Scrivener for iOS.
There are fewer and fewer OS X / macOS apps that I use daily that have not made the journey onto iOS. Actually just two now, Sketch and Xcode. Though “Xcode light” is on the iPad playgrounds app now, and there are many useful vector based or other drawing and design apps that you can jot down ideas on, and then import to Sketch.
The tools in this folder let me work on, or at least begin almost all dev and design tasks.
I am loving the progression of professional grade apps that are making it across, at the beginning when iPad first launched, you had to use workarounds such as VPN and VNC/RDP to access ms office, or your Mac applications. I was doing this with the first iPad and a 3G sim and it worked quite well, as long as you had signal. Now I use a few applications to access my main server when out or at home (it’s a headless Mac Mini) so I’m controlling it via Prompt SSH, transmit or vnc depending on needs..
Scrivener for iOS makes very few compromises if any. I’d love to have iCloud Sync/Drive support, but this would exclude Scrivener for Windows users; Dropbox is the Multiplatform alternative, and it was trivial to link even on an iPad which I have no Dropbox app on.
The app works nicely on the iPhone too, ideally you probably want this sort of setup with a larger screen iPad and paired / connected keyboard yet this paragraph was quickly written on an iPhone 6S then synced back to the master draft in a couple of minutes.
The only feature that I would love is direct export to Medium, Wordpress or Tumblr et al; at present you can easily copy and paste the text but a direct button or at least share sheet that copies images too would be brilliant- I love medium myself but would definitely rather type up my pieces in Scrivener; this also let’s you keep your writing in one spot, if medium shuts down you can quickly re upload to “Wordo” or the next tumblr. Sometimes hosting sites shut down with zero warning if they can’t pay their bills etc and you can lose the entire body of work.
Another potential brilliant feature could be done with AirPlay – use a TV or receiver screen as your research cork board; instead of airplay mirror style choose a cork board with characters/scene or other research so you don’t have to keep flipping around the app, you can look up. Can be achieved with a Mac nearby that’s running scrivener too but I haven’t tested this yet to see if the Dropbox sync goes “out of whack.”
To summarise, with a good Bluetooth keyboard you can have a terrific little writing setup, and extremely portable.. Or any of the available keyboard cases for the iPad’s and Pro, or perhaps if you want to be Ultra Portable and have great eyes you could probably manage on a SE, 6S or 6+ sized device too; I was able to write a few of the paragraphs of this review on an iPhone 6S no worries using the onscreen keyboard. Feature wise, for a 1.0 this is lacking very little, and makes no compromise to fit onto iOS. I have a few requests but could keep using this happily if none of those materialise too. The only things that would make it a Perfect / home run would be better share sheet exporting so I could post this review right away; right now i’m about to work out which is the best conversion to get it onto my Medium Publication. I was able to copy and paste the text directly into the medium application, but the images did not carry across; not a big deal for two as I could just re add them but this might be something to address in the future for exporting to publish.
