Anyone doing their writing on Apple’s new and large-screened iPhone 6 Plus or the smaller iPhone 6? Someone named Yuvi Zalkow is quite happy with the experience and has written about it. Since he uses Scrivener, I suspect he’ll be even happier when Scrivener for iOS comes out:
If you’re using either iPhone or perhaps one of the large-screen Android smartphones, you might share your experience. Beta-testers might also want to share what they can of Scrivener running on various models of iPhones and iPads.
Alas, my budget won’t stretch to a new iPhone, although I am delighted with the totally unlocked Verizon iPhone 5 I bought used and the lower rates of a PagePlus, a Verizon reseller. Where I live, no other cellular company has decent coverage.
–Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Auburn, AL
P.S. He complains about the iPhone 6 Plus being too big for a pant pocket and not liking the hassle of a ‘man purse.’ He might do what I’ve done with my iPhone 5 and hang it in a pouch from around my neck. If you’re a guy, you can easily slip it under your shirt (or whatever), so it’s out of sight. I’ve made my own from scraps of cloth, but the pouches that some travelers use for their passports etc will do as well.
I would love man purses return of fashion. They are incredibly handy. I have a beautiful, hand-made leather one, that I only use sporadically. Would I feel confident carrying it, it would solve a lot of problems with modern technological gadgets.
Why are women allowed to use their purse, and men are not? Shouldn’t we pretend rights equality?
All this egalitarian levelling of the man-woman playing field is doomed to failure. I won’t give you a verbatim account of my wife’s verbal diatribe, when I wear her knickers. Nor will I repeat her response to me offering to let her wear my jockey-shorts and y-fronts.! 'snot gonna work.
Vic-K (paragon of sartorial trailblazing trend-setting)
Pockets are handier. At least two in ones trousers (with maybe another one or two at the rear). Then there’s the jacket; a suit has four or five. And a coat probably has at least two; my normal coat, a lightweight waterproof, has six pockets. And then there are the shirts with a breast pocket. No need for a man-bag at all. Easy to slip that iPhone into one of the many carrying devices about your person.
There are a number of reasons why I like being a guy not a gal and among them are:
Lots of pockets.
Clothes that looser, especially pants.
No need to carry a purse-like thingie because those tight pants have so few pockets. Purses are too easy to forget. If I carry something, I want it to be a whopping big backpack.
I recall an all-day date I once had to Six Flags over Texas. When I picked my date, a very cute nurse, she gave me her apartment keys to carry because she had no pockets in her skirt. Later that day, I discovered that she didn’t have a wallet or a penny of money with her either. She was totally dependent on me to get her there and back without a hitch.
As a guy, I can’t imagine myself going out that unprepared for eventualities.
Don’t forget this post is about the advantages or disadvantages of writing on big-screen iPhones.
I write with my iPhone or rather I dictate on it using Siri. But this only happens on the few occasions when I’m completely alone. Can’t have people over hearing the steamy content of my latest academic paper or the boring narrative of my E L James beating novel.
So now that we’ve flogged the margins of this topic . . . I’ve been hanging fire with an ancient flip-phone and eschewing an iPad because, without Scrivener for iOS, what’s the point? But with Scrivener for iOS peering around the doorjamb and clearing its throat, almost (we hear) ready to go on-stage, how about this writing-on-the-iPhone business?
For me, the sole purpose of iOS Scrivener is to capture all those random thoughts and snippets that now get scribbled in a pocket notebook or a pocketful of index cards or the marinara-stained corner of a napkin, eventually transferred to Scrivener (or lost, or forgotten). I thought an iPad would be the lobster’s waistcoat as an external input device, but after fiddling with an iPad and watching my wife fiddle with hers, they seem far too unportable to be always at hand–even a Mini like my wife’s. An iPhone, on the other hand, can always be as close as your pocket: Clack-clack-clack, Thought Captured. Snip-snip-snap, Snippet pilfered. Even Squint, Click, Foom: photograph taken.
I’m sure I’m missing something, coming at this as I am from the perspective of a flip-phone Luddite who rarely uses it for anything except to ask my wife which one of these things I’m supposed to buy at the market, or to tell Jennifer at Accounts Service just where she can stuff her credit card offer.
I read the articles mentioned above, but is anyone on the board successfully using an iPhone as an ancillary writing device?
