Mobile Styles

[green_knight]

I love the Storyist iPhone app - so much inspiration in such a small package. My main feature request would be the ability to define mobile styles which are automatically mapped to style names, so that I can use all the fancy fonts and formattings on my Mac, open the file on my iPhone and see it in an appropriate font and layout, and send it back to my Mac without having to reformat it at both ends.

 

Which, given how much hassle changing the format is, right now is a major obstacle to sharing the same file on both platforms.

 

Also, can the 'common fonts' menu please be dynamic and put the fonts I use at the top instead of the pre-chosen ones? I'd rather not have it than have it clutter up with three - to me - useless fonts.

[Steve]

Hi green_knight,

I love the Storyist iPhone app - so much inspiration in such a small package. My main feature request would be the ability to define mobile styles which are automatically mapped to style names, so that I can use all the fancy fonts and formattings on my Mac, open the file on my iPhone and see it in an appropriate font and layout, and send it back to my Mac without having to reformat it at both ends.

Which, given how much hassle changing the format is, right now is a major obstacle to sharing the same file on both platforms.

What are you having to reformat? Styles that are defined on the Mac should transfer to iPad without a problem. The only snag would be if you use fonts on the Mac that aren't available on iPad.

Also, can the 'common fonts' menu please be dynamic and put the fonts I use at the top instead of the pre-chosen ones? I'd rather not have it than have it clutter up with three - to me - useless fonts.

It certainly could. Let me think about how to implement that efficiently.

-Steve

[green_knight]

 

What are you having to reformat? Styles that are defined on the Mac should transfer to iPad without a problem. The only snag would be if you use fonts on the Mac that aren't available on iPad.

 

 

Hi Steve,

 

they're very different environments and my needs are different. On the iPhone, I want to put as much text onto the page as I can comfortably read: I am looking for a font that is readable on a small screen, so I want a small-ish size, narrow margins, single spaced, and a font that's clear because I'll often be moving and don't have much attention for the screen.

 

On my Mac, I want to break up the 'wall of text' effect with white space, indents, and space between paragraphs, and I tend to use fonts that are more ornate: one, because they put me in a better mood, and two, because they slow down my reading speed slightly and stop my eyes from racing across the text without actually noticing the flaws in it. (On the phone, the limited screen size does that job for me.)

 

I also like seeing immediately which project I am working in, so I tend to assign every document different layouts, whereas my needs on the iPhone are consistent: every text document I work on needs to be optimised for readability because there's so little screen.

 

On an iPad - I have my eye on a Mini - I guess I will be somewhere in-between, but I'll still be largely using it in situations where I cannot focus on the screen very well (because I need the attention for other things, or I'm moving) and thus must use a style that makes it easier to take in what text is displayed on the screen.

 

 

So yes, very different needs that cannot be served by a single layout, quite apart from the fact that a user shouldn't be forced to do things the software's way unless there is a pressing need for it.