I own, for some month now, a nice and quick Android tablet. It replaces most of the time my much heavier and old laptop for writing on the road. And because I’m much more mobile now, with longer battery power, I chose to write not at my desk on four of seven days.
I still like to structure and organize my writing projects in Scrivener, but switching between mobile and Linux PC is getting more and more tedious with every day.
I tend to forget to export the current text from Scrivener, before rushing out oft the house and I’m then stuck with an obsolete state of my work on the tablet. Forcing me to recall the current state roughly and having to do more editing and cleanup when I’m putting the text written mobile together with the text I already have. Importing everything back into Scrivener is also just boring, draining work a computer could do better.
Short: I would need folder sync. I’m not the person that will happily do repetitive work that a computer can do much better for an extended time and I won’t buy a Mac because I need a single feature. It wouldn’t be in the budget anyway. And I’m not willing to wait another year or longer for this feature.
It would be great if there is hope for a 3.x beta in the first half of 2016 or if I need to look inevitable for a full Scrivener replacement. The current situation seriously hinders my workflow and I don’t have any time and energy to spend on unhelpful software.
Pretty sure that KB and folks know how to post more specific information when they’re ready to do so.
I know that if I ran a business and had a support forum and I told my customers multiple times that I wasn’t giving out ETAs, getting constant requests for ETAs would probably start making me think less of my customers.
But I don’t run a business, and KB and folks are probably much better people than I am.
Here’s a workaround I have found (though I’m not sure it would work in Linux). I use the google drive for PC app, which puts a folder on your computer into which I always save my Scrivener folders. All auto saves go there (and I also put my backups there, since I’m paranoid about a fire or something destroying my home computer and all my backups). Then every time I close Scrivener, it automatically is saved there and accessible to me via my tablet and laptop. The only downside is that I must make sure I have data access and that Google drive syncs to my current device BEFORE I open Scrivener. Otherwise it will open the last version I had on the current device and I have to go to the last backup.
I imagine this would work with Dropbox or other similar cloud storage services as well.
Actually, I think it works more reliably with Dropbox or Cubby … people have suffered badly corrupted Scrivener projects with Google Drive, and for a long time there was a warning out about using it for active projects … but Google may have improved it since then. Whether you use that or Dropbox or Cubby, pilot error—not giving time for the synchronisation in either direction to complete before switching off or before opening the project again—is the biggest risk.
xiamenese, now you’re making me paranoid! I’ve never had trouble with Google Drive, but I might just install Dropbox locally (and try to remember my password…argh) and use it to store the backups, You know, just in case…
