PlainText and Innovation

I have written before about the app PlainText (Hog Bay Software), my text editor of choice, because it has a lightweight, intuitive, clutter-free, easy-to-use user interface and it syncs with Dropbox. I have written also about the features I would like to see added to iOS, particularly for text editing. Today, somewhat to my surprise, I find that PlainText already has one of the features that I had requested but with an unexpected and delightful implementation that would transfer nicely to other editors (I'm thinking of Pages and Diet Coda, specifically).

So what is this feature? How will it transform your life? Actually, in answer to the second question, I have to say that it probably isn't going to have much impact on your wider life. It would be nice if it did but text editing features can do only so much; you have to be realistic about these things.

One of the things I wanted to see in iOS 6 was an extended keyboard that included left and right cursor keys, as seen in Diet Coda. My reasoning was that cursor positioning in iOS, even on the iPads larger screen, is a bit tricky. Dedicated buttons for small adjustments seemed like a good idea in terms of increasing usability and productivity. How often, after all, do you use the cursor keys on a physical keyboard?

Hog Bay Software's solution is to make the left and right borders of the app, which are merely white space (clutter-free UI), into giant (but invisible) cursor keys. Tap the right margin to move right, the left margin to move left. Simple, elegant, easy to use and executed without need to have extra buttons on the keyboard.

The only real problem is that the feature is literally invisible. Looking back through the app's release notes I see that the feature was added in version 1.4 and that the app is now on version 1.61. In fact, things get even better, now that I've read the release notes, because they include this little gem about one and two finger taps:

New: (iPad only) In full screen mode, tap the page margins to move cursor left or right by 1 letter (1 finger tap) or 1 word (2 finger tap)

A two finger tap turns out to be a bit tricky to do (both fingers have to hit the screen at pretty much the same time - easier to write than to do) but it still works rather well and should give me another little productivity boost.

From here, it would be nice to see these features propagate out to the rest of the iOS development community, where they could do good service in many apps with text editing features. My hope is that, like Pull to Refresh in Tweetie 2, margin tapping could become a standard feature in apps or mobile websites where text entry is required. It would certainly make my life easier, which is never a bad thing.