In a long history of Star Trek movies, going all the way back to the original Motion Picture, this was the first one that I seriously thought about skipping:
I hate to see a good franchise shoot itself in the head, and by the looks of the trailer, Star Trek Beyond was going to do exactly that. The movie was directed by Justin Lin, who is partially responsible for the never-ending Fast & Furious series. Trekkies across the globe were a little worried about the director, given his track record to date, and the trailer didn’t help: I thought I was watching Fast & Furious 15 – Romulan Drift. It looked like the film makers had missed their target audience by a light year. But rather than release the film and accuse the fanbase of being alien-hating mysognists (like the makers of the new Ghostbusters flick would have done), they revamped the trailer and tried again.
Okay, first a disclaimer: I’ve been a Scrivener user since day one (that must be going on about ten years now), and I’m also one of those people who didn’t believe you could write a whole book on a tablet, much less a mobile phone. So, skeptical me promised the developer I’d give it a damn good try…
This is where I was when I finished Novel Number 4, the last two chapters written on my mobile phone.
If you’re going to walk and write, keep one eye out for the river bank
So it’s fair to say I’m something of a convert.
Scrivener for iOS should probably be called the Messiah Release: millions waited for it, and as time soldiered on it seemed less likely that it would ever arrive. But Literature and Latte battled on making missteps and hitting setbacks until their developer – who said he wasn’t go to write it himself – decided to write it himself. A surprisingly short year or so later, the beta arrived, and straight off the bat, I can tell you it was well worth the wait.
I got my notification, and taking great care to ignore all the warnings and instructions, I downloaded it and cracked on. Getting my work in progress on to iOS was pretty easy: Scrivener uses Dropbox to store its files (it can’t use iCloud – more on that later), so it’s simply a case of copying your stuff to a Dropbox folder and then syncing across to iOS. Unsurprisingly, things didn’t look quite right; everything was there: the manuscript, my research notes, character bios, photographs, story plans – but the fonts weren’t right. I got straight on to the developer who pointed out the spot in the manual where it explains how to sync fonts into Scrivener. Two minutes later, I had a project that looked eerily like the one I have running on MacOSX.
