When it comes to choosing the right text editor for your iPad, the choice is incredibly large. There are some amazing iOS text editors which could easily complete with Microsoft’s Word and Apple’s Pages. In combination with a wireless keyboard, these applications are able to transform your tablet into a full-featured notebook.
When choosing a new text editor for their tablets, many are simply purchasing Apple’s iOS version of Pages, and those are mostly OSX users who are not aware that some third party developers already published some very competitive text editors which are more affordable than Pages. With all this said, today’s article is going to bring a lot of useful information for hardcore writers who are in search for the next great iOS text editor.
Editorial is newly released iOS text editor, which is available on the iOS App Store for $5. At a first glance you might think that this is just another plain text editor with a bit confusing interface, but once you dig deeper into it you’ll be surely surprised. This application actually comes with full-featured Markdown syntax support, ability to configure over 50 workflows, and it even supports Python scripts. Other interesting features are smart keyboard and extensive documentation that will help you navigate and learn more about all these amazing features. So, let’s see how all of these tools work.
Once you open Editorial for the first time you’ll see pretty simple and straightforward interface, which doesn’t give a clue of abundance of features and tools hidden beneath. Once you start typing you’ll get to see the smart keyboard layout, which will tell you that you can use Markdown to write and format text. This text processor is created for those who are already familiar with Markdown syntax, so these users are immediately going to recognize additional keys which are there to open and close custom Markdown commands. Once you’re done writing you can even use in-app web browser which will show the end result, so you can always go back and re-check Markdown commands if there’s an error.
On the other hand, Editorial is also quite powerful when it comes to custom workflows. A workflow in Editorial is a set of actions which works similarly to OSX’s Automator. This means that you’ll be able to interact with text in the editor, and if you add Python scripts on top of it, this can create some amazing interactive controls. This way you can easily create to-do lists, search the web, send a message or an e-mail, and similar. In case you’re very experienced with scripting you can create some complex workflows which will give you the ability to directly post text to your WordPress blog, or to send that text to some other iOS app. These are only a few rough examples, since possibilities are pretty much endless.
Editorial is not made for an average user who’s only interested of entering and possibly printing text. This text editor is for those power users who are very skilled in Markdown and scripting, and they won’t’ find a better app in the iOS App Store. With all this in mind, the price of $5 is a real bargain.
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