sync enhancements

[beru]

currently, I use folder sync for IA Writer sync and Simplenote sync for some notes.

so in simplenote sync I ALWAYS have to select another folder than "Manuscript" and that is cumbersome.
I guess one has to be greatfull that sync is possible, it is just 10 years since year 2000 after all, but somewhat improved sync would not hurt...

[KB]

Sync works well. I'm not really sure what your problem is - perhaps you could explain better?

[MimeticMouton]

Hi Beru,

Are you talking about needing to switch the folder for "import selected documents into" from "Draft" (or "Manuscript") to "Research" in the dropdown box during Step 2 of the SimpleNote sync? I see what you're saying--it doesn't appear to remember the settings from your previous sync but always reverts to Draft.

[KB]

Ah, right, thank you MimeticMouton. That would be a bug - which exist, even ten years after 2000.
Best,
Keith

[beru]

yeah, that is what i was referring to, would be good if that setting could be remembered.

[beru]

and another problem is the number of folders possible, which seems to be equal to 1.

so text in several binder folders cannot be synced with simplenotes currently (character notes, general notes, ideas, settings, reminders etc.)

[KB]

I've already explained that your first gripe - the folder not being remembered - is a bug already fixed for the release version next week.

As for your "another problem", I'm not sure what you mean - Simplenote doesn't have any folders. Everything in Simplenote is one big list of documents. So that's a limitation of Simplenote, not Scrivener.

Seriously, these sync features have been thought about long and hard by both myself and Ioa. The limitations you are running into are limitations of the iPad, not Scrivener. Several iPad apps (such as iA Writer and Elements) sync all their documents into a single folder, which wouldn't work with different Scrivener projects; all such iPad apps are plain text; and Simplenote just stores everything in one long list.

Scrivener cannot be expected to make other programs do things they cannot do.

I'm not sure what you mean about text from several binder folders not being able to be synced with Simplenote though. When you sync with Simplenote, Scrivener allows you to choose to sync any text document in your project.

Have you tried referring to the documentation or clicking on the purple "?" button in the Simplenote sync sheet itself (which gives a full explanation of how to use the feature)?

[MimeticMouton]

As Keith said, you can export from Scrivener to Simplenote (or wherever) text from anywhere in the Binder; when you edit them in Simplenote and sync the back, they'll retain their place in your Binder. The only time this is ever different is if you create a new note in Simplenote to bring into your Scrivener project; you have to choose one folder to import everything new. They'll always just go to the bottom of that folder, so they should be easy to find, but if you have a lot of notes of all types and want to quickly sort them it might help to include something distinctive in the name, e.g. "RESEARCH" or "CHARNOTE" or whatever, so that you can quickly file them once you're back in Scrivener. Since you can run a project replace in only a certain field, you could use distinctive keywords like that in your title and then quickly delete them by replacing "CHARNOTE" in "title" with nothing. (You could of course manually fix it in each title too, but I'm imagining a scenario when you have such an explosion of documents as to make this all worth it anyway. If you only have three or four it's probably unnecessary.)

[AmberV]

Do you perhaps mean you can only choose one collection at a time? I don't see how this is a limitation at all, since you can just make another collection with the contents of both collections you want to sync.

[beru]

Simplenotes DOES have tags with Scrivener already seems to USE. Maybe the binder folder name could be a tag. But what I meant was the sync. When I have synced notes which go into different Binder folders, that seems to be impossible to do (i one sync action) the dropdown list in Scrivener sync dialog allows only 1 selection.

[AmberV]

I think we are still suffering from a miscommunication here. I'm posting a screenshot where I'm selecting more than one "folder" to be synced to Simplenote.



Granted, one of those is a file container, but that's effectively the same thing in Scrivener.

The Simplenote tag that Scrivener sets is based on the project, so you can quickly filter the list down and see all of the notes pertaining to a particular project. Are you suggesting that each item that happens to contain children items in the binder get used as a tag for each item that happens to be beneath them? I think that would get extremely messy, really fast.

[MimeticMouton]

Oh, I thought the discussion was about going the other direction, from Simplenote into Scrivener. In Step 2, you choose a single folder to dump any new notes you're importing, so things that aren't already in the Scrivener project and don't have a place in the Binder. You can't choose to have note X go to the "Character" folder in the Binder and note Y go to the "Draft" folder and note Z to go to the "Locations" folder or what have you. My comments above were to address a sort of work-around for that, if you happened to be pulling in a lot of new files created in Simplenote.

[AmberV]

Okay, that would make more sense! Once these items are imported into Scrivener and sorted out into appropriate folders, they can remain synced across many different containers in the binder though. Given that there could be any number of items incoming, it makes more sense to me to use all of the power of Scrivener's organisational features to sort these items from an incoming folder, to where they should go, rather than coding a stripped down UI on a per-note basis in the sync dialogue itself. Or to put it another way, if the sync dialogue allowed you to supply each incoming note with a destination, it would be more limiting and clumsy than simply organising those items after the sync. In either case, you are going to have to tell Scrivener where the items should go---it wouldn't actually be any easier to set that up in a distilled UI.

Or maybe I'm still not getting it. I'm a little buzzed.

[beru]

I would like to keep drafts (which I sync to IA Writer using folder sync) separate from other notes and also to have separate notes for different projects (via the tags in Simplenotes).

When syncing with simpelnotes, only the draft folder (and its subfolders) are possible to select.

It would be GREAT if simplenotes tags could be generated for Scrivener Binder folders and these folders selected for simplenote sync (as of now, Scrivener already makes use of the tags, which e.g. is very useful for keeping projects seperate on the iPad).

I am just saying that would be GREAT, nothing wrong with Scrivener now, just that the sync still is somewhat cumbersome...

[KB]

Thanks for the kind words in general, but I disagree that it's "cumbersome". You can select other documents for compile, not just the ones in the Draft folder:



I think adding Simplenote tags for every single folder in Scrivener would be cumbersome - some documents would need several tags (being several levels deep), and users would quickly find their Simplenote account overwhelmed with tags created for them by Scrivener. Many users won't want Scrivener to take control of their Simplenote account like this - I know I wouldn't. Users who carefully set up their tags in Simplenote to help them find things could get quite annoyed if every time they sync a Scrivener project they get ten or twenty or a hundred extra tags created in their Simplenote account.

Really, these syncing features are pretty slick and work very well (and many users are very, very happy with them), so I'm a little confused about what it is you are finding so problematic.

All the best,
Keith