Tried it for a few days now, and unfortunately despite the early promise, I am going to abandon it. Here are the problems I encountered:

1. It crashes too often and behaves really weirdly on my mac, jumping from section to section. It seems like a memory hog on my system too (spinning beachball and all)

2. For citations,you really need Papers for it to work well. If you use endnote, you'd have to export the XML file of your references each time you start a new document. If your endnote library is really big, the XML file cannot be read by manuscripts. 

3. Editing of tables is very barebones. You can add columns and rows. That's about it. 

4. I use APA style for my references, unfortunately, the bibliography generated is not in APA style even when I specifically set it as so

For those who haven't bought it yet, I'd advise you to first try it for a month with the trial and really give it a rigorous test and let me know what you think. Hopefully you'd have better luck in getting it to work. I think there's too much fiddling with the unintuitive interface unlike Scrivener which just gets out of the way and let's you do what you are supposed to do - writing. 

Hi John, I don't know Manuscripts.app but I wondered wether I should buy Papers 3. Can you recommend that app? Or what are your reasons for changing to a different app? Thanks

Hello Stefan,  I used Papers 1 then Papers 2 which I still use.  Papers 2 is a great program which I use to store ~4500 articles as well as use the citation ability when writing my own articles.  I wouldn't do without it. Papers was bought from its developers by a publishing company and Papers 3 came out.  A great disappointment.  While I understand the issues plaguing sinking between devices have been solved (they changed the method) I  am not convinced enough to change.

Mohamed - sure

http://www.manuscriptsapp.com

Matias Piipari, CEO of Manuscripts.app Ltd here. You can get a slightly better idea of what we have built from either a) our beta product website http://beta.manuscriptsapp.com as well as from this product demo video b) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9JVFCL0fvk (neither of which is really launched more widely, so enjoy your sneak peek).

In brief, we want to create tools that really help in preparing a complex manuscript from the outlining and planning stage to publishing, helping you focus on the substance of your writing, with interoperability with Word, LaTeX and Markdown.

There's also this brief piece written for our support forum (as we get the question of comparing what we do to other writing tools a lot):

http://support.manuscriptsapp.com/topic/21/what-makes-manuscripts-special

Regarding Papers 3 (at version 3.4.0 by now) and syncing in particular (I also happen to be CTO at Papers, with the company before and after the acquisition): I think you'll find our system heaps better than what you would have experienced at 3.0 or indeed in Papers 2. We have recently added a WiFi syncing mechanism that works between iOS devices and iOS / Mac and is lots faster and more robust than the Papers 1 / 2 one (works in the background unlike the one in Papers 1.x for iOS / Mac). We've added iCloud Drive / Google Drive / OneDrive etc syncing capacity to the Mac and Windows clients (and will be extending some of those also to iOS), and most importantly we have continued to continuously improve the reliability of the entire system. I think you'll find the high ratings (4 1/2 rating on US App Store for instance at the moment) also another sign that we've got somewhere pretty good with it. The problem of synchronising bidirectionally the kind of interlinked and large sets of data that we store in Papers is really quite a hard one (hard enough really that there are research papers to write about how we have solved it), and it is fair to say that at 3.0 we had not cracked it yet. Now we have.

Wow - thanks Matias for the response.  I've  

Hi John -- your response looks to have been trimmed? Happy to answer questions / comments about either product really.

Thanks Matias.  I don't know why it truncated, I just tried editing without luck.

A couple of questions:

I noted that there are a limited number of templates for journals.  What is the plan for adding more? (a potentially very useful feature as preparing a manuscript is a painful job).  Will it be possible to swap between templates for a document?

Inevitably, collaboration means sharing files - particularly Word docs with tracking on.  Does tracking get imported?  Is there a way to display (and export) changes between versions?

Thanks

Regarding templates, we have presently about 1.1K of them in the app, which is of course a small fraction of all research document types imaginable, but we still intend to add a good few number more of these "complete" templates. We are also adding a much larger (in several thousands more) set of more generic templates which don't quite into quite as much detail in the document structure as the ones we have built this top quality set for. We have a good idea of the focus on the former kind of templates based on the volume of requests we have received during the beta program.

