Testing text editors for iOS

In many ways, the iPad presents users with a new opportunity for taking notes. This device combines the portability of a book with the versatility of the digital world — but demands developers to deal with a new human interface. How do users access and organize files? What advantages does a virtual keyboard offer? Although the iOS is young, many developers are pushing the evolution of the text editor.

At the time of this writing, Appshopper.com lists more than 200 apps related to notes and text files. Meanwhile, App Advice has reviewed more than 75 apps described as note takers, word processors and text editors.

As someone who works with text daily, my search for a text editing app began days after I bought my first iPad. I bought and downloaded many apps and gradually weeded out the less useful contenders. The ones I use regularly are Elements, PlainText, SimpleNote, IA Writer and Evernote.

Elements

Elements is a text editing app that reads from users’ Dropbox accounts. It’s very straightforward: create a file and start typing. Using Dropbox means that users can also create, edit, delete and organize text files as they would any files on Mac or Windows. Personally, I enjoyed being able to search/replace masses of text with BBEdit on my MacBook without worrying about multiple file versions.

It also features a temporary scratchpad for storing “quick ideas, store paragraphs you want to get out of the way, or just make a note for yourself later on.”

Elements allows users to alter the size of its text and choose from 47 different fonts, most of which have at least bold and italic variations. But some of the typefaces, like Copperplate and PartyLet Plain, are less than ideal for text editing.

Oddly, while users can scroll through a document with simple finger flicks, they can only do so by touching the text itself. Flicking the text area’s margins does nothing. It’s a minor inconvenience that took me out of the writing flow before my thumb learned to tap the text.

PlainText

The first serious text editor I used, PlainText could be a close sibling to Elements (and vice versa). Like Elements, PlainText syncs its files in a particular Dropbox folder. Unlike Elements, PlainText shows its file browser in a handy pane on the left. That’s very convenient when comparing files or searching for a bit of text.

Like most editing apps, PlainText does not let users change its text size or face, which looks like 14px Georgia. I didn’t miss it. Unlike other apps, PlainText’s word counter appears in the standard copy/paste/replace cursor tool. It’s a minor convenience that makes a difference.

Simplenote

In spite of its name, I found Simplenote to be a full-featured text editor suitable for long documents. But unlike most text editors, Simplenote enables users to search for keywords in all documents and assign multiple tags to a text files. Only Evernote (below) compares with its ability to skim among multiple files.

Like PlainText, Simplenote lets users show/hide its file browser to the left of it’s writing area. Atop this browser sits a keyword search box at yields results as you type. But it doesn’t show where the keyword appears in each file, which isn’t as helpful if one’s files get long-winded.

Simplenote’s big plus over other apps is it’s “revisions” feature. Users can scroll through previous saves of any text file with a convenient scrollbar and restore with a tap. It’s quick and surprisingly useful.

IA Writer

The keyboard features I miss from desktop platforms are arrow keys. The people who designed IA Writer agreed. Their app’s keyboard includes back/next character and word buttons, as well as convenient quote, colon, semicolon and parenthesis keys. Unfortunately, those keys take valuable space from the writing area. Coupled with Writer’s bulky, monospaced, non-changeable typeface don’t leave much room to work. I found long files difficult to work with.

Rather than displaying traditional page counts, which doesn’t readily apply to text in the digital world, IW Writer displays how much time someone might take to read from the beginning of a file to the cursor. I’d like to see more convention-busting ideas like that in writing apps.

Evernote

I’d been using Evernote for about a year before trying it on my iPad. It’s tags, OCR and search tool work well for recording brief snippets. The Evernote iPad app recreates it’s desktop application and syncs well with their website.

Not strictly a text editor, Evernote was designed to be a quick-reference, multimedia note app for desktop computers and mobile devices alike. To this end, Evernote can snap photos (on devices with a camera) and interpret most text with its server-based OCR software. Snap a pix on the street, sync with their service, and minutes later photos are keyword-searchable. Evernote also has browser widgets capable of “recording” web content for future reference.

Oddly, its iPad app can create new notes, trunks and tags, but not new notebooks. Evernote is also slightly harder to edit text than the other apps I tried because it’s text editor is a separate popup window from its note viewer.

Privacy

Mobile device apps increasingly store files somewhere other than the devices themselves. All of the apps above keep data on remote servers.

Elements, IA Writer and PlainText use their own folders in Dropbox to store files. Dropbox’s privacy statement says that other people may access a user’s files if that user grants them permission. Files in a user’s “public” Dropbox folder “can be used by anyone, for any purpose except commercial use.” Their privacy statement states that Dropbox will use users’ personal information when sending ads and newsletters, from which users may unsubscribe.

Evernote’s privacy policy states that generally they will not view stored content. “As a rule, Evernote employees do not monitor or view your personal information or content stored in the Evernote service, but it may be viewed if we learn that our Terms of Service may have been violated and confirmation is required…”

Bottom line

I’ve tried many text note apps, but have the most practice with the ones above. Simplenote would be my favorite except for its non-Dropbox service. Evernote is the best for on-the-fly notes; PlainText has the most streamlined interface.

Tags: iOS text