Looking for good Mac/IOS writing software for hardware/software reviews

[stevie]

I am looking for good Mac/IOS writing software for hardware/software reviews and news articles. I would like to keep track of relevant information, images and links while I am putting together my articles. I have Scrivener, but I would like an IOS counterpart to write from as well. Does Storyist and Storyist IOS lend itself well to this type of writing? Or is the workflow really limited to fiction or novel/screenplay writing?

[orrenm]

Hi Stevie,

 

In my day job as an acquiring editor for an academic publisher, I'm always evaluating Storyist in terms of how it can work with technical types of writing (my field is music/music technology). There are aspects of Storyist that are geared to fiction: story sheets, index card views, etc. But there is a lot of great general purpose stuff as well: you can start blank documents for your writing, store images, store live links in general text files, and all can be accessed from the project view. And of course if your editor wants the final output in Word format you can export doc files. Will it be perfect for you? I've no idea. But it's definitely not limited to fiction and I'd absolutely recommend downloading the Mac demo and trying to use it for an article to see how it feels. If you like the Mac version, you'll like the iOS version tooit's not a cut down iOS app, it's fully featured and excellent.

 

Hope that helps,

Orren

[marguerite]

You can certainly use Storyist for nonfiction projects. I keep all my blog posts in one project that covers the whole year, for example, and I store copyright information for the images I use in the project as well as the individual entries, each in a note of its own. It's more convenient than TextEdit because I can set Storyist to convert straight quotes to curly quotes as I'm typing. Storyist also doesn't dump a bunch of formatting stuff at the end, as Word does, which mucks up a plain text editor like Blogger's.

 

For academic writing, Storyist is hampered by not supporting footnotes. Track Changes are also still on the feature wish list. But as Orren indicates, import/export to Word (via RTF) is very straightforward, and syncing with the iOS version is seamless. Store your files on Dropbox, and you can stay up-to-date with a single tap. Downloading the demo would definitely be the first step. It's a full-fledged program that works for 30 days. Just start with the Blank template and add a Novel manuscript (for your text). You can ignore all the plot/character/settings stuff unless you find an innovative way to use it to chart the people, places, and events in your articles.

 

There are also tutorials on the Storyist site (under Support) that can help you get up and running. And posting a question here will usually get an answer within hours, although you may want to check around a bit before posting: answers to a lot of the basic questions are already in the Using Storyist and Troubleshooting threads.

 

As someone who's used both Scrivener and Storyist (and prefers Storyist), let me just mention that the two programs use different approaches to achieve the same goal. As a result, Scrivener users sometimes get bothered by not finding the equivalent of scrivenings and compile and other features. Rest assured that Storyist is just as flexible in how you set it up, and it has many attractive features of its own. So it's worth persevering with it past the initial discomfort (if any).

Best,

Marguerite