Tags
cloud, ipad, novel, technology, writing
I wanted to be able to work on the same word processing document on my Mac (assuming I get it fixed someday), my PC when it’s running Windows, my PC when it’s running Ubuntu, and my iPad. Maybe on my iPhone too, at least for quick edits and whatever. That’s what I wanted. But there’s more. When working on this document, I wanted to be saving and overwriting the same file on the same cloud-based service, rather than emailing different versions of different drafts back and forth to myself to open them in these various environments.
This is not a strange set of wants.
I’ve been using Evernote for writing drafty versions of my documents in all these different environments, seamlessly, and it is indeed sweet for drafty versions. but Evernote is not a word processor. I’m past the Evernote point. It’s time to generate some professionally-formatted manuscripts out of my mess, you know?
I’ve owned Pages since it came out for iPad. It is the most full-featured word processor I’ve seen on the iPad, but it doesn’t have Dropbox integration. I have a feeling that maybe it used to, before iCloud existed. I am not sure of this. I decided to try it anyway, but couldn’t figure out how to get iCloud integration to work on my Windows PC. I could get to the control panel applet, and see my docs, but I couldn’t open them. And then I remembered Ubuntu. I wasn’t even about to try to get iCloud going on Ubuntu. That’s a headache I don’t need. There’s probably a way (dear Ubuntu-using friends — I know you are about to start typing a comment which will tell me all five hundred and twenty-seven steps I need to take to make iCloud work with Ubuntu — and that’s cool, I appreciate it, but never mind). So Pages is out. Pages would be perfect if all my writing devices were Apple products, and all my operating systems were Apple OSs. But they are not.
Google Docs looks like crap on a crap stick on the iPad. Are they joking?
The Zoho Docs app is read-only.
iAWriter is text-only — it literally saves your documents as ASCII .txt files — so there’s no formatting beyond simple paragraph breaks. That won’t do.
I ended up settling on Docs2 HD, after about two hours of looking, and installing different apps, and being disappointed.
This was supposed to have been much easier than it turned out to be. On the bright side: all this “work” made me feel productive, even though I got absolutely no actual work (non-quotation mark work) done.
Now I’m going to take a shower, and maybe when I have gotten myself all clean and patted dry and sweet-smelling and powdery, etc., I’ll be able to do some actual work work. I’ll keep you posted! The idea is to reboot Snake-Boy Loves Sky Prince with an all-new, all-revised, all-compact and flowing version of Chapters 1-3, and soonly.
