More on plaintext apps

I stand by my solutions to plaintext writing, and for me they are the best that I know of. But while they are solutions, they are still compromises. They use a mish-mash of apps, require a subscription, or don’t have native interfaces.

I’ve thought about it some more recently, especially in relation to up-and-coming web apps. There are many brilliant services on offer which I think can be used as examples of what a great plaintext app and service could be.

As for the web side of my imaginary plain text app, Calepin.co is a great, extremely simple blogging platform (example: ticci.org). It’s powered by Dropbox, another great web service (you may have heard of it). If this dropbox powered publishing was mashed with typerighter.com, it would allow the current typerighter.com environment to be less tied to the web and it would create the foundation for syncing. I really like the simplicity if typerighter.com’s writing area, the only place it needs improving is in navigation and the file manager. My idea would involve folders and a way to easily move and delete the plaintext files.

A while back I said that I prefer tags, and I’d like to amend this slightly. Tags are good for a notes app, but folders are good for more creative writings. With this is mind, I think that an iOS app (both iPad and iPhone) that is designed for and after this web app (and vice versa, obviously) that includes folder would be perfectly sufficient for a creative writing app. An example of a similar app would be plaintext.

For the mac, I still really like Chocolat and stripped of it’s coding features, it’d be a much simpler app. In my app, it’d have a built in file manager (like iOS apps have) rather than relying on finder.

Everything of course – web, iPhone, iPad and Mac – is sync’d via dropbox. Any plaintext file can be adjusted, added, or created in the dropbox folder as well as in the apps themselves.

I’m going to stick with simplenote + Nottingham for notes, but for writing (this article, for example), I want the the above imagined app. Of course, I can’t afford to pay to get the app developed (though I do believe it could be financially successful), nor do I have the skills myself.

I’ll be continuing to think about what I want from a plaintext app, and you’ll hear from me more on this. You never know, I might stumble upon a way to get this developed (I’d sure like to).