July 20: Scrivener for IOS comes out
July 22: I quit my day job!
August and September: I will travel to Europe with iPad but no laptop, and will be able to write anywhere and everywhere while my husband is concertizing. A new phase of life begins for me and Scrivener comes to IOS at exactly the right moment! Thanks, Lit and Latte!
Sorry, mods, I thought this was being entered in a new category but I see it ended up in Bug Hunt. Can you move it?
The iOS version of Scrivener will liberate me from carrying a laptop at all. I made the transition to the 12.9" iPad Pro very skeptically. I forced myself to go Mac-less on a recent two week trip to central Africa to see if I really could use it as a true Pro work machine. In my notes, the only real headache was not having Scrivener (which made me remember why I hate Word so much). I’ve always travelled with a Macbook Pro and 9.7" iPad. It seems trite, but not having to carry the Macbook Pro, power brick and adapters makes a huge difference on global travel. Afterward, I noticed I had one of those “brain switches” that happens when you change OS. Each one is a different way of thinking and the last time I had one was when I abandoned Windows for good about 10 years ago. The Scrivener app icon will replace my Facebook app icon on my home screen on Wednesday (that’s another PITA that can go in the trash can).
I use Scrivener to write essays and take notes for classes at university. Hopefully scrivener for iOS allows me the luxury to write my essays on an iPod with an external Bluetooth keyboard. I have been using Microsoft Word which has a nice iOS port; however it has its shortcomings which I’m hoping Scrivener won’t have. Anyways, iOS scriv may dramatically lighten the load of not having to carry my seven year old MacBook from class to class. My hope is there is some sort of night mode feature as that makes things easier on my eyes to type out writings. We’ll have to wait and see.
There’s no night mode, just to get that out of the way. Unfortunately iOS’s text system doesn’t have the feature the Mac text system has of being able to add a temporary override text colour so that you can have a dark background colour and light text colour without changing the actual text. Plain text apps can add a “dark mode”, but not rich text app such as Scriv. If Apple enhances TextKit to add the features the Mac version has in the future we’ll be able to look at it again, though.
Well that kinda sucks. Ah well, I’ll just invert the colours of the whole screen through the accessibility settings; it’s not ideal, but it’ll have to do.
With no full screen mode and no night mode I do sincerely hope the experience of of using your app is better than using the stock apple notes app. Microsoft Word’s iOS port has a text reflow mode that may be the equivalent to full screen and perhaps colours could be changed this way.
But b4 I make anymore judgements I shall wait till the product actually comes our.
By the way you can set up invert colours to triple-press on the home button, using the “Accessibility Shortcut” option at the very bottom of the General: Accessibility pane.
I just spent an entire week at a conference using an iPad Mini w/external Zagg keyboard and iOS Scrivener (beta) as my primary system. It’s the first device I’ve found that’s non-intrusive enough to replace paper for interviewing, and I’ve been using the combination for general notetaking for several months.
I took my MBA along as a backup, but barely used it.
Katherine
I do not know what you mean by “no full screen”. Yes, I suppose using the on screen keyboard precludes “full screen”, but using an external keyboard, all you have to see except a narrow header and footer is just your text. To me that’s “full screen” enough.
By full-screen I mean just that. The entire screen devoted entirely to what your writing; no sidebar, no status bar, no top label. Just the text. The iOS port of MS Word, Adobe Reader for iOS have this feature of text reflow and that’s the closest thing to full-screen mode I can think of that Scrivener can possibly use. On an iPad this may not be a hindrance as the screen is big to allow for other things; however, on an iPod on iPhone, the screen is tiny and thus a mode that enables full-screen mode would be nice as there really isn’t much screen real-estate to begin with, what have you.
This is very handy AmberV, thanks so much. Now I can use Scrivener with ease.
Oh man, three more days…by the way Keith – or whoever else that can answer this – what time of the day, will the app get released on the app store?
Full screen mode in Scrivener would be pretty useless if you couldn’t access the formatting tools. It’s as full screen as makes sense for Scrivener. I do recommend not prejudging before it’s out. If you prefer Notes, though, you should just use that…
It will be out whenever I feel like pressing the button. 
