Scrivener for iOS

For any kind of writing, this is essential

$19.99 Developer Literature & Latte, literatureandlatte.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 9 or later

If you do any kind of longer-form writing at all, Scrivener for Mac has always been a favorite, and now it’s on iOS too. Almost all the features that make Scrivener so great on the desktop are present. Add the ability to sync across devices using Dropbox and you have a candidate for the best platform for writing anywhere.

Those of us who love Scrivener do so because it allows us to start writing at any point in a report, document, novel, or screenplay in the knowledge we can easily re-arrange chunks at a later date. Sections can have notes attached and be organized in folders. They can be dragged around on a corkboard to change the order in which they’re compiled, and you can even choose an image to be displayed on the corkboard to represent each section. So, you could create descriptions for characters in a novel and choose a photo of somebody who resembles the character to be displayed on the corkboard, then view all your characters as faces.

Scrivener also supports split-screen mode on the iPad, allowing you to see research notes or images alongside the text you’re writing, whether they’re Scrivener or another app.

Neat touches abound and reveal themselves as you need them. The keyboard, for example, has 24 “function” keys that provide easy access to punctuation marks and cursor keys, as well as tools for highlighting sections, adding footnotes, and creating hyperlinks. Some of these features can also be accessed from the contextual menu that pops up when you tap and hold on text. From there you can also choose to paste styled or unstyled text, split text into different chunks, add comments and share sections of text. There’s also a typewriter mode that keeps the line you’re working on centered on screen.

Scrivener for iOS doesn’t have all of its desktop counterpart’s features: some templates are missing, for example. Still, there’s more than enough here to make it essential for anyone who uses Scrivener on a Mac or Windows – and serves as an excellent introduction to what is now a complete writing platform for anyone who doesn’t.

the bottom line. Arguably the Mac’s best writing app is now one of the iPad’s best.

The contextual menu in the text editor is one of the features that makes writing in Scrivener a joy.

Adding images to character or location sheets is a useful tool for visualizing.