Distraction-free editing with WriteRoom

Hog Bay Software puts out a great distraction-free text editing app title called WriteRoom. Available on the iPhone, iPad and Mac, WriteRoom removes all menus, toolbars, and other user interface distractions from your view.

While it’s nice that WriteRoom works on all three platforms, you don’t want to get stuck worrying about which device holds the latest version. Enter DropBox. With DropBox, you can access your files in WriteRoom over the internet from each device. While WriteRoom on iOS natively supports access to DropBox, WriteRoom on OS X will require the use of the DropBox Mac client to help keep your files organized, but that’s a free download that’s easy to set up.

If you tend to leave your apps running on all three devices, one thing that you may need to do after making edits on your iOS device is select “Revert To Saved” from the File menu as you switch back to OS X. Going the other direction, the iOS version of WriteRoom will pick up on the edits you have made on OS X as you switch between active apps.

Unlike with  a few other DropBox-based text editors for iOS, I’ve also found that WriteRoom is capable of making edits when there is no network connectivity. There’s even a “Sync All Now” button on the DropBox configuration page for iOS devices. This will trigger a sync operation, and ensure that all of your devices have the edits you made while disconnected.

Save keystrokes with TextExpander

Smile’s TextExpander, which is also available on the iPhone, iPad and Mac, is another great tool for cross-platform productivity. Making every keystroke count, TextExpander has a user-configurable library of witty abbreviations that are used to replace the text as you type. It’s a little like a supercharged autocorrect. You type an abbreviation like “brb,” for example, and TextExpander will replace the abbreviation with “be right back.”  On OS X this works with all applications, as it is a system-wide service. TextExpander Touch for iOS depends on other app developers to support TextExpander’s API in order to bring in its abbreviation replacement features. Luckily, WriteRoom is one of many apps that support TextExpander’s iOS API.

TextExpander can handle more complex situations as well.  You can use it to insert the current date in any format you choose, and you can also control where the cursor will be placed after the abbreviation has replaced the text you’ve typed.  This is accomplished by placing a pipe character (“|”) in the definition of the abbreviation. Books like “Take Control of TextExpander,” websites like Alex Poslavsky’s snippet repository and even a video tutorial series can all teach you how to use TextExpander to its full potential.

Managing your abbreviation libraries on DropBox

Once you have TextExpander installed and enabled on your iOS and OS X devices, you will want to start selecting and defining what abbreviation libraries you want to use. You can use your own, but you can also grab predefined libraries in the app itself. Some even use TextExpander to automatically correct common misspellings and typos. Once you’ve decided which abbreviation libraries to use, you’ll want to keep them in sync on every device you type with. And that’s where TextExpander’s DropBox integration comes into play. You can configure TextExpander to sync its database of abbreviations to DropBox, so that any new abbreviation you define on your iPhone, will also be available for use on your iPad and Mac.

Not only have the developers of these solutions created great standalone products, but they’ve also created a collection of apps across all Apple platforms, which is the real key to creating lasting value for Mac and iOS users.

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Plays better with others

Elements introduces a ton of exporting/publishing features with the latest update. Now you can send your files as e-mails (inline or as an attachment), publish directly to Tumblr and Facebook, and send to Evernote or iTunes. My personal site is hosted on Tumblr and I use Evernote a lot, so I love those features in particular, but all of those listed alleviate the pain of getting files off your iPad.

New publishing options in Elements.

My only problem with exporting/sharing/publishing is that the new selections are limited, and buried under confusing menu choices. Choosing Export lets you send the file to Dropbox, Evernote, and iTunes, but only as an HTML or PDF file. I think Elements would be great in a classroom where the full-screen, no frills interface is perfect for capturing lecture notes, and Evernote is a great repository for class notes and materials. But being limited to exporting only HTML or PDF files is a hassle. The workaround to sending text to your Evernote account is to use Element’s inline e-mail feature to send the note to your Evernote address.Sending files to other services needs to be consolidated. Instead of choosing export, PDF, and then Evernote within Elements, it would work better if I chose export, Evernote, and then the format (and create a text note needs to be there).

Element continues to support Markdown, however, making it an excellent general editor for blog posts. Also, the app developer is looking into support of Markdown formatting when you export a PDF file. If this feature is implemented, it may become best way to create a file with footnotes.

Final thoughts

Right now, I’m using Pages as my editor of choice for iOS and OS X because of the ease of using the same file on both platforms and because iCloud will allow me to seamlessly (I hope) sync files in the background. Am I going to change to Elements thanks to this major update? Pages is still likely to be my go-to tool for general use, but for Tumblr posts and Evernote entries, Elements gets the nod. This is also still a basic plain text editing tool. There are zero formatting features. No bold or italics, no paragraph styles. For my needs, this is fine. If you need to bold files without using Markdown, this is not the tool for you. Still, Elements looks like the easiest way to get text into a format I’m going to want to quickly get at on my desktop thanks to its new sharing features, which at least merits a spot on my primary home page.

Forced Dropbox usage for basic file systems remains a downside. I’d much prefer if the app stored files in its own sandbox first, and then integrated with Dropbox as an option. I’ll have to suck it up with Dropbox, though, at least until Elements incorporates the upcoming iCloud document syncing feature. Elements looks like the easiest way to get text into a format I’m going to want to quickly get at on my desktop. I expect iCloud to have a huge impact on iOS text editors on the whole, so I can’t wait to see what developers do with it when it arrives this fall.

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I’ll take the latter issue first. The funny thing is, 4 years (or so) ago when I got back on the Mac side of things, finding a decent FTP client was next to impossible. Interarchy, Fetch, RBrowser and Cyberduck seemed to be the viable solutions. Then Transmit (from Panic) came out and the show was over (as far as I’m concerned). But in recent months – maybe the last year – it’s crazy how many FTP options are available to us. Yummy FTP, Captain FTP, and Forklift come immediately to mind. (There are plenty more though…)

Having options is great and all, but how many do we need? Is one really that much better than the other? The core functionality is all essentially the same, so I guess pick the best UI and plunk down your card to make a purchase.

Worse yet is the Text Editor scene. My favorite couple are TextMate (de facto winner in this space?) and SubEthaEdit – I tell you because I can see you care. But then there’s an endless line of other options here – xPad, TextEdit, TextWrangler, Mori, Jedit, Smultron, to name a few. The list goes on… I understand where apps such as WriteRoom offer something slightly different. But geez, it’s still just a text editor that’s aimed at the more easily distracted – hey look, squirrels!!!

But what is it about FTP apps and Text Editors that seemingly attract developers – the experienced and green alike? Every developer’s gotta practice on some project, and [guru] Scott Stevenson has a great tutorial on CocoaDevCentral for creating your own Text Editor (the tutorials here are hands-down, some of the best you’ll find on the web). So I get that – it’s an easy jumping-off point where you can get your feet wet and work your way up. But what drives every developer and their mother to try to sell their code as if it were so earth shatteringly different from the next 5, 10, 15 competing apps?

My intent is not to blast these developers – heaven knows I’m no application coder! I’m just trying to wrap my brain around the reasoning behind everyone trying to sell more or less the same program. (I understand that everyone wants to make a buck, but still!) I invite any coders – especially of Text Editors or FTP Clients – to either sound off in the comment here, or better yet, contact me directly (nick[dot]appleblog[at]gmail[dot]com) and lets get a conversation going on this topic.

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