I’ve been using the iPad for a little less than a year now. It has served me well for teaching, checking email, reading PDFs and ebooks, surfing the web, watching videos, etc. Beyond using it as an e-reader, I haven’t really tried to integrate it too much into my research, for which I have preferred my MacBook Pro and 24” display, both of which are well suited for the work I do in web design and media production.
If I am going to get more out of my iPad, I first have to get it to play nicely with Literature and Latte’s Scrivener 2.0. Ostensibly a writing program in the vein of Ulysses and Storyist, Scrivener also serves me well as a file and project management system. I use it extensively for my research, writing, teaching, and design work.
Here’s a promotional image from the Literature and Latte web site. The corkboard feature is especially helpful for organizing your ideas and revising your writing.
The first problem I have with integrating the iPad into my Scrivener workflow is that there is no, and will likely never be, an iPad app for Scrivener. As Scrivener’s primary developer reports here in a long reflection on the iPad and app development, even as Steve Jobs was announcing the new device, people were asking Literature and Latte if Scrivener would be ported to the iPad. Unfortunately, as the developer explains, Scrivener is the product of only two people and the work they can devote to it in their spare time. Neither of them, it would seem, have the time or the desire to port Scrivener to the iOS platform.
With that said, Scrivener 2.0 does have some affordances that should allow me to integrate the iPad into my workflow. First, it allows you to sync your “scrivenings”—your text—to an external folder as either .txt or .rtf files. Make that external folder a Dropbox one, and you now have access to your text files on the iPad. So far, that’s working well.
Unfortunately, this leads me to my next problem, which I discussed on Facebook: for some unknown reason (at least unknown to me), there doesn’t appear to be very many iPad apps that will let you edit an .rtf file. While Scrivener allows me to sync both .txt and .rtf files, I would prefer to use .rtf files, since .txt files lose all of my formatting, even boldface and italics. For someone who works in document and graphic design, that’s a real pain.
As for .rtf files on the iPad, sure, Docs to Go and other apps will let you view the files, but editing them is another story. Apparently, Docs to Go will allow you to edit .rtf files, but you have to save them as new files first, as the app opens them as read-only files first. That’s an annoying, and potentially problematic, route to take (would “saving as” a new file play nicely with my sync system?). So my next task will be to try iNotePad HD. According to the App store, it will edit .rtf files. Will see…
In addition to syncing with an external folder, Scrivener can also sync with SimpleNote and IndexCard. SimpleNote is a cloud-based note syncing system. Looks nice, but I’ll have to see if it supports .rtf files or only plain text. Not to mention, I don’t really want to rely on yet another sync system. Dropbox is great for my files, and I use MobileMe for my contacts, bookmarks, personal email, and personal web site. Do I really want another sync system to manage?
So, likely no to SimpleNote. That leaves IndexCard, which I’ll try along side iPadNote HD. From what I can tell, IndexCard plays nicely with Dropbox and it syncs your index cards between Scrivener and the iPad. Now, the question is, what exactly does it sync between the two? Some of the text I work with in Scrivener is in “Index Card” format, and some isn’t. Will IndexCard pull all of my “scrivenings” or only those in the index card format?
I’m feeling confident that I’ll be able to make something work for me. I love the idea of being able to work with my Scrivener files on the iPad. Now I just need to determine the best way to make that happen.
More to come soon…
I never imagined, Ioa, that an actual developer would chime in on this thread. Thanks for your comments. They illuminate a lot, especially why there are so few .rtf editors for the iPad.
As you may have learned elsewhere on this blog, we’re studying the usefulness of the iPad for academic research and scholarship; hence my post about getting the iPad and Scrivener to work together. I very much enjoy using the application on my desktop, and I’m certain I’ll find some useful ways to integrate it into an iPad workflow. Thanks, again, for taking the time to provide some explanations.
I am glad to see a developer chime in here too. Very cool. Just for the record, although we are focused on the iPad this summer, I envision this space to be a site in which we faculty in the College talk about technology and research in all its facets, so programs like Scrivener independent of the iPad is something we want to use and discuss.
One quick note on how Scrivener manages things when you use .txt files: it sounds worse than it is, really. 🙂 Yes, if you edit a portion of that file on your iPad and sync it back, the formatting *in that paragraph* will be lost. This is just necessary unless you are using some kind of markup like Markdown. However it will do the best it can to make the altered paragraph fit in with the flow around it, so you won’t lose the standard look and feel of the document in that paragraph—just any inline italic spans or anything else of that nature within it.
So the key thing is that these .txt files are looked at on a per-paragraph basis, and that only the parts which have actually changed within the files will be synced. The rest of the document will be intact. If you have a good recollection of where any special formatting might be, you can work around those paragraphs.
