I use a traffic-light system: red for a problem to be solved or research to be done, yellow for outline notes, amber for ‘started to write’ and green for written. I have the preferences set to shade the whole name in the label color. I do this using Scrivener’s ‘label’ function, which I was very relieved to see is supported by the iOS version. I mentioned that I use color-coding to allow me to track my progress. Tapping on book one then opens another very familiar view: chapters on the left, text on the right. I use color-coding as progress indicators, so this is a slightly customized view I’ll discuss shortly. I’m working on a series of SF novellas, with a short story to kick things off, so the top level view of the manuscript is the first three books. Swiping left on an individual document pulls up a sub-menu, which includes delete – or the Scrivener equivalent which, as on the Mac, is simply ‘Move to Trash’ so that the document can be retrieved if required.Īlthough I work on the Mac with my various nested folders all expanded, on the smaller screen of my 9.7-inch iPad Pro I found it was better to open only the book on which I was working. Here I tap on Manuscript to see my actual book – or books, in this case. The indents are quite subtle, to make best use of the limited space on an iPad. Here I’ve expanded both the Manuscript folder and Book 1. You can do this with sub-folders too, revealing as much or as little as you like in the binder. Swipe left on any section (a somewhat scary thing to do when most apps use that for ‘delete’) and an ‘Expand’ option appears. I didn’t initially think that was possible with the iOS version – it very much looked like it was one view at a time – but I was wrong. With the Mac app, we can expand the contents of as many of these folder as we wish to see everything at once. The top-level project view will be very familiar to anyone who uses the Mac version: the binder on the left with a folder for the manuscript itself, together with others for the character notes, research and so on. In this particular case, I only have my current project loaded, an SF series known as ‘Steel City’. When you first open the app, you see the main screen, showing your projects. My review is based on beta versions, so there may be small differences between the screengrabs below from the beta and the final version, but any such difference should be very minor. The release version will be available on 20th July. I’ve been beta-testing it for a few weeks now, and found it rock-solid. The story behind that is apparently long and painful, but the end result was that the man behind Scrivener, Keith Blount, decided to write the iOS app personally. There was, though, one major problem with Scrivener: the lack of an iOS app … Almost everyone I know who has tried it has said that there’s no going back. I wouldn’t dream of writing a novel in anything else, and many other writers say the same.
Outlines, pen-portraits of characters, offline copies of web pages, photos, notes, PDFs … absolutely anything and everything that might help you create your opus magnum is right there all within a single app … What Scrivener does is bring together in one place all the resources you are likely to need to plan, research, write and either submit or self-publish a novel. You can read my review of the Mac app here, but I’ll save time by including my summary here. As a writing tool, Scrivener may be a niche app, but it has a fan-base almost unlike any other app I know. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s an app written by a writer for writers.
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