Yes. Whenever I need to write and I have only the tiny guy with me (although the 6 plus can no longer be called a tiny guy. It’s like, a mini mini ipad!) Even made changes with track changes and comments in a Word file on my 6 (not plus)! BTW, you don’t need to wait for iScriv to come out to use the device. There’s plenty of text editors working really well on iPhone that can integrate what you do on Scrivener, as long as you sync plain text in Dropbox
Sounds like a plan, then. Is the 6 large enough for the screen to be truly usable for a writer/reader? The 6 plus seems awfully unportable, particularly in T-shirt season. I assume that Thoreau’s advice to beware all enterprises that require new clothes applies equally to technology.
If you just want to capture random thoughts and eventually transfer them to Scrivener, why do you need an iOS version of Scrivener? I do it all the time, using Drafts 4 http://agiletortoise.com/drafts/index.html.
Ping! New thought! Grab the iPhone or iPad, open Drafts 4, fire away, and when done, I just send it to the Scrivener Scratch Pad using one of the many Actions available for Drafts 4. Then, when I am sitting with my Mac and working with Scrivener, I just open the Scratch Pad and copy/paste the stuff into the right project/chapter/page.
I actually use Drafts 4 for entering stuff in the same way into Evernote, Wunderlist, 2Do, writing mail, etc., all sorts of stuff. It has become my general purpose scribbling-on-the-iPhone-or-iPad app. In the Action directory there are “actions” you can use to connect Drafts 4 to a lot of other apps. http://drafts4-actions.agiletortoise.com
Well, I want to do more than simply capture random thoughts, though that’s a big part of it. I want to be able to work on a string of paragraphs all day on the desktop and then, when the solution to their awkward flaw arrives in flash of light at two in the morning, I want to fix the paragraph string itself, and not simply make notes on index cards or a notebook or a different piece of software about how I’d fix them if I was downstairs in the office, with the master file open. After 40 years I’m hard-wired to work this way, and tried various technological solutions from a Radio Shack Model 100 to a Newton 2000, but none provided the level of portability of, say, an iPhone–only Dick Tracy and the crew of the Enterprise had them back in those days–and none allowed me to work on exactly the same files that were on my desktop; without the context of the text before and after, it’s hard to tell whether your epiphany is a brilliant solution, or numb as a bucket of thumbs.
I either go downstairs to my home office or grab my iPad and use VNC to get a virtual desktop. Both give me access to my prime Scrivener setup. (I could grab my iPhone and use VNC from that but my Mac has a 22" HDMI screen and the iPhone screen simply isn’t large enough to use.) Hopefully Scrivener for iOS will make it to market soon then we can each lay in our beds or sit at our desks and work no matter what.
I’m sorry for making my first post here instead of introducing myself, but I am absolutely desperate right now.
I’ve been using Scrivener on my Mac for several months now. Maybe a year, I’m not sure. I really love using it on my Mac, but I cannot take my Macbook everywhere with me, and I certainly cannot take it to work.
I also have an iPad, and whenever I go out to Barnes & Noble or wherever, I use the app Textilus to write scenes for my books. For those that do not know, Textilus is an iPad only app that supports the creation and editing of RTF documents.
I recently got an iPhone 6 Plus and I would really, really like to use it to write while at work (on lunch, of course) but none of the apps I have work as well as Textilus. Either they don’t support keyboard shortcuts (I use an external keyboard the phone, and cmd+i for italics, for example, doesn’t work in any of the apps I have used) or they don’t support RTF. I just tried creating a plain text file in my Dropbox sync folder with some Markdown formatting and when I synced Scrivener, the formatting was not saved. I really need to be able to do italics and I don’t have the patience or time to go through everything I write and apply formatting to it. I could try selecting the text on the phone and using the on-screen toolbars, but using the keyboard shortcuts is much faster.
I haven’t tried it extensively enough to know if it will suit your needs, but after a long search a month or two ago, I did download an iPhone app called Cool Writer, which has RTF support and syncs to Dropbox. I was a little apprehensive at first, as I hadn’t heard of it, and I was worried it might be a little sketchy, but it seems to work in the little that I’ve used it.
I’m using an iPhone 6, so I can’t speak to how it works with the Plus, either.
Nor will I repeat her response to me offering to let her wear my jockey-shorts and y-fronts.! 'snot gonna work.