The reason for why you don’t see many RTF editors on the iPad is one of the concerns we’ve had for making a Scrivener version for the iPad, and that is the total lack of support for rich text at the OS level. On a Mac, you can make a simple RTF text editor, like TextEdit, in minutes (we’ll ignore for now the plethora of Apple bugs and missing features you’d need to fix—and which Scrivener does its best to fix). On the iOS, there is no such thing. To write an RTF editor, you’d have to code such a beast from scratch, and that is massive undertaking. It’s a huge job even for a larger development shop, and is easily about one or two years of work for a lone developer. That’s one or two years of doing nothing but re-inventing a wheel Apple never thought to include—and might very well decide to include, on a whim, in a future iOS update. So you can see the problem is two-fold. Not only is it a huge cost to undertake, it’s also quite risky. You might very well end up wasting a year or more of your life on something that Apple just needs to throw a switch on (and I think it is inevitable that they eventually will).
The RTF implementations you *do* see are from large companies, or companies like Docs 2 Go that have been doing mobile word processing since the Palm days and have all of this stuff already coded and ready to port. We are only just now seeing independent efforts at rich text, and most of them are *very* basic—and by necessity must eschew some of the nice features you get for not working from scratch, like spelling and auto-correction while you type.
Anyway, that’s a little background for you. 🙂 Like I say, all of this is in part why a Scrivener for iPad is a bit daunting to take on. To do the job right, we really need RTF, and it seems supremely unwise to spend a lot of time bringing that to the platform when Apple is sure to provide for it out of the box one of these days. We could make do with the .txt sync code, and work on a paragraph level in this hypothetical “portable Scrivener”, but as you note, that would be a pain for a lot of people, and it most certainly wouldn’t fit the expectation of a mobile Scrivener.
It does have a learning curve. In fact, I’m convinced that there is so much more that I can do with the program if I just had the time to figure out how. Today I noticed that there is a fairly comprehensive user manual included with Scrivener. I’ll have to load it on to my iPad and take a look at it in GoodReader some time when I get a chance.
That has been my issue with Scrivener. I simply couldn’t find the time to get over the learning curve…. It looks great and powerful, however and I have tried to get my daughter to use it for her novel/short stories.
OK, I am going to think about it like a robust outliner and see where it takes me. I like the idea of bringing notes and ideas together. When I write, though, I have robust footnotes with references linked to a reference manager application so I don’t need to deal with reference formatting when I am done. But Scrivener might allow me just to get my ideas out there and organized and the final crafting can be done with Word as I have in the past. We’ll see.
Looks like you can only set one bibliography manager, and mainly what Scrivener does for you is launch the manager itself. After that, you have to do the copying and pasting on your own, so there’s not much really in the way of integration between the applications. Scriveners real strengths lie in planning, organizing, and drafting. If it had better citation manager integration, that would be great.
This is great information. I am going to play with Scrivener as I try to finish a paper for a conference in Freiburg in early July. Of course, with something new like this in a time sensitive situation, I might need to revert to old practices in order to get it done. Can you set two bibliography managers? I am thinking Zotero and Mendeley. In any case, I will play with it.
Scrivener lets you set a bibliography/citations manager, Chris. It can manage what it calls “references” on its own, but these are typically web links, and not the kind of academic citations/references that you are likely thinking of. I have Scrivener set to call Firefox, where my Zotero is housed.
How I use Scrivener depends on what I’m doing with it. If the design/formatting of the final document is crucial, I do my finishing in Word or InDesign. Or even in TextWrangler or Dreamweaver, I guess, if I’m writing web content.
You can, technically speaking, do everything in Scrivener, and then export your document in whatever format you need when you’re done. But when it really matters, like when I’m sending out a manuscript for review, I do my finishing in Word, just to make sure everything will look and work the way I want it to for the end user. I like to be careful, even if it means the extra step in my workflow.
I am looking more deeply into Scrivener now and I am intrigued. It seems like it might work well with the way I work. However, I have some questions, primarily about how it handles citations: does it integrate with reference managing software or is it its own reference managing software?
How do you use it? Do you draft, craft and brainstorm with it only to compile it to a Word or other word processing document at the final stage, or do you do everything in Scrivener?
I discovered Scrivener about a month ago and absolutely love it. I’ve been using it as my blog editing software, compiling the text as markdown and I find it works perfectly. I haven’t yet tried to sync the iPad with Scrivener, since I still prefer typing on a laptop, but I’m certain that at some point I’ll be giving it a go. It’s one amazing piece of software that until you you try it out, you really have no idea what you’re missing.