PlainText - iPad App Extraordinaire

A while ago I wrote a post about my experiments with distraction-free writing, as supported by Apple's Pages app for OS X (I've since tried MS Word under similar conditions - Pages is better for my purposes). I was reasonably happy with the text but the blog-reading public, perhaps unaware of the brilliance of my prose, didn't visit in any great numbers (two people only, it seems).

Why am I mentioning the (entirely unsurprising) lack of public interest in my blog? Other than a slightly masochistic delight in exposing the utter lack of appeal of my writing, it gives me an opportunity to mention an app I have been using on my iPad to do essentially what Pages does on the Mac; PlainText.

There are two things that I particularly like about PlainText. First, it is, as the name suggests, very plain; when you are working in full-screen mode you will not be distracted by pop-ups, formatting tools, borders, rulers, menus or anything else. The three-quarter screen mode is also almost entirely clutter free, adding only a file list in the left-hand margin, which seems strange until you want to switch files, at which point it turns out to be rather useful and elegant.

Isn't it a bit wasteful to devote a quarter of the screen to the file list? Not really. There are so few controls (i.e. None) that you might as well make the file navigation control as easy to use as possible. It works really well, allowing you to move quickly through the folder structure to the file of choice.

Second, the app syncs with DropBox so that you never lose your files (if you are not already using DropBox as secure backup for your files, give it a go: dropbox.com). Unlike other apps that sync with remote file storage services, PlainText saves your files every few seconds, taking advantage of breaks in your typing to bung a copy up to the cloud. This makes it a very safe app; it's almost impossible to lose your work, even if the worst happens and the app crashes half-way through editing your magnum opus or your iPad is eaten by a cow.

Leaving aside concerns about bovine consumption of tablets, I think it is fair to say that PlainText's simplicity and security are enough to recommend the app for pretty much any notation exercise you might care to undertake. At some point, of course, you'll probably want to format the text, add pictures or insert hyperlinks and that's when you need to switch to Pages. By this point, however, you've done all the really tough work (capturing your thoughts as text) and you're on the home straight.

Any weaknesses? No, not really, unless you want to list the main features (lack of features, for example) as a "weakness". I don’t, so I can strongly recommend the app; it's fast, secure, easy to use and it does exactly what it says it will do.