Judging by the many requests for help in here, where people sometimes can’t find rather simple things, indicate to me that Scrivener is approaching the balance point where adding more stuff to please experienced users may scare away new users. A learning curve should be S-shaped so new users can quickly get going and gradually learn to use more features, but adding more stuff gradually changes the shape until it starts with a steep slope. The way I see it, this is where Tinderbox ended up.
Should the iOS version become more like the Mac version. Yes, why not, but without becoming so complicated that a new user can’t immediately understand how to use it. iOS apps are supposed to be so intuitive to use that they don’t need a manual, not even a large tutorial project. If an app requires that, I think it may be a bit too complicated.
An iPad is not a laptop and it shouldn’t try to become one.
A roadmap from Keith on what his vision for the iOS version. I am not looking for dates, but just an idea on where he wants the app to go.
More sync service options. We have beaten this one to death, but Scriv is the only app I use that requires Dropbox to sync.
Be able to use my export settings from Desktop Scrivener. I don’t care if I need to create them on my Mac, but I’d like to use them on iOS. Right now, my iOS exports are just to help proofread.
Arguably, Scrivener has gone about as far as it can without running into that problem. The learning curve already comes up quite often when people are deciding whether and when to switch to Scrivener.
If you’d read my posts a little more closely, you’d know that I wasn’t advocating adding new features. I simply want the existing features to work properly.
I’d like the screenplay formatting to work as well as the competing screenwriting apps. I’d settle for it working as well as WriterSolo, which is a 100% free app written by a sole programmer. It’s not bells & whistles I want, it’s cut/paste and drag/drop to work like all the other apps do it.
I’d like iOS versions of Scrivener to work like OSX Scrivener. That means index cards on iphones. it means scrivenings and collections.
Other software developers manage to fix their products. I hold out hope that L&L will do the same for Scrivener.
FWIW, I have to work on a complex MS-WORD document this week generated by a law firm. I’m so impressed with how Scrivener handles and interacts with this document. It really is an amazing tool for many kinds of writing.
I’m a little surprised by the pushback on some of the comments made by PopcornFlix, to be honest. He’s the only one looking at the problem through a business strategy lens, has made some great points, and has been quite a bit more patient with his replies than I probably would be.
As for my opinion, I just hope that Keith is looking at this problem very hard. Apple have made it clear which way the wind is blowing; both short term (Catalyst) and long term (SwiftUI). I switch between an iPad Pro 12.9 and a MacBook Pro multiple times over the day, and the lack of feature parity / lopsided relationship between desktop and iOS is at odds with Apple’s vision, which appears to be all about unification rather than disparity.
Will it impact the viability of Scrivener in the eyes of Apple at some point in the future? No idea, but I’m glad we’re having this conversation
Well, maybe that’s why we see things differently? I don’t think the new Mac Pro suggests that Apples vision is “all about unification”. Making iOS more capable and introducing iPad OS still doesn’t suggest that they want to turn all iDevices into some kind of Micro Macs in the future.
And for this part…
Well, maybe that’s why I and others don’t agree, because we perceive Scrivener and L&L not only as a business but also as the manifestation of an artistic creation and a choice of lifestyle. Ones life is not a business, it’s… a life.
It’s easy to claim to look at an issue though a specific lens when you’re doing it in the abstract.
I’m pretty sure KB looks very closely at all of the business aspects, as he and his employees are the ones impacted if he guesses wrong.
All we here in the forums are doing is armchair quarterbacking without access to a lot of the relevant data. We’re like the guys up in the stadiums who’ve each had four beers before the first half is over, trying to yell at Lionel Messi and tell him what he’s doing wrong.
Agreed, except that I don’t think anyone is telling Keith he’s wrong - we’re all here because we use and love Scrivener. It’s just a refreshing conversation to have amidst a sea of posts trying to troubleshoot formatting
All we can really do is speculate (and that’s half the fun). Catalyst, SwiftUI, (a possible shift to) ARM architecture… these are long games by Apple, and exist on a different timeline than the Mac Pro.
It’s interesting that people assume that unification means dumbing down MacOS apps, rather than elevating iOS apps. If you put a 12.9 iPad Pro next to a 13" MacBook Pro, it’s difficult to argue that the productivity potential of one is greater than the other (software notwithstanding); they are both roughly the same size, they both have roughly the same user input (assuming iPadOS with mouse support), and they are both technically capable in their own right.
It’s very romantic to imagine Keith as the lone programmer, crafting his labour of love free of external constraints and considerations… but let’s not kid ourselves. L&L is a business, and Scrivener is a product. Devin said it - people’s livelihoods rely on the viability of Scrivener as a marketable product. If you think that Keith has gotten this far without any consideration given to business strategy or acumen, then I have a bridge to sell you.
