It broke with both my iPad Pro 12.9 3rd gen and iPhone X.
iPhone 7, iMac, MacBook Pro (one with crappy keyboard).
For guidance with issues see http://scrivener.tenderapp.com/help/kb/ios/dropbox-syncing-with-ios
and
http://scrivener.tenderapp.com/help/kb/ios/quick-troubleshooting-for-ios-syncing
If the synching doesn’t work, easy enough to just re-set it up again.
I’m also affected and I’m also switching to Ulysses right now, in conjunction with Aeon Timeline.
I’m also on that discussion in the forum and yes, even though they certainly try to find a solution, I also found the tone a bit peevish. I think they know that the syncing is a weak point and that they would have to rewrite everything in order to make it as fluent as Ulysses. But of course Scrivener has some fantastic features that Ulysses hasn’t. Especially the snapshots are something that I’ll miss. A lot of the other stuff (status etc) can probably be replaced with tags, notes and filters
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My thoughts exactly. The fact that there is an issue and that it’s very complicated and time consuming to fix is understandable. Faithful users can ride with that (I know I would have). But the passive agressiveness of the LitnLat people (name removed by post author - my apologies for that) has made me lose faith in a tool that’s absolutely mission critical.
Maybe we can share ideas about how to replicate Scrivener’s features in a separate thread? Would you be interested?
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A great combination. If you don’t need iOS another app to consider, designed originally for screenwriters but which works for any type of writing, is Highland 2. Both offer good export/import, both have great theming. Highland is free with $50 Pro unlock, which pays for itself compared to most subscription alternatives. I have both apps (out of sheer perversity) and I tend to use Ulysses but mainly because of the iOS sync.
EDIT: Another Mac/iOS combo that offers fantastic bang for the buck is FSNotes. It’s an open source app whose Mac app can be downloaded from Github (or bought from the MAS for $3.99 to support the devs) with a syncing iOS app in the App Store that’s just $2.99
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FSNotes looks very interesting! Can you clip web pages or store any kind of files in it?
Does it support internal links to other of its own documents?
Yes, that’s a great idea, I‘d love to find good practices for that transition!
A smooth transition between Mac and iOS is important for me. If I was only on Mac I would certainly stay with Scrivener.
I’m in exactly in the same case! Will start a forum thread with the little things I’ve found (the good and the bad).
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Great! Meanwhile I will think about which features of Scrivener I actually use and would like to replicate in Ulysses.
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FYI this appears to be fixed with iOS 13.4 . So as many argued, it wasn’t a L&L / Scrivener issue, but an Apple one.
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That’s great news. Even though I have indeed decided to move to Ulysses.
Yes, it’s fixed for me as well. I also moved to Ulysses meanwhile, but I guess I’ll come back to Scrivener now. Only for complex and longer projects though, I learned during this episode that it’s not the right app for me to manage one-off texts like articles. I’ll just do that in Drafts from now on. But to write and organize novels I still prefer Scrivener a lot over Ulysses.
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I have always loved Scrivener’s power but I am concerned by the dismissal of support during that time and the pace of upgrades. I have successfully written a small project in Ulysses and intend to ramp up to see if I can replace Scrivener in the end. TextExpander and iOS / macOS feature parity in Ulysses are really appealing to me.
Even though they were in fact correct that it was an Apple problem?
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I also found the tone in the support thread to be unfriendly or playing down the problem. But they tried to fix that. And I understand that they got a little nervous, because they just couldn’t reproduce the bug and didn’t know what to do. Also (that’s my personal interpretation) it affected Scriveners main weakness, the sync process. Pointing at that makes them a little defensive.
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@Robert said it all. What really came across was “deal with it, sync isn’t that important”. I’m sorry but it is. I have been a Scrivener affiliate for years, have loved and defended the product with my professional fiction writer colleagues but this whole mess seriously damaged my trust in the company and product, where the Ulysses guys come across as much more interested in what their users have to say.
I agree with Robert as well. Even though the problem was ultimately with iPadOS, I wanted to see the Scrivener team take the problem more seriously and to make it clearer that they were lobbying Apple on our behalf to get the problem fixed.
That said, for the long-form, heavily-researched non-fiction which I write, Scrivener is unparalleled. I have continued to use it on Mac through all of the iPad problems and will keep using it there. It has always been rock solid on Mac, including in projects with 1m+ words. I’m going to play with it on the iPad once again, but I don’t really trust it there. To think that just before the sync problem, I almost went iPad only on a two week trip on which I needed Scrivener. Luckily that problem happened just before I was scheduled to leave. I can’t see myself ever doing that now.
The problem is that Scrivener really complex, which is of course also its strength. But syncing this kind of project isn’t trivial and probably much harder than an Ulysses project, where meta data mainly consists of tags. And I actually trust L&L to be extremely productive concerning data loss. They explained reasonably that the clumsy syncing process is due to taking care that nothing gets lost. Whenever there was a conflict, Scrivener made backup files and asked to check etc. So I’m actually pretty confident in their sync. And I never lost anything. Actually the current bug was, as far as I understand it, not really a bug in the syncing mechanism, but the device crashing the app because of some ram issue. So that’s all fine for me. It’s just that they really don’t have any way out of this clumsy but save syncing phenomenon, unless they change everything. And I guess that’s why they sound so unkind sometime.
I think the iPad version is very stable, but it hasn’t any feature parity to the Mac version.
But to be honest, I also had problems with syncing in Ulysses, as sometimes it just took too long until the updates showed on the other device and there is no way of manually starting the syncing. So actually with Scrivener you have more control.
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