Found this neat little app called Changes that allows you to compare, side-by-side and with color overlays, the differences between text documents. This seems pretty boring and useless until you realize how many damn lines are in a fanfiction or novel and how long and tedious it quickly becomes to re-read your own and proofreader’s work until you find everything.
Neat, useful, stable and well thought-out.
Granted, this is a problem first and foremost because my primary word processor is Apple’s Pages 09 and everyone else on the damn planet is on Micro$oft Office’s Word, but still. This works, it’s efficient and it’s a workaround to downloading and installing Office for Mac (snort, cough, rattle..).
In a completely unrelated sidenote, this guy is working on an iPhone app which would be 100% compatible with Scrivener‘s file formats. A novel writing app on the iPhone… Useless and tedious, you say? Personally, I adore the idea of reviewing changes on the go, and with a proper sync mechanism in place, this could very well become the golden solution for angry Dropbox and SugarSync users. If you’ve read my post on SugarSync, you know I had high hopes (and possibly a SugarRush) as I embraced it as the perfect cloud sync. And it’s not far from that. However, the Scrivener file format itself is very close in structure to a .dmg file and we all know how well those transfer across the web.
Syncing over the cloud for me so far only works if I backup to zip or manually compress the Scrivener file, then move it into a synced folder, which is a bother when you’re on the run or rushed. You can’t work directly from the synced folder, because all kinds of badness can happen to your .scriv file.
So. Scribbler for iPhone. 5.99$ projected price. Bloody well count me in.