My favorite iPad text editor: PlainText

One app I've been using a lot lately is PlainText, a simple text editor that syncs seamlessly with Dropbox and saves as actual .txt files. (Free with ads, lose the ads for $2.)

I use TextEdit a lot on my Macs, doing almost everything I can in plain text or .rtf documents. I only use Word when I actually need the features. But it was surprisingly hard to find an editor on the iPad that could open and save to a simple .txt. I tried Evernote, but it saves you work as some internal file type that can't really be accessed outside of Evernote itself. Same for my extensive collection of notetaking apps that allow both typing and handwriting.

I wanted an app to work on simple lists, blog posts, and other writing projects in, so that I could also open them in TextEdit or other programs on any computer. Enter PlainText.

It's simple and does its job beautifully. It creates a folder in DropBox, and you can either set it to sync continually or only when you tell it to. (I had it set to sync continually, til my husband was using the computer and got annoyed when it kept telling him that Note.txt had been updated - now I sync manually.) You can create subfolders within the app. The text editor itself is simple, no frills. The document list is in a column on the left (it doesn't autohide in portrait, by the way), or you can go into focus mode and see only the text you're working on.



It's certainly nothing fancy. But it is precisely what I'd been looking for. If I could wish for one upgrade, I would want it to also do simple .rtf files, possibly via MarkDown. I've had a hell of a time finding anything on iOS that does .rtf. But for now, it's serving its purpose very well.

A few favorite photo apps

Sorry I've been gone for a bit, but hopefully I'll be updating regularly again now!

I do a lot of photo editing on my iPad. A LOT. My camera has an Eye-Fi card in it that auto-uploads every picture I snap to Photobucket. I use the Photobucket app to sort through those, put them in albums, etc. Then I download the ones that need fixing up and do that on the iPad and reupload them with the app.

I have literally a couple dozen photo editing apps on my iPad, but over time I've found that there are just a few that I keep going back to, the workhorses that are good for more than just a few gimmicks.

Snapseed - There's a reason this app won app of the year last year. We went to Hawaii this year, and the photo problem was that there was tons of nice scenery, but it was overcast and rainy almost the whole time so it was hard to get a nice shot of it. Enter Snapseed, with their Drama filters and excellent tuning tools. Over and over again, I put in a photo that was too dark, too underexposed, and it found whatever information was hiding in there and brought it out to great effect.

Photo as originally taken:


After running it through Snapseed:


Snapseed brought out details of the island that I thought had been lost, and made the water look more like it had before the clouds rolled in and dulled its surface. And it took just a couple of minutes!

PhotoGene - This is actually a recent purchase, but I'm already using it constantly. I bought it for its redeye correction - the Photos app can catch some red eyes, but sometimes it overdoes it and you wind up with eyes that look like they came out of a horror movie. Rather than simply putting black blobs over the red, PhotoGene adjusts the color to a yellower hue and darkens it. And if that doesn't work, it has a dodge mask feature that lets you darken just the bit you want, to get rid of remaining pupil glare. And if that doesn't work, it has a cloning heal tool, and I will freely admit that I just printed out a couple pictures that had one iris cloned over to the other side to cover up an irretrievably red eye. You have to be careful with that, of course, or you'll wind up with some very creepy results, but if you're careful you can't tell, especially at 4x6 size. The masking tools are useful for a variety of other applications as well, and I have barely begun to explore this app's other features.

Here is an example of my dog Fred before:



And after redeye correction and a burn mask in PhotoGene:



As you can see, the Photo app correction is a little too harsh in this picture; I find it works best when the pupil is well-defined and is the only thing that's red:



PicStitch - I assumed that a collage-making app would be a gimmick I'd use once or twice and forget about, but this turns out to be a very useful tool. When I have a variety of similar shots that I want to share online (say, of my baby trying different foods and making a mess out of all of them) I don't have to make my FaceBook friends flip through a whole album. I even print them out sometimes - I wanted to capture the interesting local options on the Waikiki McDonald's menu, but didn't really want to print out four photos of a McDonald's, so instead I printed this one picture:

The Road to the App Store

I'm doing a 101 in 1001 project - that is, I set 101 goals for myself and have 1001 days (about 2 years, 9 months) to achieve them. One of those goals is to write my own iPad app! I have a few app ideas, but the simplest one (a good place to start) will actually be the app I wish I had when making this list of goals. Right now I'm using Task PRO to keep track of them, and it's a great app that I like a lot but there are a few features I'd like to have specifically for this kind of goal list.

Now, I haven't really programmed much since I took 6.001 (Structure & Interpretation of Computer Programs) my freshman year at MIT - and that was well over a decade ago! And it was taught in Scheme, an obscure variant of Lisp (already an obscure programming language) that is pretty much only used in 6.001 and classes around the country based on it. I programmed a little in plain C in high school, but I've never really used an object-oriented language... Unless you count NetLogo. Yes, that's a descendant of the Logo that had you telling a turtle to turn right 90 degrees in elementary school. Unlike original flavor, NetLogo isn't the worst intro to OOP you could hope for, so there's that.

What I'm trying to say is, I understand the theory but I don't know any useful programming languages.

So this is going to be a fairly big project.