I have both an iPad Pro and a 13" MacBook Pro and I do know how capable the iPad can be, but you miss my point.
The iPhone won’t evolve into a laptop because such a small laptop wouldn’t make sense. So we need a laptop and a phone, right? The iPad then has to be something else, in between. If iPad OS was to evolve into Mac OS, the iPad would actually require a keyboard and possibly a mouse, and then it would suddenly become a touchscreen laptop with an external keyboard and would no longer be an iPad.
If iOS Scrivener was developed so it got feature parity with and looked like the Mac version, you’d have to use a keyboard and a mouse or trackpad to use it, which means that iPad users who doesn’t have that couldn¨t use it.
I do know that some like to use an external keyboard with their iPads. I don’t. I tried it and didn’t like it at all. If I want a keyboard, I use my MBP or MB. iPad apps must be designed to work with only your fingers, just like iPhone apps. And that’s where you have the intrinsic difference between Mac OS and iOS, and also iPad OS.
Of course I understand that people who start their own business make strategic decisions, but running a small scale business is a kind of life style, not just a job. It’s not as if you were employed as CEO by someone else. And some people like “doing business”, others get an idea they want to pursue. As far as I understand it, Keith belongs to that second group. He didn’t wake up one morning saying “I want to start some kind of business!”. I think he woke up and thought “I think I’ll fix my own app for my own writing!”
Agree with you regarding hardware and form factor, I’m more referring to software.
It sounds like you and me might work in a similar fashion in regards to device usage , so I have to ask does it frustrate you that Scrivener on iOS doesn’t have a cork board view, or the ability to view and edit snapshots, or a reliable syncing method (amongst others things)?
I’m going to disagree with you that there’s anything on MacOS Scrivener that couldn’t be ported to a touch interface, certainly there are apps available with similar and increasing complexity. That’s more of a UI/UX conversation though
Currently the decision to use the MacBook or iPad is driven as much by the task I need to accomplish in that particular session as it is by mobility / accessibility, and I just don’t think that’s the best outcome.
On a slightly unrelated note, I was never a fan of the Smart Folio Keyboard and last week I bought an Anne Pro 2 mechanical keyboard (Bluetooth connection). It’s so awesome that I’ve found myself using it on the MacBook Pro as well! Not exactly portable though - it weighs more than the iPad
Scrivener on iOS has to be able to function on all the devices that run iOS, including older iPhones with smaller screens and less capable processors. This move to iPadOS might actually help in that regards, assuming KB wants to split the code that way.
As for the reliable syncing method, Scrivener on iOS has two. Any frustrations with sync results are understandable, but are also naturally derived consequences of Apple’s limitations in their current implementations of iOS.
iOS Scrivener most certainly does have a corkboard view. I use it all the time. The iPhone doesn’t support it, due to screen size, but the iPad Mini (and larger) does.
Reliable sync method? I’ve never lost a syllable with Dropbox, and that includes the time when Dropbox broke their API and syncing kept crashing. Annoying, yes, but I didn’t lose any data.
I think maybe I shouldn’t have listed specific pain points, and rather just said ‘does it frustrate you that Scrivener on iOS doesn’t have feature parity’? It wasn’t my intention to derail the conversation with discussion around individual components (specifically syncing, where there are more than enough discussions already taking place).
I definitely agree with you Devin regarding iPhone support, but another point to consider is that it’s fairly standard practice for apps to drop support for older versions of iOS, and hence older model phones as they become deprecated. But the screen size is certainly something to consider. I’m eagerly awaiting the public release of iPadOS - I’m a bit scared of trying the beta, considering how much data I have sitting in iCloud, but it looks amazing
Katherine, you learn something new every day re: cork boards, thanks for that
No.
Not at all.
And neither does it frustrate me with other apps that are available on both platforms.
I use the Apple pencil quite a lot but it doesn’t frustrate me that it can’t be used on the MBP.
I prefer specialized devices in the same way that I prefer specialized apps. To me, the iPhone, iPad and Macbook have different uses.
And Scrivener. Nisus is built on the macOS text system just as Scrivener is, and the amount of customisation I have done to that system runs to many thousands of lines of code. It’s just wrong to say that Scrivener doesn’t use a custom text engine or that it just uses the vanilla Apple tools.
Not true. Apple’s frameworks are perfectly capable of all of this. The problem is that you want me to do something that I have no plans of doing - of building a text engine primarily aimed at screenwriters. I have probably added more stuff to Scrivener based on suggestions from you than from any other user, certainly in the screenwriting department, but the trouble is that you want something entirely different from what Scrivener is, it seems.
This is insulting. Money wasn’t the issue. The skill of the coders we could find was - even a professional iOS coding company. I may have “taught myself” to code, but that was fifteen years ago; I’m not a hobbyist coder now. I wrote the iOS version myself because that was the best way of getting it done right.
