Scrivener

I’ve lost hours of work due to accidentally deleting but there’s no undo/redo button. Stuck rewriting for hours, very frustrating.

It’s overly complicated and has a very old style UI. Worst of all even though it’s a dedicated Apple application you have to pay for separately on both desktop and iPhone there is no way to use iCloud and sync files across devices.

I have been a Literature and Latte devotee since pre Scrivener days and absolutely love Scrivener iOS. I find it much more comfortable, flexible and less invasive to write on an iPad than a lap/desktop, and with Scrivener iOS I have no need for the former any more. No matter how one approaches a big project, there is a way forward with index cards, outlines, notes, folders, summaries visible in different ways and kind to those of us who think spatially. There have been comments about features lacking in the iOS version, but these are minor, and very clearly explained in Will All Desktop Features be Added to Scrivener for iOS article on the L &L knowledge base.

I love Scrivener! It has been a real game changer for me when it comes to organising my writing and meeting my goals! One of the biggest issues is the syncing between devices. I originally started using Scrivener on my PC, and when I moved my projects over to my iPad, the syncing was painstakingly difficult with Dropbox, and vice-versa when I moved the documents from my iPad to my Mac. BUT! A work around that I’ve found with syncing my projects from my Mac to my iPad and iPhone, is Airdrop! As long as you’re projects are saved as a Scrivener file, you can airdrop your projects from one device to another. The only downside is that there is no way to automate this. Overall, I’m very happy with how Scrivener has helped me become a better, more organised writer.

I updated to the latest version and it crashes on launch. Cool.

I quite like scrivener desktop overall, but since the iOS app will only sync with Dropbox, it really impacts the utility. I wish the devs would add the ability to store projects in iCloud rather than just on-device, since Dropbox only offers expensive, high capacity plans, and also I just don’t like their service very much, it’s bad

I understand that they can’t fit all of the UI into the iOS feature, but at the very least, I wish they can somehow utilise snapshot. It’s honestly the best feature of scrivener and it’d bring the iOS experience to a whole new level.

Scrivener is great, the desktop version. I couldn’t write without it. The app is a disaster. It doesn’t always sync correctly and randomly wipes files. The file is still there but all the text is gone. Not worth the risk.

Can’t figure out how to sync between one drive and iOS, only other option is to continuously copy back and forth from Dropbox, that was a problem solved 10 years ago for most other platforms

I love Scrivener, I’ve bought a PC and Mac copy for various laptops over the years, and eventually bought the iOS version, hoping to use it on the road with my iPad. Unfortunately, it’s a severely neutered version on the App Store. Fair enough, it’s going to be lacking some features, but there’s even basic stuff on the phone version that it can’t do. Like tell you the word count of a document. I found it useful only for checking something briefly, but as for getting any actual work done on the phone version, don’t even try. The iPad version is better, but still not great. It would be functional except for one massive problem. It uses Dropbox to get the files from your computer to the App, and there’s no other way to do it. And Dropbox is far and away one of the most problematic and irritating programs I’ve ever used. For one thing, it syncs across devices whether you want it to or not. Which means if you open it on your phone to check something (don’t have to change anything, just look through it), then later use your iPad to do something but don’t sync first, you break your files. Or if you accidentally leave it open on one device and then use another. All I want is the ability to put a file on, do what I want with it, then TELL it when I’m done and want to send it back. Synching is obviously meant to be simple and keep all your versions up to date, but what it really does is break everything, corrupt your files if you do something absent minded, and for some reason Dropbox constantly has file permission errors and refuses to copy stuff to it frequently, even if the day before it worked perfectly well. Love Scrivener, recommend highly the PC and Mac version, but until they implement some file transfer system that doesn’t force synching and definitely doesn’t force Dropbox on you, I cannot recommend the iOS version. Also, don’t get if you only intend to use your phone and not an iPad because the phone version is so stripped down as to be worthless.