Storyist: a Swiss Army knife with a few broken tools

The idea behind Storyist is not new. An all-in-one program allows the creative juices to flow, without having to jump from app to app collating ideas into a finishing app.

Storyist offers the opportunity for the writer to break down their story to its basic components. It manages this by offering easy to access and easy to create sections within each project. Helpful tools include pages for character profiles, a plot summary, blank text pages for notes, complete text and paragraph style functionality, and even an images folder.

Like many all-in-one programs, there is a tendency for some parts of the app to shine, leaving other parts that dont live up to their potential. The index card feature is a perfect example. It is cumbersome and while integrated, seems to function much differently than many much more intuitive and functional index card apps.

Inserting images into a document is an exercise in frustration. It is as if Storyist treats images as one of the many text styles (basic or custom). I am not sure why one would want to include images in a novel manuscript or screenplay submission, as it is highly irregular. But the option is available, if you can figure out how to make it work.

The most disappointing issue is text flow. Storyist offers such advanced style sheet customization and extended keyboard functionality, I was surprised to find that Storyist advances words in a sentence to the next line, despite there being plenty of white space left on the previous line and no custom margin settings other than the standard, left align.

Perhaps an example is best. I will use a sentence demonstrating how most text editors would correctly handle a sentence:
"Storyist could be a great application for writers,"

Here is how Storyist might render the same sentence:
"Storyist could be a great application
for writers."

Notice how Storyist advances text to the next line when unnecessary? Storyist handles sentence flow in this fashion far too often. A manual solution to the problem is to perform a cut and paste operation, placing the words where they should be, thus fixing the irregular text flow anomaly. Having to do this at least one time, in nearly each paragraph is unacceptable.

Updates/Upgrades: Storyist responded with four updates in 2013, and none in 2014. It has now been nine months since the last update.

The bottom line: If the rudimentary settings are not changed, Storyist provides the writer templates to create properly formatted manuscripts for both novels and screenplays. Many other apps do the same. The extra ability to create a finished document, with custom formatting, provides the user with page-layout functionality. There are better page layout apps in which text flows properly, images can be inserted, scaled, masked and to which text wrap settings can be applied.

My opinion: Storyist is an almost great app for writing stories, screenplays and novels. For in-spec novel manuscript or screenplay submissions, Storyist functions best when you use the formatted templates and change nothing. Having said that, the style sheet options are among the best, and the extended keyboard options are handy. I use Storyist for this reason alone. It makes great short, ready to print documents. The inability to work with images, a less than stellar index card function and the incredibly poor text flow glitch prevent it from being capable of doing much more. Though it had four updates last year, it has not seen an upgrade since 2013. In the effort to create an, "all youll ever need text, screenplay and page-layout app," Storyist comes up short. I give it three stars.

MacDelta about Storyist