Comparing iPhone Text Editors, v6
Since version 5 of my comparison, I’ve added rows for tracking iPad and TextExpander touch support.
Elements added support from LF line breaks and a nice interface for choosing the folder on Dropbox. It also has an interesting Scratchpad feature. Locayta Notes added support for choosing the Dropbox folder, background colors, and sorting by date. Nebulous Notes added multi-file searching. WriteUp, still my preferred editor, syncs faster with Dropbox than before and now supports .taskpaper files.
It’s nice to see so many of the features that I track become standard across nearly every app in just a matter of months.
| Droptext 1.2.1 | Elements 2.0.1 | Locayta Notes 2.0.1 | Nebulous Notes 2.1 | Notely 1.3 | Notesy 2.0.2 | PlainText 1.4.1 | Simplenote 3.1.7 (Premium) | Write 2 1.1 | WriteRoom 3.0 | WriteUp 1.5.1 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Choose Folder on Dropbox | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes1 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes2 | No | Yes | Yes |
| Nested Folders | Yes | Yes | No | Yes1 | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Works Offline | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Choose Font | No (Helvetica) | Yes | Yes3 | Yes | Yes | Yes4 | No (Georgia) | No (Helvetica) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Font Size | No | Yes | Yes3 | Yes | Yes | Yes4 | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Font Color | No | No10 | Yes3 | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No10 | Yes | No10 |
| Background Color | No | No10 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No10 | Yes | No10 |
| Multi-File Search | No | Yes | Yes5 | Yes | Yes | Yes9 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Search Results List | No | No | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No |
| Jump Within File | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes6 | No | No | Yes |
| LF Line Breaks | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Sort by Name | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Sort by Modified | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No7 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Rearrange Lines | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| Versions | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes8 | No | No | No |
| TextExpander | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| iPad | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Price | $1 | $5 | free | $2 | $2 | $5 | ads or $5 | $20/year | $2 | $5 | $3 |
1. Rather than syncing everything, Nebulous Notes makes you choose individual files as “auto-saves,” which is a drag.
2. Simplenote seems to be much slower than the other apps at picking up changes from Dropbox. It was often 5 minutes out-of-date, and sometimes hours or days. You can force it to sync, but to do that you have to go to the Simplenote Web site.
3. Locayta Notes is the only app I saw that lets you set font and color options per-file.
4. Notesy lets you set both a variable-width font and a fixed-width font, which is a good compromise between choosing just one and choosing per-file.
5. Locayta Notes does some sort of indexed/prefix search, coupled with auto-correct, which didn’t work well for me. Some words it didn’t find at all. When searching for “cat” it would find lots of useless matches of “at” but totally miss “wildcat”.
6. Simplenote’s results-jumping did not work for me with files containing basic Unicode characters such as é and ’. The tech support person was not able to tell me which subset of characters to avoid, so the only solution seems to be to stick with ASCII.
7. The option is there, but in my experience the modification dates shown in Simplenote, if I’m using Dropbox, have little relation to when I actually edited the files. The tech support person said this is not the normal behavior and is looking into the matter but has not yet found a solution for me. Even going by the displayed dates, the sorting is sometimes out of order.
8. Simplenote’s versions feature is like the one in Lion and works within the app—very cool.
9. Excellent options for searching by word (Boolean AND), phrase, or regular expression. You can also choose whether to search everything or just the filenames.
10. You can’t pick colors, but there are preset themes to choose from.
