Literature and Latte

I would love to have scrivener access on my phone. But I worry when I see the app hasn't been updated in a year. I don't want to buy an app that's DOA to my phone.

I also understand Scrivener is generally updated slowly. I would just like some assurance that if I spend the $20 to get the app it's going to be retired.

Any insight would be great!

Yes, iOS Scrivener is still supported.

Katherine

Still supported, works great, I write in it every day.

Thanks!

It is still supported and it's a great program but if you're writing screenplays you may want to try something else. Scrivener's focus, especially in the iOS app seems to be very much on prose-writing and there's an annoying bug on the screenwriting side that will slow you down/enrage you/constantly interrupt your creative flow that the devs haven't even acknowledged yet and are obviously in no hurry to fix (fair enough I guess, as the program IS mainly for novel-writers). So if you buy it as a screenwriter right now, you MAY feel like you've wasted your money. But if you're writing a novel or any other sort of prose - have at it! There is no better program.

if you're writing screenplays you may want to try something else.

I agree that Scrivener's script-typing features are sub-standard, but there's much more to Scrivener for screenwriters. The organizational tools are really powerful. If you want to break story or brainstorm on iOS, Scrivener is awesome.

That being said, I recommend Final Draft mobile if you want to write script pages on your iPhone or iPad. It's only $10 (not a subscription) and it works beautifully. My daily workflow is going back and forth between FD and Scrivener. I do everything in Scrivener except type script pages. I do that in Final Draft, and then paste the pages into Scrivener. I haven't tried that on iOS yet.

there's an annoying bug on the screenwriting side that will slow you down/enrage you/constantly interrupt your creative flow that the devs haven't even acknowledged yet and are obviously in no hurry to fix

To which annoying bug in particular are you referring?

Scrivener's focus, especially in the iOS app seems to be very much on prose-writing

It seems like none of the L&L team writes screenplays. They don't "eat their own cooking" as the saying goes. If they did write screenplays, I think the scripwriting features in Scrivener would be more robust and comparable to other programs like FD.

I think there is little hope of L&L improving the screenwriting engine. It's kind of the Minimum Viable Product, built on Apple's buggy text frameworks. All the other screenwriting apps I know of have coded their own purpose-built screenwriting engines, which they can correct or augment at will. L&L is stuck with what the Apple frameworks give them.

Still, the organizational tools in Scrivener are amazingly useful for screenwriting. I love it so much that I put up with the Scriptwriting text engine.

To which annoying bug in particular are you referring?

There's more than one???

The one I was referring to is viewtopic.php?f=54&t=53757 - it's the one that drove me very reluctantly away from Scrivener and back to Storyist (and Final Draft for my, er, Final Drafts).

I agree that Scrivener is fab when you're in the honeymoon period of PLANNING your writing and doing all the creative stuff leading up to actually writing a first draft. But the app's USP for me was always that you could do all that AND write your script within the same program.

Yes, the Scrivener screenwriting engine wasn't *quite* Final Draft - no dual dialogue for example (well, there's a workaround but it's a kludge and involves roundtripping the script to Scrivener's desktop app). But it also wasn't as temperamental as Final Draft iOS either and you could easily export the results to Final Draft iOS to create a PDF to deliver to your producer/director (Scrivener is no good for making script PDFs on its own cos it page-breaks the script in odd places).

But then iOS 12 came along and broke Scrivener for iOS's scriptwriting engine (I'd like to emphasize this was not at ALL L&L's fault!) producing the https://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=54&t=53757 bug. And iOS 12 is getting on for a year old now (actually, that's going from the first public beta, I guess officially it's 7 months old) with still no sign of a fix for this GIANT annoyance - the kind of annoyance you don't want to deal with 200 times every day when you're working to someone else's deadline or in production!

You're right - L&L aren't screenwriters and Scrivener (certainly the iOS program) is therefore only secondarily a screenwriting program, albeit an awesome one up until the advent of iOS 12.

And they're small and they can't do everything at once so I totally get why this should be a low-priority for them. But that bug is why I have now - regretfully - drifted away from Scrivener even though, like you popcornflix, I still love it deep in my heart. And I'm hopeful that one day, before I'm retired or dead, it will return to its former glory!

FWIW, I use Scrivener on the Mac for more than just planning. I type my pages in Final Draft, then paste them back into Scrivener one scene at a time. Then I can use tools like Collections and keywords to refine the script.

I, too, wish Scrivener had a robust screenwriting engine, so I could do my work in one place. I'm not holding my breath.

I am surprised that L&L hasn't squashed that bug for more than a year.

kewms wrote:Yes, iOS Scrivener is still supported.

Katherine

Is this still the case? Is this Bug Hunt forum monitored by anyone in tech support?

I see many reports of the same bug on iPhone where the active line of text being entered is mostly hidden behind the keyboard, and yet no reports from the developers that they're working on a fix.

Yes, iOS Scrivener is still supported. We do not announce future release dates.

If you would like a direct response on a specific issue, you should open a support ticket, here:
https://www.literatureandlatte.com/contact-us

Katherine

I'm not sure, but i think so