{"id":3594,"date":"2011-07-18T13:03:01","date_gmt":"2011-07-18T18:03:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=3594"},"modified":"2011-07-18T13:09:09","modified_gmt":"2011-07-18T18:09:09","slug":"comparing-iphone-text-editors-v4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2011\/07\/18\/comparing-iphone-text-editors-v4\/","title":{"rendered":"Comparing iPhone Text Editors, v4"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since version 3 of my comparison<\/a>, I’ve added two new apps. Both offer features similar to Notesy<\/a>, which remains my choice.<\/p>\n

Notely<\/a> adds some extra arrow-key buttons to the keyboard that make it easier to fix typos. It also has the first graphical Dropbox folder chooser that I’ve seen.<\/p>\n

WriteRoom<\/a> has a minimalist interface that favors scrolling and pop-up menus over toolbars; I found that I prefer having the buttons more easily available. It also offers more control over line spacing.<\/p>\n

The feature sets of these apps seem to be converging, except that most still don’t help you find search results within a file or offer versions or line rearranging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
<\/th>\nDroptext 1.2.1<\/a><\/th>\nElements 1.5.1<\/a><\/th>\nLocayta Notes 2.0.1<\/a><\/th>\nNebulous Notes 4.3.1<\/a><\/th>\nNotely 1.3<\/a><\/th>\nNotesy 2.0.2<\/a><\/th>\nPlainText 1.4.1<\/a><\/th>\nSimplenote 3.1.4 (Premium)<\/a><\/th>\nWriteRoom 3.0<\/a><\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
Choose Folder on Dropbox<\/th>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes1<\/sup><\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes2<\/sup><\/td>\nYes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Nested Folders<\/th>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes1<\/sup><\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Works Offline<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Choose Font<\/th>\nNo (Helvetica)<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes3<\/sup><\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes4<\/sup><\/td>\nNo (Georgia)<\/td>\nNo (Helvetica)<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Font Size<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes3<\/sup><\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes4<\/sup><\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Font Color<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes3<\/sup><\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Background Color<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Multi-File Search<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes5<\/sup><\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes9<\/sup><\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Search Results List<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Jump Within File<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes6<\/sup><\/td>\nNo<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
LF Line Breaks<\/th>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Sort by Name<\/th>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Sort by Modified<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nNo7<\/sup><\/td>\nYes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Rearrange Lines<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Versions<\/th>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nNo<\/td>\nYes8<\/sup><\/td>\nNo<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Price<\/th>\n$1<\/td>\n$5<\/td>\nfree<\/td>\n$2<\/td>\n$2<\/td>\n$5<\/td>\nads or $5<\/td>\n$20\/year<\/td>\n$5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

1. Rather than syncing everything, Nebulous Notes makes you choose individual files as “auto-saves,” which is a drag.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

3. Locayta Notes is the only app I saw that lets you set font and color options per-file.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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”.<\/p>\n

6. Simplenote’s results-jumping did not work for me with files containing basic Unicode characters such as é<\/tt> and ’<\/tt>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

8. Simplenote’s versions feature is like the one in Lion<\/a> and works within the app—very cool.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since version 3 of my comparison, I’ve added two new apps. Both offer features similar to Notesy, which remains my choice. Notely adds some extra arrow-key buttons to the keyboard that make it easier to fix typos. It also has the first graphical Dropbox folder chooser that I’ve seen. WriteRoom has a minimalist interface that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3594"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3597,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3594\/revisions\/3597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}