Daedalus Touch, a Clever, Gesture-Based iPad Text Editor.PlainText: iPad Text-Editor from the Makers of WriteRoom.If you don’t care about the extra keyboard row, or the text-tweaking options, then stick with the free and still excellent PlainText. If you’re looking for a solid, reliable iPad text editor with just enough settings to make the workspace nice and comfortable, along with some great features to make actually writing a lot faster and easier, you should probably go get WriteRoom now (and if you already have the iPhone version, this update is free). Textexpander support remains, as does a pop-up box (tap the document title) to let you print, email or sync a document, as well as view a word count. You can password protect your files and switch auto-correct on or off. You can switch the status bar back on (the bar with the time, battery and carrier info at the top of the screen). Other new tweaks let you change text and paper colors, as well as text highlight colors. It sounds pointless, but works surprisingly well, and in long documents it saves you from pawing at the screen like a demented kitten. The difference is that you can now grab that thumb and use it to drag the content, just like you can on a desktop. When you do so, the regular scrollbar “thumb” appears on the right to give you feedback. With any document more than one page long, you can scroll by swiping your fingers, as with any other iOS app. WriteRoom also introduces the “Draggable Scroller”. Smart and, once you’re used to it, essential. Tap with two fingers and it moves one word at a time. These arrows sound handy, but are redundant thanks to a feature that already exists in PlainText: tap the left or right margin and the cursor moves to the left or right by one character. These keys are customizable (all you do is type the symbols into a text box in the settings), but the default set is pretty good, with tab, a hyphen, colon, semicolon, parentheses single and double quotes, along with a pair of cursor arrows. This puts another row of keys above the standard QWERTY layout. The other big change is the Extended Keyboard. The small default font of PlainText was one of the things that kept me from using it. Size, font and even line spacing can now be tweaked. The biggest changes are the ability to change the typeface. In fact, WriteRoom 3.0 is more like PlainText 2.0, and that’s a good thing. Markdown works, for example).Īnd both sport the same clean interface, which can be melted away at the tap of a button leaving just your words and your keyboard. Both versions sync with Dropbox, the iPad’s de facto file system (they can actually be tied to the same folder so you can use either app to edit the same documents), and both support only plain text files (you can specify what kind of plain text documents by entering file extensions when you first connect to Dropbox. WriteRoom 3.0 is a kind of pro version of PlainText, which was Hog Bay developer Jesse Grosjean’s first iPad Text Editor. So it is that Hog Bay software’s WriteRoom has finally hit the tablet, turning swan-like from a rather pointless iPhone app into a beautifully full-featured (universal) iPad app with almost nobody noticing. Note: If you like the idea of a distraction free workspace for other applications and not just writing, check out Think.The waters of the iPad text editor world are so crowded that its easy to miss yet another one slipping from the shore, even it is a big-name app that would normally make a splash. If you’re looking for fancier text editor features and don’t mind shelling out $25, get the newest version (currently 2.3.7). Yes the features are more basic, but if your core need is to write in a distraction free space, 1.0 does the job just just fine. The latest version of WriteRoom is really cool with a lot of great features but we are actually going to suggest WriteRoom 1.0, because it is free to download. Check out the screenshot below.īesides the color scheme, you can also customize the width and height of the writing space, so if you prefer the genuine full screen console appearance it’s just a matter of setting the workspace to the width of your display. The WriteRoom workspace is attractively presented in a simple retro green on black terminal-like appearance, although you can change the color scheme to whatever you want. There are few frills other than what you absolutely must need to write, so don’t expect Microsoft Word.
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