The Cellar Door » The Vapour Trail of Scrivener for iOS

For the longest time, this was something I kept biting at the bit for. The Literature and Latte folks posted a long note to users today explaining the delays, the reasons, and the Let Me Sum Up version:

The short version – the “tl;dr” version as the cool kids say – is that we still expect it to be finished this year, but now very much doubt it will be released until next year 2015 because of the amount of testing we need to put it through before letting it loose on the world.

via The Cellar Door » The Vapour Trail of Scrivener for iOS.

Knowing how small a shop they are, and having seen code rushed in other shops to meet demand, I think they’ve probably made the right decision here. It’s really tempting to release early and often, adding features as you go, but if they had we’d see two results: folks would just complain about what wasn’t there, and the L&L folks would be spending all of their time chasing bugs instead of working on improvements.

I have a small confession to make, something I haven’t mentioned: for about six months, I switched over to Storyist completely. Wait, don’t lose faith in me, I came back! While the ability to transition between iPad and desktop was very, very nice, the application itself didn’t work for me. Too used to the shoebox mentality of Scrivener, where I can move pieces about and work more organically, I found Storyist to be too constraining and hard to navigate. Which is perhaps ironic, since I tend to write in a mostly linear fashion, not jumping around. Meh.