I love Scrivener. It is hands down my favorite Mac app and I probably have spent more hours staring at a screen in Scrivener than any other application I’ve ever used. It is hands down the best writing tool I’ve ever used.
But I’m spending more and more time writing on my iPad these days – and the long promised iOS version of Scrivener remains the platforms most famous vaporware. This has forced me to look for work arounds.
For a while, I was using Byword, which is a wonderful writing environment in it’s own right. But it is sort of hackey in the way it works and looking at file structure is sort of maddening.
But then I read a feature set for Storyist for iOS that included native support for reading Scrivener files so I gave the app a try. I’ve used Storyist for Mac before as well, and liked it, so I was optimistic about trying the mobile version. I will tell you right now that my small investment has been worth every penny and if you won’t want to read further, just go buy it.
As promised, Storyist will open up a .scriv file and allow you to work with all of the text files in your project – just like in Scrivener. Period. Full stop. No need for weird work arounds. No need to hyper label every text file so you can tell one text file from another. I opened up my latest novel manuscript and picked up right where I’d left off on my computer. It was what I’ve been hoping Literature and Latte would deliver for over two years now.
Storyist accomplishes this by syncing with your iCloud drive, so you have to be on Yosemite or El Capitan. Relocate your working .scriv file to the Cloud Drive folder, though, and you can begin to sync your project between Scrivener and Storyist.
This isn’t a review of Storyist for iPad. I think it is a fine app and it has it’s plusses and minuses. I haven’t tried to work with my comic script files extensively, which might be an example of where the Scrivener -> Storyist compatibility may start to break down. But from as much as I’ve used it on my novel manuscript, the Storyist folks have totally won me over on iOS.