Elements, the much anticipated (by me) writing app for iPad/iPhone was recently released by Second Gear Software. What it proposes to be is an excellent writing platform for the iPad, and it is one that I can heartily recommend. It has a clarity of purpose that I appreciate; it is all about the writing here, no fancy shmancy hoopla. The design decisions were clearly all made with this fact firmly mind. Let’s go over some of the things that I enjoy most about this excellent app.
First, the setup. Upon starting up the app, you are presented with a login screen requesting your Dropbox details. More on that later. You enter your credentials and then are presented with an attractive and helpful document explaining how things work. I glanced through it, and created a new document. Effortless. I certainly enjoy the fact that there is no ugly left hand split screen nonsense when in landscape mode, distracting from the writing, just a clean pinboard of all your documents, and once you select one, you move into the attractive fullscreen editor. Now that it is setup, it is literally two taps from iPad homescreen to full on text editing bliss. That tells me that they really thought about this.
Now to some of the features of the editor itself. On my opinion, it is a triumph of unobtrusive feature design. Nothing gets in the way of your content creation. It provides word count and character count at the tap of a finger, but you don’t have to see that all the time. They thoughtfully provided a scratchpad, for referencing material, or trying out certain phrases. You can use it as you like, of course. I haven’t had a ubiquitous feature like that before, so I am unsure of how it will fit into my workflow, but I can see its utility. Again, this scratchpad is available at the tap of a finger. Elements is fairly customizable, as far as your writing surface is concerned. It allows you to change the font and color of your background and text. Some prefer the more classic white text on black background, that is fairly easy to create. I used all the defaults, and frankly have had no problems with legibility at all. It provides an easy avenue to email your document, but right there in the document, no jumping out to a complicated document management screen. All in all, an excellent writing experience. It constantly autosaves your document, so no fear of losing any significant amount of content.
Speaking of document management, that is where Elements really shines. All my other iPad writing apps (Pages, myText) suffer from one big problem: getting them off the iPad at all. This really has been the downfall of my (serious) writing efforts on the iPad. Everything seems to require hooking your iPad up to your laptop and firing up iTunes which, even if you like it, is a slow process. After iTunes has started up, detected your iPad, backed it up, synced it, asked you about photos, asked you about recently added apps, bothered you about new firmware, and then synced it again, you can finally access its document management ‘features’. This requires navigating to a buried tab on your products sync profile, and the semi-manually moving around files to where you need them to be, saving and adding things individually. Now that I have painted a horrid picture of ‘normal’ document management on the iPad, I can say that Elements neatly steers around that by thoughtfully syncing to your Dropbox account. If you don’t have one, you absolutely should go and get one now. Especially if you have more than one computer-like device. All you need is an email address. Also, I stand in awe of you, really. How have you made it so long without it? With that digression out of the way, I can now tell you that Elements simply creates itself a folder in your root Dropbox, and saves all its files to this folder. Now all your files are available everywhere you have Dropbox, which can be pretty much everywhere. If you aren’t lucky enough to have that always on 3G connection on your iPad, or maybe you are just out of service. Elements, true to Dropbox form, stores your files locally and syncs up next time you do have enough inter-tubes available. Simple and brilliant, this all takes place in the background.
Alright, you say. So it has great document management, a near perfect writing environment, and an attractive app icon. What is it’s secret flaw, the terrible thing that you have been holding back? Well, you are right, I have been holding back. I can tell you now, I am not a huge fan of the title bar’s texture. Not that it detracts from the writing experience or anything, or even that I hate it, it just isn’t my style. It is the tiniest bit kitch, and I am not so overjoyed about it. That is it, however. That is my only beef with this app. Yes it *requires* a Dropbox account, but Dropbox is free, so that shouldn’t stand in the way of you getting and using Elements to its fullest potential. If you are serious about writing on your iPad, this is a bargain at $4.99 for the Universal App. Really, it’s like you get the iPhone app for free (that’s how I think of it). Now, I know this review was primarily on the iPad app, but the iPhone version ain’t to shabby either. When it comes to real writing, I don’t know if I have spent a better $5.
