iPad Text Editors - Which is Best?
UPDATE: I no longer recommend WriteRoom, and my criticisms of Elements no longer apply. See my latest update.
The iPad is a wonderful tool for writing, coupled with a Bluetooth keyboard. Yes, it has an onscreen keyboard for a reason, but I know that I’m much more efficient with a physical keyboard, and Apple knows it too, else they wouldn’t have attached a keyboard to their dock for the iPad 1. For all that, though, you get a writing platform with the best possible battery life and a slew of other advantages.
That leaves the question, though: what app should you use to write? On the iPad, you have a ridiculous number of choices, really. You can go the minimalist route and use the Notes app. You can go the office drone route and write in Pages. You can use Evernote if you prefer to have a dedicated UI for note-taking. You can even go the code nerd route and use Textastic to write in monospaced and syntax-highlighted glory - and it is a good app, I recommend that you check it out if you’re interested. Some people might even prefer Microsoft’s online OneNote app, for those who need really good compatibility with Windows’s best note-taking application.
My preferred method, however, is with a simple, customizable yet manageable plain text editor. This provides the best future-proofing - plain text files are never proprietary - and the most focused experience. Open up the text file, type your words, and look them up or publish later.
With that in mind, I’ve picked out three applications which appear to be the best for the task. I have Simplenote, WriteRoom and Elements.
Simplenote
Simplenote’s biggest advantage is that it offers a free version that is quite capable. For no cost at all, you get an app that you can type in plaintext notes, add tags that you can filter by, have them synced to their servers, and you even get limited versioning support. If you want Dropbox syncing or the ads removed, though, you’ll be moving up to the Premium version which is $19.99 a year.
I used this for several months, and I do like that I can access it from pretty much anywhere - using a native iOS app, or through a good web interface if I’m stuck on Windows. There are also lots of third-party applications that sync with Simplenote as well. However, I have noticed in those months of using it that there are occasional syncing bugs - one day I had eight files suddenly appear out of nowhere based on a note that I had written. I don’t believe I’ve ever lost anything I’ve written from this, but it is a concern.
Fortunately, Dropbox syncing both gives you a way out and also gives you a backup versioning system should Simplenote ever crap out on you. I find that this is an acceptable risk - it didn’t happen often, and it was always recoverable in my experience.
The biggest concern to me was price. $19.99 a year is a significant chunk of change, and I would be concerned about the syncing issues if I didn’t have that Dropbox backup. So, I’ve switched away from it to the next two applications. Which is funny, because this app’s bugginess pales in comparison to WriteRoom’s.
WriteRoom
Let’s get this out of the way immediately: WriteRoom’s file and folder management UI is buggy to the extreme. I could go in there right now, start pushing buttons, and I can pretty much guarantee that an error message will come up in short order. They’ll often pop up on renaming, and syncing will fail occasionally for no reason.
That said, it’s perhaps the best writing experience I’ve ever had. When you hide that management UI and you’re just presented with the words, it’s extremely readable and fun to write on. Out of all the applications, this is the only one that I can set a cool TRON-like cyan text on black background effect, while hiding all other UI elements, until you just have a black iPad with a column of text. That is just a cool way to write, there’s no debating it.
The syncing issues with this app have been much more mild than with Simplenote. I’ll occasionally have it tell me that a file failed to sync, but trying again after a short while causes it to sync properly and I can just get back to what I’m doing. Syncing doesn’t seem to be destructive.
The price is $5, but they also have a free app called Plaintext which offers the same functionality, if not the beautiful UI. WriteRoom also has TextExpander support, which can come in handy for specific situations.
Elements
Elements, like WriteRoom, is $5, has Dropbox sync and TextExpander support, but they also really push Markdown preview mode. It’s as if they wrote this application specifically hoping to be promoted on Daring Fireball (which it was, the lucky ducks). It does work nicely, though, and it’s very useful for the one other awesome feature of Elements: Tumblr support.
Yep, I can publish this post to Tumblr straight from the text editor. I’ve never been happy with Tumblr’s entry interface for long articles - like any web interface, there are too many things that could cause your written words to disappear forever before you have a chance to publish. I would feel much better with Elements, as all I’m doing is exporting a copy of my local copy.
However, stability issues intervene again, as every time I attempt to publish this post to Tumblr, the application crashes out to the iOS screen. I don’t think that’s supposed to happen! Also, the Tumblr account addition UI only supports portrait orientation for some reason - an odd choice when you’re standing up the iPad as a display using the Smart Cover. Indeed, the entire application on the iPad feels like a scaled-up version of the iPhone app. WriteRoom’s UI, though buggy, has nice big touch targets to tap.
Conclusions
Text editors are supposed to be bare-bones, rock-solid apps for writing plaintext files without a hiccup, because this is one of programming’s simpler tasks. Building a text editor in any development environment, in theory, isn’t a major challenge.
However, somehow, we have here the three buggiest applications I’ve ever used on iOS. That isn’t to say that the rest of the apps aren’t good - I might even call WriteRoom awesome - but I just don’t see the quality in any of these applications. That’s a real shame. The nice thing about bugs, though, is that they can be squashed with updates. Let’s hope that happens pretty quickly.
Otherwise, Elements is the most feature-rich of the applications, but WriteRoom provides the best writing experience - Elements is rather more utilitarian in this regard. That will probably be a benefit to many of you, however, but I really like my bright blue-on-black entry theme and you can’t take it away from me. (I might be a casualty of having grown up first on DOS.) Simplenote is possibly your best free option, though I would definitely consider Plaintext.
Without a working Tumblr export feature in Elements I’m going to stick with WriteRoom for now. Indeed, if WriteRoom fixes its UI problems and maybe adds a working Tumblr export option, I don’t think I’ll ever switch to anything else. WriteRoom wins for me!
