Second Gear's Elements Text Editor Keeps Getting Better With Each Update
Elements from Second Gear is one of the best text editors you can buy for your iPhone or iPad. What makes it so good, you ask? I personally love it for the clean and minimalistic interface, fast syncing, ability to choose any location in Dropbox to sync with, and the ever-useful Scratchpad feature.
I mostly do my writing on my MacBook Pro with iA Writer, but when I’m on the move, Elements is my go-to app. The icon is beautiful as well, and it deserves that spot on my home screen. So I was very pleased to hear about the latest update to my favorite text editor.
The biggest change is probably the inclusion of iCloud. Now, whenever you make a change with settings, appearance preferences, and even scratchpad contents, all of these will be synced across all of your devices with Elements thanks to iCloud.
Another big new feature is the ability to copy Markdown generated HTML in the preview to your device clipboard. This was heavily requested by users, and now that it’s here, users can instantly get the generated HTML into their choice of blogging or content management system.
Of course, with these new features, especially iCloud, Elements now requires a minimum of iOS 5.0.
Here is the full changelog:
- [NEW] Added support for syncing scratchpad using iCloud.
- [NEW] Added support for syncing app settings using iCloud.
- [NEW] Added support for syncing appearance settings using iCloud.
- [NEW] Added support for the native UIRe/ference stuff for dictionary lookups.
- [NEW] Added support for copying HTML to clipboard from the Markdown preview.
- [CHANGE] Removed Terminology support.
- [CHANGE] Elements now requires iOS 5.
- [CHANGE] Removed ‘Our Other Apps’.
- [CHANGE] Migrated the metadata cache from the /Documents directory to Library/Caches for faster iCloud backups.
- [CHANGE] Updated to latest version of MarkdownKit.
- [CHANGE] Updated Facebook logo.
- [CHANGE] Added some additional logging to help ferret out some Cocoa Error 4 stuff.
- [FIX] Fixed a rotation issue in the new account view controller.
- [FIX] Fixed a typo in Welcome.txt.
- [FIX] No longer hardcoding the localPath for each file in the database.
- [FIX] Added background image to the search bar so it doesn’t look terrible.
- [FIX] Resolved bug where bottom of a long file would be clipped by the toolbar in certain instances.
- [FIX] Restored ability to submit crash reports.
- [FIX] Fixed several iOS 5 related rendering issues.
- [FIX] Adjusted some logging info to not be so chatty in the device console.
- [FIX] Fixed an issue where the margins selector wasn’t adjustable in some instances on the iPad.
- [FIX] Miscellaneous bug fixes and memory usage improvements.
Elements is $4.99 in the App Store and version 2.1 is a free update to users.
