Editorial, iPad Writing Re-Imagined

There has been a secret society of tech nerds using Editorial (Website) (iOS App Store Affiliate) for months now. The app is done and the Internet is having a nerd-gasm over its release. Speaking on behalf of the secret society, I’m here to say this enthusiasm is justified.

Until Editorial arrived, I felt like iPad text editors really didn’t have much room left for innovation. Boy, was I wrong. Editorial combines thoughtful Markdown integration with iOS scripting that will curl your geek toes. (Editorial’s developer, Ole Zorn, is the same guy that brought us Pythonista.) Editorial includes a bunch of pre-built scripts with useful functions like linking, versioning, statistics, and web searches. You can also roll your own by stacking pre-built blocks or writing your own. I’m not a Python programmer but I’m able to use the heck out of this. 

This app is really powerful. In a lot of ways, Editorial is more powerful than anything I’m using on my Mac. I need to spend more time figuring out exactly how many of these shiny things I’ll put to use. This is going to be fun.

In the meantime, there are some very in-depth reviews from Federico Viticci at MacStories and Gabe Weatherhead at Macdrifter. (With Editorial, both Gabe and Federicco have published the first iOS app reviews I’ve ever seen with Tables of Contents.)

Is the Mac Power Users going to revisit iOS writing in light of the advance? Magic 8-Ball says “most likely”.