I'm getting started by taking the Stanford iOS development class from iTunes U. Even that is proving to be tricky, though, since I run OSX 10.6 on my desktop. Why does that matter? Well, the most up to date version of the class, which covers iOS 5, requires Xcode 4 for the assignments - and to get Xcode 4 my options seem to be upgrading to 10.7 (which I'm hesitant to do for various reasons that I won't go into here because this is an iPad blog, not a Mac blog) or paying the $100 developer fee now. I'll have to pay it eventually anyhow, I was just hoping to put it off since it's an annual fee.

So I'm watching the lectures now and mulling what to do about the assignments. I'll keep you updated as I progress, for anyone interested in seeing the app development process from total noob to App Store.

iKeyWi HD - The tweak I've been waiting for!

For the longest time, one of the main jailbreak tweaks I have really, really wanted is a keyboard with arrow keys. Sometimes, especially when you're moving (or have a baby bumping the iPad), it's really hard to get the cursor exactly where you want it. It's easy to get it within a couple characters, but that doesn't cut it if you've placed it before the stuff you want to delete.

Thanks to iPad Help, I discovered that such a thing finally exists! iKeywi HD (link will take you to Cydia) adds a fifth row to the keyboard as well as arrow keys in the lower right corner, and makes all non-alphabet keys completely customizable. The tweak costs $3.

This is exactly what I've been hoping for! Not only arrow keys, but numbers on the main keyboard as well as the ability to make all kinds of symbols easier to get to. The keys are smaller because you're fitting more into the same space; for some people with big fingers this might be a downside, but for me it just makes it easier for me to type one-handed in landscape!



Now, I was all set to tell you that, unfortunately, the tweak is buggy to the point of being unusable. BUT - I went back to Cydia to check for an update, and sure enough, the worst of the bugs have been fixed! Yay for developers who are on the ball! There are still a few problems to watch out for, though:

- At first, it had problems capitalizing words at the start of lines or sentences. Now the only issue is if the word needs to be autocorrected, it gets corrected to lowercase.

- The arrows weren't working for me in many apps - now they work almost everywhere. They still aren't working for me in Mail, or on some website text boxes in Atomic.

It's also a bit sad to lose the ability to swipe up from the . and , keys to get to ' and ", but since everything is customizable I can still get to those with the shift. The other feature I'd like is being able to actually turn the keyboard on and off in Settings - right now the only way to revert to the standard keyboard is by deleting iKeyWi entirely.

Now that the worst of the bugs have been fixed, I think this tweak is definitely worth the $3 if you've been wanting a better keyboard. I came for the arrows, but I'm staying for the ability to assign entire HTML tags to a single key.

Really, ESPN?

I present to you ESPN's "tablet" site:





In the immortal words of Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers - really?? ESPN, did you design this in 1996 in the hopes that tablets would one day be invented? Or maybe it was made for a prototype web browser on the Newton. Either way, ESPN, do you really think that a modern machine like the iPad, or even various Android tablets, is capable of loading nothing more complicated than a list of text links? Really?

Now, to be fair, a more normal-looking tablet site loads in Safari (the above is in Atomic). But Atomic loads the full desktop site no problem, so I have no idea what ESPN is doing here.

What a temptation!

I wasn't going to get an iPad 3, really I wasn't. I'm just not an upgrade-every-generation kind of girl. I still use a PowerBook G4 for work, and my desktop was a CRT eMac until 2010! At most, I was considering trading in my wifi model for an identical 3G - used, even. The retina display is cool and all, but I can wait another year for it. Maybe even two.

But Apple had to go and throw in the one thing I really wish I had. They went and upgraded the rear camera! Nooooooo!

I've seen people make fun of this upgrade, I've seen people question the existence of the rear camera at all. I agree that the iPad is a bit awkward to take photos with. But here's what it comes down to for me: I have my iPad on me almost all the time at home. I do not have my camera (or even my phone, which takes slightly better pics than the iPad) on me all the time. When my baby does something cute, I can either run and find the camera, wait for it to power up, and possibly miss the cute, or I can switch to the camera app and capture the cute now, but at low quality. I do a little of each - but with a decent rear camera, I'd never have to choose again.

But is that convenience worth $330 (assuming I could get $300 for my current iPad)? I'm still not sure. Luckily, I wouldn't buy one til it's jailbroken anyhow, so I've got some time to think...

iPad 3: Tactile display? Nah, couldn't be.... Could it?

I would just like to call your attention to this thread over at the MacRumors iPad forum.

The OP gives fairly compelling evidence that a tactile display is not outside the realm of possibility for next week's iPad 3 intro. Apple even may have obliquely referenced it in their event promo tagline: "We have something you've really got to see... And touch." The tag line for the iPhone 4S/Siri announcement was "Let's talk iPhones." It was innocuous enough on the surface, and only after the fact was it clear that it was foreshadowing Siri. "Something you've really got to see" is likely the much-anticipated retina display, but why the "and touch?" iOS's touch interface hasn't been something worth noting in years. Could it be a tactile display?

Eh, probably not. It seems like a very cool technology that will make it to the iPad in another year or two, but I'm not convinced that it's ready for prime time just yet. But I wanted to post this so that it goes on record that, if Apple pulls this particular rabbit out of its hat, Zweimeter totally called it.