This week I am answering a subscriber question.
Awesome creator Sterling Martin of
wrote:Hey Greg! Question for you since you are the Scrivener Guru. I got it a while back for my computer to organize my graphic novel on. I haven’t used it in a while, but I just got an iPad Pro. I was looking at the app for Scrivener on here, which is another $23. Not terrible, but I was wondering if you have any experience with the app version and how compatible it might be with the desktop version. No worries if you haven’t checked it out, but thought I’d ask.
Hi Sterling, the short answer is yes, I use the iOS version of Scrivener, and yes, it is compatible with the desktop version, reportedly even projects created with Scrivener for the PC, although I can’t honestly say I’ve tried that. It is also pretty straightforward to synchronize Scrivener projects between your desktop and your iPad as long as they are stored on Dropbox.
The iOS version just isn’t quite as feature-rich as the desktop version, but it’s still pretty good. But full disclosure, I actually use Scrivener on my phone more than I do on my iPad. Why? Because I find it harder to type without a keyboard on my iPad than on my iPhone. And if I have a keyboard handy, I’m likely to be at home near my computer anyways.
On the other hand, when I leave the house, I’m more likely to accidentally leave my wallet behind than my phone. My phone is in a protective case, so it goes with me to the beach, on hikes, and more - it’s my cyborg writer’s appendage. I am a pretty fast two-thumb typist, especially when I remember to use auto-complete, and I often use speech-to-text to enter quick thoughts. So, I’m a big fan of using Scrivener on my iPhone.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like you want to edit your entire manuscript on your iPad. That is totally doable. I used to do that, and I still do it when editing, but now I tend to enter new text into a simple stub file. Synchronizing to Dropbox takes time, and I found having a small, easy-to-load stub made it faster to jot down ideas on the fly. After I discovered how easy it was to drag documents from one project to another, this became my workflow. I copy things from the stub to my larger overall series file only when needed.
Thank you so much for your question. I hope that helped.
What follows are a few resources I found useful for using Scrivener on iOS.
Scrivener 07: On the Beach