Will iOS Scriv Work in iPad OS?

[lunk]

The most powerful iOS apps use custom code and frameworks rather than depending on Apple's code.

Can you give some examples?

[xiamenese]

Again, it doesn't have to do with the relative power of the iPads vs. Macs so much as it is what Apple has included in the relevant OS APIs.

The most powerful iOS apps use custom code and frameworks rather than depending on Apple's code. I wish L&L would step up to that. Scrivener's shortcomings are often blamed on Apple's code.

And are those apps programmed by a single coder who is also the coder for the Mac version and another Mac application?

[AmberV]

And are they building an RTF engine from scratch that is capable of handling the breadth of formatting the PC and Mac versions of Scrivener makes use of?

[kewms]

The most powerful iOS apps use custom code and frameworks rather than depending on Apple's code. I wish L&L would step up to that. Scrivener's shortcomings are often blamed on Apple's code.

Keith has said that if it weren't for Apple's frameworks, Scrivener wouldn't exist.

Katherine

[lunk]

The most powerful iOS apps use custom code and frameworks rather than depending on Apple's code.

... and one more question:
How do you measure the ”power” of an app? And in what unit? Horsepower?

[TadeoBlanco]

Amuses me how people with no understanding of the thought process and decisions made in designing software presume to tell the developer how to do it ‘better.’

A bit like those who demand changes under threat of taking their bat and ball and playing elsewhere....

[devinganger]

Again, it doesn't have to do with the relative power of the iPads vs. Macs so much as it is what Apple has included in the relevant OS APIs.

The most powerful iOS apps use custom code and frameworks rather than depending on Apple's code. I wish L&L would step up to that. Scrivener's shortcomings are often blamed on Apple's code.

I would like to see some statistics on this rather than just rely on the word of a random stranger over the word of the developer of the app. Do you have any references or citations to back up this claim?

Yes, there are commonly used frameworks in a bunch of games -- Unity, Unreal, etc. -- but those generally have to do with graphics and other functionality *not* provided by the base OS, or provided at a most rudimentary level. The Apple text system on MacOS is actually pretty powerful, from what I understand, and has a lot of functionality built in -- but it's not easily extensible. And Apple did not port all of that functionality to iOS, which is where the problem lies. KB would have to pretty much rewrite the text system from the ground up, and I'm not sure if you comprehend just how much work that would be both in initial time investment and then again in maintenance against new bugs in MacOS, iOS, and the forthcoming iPadOS.

[chipotle]

KB wants to provide the feature but iOS's implementation of the underlying APIs (the system calls into the central library of shared functions that are made available to all developers so their programs don't have to reinvent every wheel, and that programs that do the same sort of things have the same sort of look and feel) is limited or missing when compared to the equivalent API on MacOS.

Despite possible impressions to the contrary, I get that. For context, I actually am a programmer, or at least was up until a few years ago before I moved into technical writing full time. And, yes, I know that iOS's text handling is not at the level of macOS's. But things like not having a free-form corkboard, or not letting me drag a PDF into the resarch folder, or just not having been compiled against the iOS 12.1 SDK so it'd take full advantage of the 2018 iPad Pro screens -- those can't be pinned on iOS's poor under-the-hood support for rich text handling.

And I don't know what "custom code and frameworks" apps like Apple Pages, or for that matter, the iOS version of Microsoft Word use. But Microsoft Word on iOS can handle essentially all the formatting that Microsoft Word everywhere else can. Probably more to the point -- if anyone actually has written their own custom RTF engine, it'd be Microsoft, after all -- Pages on iOS can handle essentially all the formatting that Pages on macOS can. Again, maybe Apple is using their own custom engine here -- but if they are, then, well, it's at least proving it's possible to do that, right? Pages also exports ePub on iOS

The case may well be that it's not remotely cost-effective to get Scrivener for iOS to that level, and while I wouldn't love that case, I'd totally understand it. It's just that the case seems to often be made as "you just can't get there from here."

If there is a majority around here who want Mac or Win Scriv to be dumbed down, they seem to be mostly silent.

I doubt there's a majority, or even a minority; I was reacting more to several comments I've seen, even earlier in this thread, along the lines of "I don't want the iOS version of Scrivener to replace the macOS one -- we'll lose a lot of features!" (I suspect this comes from worries about Cataylst/Marzipan, but I can't imagine many companies that already have separate Mac and iOS versions deciding to scrap their Mac app and go with a Catalyst port.)

Ha! I hope the Windows Scriv users who complain about being second class citizens read this.

I do have several Windows-using friends who are waiting with varying degrees of patience for the impending update.

[xiamenese]

Why will people keep comparing Lit&Lat, and in this case one person KB, with Microsoft and Apple, with their large teams, huge bank balances and who program not only their private code for a Word and Pages, but also the underlying operating systems.

[kewms]

And I don't know what "custom code and frameworks" apps like Apple Pages, or for that matter, the iOS version of Microsoft Word use. But Microsoft Word on iOS can handle essentially all the formatting that Microsoft Word everywhere else can. Probably more to the point -- if anyone actually has written their own custom RTF engine, it'd be Microsoft, after all -- Pages on iOS can handle essentially all the formatting that Pages on macOS can. Again, maybe Apple is using their own custom engine here -- but if they are, then, well, it's at least proving it's possible to do that, right? Pages also exports ePub on iOS

And yet, with all their resources, neither Microsoft nor Apple offers anything resembling Scrivener's complete writing environment. Pages and Word both support very complex, sophisticated formatting, but that's *all* they do.

