Yes! A Great iPad App for Scrivener Users–Scrivo Pro Works!
Those of us who are faithful users of the popular Scrivener software for writers and also have iPads have been waiting and waiting and WAITING for the dedicated Scrivener app. As of this writing, the iPad app is finally in Beta and just about ready for the last iTunes testing process. Of course, who knows how long that will take…
I have two MacBooks (of course I do!): a 15-inch MacBook Pro that I keep at my co-working office space, and an 11-inch MacBook Air that I keep at home and take on the road with me. After giving my 13-inch Air to my daughter, I specifically bought the 11-inch Air to use the Scrivener app while I was out and about. I also still have my 10.5-inch iPad, but none of the other iPad apps I tried on my ‘Pad worked as well for Scrivener as I would have liked. I also recently bought the 12.5-inch iPad Pro, and I love it. Yes, I have a lot of Apple computers and devices, but that’s another blog post.
After trying app after app and hack after hack, I finally found an app that syncs perfectly with the desktop Scrivener and allows me to work on Scrivener projects on my beautiful new iPad Pro, as well as on my iPad2 and iPhone 6S Plus. Named “Scrivo Pro”, it recently came out of beta and it part of a suite of writing apps offered by a company called Studio5. If you are relatively experienced in using Scrivener, you know how to set the export function to send a complete Scrivener project to your Dropbox account. Once that is done, you’re ready to use Scrivo Pro to work with your Scrivener projects while you’re on the go (or at the beach…).
Once you’ve synched your project to Dropbox, when you open the Scrivo Pro app, you will be able to search for that project and import it almost perfectly into the app, and everything in your Scrivener Binder, including all documents, index cards from the Corkboard, and even individual file word counts are available to you. You can even start a new Scrivener project in Scrivo Pro and it will sync back to your desktop Scrivener. As you write in Scrivo Pro, you can synch right from the app and everything shows up perfectly back on your desktop Scrivener. I say the Scrivo Pro syncs “almost perfectly”, because what I found is that web links and other non-text items in my Research Folder do not synch over, although photos in the Research folder do sync over just fine.
With Scrivo Pro, you can also write your non-Scrivener documents and export them into other apps, or share them via email, etc., as well as have offline access to the files in the app. Whichever type of documents you write and edit in Scrivo Pro, you have the full complement of advanced RTF formatting options, you can export in all of the popular formats. One of my favorite features of the Scrivener software is the ability to work with a split screen so that I can view two separate files at the same time. Now, with iOS 9, the split screen function on the iPad works so very well, it really helps when using the Scrivo Pro app.
Scrivo Pro is not intended to be a full replacement for Windows or
Mac desktop Scrivener, and you will need to have the latest updates of both Scrivener and Dropbox on your desktop computer, as well as the latest iOS update on your iPad and/or iPhone in order for the sync to work correctly. You can view the entire set of features of Scrivo Pro on their website. Priced at only about $20, Scrivo Pro is an excellent app to use while we wait for the official Scrivener iPad app.
Pamela Hilliard Owens is the founder and CEO of Detroit Ink Publishing, a company that helps authors with their ghostwriting, writing, editing, formatting, manuscript preparation, and self-publishing projects. Contact us here to schedule a free consultation about your needs.