Regarding collaboration, we have built the entire technology stack for Manuscripts this time around for not just offline use, but also for synchronisation and versioning. You can read more about that here: http://support.manuscriptsapp.com/topic/8/manuscript-file-versioning-backups-change-tracking . Collaboration features are not there at 1.0 -- this is one things we will be building on top of this system after the 1.0 version. We fully realise that Word change tracking is an important feature to have, but that may not be quite the end of our collaboration features… :-) 

I am trying the software now. I am a long-time Papers user so I thought I would give it a try. I find it to still be a bit buggy. More crashes than I would like

If you like Papers (I do) then it is a no-brainer to give Manuscripts a try. I've started using it for lit review work for projects in early stages. 

I'm concerned about two limitations: 

- Nearly everyone I work with uses Word for writing, so this will have to become powerful enough to get a critical mass before collaboration will make sense

- Limited range of formatting templates (at this point), which the developers assure us they are increasing

So far, I LOVE the concept and want to see a project through to completion. I imagine this would be PERFECT for writing review articles and book chapters. 

It seems promising. I like how there are templates for many of the journals I intend to submit to and how figures are nicely formatted. A few improvements I can think of that hopefully will be added over time:

1. Allow dragging of endnote citations into the text (magic citations is good if you use papers. I use endnote for citations and readcube to store my pdfs.)

2. Allow us to compare sections (like a split window)

I currently use scrivener to write my manuscripts which allows for the above two. I am thinking of using  Manuscript for paper I am writing. Let's hope that it goes well. But overall, I think it is really promising for a first version.

Tried it for a few days now, and unfortunately despite the early promise, I am going to abandon it. Here are the problems I encountered:

1. It crashes too often and behaves really weirdly on my mac, jumping from section to section. It seems like a memory hog on my system too (spinning beachball and all)

2. For citations,you really need Papers for it to work well. If you use endnote, you'd have to export the XML file of your references each time you start a new document. If your endnote library is really big, the XML file cannot be read by manuscripts. 

3. Editing of tables is very barebones. You can add columns and rows. That's about it. 

4. I use APA style for my references, unfortunately, the bibliography generated is not in APA style even when I specifically set it as so

For those who haven't bought it yet, I'd advise you to first try it for a month with the trial and really give it a rigorous test and let me know what you think. Hopefully you'd have better luck in getting it to work. I think there's too much fiddling with the unintuitive interface unlike Scrivener which just gets out of the way and let's you do what you are supposed to do - writing. 

As for me I don't see any problems with general stability of the app. I've being testing the most popular reference managers for the last few months, including papers. I don't like Word for Mac 2016, so when I discovered the Manuscript app, which works perfectly with Papers, I was really happy.

What's good and what's bad:

1) I do like how it helps to structurally organize the article in the very beginning. Something familiar with Scrievener.

2) It works perfectly fine with Papers. I am not sure that Papers is the best bibliography manager, but for me it is obviously better then Mendeley.

3) I am excited with the ideology of the app. I'm wondering why there were no text processors for scholars before.

4) It works badly with cyrillic fonts in bibliography. That usually shows up when you export your article into .docx: cyrillic letters sometimes become sticked together.

5) Maybe that's about me, but I couldn't figure it out how to create your own template.

Anyway, I continue using Word for Mac + Mendeley as my main working instruments. Manuscript is at the very beginning of its way, so I think I'll give it a chance.

I've been periodically trying it out, hoping updates will make it less buggy.  Still no luck; rampant spinny-wheel and crashing in the newest version.  Similar to Papers 3, it seems to be a great concept with too much effort devoted to appearance while still retaining stability flaws and poorly implemented features way out of the beta stage.  

Like the idea of a dedicated manuscript workplace that is adapted and clutter free. That said, the Manuscripts software is extremely unstable and simply doesn't work in most instances. Looks like a premature release...

I just tried it out. Agree with Kevin, it seems to follow the Papers cycle of showing great promise, releasing a barely functioning version, then slowly turning it into a 95% great product over the next couple of years. Very basic functionality (highlighting, copying text across sections) doesn't work, figure features are super buggy. Aggravating business practice. I only still bother with it because Papers does have moments of greatness in-between updates.

Really excited to be trying this app in the coming weeks for my own dissertation. Look forward to seeing the progress with this app!

I really want to like this app, but after trying for two days, its instability has driven me away again. I will check in again at some point, and see if it has gotten better.