Friday, May 30, 2014

Editorial 1.1

Ole Zorn on the new version of Editorial (App Store):

Editorial 1.1 will go live in just a few hours, and I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve been working on this for over nine months, and in a lot of ways, it feels more like a 2.0, or at least 1.5. There’s a new look for iOS 7, an iPhone version, tons of refinements everywhere, and several major new features for building even more powerful workflows.

This post is a rundown of the most important additions; I won’’t mention every single bugfix here; if you want all the details, head over to the release notes.

I haven’t paid much attention to Editorial because until now it has been iPad-only. I’ve just started giving it a try on my iPhone and am blown away by how good it is. So far, at least, I expect that it will become my iPhone text editor of choice. It seems to have all of the features on my list except for full control over colors (just themes), and no special features for rearranging lines or accessing previous file versions on Dropbox. More importantly, it feels very fast and responsive, it has the best multi-file search and in-file searches I’ve seen, and it has a nifty TaskPaper mode.

The one hitch so far is that it only loads one level of files from Dropbox at a time, so a folder isn’t searchable until you’ve viewed its contents in the app. With WriteUp, once I set the desired Dropbox folder, I could immediately search the entire hierarchy. However, the developer assures me that, after you manually view a folder, Editorial will keep syncing it automatically—so I should be good from now on. The reason for this confusing but pragmatic design is that people might want to access files from select subfolders in a large Dropbox folder, without syncing the whole thing.

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There is special support for rearranging lines at least in TaskPaper mode; drag the gray boxes along the right margin.

Unfortunately the already buggy/marginal dictation support in Editorial 1.0 seems to have become even *worse* in Editorial 1.1, so I can't use it anywhere near as much as I want to. (Simplest example: tap the microphone button on the keyboard then immediately tap Done — Editorial inserts a bunch of spaces. Worse is when the microphone button becomes entirely unresponsive.)

@Nicholas Aha, for some reason I had assumed those boxes were just indicators, like in a diffing app. Sounds like the dictation issues should be fixable.

"The reason for this confusing but pragmatic design is that people might want to access files from select subfolders in a large Dropbox folder, without syncing the whole thing."

Clever in all the right ways.

Yeah, think I managed to get Ole’s attention with my dictation complaints :-) It’s one of my favorite iOS apps, both in its prior and current versions, so I really hope that I'll be able to use it a lot more.

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