Plaintext

Plaintext
Version: 1.4.1
Compatibility: iOS 3.0 iPad / iPod / iPhone
Price: Free / Ads Free $5


Word processing on the iPad is a new experience. Writing on my iPhone was only purely for texts, notes and short forms of writing. Not to mention the touch screen is legendary for ridiculous flubs with words. 'Never in my life' I proclaimed. That was a year ago and here I am typing out reviews for a word processing app on a touch screen device.

Plaintext was my first introduction into word processing on the iPad. I wanted something cheap (it's free) and to give me the experience of typing, I never expected it to be a reliable pain in my ass. Think of a blank page to write on that syncs up to your Dropbox or gives you the option to send via email or pull when synced to iTunes.

I walked into PlainText expecting a writing experience however I couldn't shake the feeling that it wasn't more than just a glorified notetaker. Still as a welcome to the platform it does it's job, you write on it and it takes up your words and saves them, nothing much to spout on about. Long notes and short notes, it accepts all. The file organization is neat and tidy but relies heavily on your ability to organize it and to know exactly what your documents contain. There's no document searching or tags to label them to find your information.

It's a user experience and if you intend to use it as a word processor, let it be the written draft of anything you're doing. Editing your words and sentences will ultimately be a battle between your patience and an ant that never dies. You'll be pressing your finger against the screen and lean it to either side to get it exactly where you want, smooshing it's invincible guts all over the screen until you give up and type the word or sentence from scratch.

In the end my struggles with it is just complaining about the text input system of the iPad. Trying it with the keyboard is a major difference with the cursor keys to help with navigation but still there's not a whole lot of punch to it.

On the iphone you get the exact same experience just minimized for the small screen. However when it messed up my Dropbox documents by creating doubles, I deleted it because it looks like they don't get on well with each other.

I started off wanting to use it for my writing projects and documents and in the end it turned into my online note and outline database. In itself that isn't so bad and it has the potential to be more if you can put up with what it is. A blank page.