Evernote/Bear: Apple Notes/Drafts/Craft have essentailly replaced them depending on the context.
OmniFocus: Replaced with Things but now looking at Noteplan as a possible successor
Agenda and Circus Pony Notebooks: the first became too expensive and the second stopped being developed.
iShowU: replaced by Screenflow for the development of online courses.
CleanShotX: replaced witht he cheaper and equally capable Shottr
Renamer for Mac: nice app, but I just didn’t use/need it all that often
iThoughts: replaced with MindNode
Bookends: now using the free Zotero for Academic references. Bookends was nice but the yearly or so paid upgrades finally go to be too much.
I’m currently seeing whether Ulysses can replace Scrivener for academic writing. I still like Scrivener, but it sometimes seems a bit much. Plus, I really wish the developer would get on board with iCloud rather than forcing me to use Dropbox.
AIUI it’s not that Scrivener’s developer won’t ‘get on board with iCloud’, it’s that iCloud isn’t technically able to deal properly with Scrivener’s file format.
A Scrivener project is a bundle of hundreds, or thousands of files, which have to be kept in sync with the main file, so the cloud service has to be able to guarantee that everything will be kept up to date, all the time, otherwise the project will become corrupted. Dropbox can do this: iCloud, Google Drive, and others, can’t.
Keith the developer, has been talking to Apple about this for a very long but until iCloud becomes more robust in this regard then you are much better off sticking with Dropbox.
The technical details behind all this are way beyond me, but that’s the gist, I think.
It’s always sounded like an excuse to me: file formats can be adapted. You could even develop your own sync system as many apps have done. It’s understandable if a developer realises that they don’t have the resources or don’t want to re-write their core code, and it’s their choice, but the consequence may be to make your app less useful and less used.
IMHO Scrivener being determined to live in its own silo and not move with the Apple Ecosystem has harmed it in numerous ways, despite the fanatical faith of some of its users.
I suspect, and I say this as one who dislikes subscriptions, that developing one’s own sync system would require a subscription model to be sustainable. I’m also not sure if Scrivener’s user base is large enough to provide the resources for a major rewrite. It took years for the iOS version to be released.
I don’t think it’s an excuse: Dropbox genuinely does provide hooks that make sync more reliable for this sort of package (which is a lot more complicated that most other formats). If working around those apps would require growing the development team by a significant amount, then who knows whether they’d be able to recoup the costs: I don’t, and neither does anyone else outside the team. ‘Excuse’ implies that this is an irrational decision: I’m not sure that you or I or anybody else outside the company are in a position to make that judgement.
BTW, they have a new, less complex, writing app in beta testing, which they have publicly announced does includes iCloud syncing:
So this isn’t Scrivener; it contains only a fraction of Scrivener’s features, and that fraction often works differently. It’s a scalpel to Scrivener’s Swiss army knife. And because it uses a different text system (and thus a different file format) and steers its own course, this isn’t a “Scrivener Lite”, either. It is its own thing. (Its own thing with iCloud sync.) (My emphasis)
iCloud’s limitations and inadequacies are well known, and Scrivener isn’t the only app affected by that. If there are invalid excuses, they’re all on Apple’s end, and they certainly can’t claim a lack of resources.
CloudKit mostly works okay, but apps that store files in system folders usually have issues with syncing over iCloud, even if they use simple .md or .txt files.
On the bright side, I heard that in the latest versions of Apple’s OSs this fall there will be an option to prevent iCloud from removing local copies of files from users’ devices. It will be interesting to see if that reduces or eliminates some of these issues.
I was an Android user for a few years from high school into college. I loved Inbox by Google, I think it’s my favorite email app I’ve ever used. That app is the only time I’ve ever wanted to manage my inbox because the app was just so fun to use.
Along those same lines, Hangouts was fantastic for it’s time. When my now-wife and I started dating, we messaged and video-called on Hangouts. It 's a shame it was shuttered for whatever Google is doing now.
More recently, I miss Things 3 from college and grad school. Just a wonderful app I hope to return to one day when my work setup is more conducive for it. My favorite feature at the time was the ability to set up due dates and start dates, very helpful for school work.
Finally, I miss using the R programming language and the RStudio IDE. I know folks in academia and healthcare still use it heavily, but the rest of us in the data world have standardized on Python for better and for worse. I still use R and RStudio occasionally for the rare visualization and it always brings me joy!
I’ll probably give it a try, but I’m very disappointed that it uses rich text instead of markdown. At one time I would have been excited by it, but I no longer see any advantages to rich text in a modern app that’s designed for writing drafts rather than formatting final documents.
I like and use Scrivener, but it originated in a different era, when nearly everyone wrote with WYSIWYG word processors and before the plaintext resurgence and the rise of markdown.
I also use Markdown most of the time, but find Scrivener works very well with it anyway – in some ways it’s a lot more powerful as a Markdown environment than some dedicated Markdown editors. The Latex/Markdown section of the forum has many examples of really complex workflows based on Markdown to demonstrate that. It doesn’t really matter that the underlying files in the project are RTF when the output can be trivially compiled to plain text files for both backup and final output.
What it doesn’t have is a live preview, but there’s nothing to stop one writing in raw Markdown and using the integration with Marked, and personally, I think the other benefits outweigh that limitation.
We had several Macs at the office where I worked, with one set up with a Laser Writer in an open area for anyone to use for desktop publishing. And this machine had Talking Moose installed.
One weekend, the janitor was in and he sat down at the desk with this machine. And the Taking Moose blurted out, “Get to work slacker!”.
First thing Monday said janitor was in my office wanting to know how the Moose knew!
For the record, I use Resilio Sync basically my own cloud and zero cost. It syncs Scrivener and other programs’ data and I’ve never had anything corrupted.
On a related issue, Quicken now occasionally hiccups syncing with Dropbox. Quicken used to officially support Dropbox and now they don’t. I’m going to see how Quicken works with Resilio Sync and if it tests out all right I can completely get rid of Dropbox, adding to my “no longer used” app list, but never a favorite!
No, I sync it among three Macs (my desktop iMac, portable MacBookPro, and Mini server which runs 24/7 and acts as the “cloud” device. They do have an iOS port, I just don’t use it.
Not really an issue for me. My iPhone is basically a data consumptive device and I don’t use an iPad. I have difficulties using touch screens, so even doing tasks like adding to the calendar or sending a message, I’ll go to my iMac.
So I tried it out and Resilio Sync so far has worked just fine with Quicken. It syncs Quicken data across my iMac, my wife’s iMac, our MacBookPro for travel, and the Mac mini server.
Dropbox can finally be removed from our systems! Quicken is a real acid test for cloud services because when a Quicken dataset (a package file) is opened it seems like an unpacking process occurs replacing all the original files with new files, causing lots of cloud activity. When the Quicken dataset is closed, the process repeats. It makes the use with Scrivener seem like child’s play!