Write for iPhone
Brett Terpstra wrote a nice review of Write, a new text editor for the iPhone. I mostly agree with his assessment that it’s a well made app that falls short on some features but overall provides a good experience, especially due to its excellently executed cursor control button.
I’m writing this in Write and it works well enough for me, but I doubt it will be my editor of choice for a couple of reasons:
- No landscape orientation. I often like to type on the iPhone in landscape so that missing feature makes a big difference to me.
- Only saves to a Write directory in Dropbox. To me the whole beauty of Dropbox is the flexibility and portability of what I save there. If I can’t access a file saved by Write in other applications (and vice versa) then I may as well be using iCloud. Why not just let me save in whatever Dropbox directory I want?
One other annoyance: when accessing a file I need to press an Edit button to start writing in it. Tapping once on the text to enter editing mode seems more conventional and considerably easier.
For all these problems Write is a strong effort for a 1.0 release and I’m looking forward to how the app is developed further. For now though I’ll be sticking with Plain Text for short notes (hooked up to the same Dropbox folder as nvALT on my Mac) and Writing Kit or Byword for longer form writing. It helps that all those apps have iPad versions as well.