Much improved but still buggy – Story Planner for Writers Review

The UI is really nice, though it doesn’t take long to realize that there are some things that could be improved. My biggest complaint, however, is with iCloud syncing, which just doesn’t seem to work very well. As for things that do work, they work great. The app is a nice little database for dumping story ideas. Things start to feel a little limited beyond that, however. There doesn’t seem to be any way to sort your list of stories aside from the three options given at the top of the stories list (all projects, in progress, and completed). It would be nice to be able to search, sort, and filter the list (such as sorting alphabetically or by last-edited, and being able to filter by tags or genres). It’s also frustrating that you’re given a single text field for capturing notes about your story, which feels very limiting. I understand only having a single Notes field on characters, locations, plots, and scenes, but it would be really nice if notes about the story itself could be treated the same as Characters, Locations, Plots, and Scenes, and have its own tab/table in the database. These limitations aside, there are some features I’d LOVE to see in a future release. One feature that would be really great would be the ability to create hierarchies (or being able to indent) locations, plots, and scenes. At the very least, it would be handy for visualizing sub-plots. There are also a number of bugs. For example, there is no way to manually dismiss the keyboard, and it doesn’t always hide automatically when you navigate away from an input field. The app frequently becomes extremely laggy or non-responsive (I’m on iPhone 11 Pro and latest iPad Pro). Syncing, to me, is the biggest bug. It’s unpredictable, and there isn’t any way of monitoring sync status or sync conflicts. If the bugs were fixed, this app would be four stars. With some additional features, it would easily be five stars.
Review by tckneisly on Story Planner for Writers.