Literature & Latte, the development company behind the popular word processing app called Scrivener, has announced that an iOS version of Scrivener is in the works for a 2012 release.
Fans of Scrivener for Mac will be happy to know that the app is now in development for the iPhone and iPad. The professional writing tool will likely offer the most robust word processing experience for iOS to date.
From the Literature & Latte blog:
I think it’s in the customers’ interests to have a dedicated developer for each platform to ensure that each version is always kept up-to-date, and my hands are full with the Mac version. To that end, I’m very pleased to announce that we have just signed contracts with a developer, Jen Yates, to develop the iOS versions for us. Jen has been beavering away in secret for two or three months now, putting together some proof-of-concepts.
An Android version of Scrivener is also planned, but an iOS app is being focused on first. Scrivener is designed as a digital writing studio and research tool, with many levels of organization and options for constructing complex novels, scripts and the like. Porting such a complicated, detailed app to a mobile platform like iOS will certainly be a challenging task.
I have to say that moving index cards around on a touch screen is a lot of fun, and the corkboard implementation she has come up with is, I think, one of the nicest I’ve seen on a touch screen device in terms of selection and dragging.
It’s still early days, though – we are about to embark on the design process proper, and all we can say in terms of a release date is that our iPad and iPhone versions will be out some time in 2012.
While Apple does offer its own productivity suite for iOS, including Pages for word processing, Scrivener could very well be the best professional writing and research tool available in the App Store once it’s released to the public.
Scrivener is currently available in the Mac App Store for $49.99. A free trail is available on the Literature & Latte website.
