Storyist and Scrivener? Nope.

As I wrote in my last entry, I was excited when I read Ricardo Sanchez’s article on the integration of Storyist and Scrivener. Full of anticipation, I plunked down my $15 and downloaded Storyist. I was disappointed.First i tried to enable DropBox sync in Storyist, but then realized Storyist requires the native Scrivener file to be saved on iCloud Drive. I followed the instructions in Storyist to set up iCloud Drive—the Storyist Folder showed up on my iPhone, but not on my Mac. I consulted the forums and saw that iCloud sync can take some time—up to several minutes. I waited-no sync. I cold-booted my phone-no sync. I reinstalled Storyist—still no sync. Finally, I connected my phone to my Mac and iTunes.Lo and behold, a Storyist Folder appeared on the iCloud Drive on my Mac. On my Mac, I set up an alias for a current Scrivener project and moved the native file to the Storyist Folder on ICloud Drive. The file appear on my phone. The folder hierarchy appeared identical on the phone as on Scrivener on my Mac. Many of the features of the Storyist software don’t work with native Scrivener files.I navigated down into the Drafts folder on my iPhone and typed some text. I waited for what seemed like several minutes for the file on my Mac to update. I opened the Scrivener project on my Mac and opened the section I had edited on my phone—the edited text did not show up on my Mac. Instead, I saw file conflict notifications between the Mac and iPhone version of the section. No matter how I tried, I was unable to resolve these conflicts.To make a long story short, I feel like I wasted $15. The lack of usable features and the unreliable sync of Storyist are deal killers for me. In fact, the only advantage I can see in using Storyist is the ability to read native Scrivener files. In every other aspect, I found Storyist inferior to the Dropbox text sync method I discussed in this entry. I’m going to continue to hold out for the real deal: Scrivener iOS.