If you want a tool that does what Pages and Word do, use those programs. But most Scrivener users have specifically chosen *not* to work in that type of environment.

Katherine

[devinganger]

And I don't know what "custom code and frameworks" apps like Apple Pages, or for that matter, the iOS version of Microsoft Word use. But Microsoft Word on iOS can handle essentially all the formatting that Microsoft Word everywhere else can. Probably more to the point -- if anyone actually has written their own custom RTF engine, it'd be Microsoft, after all -- Pages on iOS can handle essentially all the formatting that Pages on macOS can. Again, maybe Apple is using their own custom engine here -- but if they are, then, well, it's at least proving it's possible to do that, right? Pages also exports ePub on iOS

Both of the products you mentioned use their own text engine, not the baseline MacOS text system. And while others have already pointed out the vast disparity between the number of programmers and resources that Apple and Microsoft have to throw at the "custom text engine" solution versus what L&L do, Apple isn't really doing their text engine cross platform to the same degree that Microsoft is. And it took *literally over a decade* for Microsoft to get it right, or at least "close enough" to where those of us who use Office on both Mac and Windows can count on actually having our documents survive the platform translation. Microsoft wasn't able to fix it on Mac until years after they moved to the new XML-based document formats, thus moving away from the mess that RTF is.

[Rayz]

Why will people keep comparing Lit&Lat, and in this case one person KB, with Microsoft and Apple, with their large teams, huge bank balances and who program not only their private code for a Word and Pages, but also the underlying operating systems.

That's a good point, but there are much smaller outfits (one or two people) who have also crafted their own text engines to varying degrees:

Nisus (I assume Nisus because they have RTF tables that work)
Mellel (I mean, wow!)
Storyist Software

Now, while I imagine this was a real pain to do (especially for a small team) the advantage was that they got a text engine that supported a lot of stuff that is hard to do in RTF (which isn't really a great format, and I don't think I've seen many new apps using it), and in the case of Mellel and Storyist, meant that they could do iOS, iCloud-ready versions of their apps that were pretty damn close to their MacOS counterparts. They took the hit earlier on, and made things a lot easier for themselves later.

Does anyone think that Apple is going to do any serious work on their RTF text engine, given that they don't use it themselves, and everyone else has either written their own, or abandoned rich text and gone for Markdown instead?

However, I'm not really sure that's really the issue here. The question is how many people need a full version of Scrivener running on any version of the iPad. I'm only speaking for myself here, but I just tend to do text changes and edits on my iPad Pro. There's not really much else I do that can't wait until I get home to the printer.

I can only assume that folk are asking for full-on Scrivener on iOS because they use their iPad as their only PC.

[lunk]

... in this case one person KB,

... there are much smaller outfits

Smaller than one?

[kewms]

Most of the limitations of iOS Scrivener have nothing to do with the text engine anyway. Certainly the text engine is a separate issue from the Compile command, the freeform corkboard, or Scrivenings mode. All of which, incidentally, are unique to Scrivener and do not exist in the other examples of iOS software that you cite.

Katherine

[xiamenese]

Why will people keep comparing Lit&Lat, and in this case one person KB, with Microsoft and Apple, with their large teams, huge bank balances and who program not only their private code for a Word and Pages, but also the underlying operating systems.

That's a good point, but there are much smaller outfits (one or two people) who have also crafted their own text engines to varying degrees:

Nisus (I assume Nisus because they have RTF tables that work)
Mellel (I mean, wow!)
Storyist Software

Now, while I imagine this was a real pain to do (especially for a small team) the advantage was that they got a text engine that supported a lot of stuff that is hard to do in RTF (which isn't really a great format, and I don't think I've seen many new apps using it), and in the case of Mellel and Storyist, meant that they could do iOS, iCloud-ready versions of their apps that were pretty damn close to their MacOS counterparts. They took the hit earlier on, and made things a lot easier for themselves later.

Does anyone think that Apple is going to do any serious work on their RTF text engine, given that they don't use it themselves, and everyone else has either written their own, or abandoned rich text and gone for Markdown instead?

However, I'm not really sure that's really the issue here. The question is how many people need a full version of Scrivener running on any version of the iPad. I'm only speaking for myself here, but I just tend to do text changes and edits on my iPad Pro. There's not really much else I do that can't wait until I get home to the printer.

I can only assume that folk are asking for full-on Scrivener on iOS because they use their iPad as their only PC.

1: NWP is based on exactly the same Apple text engine as Scrivener, but they have a team working to enhance it—as KB has done in some ways, but much more extensively—only they are working on a word processor, without all the other things that make Scrivener what it is. And note, in spite of years of "When are we going to have an iPad version of NWP", there is no sign of one.

2: The Redlers have done an amazing job with Mellel, but again, it's a word processor, not like Scrivener. They too are a bigger team than 1 person, and they started on Mellel when OSX first came out somewhere around 2001. For a while, it was the only WP around, and I used it, but it was a pain because it couldn't open docs in Chinese unless I ran them through TextEdit first.

3: I don't know anything about Storyist.