Katherine - you managed to get a Zagg keyboard? Blimey! I’m shocked. Those guys absolutely suck as far as I’m concerned. I preordered a Zagg keyboard for my iPad Pro 9.7" in April. They accidentally cancelled my order without telling me because it has been on preorder “too long”. So I reordered, they said it would be out within days, and it took a month to go out. Then it never arrived. So they promised to send out another one, but that would take a couple of weeks to go out and then another couple of weeks to arrive - but it would be sent no later than 20th June. It was never sent out. After chasing them up, they told me they are having stock problems and it will now get sent out in late July. But they still can’t provide me with a tracking number. So maybe I’ll finally receive it in August; maybe not. I hope the keyboard is nice, because the company is terrible at actually delivering… Grumble, grumble.
It would be neat if you could tell us a time (I don’t maybe even put a timer for your website like it’s some new year’s countdown). Save us all the trouble of needlessly checking the app store.
Don’t want to derail the thread, but I got a Brydgeair keyboard for my original iPad Air, 2 years ago or something.
It’s nice, it has a nice design and really feels a lot like a smaller Macbook keyboard. It’s not really cheap though.
To answer the OP’s question: well, I don’t think a Macbook Air is particularly heavy (especially since, because of its great battery, you don’t need to take a charger too), but an iPad Air with a keyboard in a small bag still beats it. If Scrivener on iOS works well enough (and it looks like it does), it will replace my Macbook Air for a lot of trips to the center of town. It’s also nice that, unlike my Macbook Air 13", I have a high quality screen with a lot of my iBooks saved on it (which I don’t have room for on the Macbook Air) and I have my playlists of iTunes of the projects I’m working on (to give me inspiration of writing) offline available on the iPad, so I think I’ll be good to go.
Also, like yesterday evening, I take the iPad to bed, and in the evening, reading, I get some ideas. Now I had to scramble them down in Notes, to copy them the next day to Scrivener. I am really looking forward to saying goodbye to that.
I am always getting more ideas for adding to my story that I started three years ago.
Scrivener is on all of my computers (2 Macs, 1 Windows) and now I hear that it’s coming to IOS!!
The biggest challenge for me other than typing has been keeping the stories synced between devices through dropbox.
Parts of this manuscript have disappeared over the syncing prior to this version 2.8 and I am praying that it will now work correclty. I had started saving things in my dropbox years ago since the manuscripts are so important.
Now with an IOS version that hopefully plays well with dropbox, I can add ideas, notes and more to the story from my 6+ anywhere on Earth.
Too poor to buy a new iPad for now and my original one is still used as a paperweight.
You think that’s bad? I ordered a WayTools TextBlade for my iPad a whole year ago, and I’m still waiting!
Yikes! Sorry to hear that.
I walked into Best Buy and played with the demo keyboard they had on display. Then took a box to the cash register, waited while they ran my credit card, and walked out with the box under my arm.
Katherine
What will you do with Scrivener for IOS that you couldn’t do before?
Get on with my life.
No, seriously. I’ve been stymied by indecision about my choice of platform (Mac vs Linux) and workflow (Scrivener vs pure Markdown). I’m leaning back to Apple (Linux desktop has been a disappointment for writing), but don’t really want to buy a current laptop - those prices (AUD) are criminal for such out-dated hardware. Scrivener for iOS means I’ll have a portable writing set up with my iPad mini that seamlessly works with my projects.
What will you do with Scrivener for IOS that you couldn’t do before?
Rationalize the purchase of an iPad.
Write while driving, of course.
Well… I have a full-time job, a preschooler, a webcomic (which I script in Scrivener), a novel, a chronic pain condition, and no laptop (just couldn’t justify something that could become a very expensive brick via a single spilled sippy cup). Pretty much every minute when I have no immediate demands and a functional brain needs to be potential writing time. Stuck at the doctor’s office? Write. At the park and kidlet has found a friend with a ball? Write. Pasta’s on to boil? Write. I can use Evernote… but a bad experience with an unsynced note and a keyboard-pounding toddler wiping out an hour’s worth of work has made me gunshy: Evernote, as tech support very sympathetically and nicely explained, isn’t really set up for what I’m trying to do with it. And with Evernote and everything else I have to transfer my work to Scrivener later on anyway.
I have been haunting this site for the past year at least waiting for the iOS version because it’s just going to make my life so much easier and free up more of those precious, precious minutes. Wednesday can’t come fast enough!
A very good friend of mine in China was the first person I knew who had an iPhone. I asked her what she thought of it. She said it was good, but it was a bit inconvenient for texting while driving! I was also much later being driven at 120 Kph along a busy and pot-holed motorway in Sichuan Province when the driver was completely focussed on the screen of his tablet, trying to find the music he wanted to play.
God help us if they start using Scrivener while driving!
Mark