I get it. Software is hard and takes time. I’ve never begrudged developers taking the time to release good software and good updates.
Scrivener might be the exception to my “Don’t complain” policy.
Scrivener is still an iOS app, with an iPad interface. We’ve had iPadOS now for over a year. iPadOS 14 came out last month. In that time, Literature & Latte has released 2 updates to Scrivener iOS, the last being 9 months ago.
I get it, Scrivener isn’t the only application they have, and I don’t know if it’s even their most lucrative. I also don’t know if it’s trivial or not to recompile as an iPadOS app. Maybe if L&L was a bit more transparent I’d know.
What I also know is that now that I’ve moved to a more iPad Pro centered workflow, for my writing, Scrivener is becoming more annoying than not. Especially it’s antiquated way of viewing files in your project.
Have a document in your research folder? You have to back all the way up to the top level of your project, then go down from there to your research file. Find what you need, then reverse those steps to get back to the scene you’re writing.
I’m normally very very pro Scrivener. If someone asked me today, I wouldn’t recommend the iOS version. The Mac version, yes, it’s great.
I use it daily. There have been times where I’ve needed to move things around and rather than deal with the clunky mobile interface, I come back to my office, wake up my computer, open scrivener after Dropbox has synced, and move things. Then I close it all down and go back to my iPad. It’s tedious, to say the least.
More and more DabbleWriter which I love overall, is looking more attractive as my main writing project app for iPad and desktop. I tend to move back and forth right now between the two tools, but maybe I’ll take a break on Scrivener and go all-in on Dabble for a bit.
