Apologies for the lack of iPad application reviews as of late. I could blame it on exam season, but in reality, I haven’t been playing too many games lately on my iPad, therefore I haven’t had anything to review. Instead, I’ve been up to some serious business: I’m in the planning stages of a novel.
Previously, I was using Pages, Apple’s word processor for the iPad. It works great for writing, but the main flaw with it was the lack of file management. I hadn’t even created that many documents on Pages, and already, it was hard to sort through my documents because there was no hierarchy. Each file was displayed with a giant thumbnail image, so it was hard to look at the documents as a whole since they physically took up so much screen space.
After much searching, I discovered (and subsequently fell in love with) Manuscript.
(Of course, once I purchased this application, Pages had an update which included more file management features: go figure.)
I was frustrated when I discovered a bug that would crash the application: if I started a new chapter with a quotation mark, the app would crash as soon as I typed the character. Kaboom. Thankfully the latest update has removed this bug.
Manuscript has many features that I enjoy, including support for multiple concurrent writing projects, index cards, and individual chapter “files.” There are a few more features that I would like to see, including exporting the index files to a txt file, at the very least.
The best feature of this application is the index cards. I’ve been using them heavily to outline my novel, develop my character’s backstories, and write down tidbits of conversation.
While writing in the chapters section of the application, it’s easy to flip back to the index cards for reference.
I haven’t written too much of the actual novel yet, just a few scenes, but using the index card feature of Manuscript has helped me to organize my thoughts and develop a detailed outline which will surely help keep me on track as I work through the rest of the novel writing process.