refine and remain living creatures in my system. It keeps my memory sharp because few things truly fade or go unnoticed.
A sync button? Boring. Static information flow is for corporations.
Time: For someone with “zen” in their username, I would have expected less adherence to the cult of speed. But in all seriousness, let’s examine the time issue.
Have you ever written anything just once? Probably not! So if you aren’t in small part doing a bit of what I outlined above, then all you are accomplishing with a “more efficient” transfer method is deferring a process you are going to have to do anyway. At some point you are going to have to go over everything you Magically Synced Globally—word by word. Why not get a head start on that, and all at the expense of a few extra minutes (if that!) of taking the time to process your thoughts by hand. I would argue that editing in bits and pieces is actually more beneficial than editing in chunks. Sure you’ll always need a big editing session at some point, but if you’ve gradually and continually picked away at it, the big session won’t be as intimidating, and your edits in whole will represent the slowly evolving equation that is your brain. They won’t be a single slice in time, or even a few, but many, and as such a more balanced perspective, less susceptible to mood and phase.
A side issue, almost, but there is a great little program for the iPhone and iPad called Zipnote, that I keep in my Dock. It’s very simple. You tap the icon, type, click send, and go on your way. All it does is e-mail the thought to yourself with an automatically time-stamped subject line. Fills in the destination address and everything else for you.
As you put, there is an app with that function for a reason.
I carry my iPad around with me at home. I’m not always sitting at my computer, thank goodness, but I do generally have the iPad within reach. Any idea I have I just put in Zipnote, or Simplenote if I want to have it available to mull over a bit. Later on I’ll collect all of that and process it as described above. Now that I have OmniFocus for the iPad, I suspect my iPad usage will more mirror the way I use my desktop in this regard. I’ll probably use Zipnote less. Just because OmniFocus has a sync doesn’t mean I won’t keep manually processing my inbox on the computer though.
Our differences here probably come from differing philosophies on data treatment. As I’ve described above, I don’t shy away from spawning lots of copies, nor do I throw away the old ones. In fact, I can’t, my archival software doesn’t let me delete. I let data build up gradually and in a vertical temporal column. Since I work in a evolving fashion like this, it’s never generated confusion for me. I also make rather heavy use of my own internal syntax for change tracking, when appropriate, and have built a system of scripts to stitch together varying alterations into a final copy.
When I’ve posted this message, it and any revision alterations I’ve generated while writing it will be dumped into my archive. All of the interim revision notes, you can’t see, they are automatically stripped out when I generate a BBCode copy.
And see, I would never trust a system like that. I don’t trust the system or myself with a single file! Way too many times in the past I’ve changed a file and regretted using Save instead of Save As. I don’t have that problem any more now that I religious versionise everything I touch, and thanks to an exhaustive and well thought out system of information capture and automatic organisation, have never run into difficulties of clutter, either.
As for killing productivity, that’s a discussion for psychologists, neurologists, and philosophers. The jury is still out on what promotes solid, sustainable productivity, and I suspect the answer is a great deal more complicated than, “Whatever works easiest”.
My two cents.
Brilliant. Your post was a pleasure to read.
Please can an MBP not be a dinosaur just yet? I’m just not ready! 
The MBP as a system, is not, nor will it ever be a dinosaur. The individual that made that statement seems to have a very myopic view of computing and may not be qualified to make classifications of that nature.
How is it that Mac sales have increased since the iPad was released then? The iPad and similar devices will not replace notebooks and desktop computers for content creation, because that is not what they are designed for. There will always be a minority of users who will insist on using the iPad in that way and whom find it meeds their needs for most such things, and that’s great for them, but most users creating content, while they might own an iPad-like device for quick notes or media consumption, will continue to need and use notebooks and proper computers, in whatever form they take in the future. So no, MBPs are most definitely not dinosaurs, any more than televisions are dinosaurs now that we can watch films on the iPad, or any more than the car made the bike a dinosaur, or drawing programs made pencil and paper dinosaurs, or the PSP made the PlayStation a dinosaur, or the toaster made the grill a dinosaur, or… Well, you get the idea.
Best,
Keith
Bit of a Cetaceousesqe-ish thread init? 
If laptops were dinosaurs, iPad users wouldn’t care about synchronization – they’d have everything they need right there.
Given all the discussion about ways to move data between the iPad and other tools, that’s clearly not the case. Even the iPad-philes – of which I am one – see it as an adjunct, not a sole system.
Katherine
Keith said…
I think it would be good to kill or freeze this thread, and also its latest iteration, for Scrivener on iOS 4 (as though that were a new topic).
Create a section on the forum: TOPICS NO LONGER ACTIVE. Any efforts to circumvent, just erase.
Otherwise, noobs are never, ever going to learn to:
Read the Board Index.
Run a Search.
Read the Web site, Help file, FAQ, Tutorial…
Before starting a new thread, not once, but twice.
8 posts. Many threads on this subject. Relatively superior air. Grandiose statements intended to make other feel that you “have a finger on the pulse” of computing.
Sounds like a noob to me.
If you had spent any time looking at resources here you would know the following:
- There is only one developer behind scrivener. Keith Blount.
- Druid is a rabid iPad fan.
- This iPad question has been beaten to death. KB (Keith Blount’s handle; relate to #1 above) has done much of the beating.
Say what you will, your zen seems more monkey than monk.