10 Killer iPhone Apps: #4 Elements – Dropbox Powered Text Editor

Elements – Dropbox Powered Text Editor

Elements is a beautiful, versatile text editor for iOS. Elements allows you to view, edit and share plain text documents on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. All of your data is stored in a folder on your personal Dropbox account so that it’s accessible from any device you have.  Whether you are a pastor, a church volunteer, or a member taking notes during the sermon, this is a great app that will help you write long documents, or capture short lists.  The Dropbox sync is the killer feature, but read on to see the rest…

FEATURES
- Create, view and edit text files (.txt) on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch
- Cloud based: Elements stores all its data in an /Elements subfolder on your personal Dropbox account so you can access it via your iPhone, iPad, Mac or PC
- Autosaving
- Offline support: upload your changes to Dropbox next time you’re connected
- Full text search of your Elements files
- Word counts, line counts, character count
- A Scratchpad to flesh out ideas or store random bits of information
- Email files as an attachment
- Sort file listings by name or modified date.
- Customize the look of the text editor to fit your workflow
- TextExpander touch support
- Free customer support via email

Text vs. Word Docs

Just a PostScript to address a FAQ: “Why .txt documents, when we could be creating Word .docs?”  Great question.  If you are a Word .doc lover – go get Documents2Go from Dataviz.  The amount of moving parts and compatibility issues with Word have pushed me to Keep It Simple by defaulting to plain text… ALWAYS.  Text works in email, websites, all text editors, and you can take full advantage of copy/paste on your iphone.  Its quick and easy.  It just works.

TAKE TEXT TO THE NEXT LEVEL

Want to delve into the little-known world of the text-power-user? This app can take advantage of TextExpander – type a few characters and insert longer text blocks that you have prepared beforehand.  This is sort of mind-blowing if you find yourself sending the same responses over and over.  Another suggestion to utilize this feature: add in entries for all your ministries into TextExpander and use them to quickly add useful info as you compose replies to emails.  This approach will require a copy/paste into mail, but leverages TextExpander and you can opt to simply send a text doc as an attachment as well.

If you don’t need the customizable screen and font, the ability to delete documents from Dropbox, word/character/line count, and spellchecking – try PlainText. PlainText has a free version if the $4.99 is a deal-breaker.  Both happen to be Universal apps and will work on the iPad too.