With all the ramblings about porting Scrivener to the iPad I feel that I must contribute to the discussion.
I love Scrivener. I suspect I will love the iPad. Yet I do not want to see Scrivener rewritten for the iPad.
From a user experience point of view I think a port doesn’t make sense.
What does make sense, from a needs analysis point of view, is the ability to send my manuscript from Scrivener to my iPad so that I can review it on a beautiful paper looking UI just as we saw in Job’s keynote.
This way the app serves the need to review it as if it were a printed book. The ability to make notes and highlights etc. that would then show up back in my Scrivener doc would be just wonderful.
I work in User Experience and this to me, using all the methods that I know of, makes the most sense.
That’s an interesting idea, and unless Apple does something incredibly stupid with their ebook reader, Scrivener 2 should be able to generate ebooks for the iPad which can be read in iBook. This could be done now, too, but requires a little work-around and third-party apps to turn output into an ePub. That will be streamlined into a dedicated exporter in the future.
So, unless Apple makes it impossible to load your own ePub books onto the device (which if it is anything like movies and music, should be possible), that would be a nice way to proof your work.
Now, going back the other way could be more dicey. I don’t recall Jobs going over any annotation and highlighting features in their book reading software (though if there is none, I’m sure it will appear shortly after release due to outcry). But, if it is anything like any other e-reader to date, getting annotations out of the device/book/etc is going to be a huge hassle, if not just outright impossible.
I hope they lead the way on that front. The possibilities for a portable device that can also serve as a study platform with heavy-duty commentation abilities on a split screen while reading books is something the market has yet to see, even on desktops, really. Nothing comes close to a canary pad and a hardback, yet.