June 4, 2013

iOS text editor nerdery

As evidenced by the existence of this blog, I enjoy writing from time to time. However, I rarely have motivation to get home from work1 and sit in front of the computer. I found myself writing on the iPhone and iPad more and more. I bought a few different iOS text editor apps, but nothing offered a good way to post to my blog.

There were options, but it always required multiple steps. I usually wrote in markdown, so I had to convert it to html, then I had to copy and paste it over to a separate app. I used Blogsy on the iPad and the Blogger app on the iPhone. Most of the time I just didn’t post from my iOS devices because it was messy and prone to formatting errors.

This week one of my favorite iOS text editors released an update that added lots of nice features. In addition to bug fixes and formatting options they added an in-app purchase2 that allows you to publish your text file directly to your Blogger, Wordpress, or Tumblr blogs. This very post will be my first test, so we will see how it goes.

I like writing everything in plaintext using markdown3 to format all the links, footnotes, and annotation. It is simple to use and powerful once you get used to it. The only missing piece was being able to post that txt file to my blog. Hopefully Byword has solved that problem.

➔ Byword • Simple and efficient text editor for Mac, iPhone and iPad.

  1. Work, where I sit in front of a computer all day.  ↩
  2. The in-app purchase is $4.99.  ↩
  3. Technically I use multi-markdown.  ↩


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