The L&L Blog  /  Other

Scrivener 2.0 and iPad Syncing

I have recently mentioned that Scrivener 2.0 features the ability to sync documents with Simplenote for the iPad and iPhone, and also that PlainText for the iPad works with Scrivener 2.0's new folder-syncing feature. Additionally, Notebooks for the iPad by Alfons Schmid works very well with Scrivener 2.0's new syncing features too. David has just finished putting together a video showing Scrivener 2.0's folder syncing feature in action, using PlainText and Notebooks as examples (although it also shows how you can use the feature to share documents with Word):

(I'm aware that there are some other nice Dropbox-syncing writing apps for the iPad such as Elements and IA Writer, too. At the moment however these two programs require all files to be in a single folder, whereas Scrivener's syncing places text files in a subfolder created especially to hold documents from the Scrivener project, so currently the sync feature doesn't work with Elements or IA Writer. I'll look into that, but it could get very messy and difficult to manage if all the files from different Scrivener projects were placed in the same folder, both from an organisational and technical perspective.)

Oh, and in case you missed it, here's the video David put together showing Simplenote sync:

Together, these provide some great ways of editing your Scrivener documents on the iPad or iPhone.

1 Comment

IaP

IaP  /  06 OCTOBER 2010

@MM: That's basically the gist of it. Good communication will, I fear, nearly always be required when collaborating. Even in a situation like Google Docs provides, where two people can be editing the same file at once, you need to be careful not to type into areas that they are typing. As you note, Scrivener does everything it can to avoid data loss when this happens. Snapshots are taken, and it is easy to drop a snapshot into a split with compare enabled, so if accidental double-editing does take place, it can be resolved with a little human assistance. No good way around that at this point of technological advance. Maybe in another ten years. :)

Lacking good communication, a good *passive* way to communicate would be to only sync parts of the project out, and then avoid those parts until they are done with their edits. This can be made easier with the use of collections. You can throw a bunch of files into a collection and then choose to sync that alone. That way you can avoid anything in that collection while it is "out". Otherwise, if you need/want to have the entire manuscript available to the collaborator, you'll need to just keep in touch over who is editing what. Dropbox can make this a bit easier if you have Growl installed. It is possible to see when someone is editing a file and saving it in real-time.

Add your comment here...

Keep up to date