Very Happy with Storyist

[josephe]

Hey guys, I bought Storyist the other day and I love it. I'm a computer science major but writing is one of my main hobbies. After having written my first novel a couple of years ago in Evernote (zero out of ten, would not recommend), I decided I should try and organize my next project better. I bought Scrivener afterwards since it was all I knew about at the time.

 

Well, Scrivener got to be a big mess because of inconsistent formatting and complex compiling options. As a programmer/designer, I thought it was really awful that it didn't have special limited styling options for writing a novel--there were too many styles, and it didn't do a good job of keeping them consistent between chapters.

 

So I moved on over to keeping everything in plain RTF files using TextEdit and a bunch of folders on my hard drive. This worked up until I needed to create character sheets. I don't write a whole lot about my characters, just a paragraph or two, so I didn't want to create a bunch of separate files that only held one paragraph each. I needed a faster way to switch between documents, something like Scrivener, but NOT Scrivener because...ugh...I already explained why.

 

Then I found Storyist. The best part about Storyist is that you can write your novel in the format it's supposed to be submitted in. It's like WYSIWYG for agent/query submissions. Storyist handles styles perfectly. It keeps things consistent between chapters. The way sections show up in the outline is perfect--it makes it super easy to label all of your scenes in the outline, allowing you to find them easier. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir at this point, though, or you probably wouldn't be here.

 

There is one thing I would like to know. I'm wondering if it's possible to change the global (master) font, if you will, while editing in Draft Layout. It's nice to see my beautiful novel coming together in the Courier font in Page Layout (the way you'd want to submit it to an agent), but for writing in Draft Layout I'd prefer a different font, such as a serif font (while keeping the Courier font in Page Layout).

 

Also, I don't know if this is a glitch or not, but I'll go ahead and mention it. When the writing editor control doesn't have focus, the options in the View->Layout menu to switch layouts are disabled. As a programmer, I think Storyist should look at the active Storyist window and find the editor control inside it and allow you to perform the switch layout function, even if the editor control doesn't have focus. Hopefully that helps.

 

Thanks for the wonderful program!!

 

Joe

[marguerite]

Hi, Joe, and welcome to the forums!

 

It's very easy to change the font style in Storyist, but I don't know of any way to have the same style display as font X in draft mode and font Y in page layout. You could set the Section Text, Section Separator, Chapter Title, and Header styles to your preferred font and just redefine them to Courier when you get ready to send the book out.

 

So long as you have your project file selected, making Storyist the app of choice, you should be able to use the keyboard shortcuts to switch modes: Alt-Cmd-N for draft and Alt-Cmd-P for page layout.

 

Glad to hear you like Storyist. I discovered it eight years ago and never looked back. Now working on novel #4 in the program. I love it!

Best,

Marguerite

[Steve]

Hi Joe,

 

Welcome!

 

As Marguerite pointed out, there isn't a way to use a different fonts in Draft mode and Page Layout mode. Many new features start as discussions here, though, so feel free to start a thread for it in the Feature Requests section and see if there is general interest in this.

 

On the enabling of menu items for views that don't have focus: As you probably know, the Apple frameworks don't do this by default. "Source lists" (Apple's lingo for the Project view) are a little bit of a special case, though, and it might make sense to forward the commands where there is no ambiguity about the target of the command. Let me think about this.

 

-Steve

[josephe]

Thanks guys I did not know that about Apple's frameworks--I haven't studied app development for Apple systems yet (will hopefully do some of that this year). I think I can live without changing the master font. (Perhaps it would be better for all styles to inherit from a very simple, but adjustable master style, a style which only has font family and and font size for its properties. I don't know, just thinking out loud).

 

I'm encountering a strange bug on the iOS 9 and El Capitan betas, though. Don't know if it's Storyist Mobile's fault or the fault of the beta operating systems. Basically, it's saying that it's synced my stuff with iCloud, but iCloud drive on my computer and the website aren't showing the latest version of my synced story files--just the original one from my computer. I know iCloud has a less than trustworthy history, so it may have nothing to do with the app. I can't exactly remember if I had this issue before I upgraded my operating systems or not.

 

The most up to date story was on my phone, so I ended up having to sync it with Dropbox to get the file from my phone to my computer. That worked just fine, but for some reason iCloud syncing wasn't working. I thought I would go ahead and mention this since it's possible you could encounter the same issue when you test on the development platforms.

 

Edit: Been reading up on the Apple Support forums and I'm almost entirely convinced now that the problem is Apple, like I suspected. It looks as if I will have to use Dropbox syncing or pick a device to write on until iCloud gets its stuff together.

[Steve]

Hi Joe,

 

Thanks for the update on the iCloud issue. I'm not encountering it here, but do see that people in the developer forums are reporting similar issues with other apps, so I believe it is an iOS 9 beta problem.

 

If you do decide to continue writing with the iOS 9 beta and would like to use the Storyist for iOS betas that supports the new features, send me a PM. The next build will be out in a few weeks, and I'd be happy to add you to the beta list.

 

-Steve