QuickAdvice: Essay, The Newest Rich Text Editor With Dropbox
Essay ($3.99) by holtwick.it is a rich text editor that offers ease of use, by only featuring the most essential formatting options. By reducing formatting options, users are more likely to keep their concentration on the document. Many other popular word processing apps try to impress the user with a fancy interface or numerous formatting options, Essay doesn't.
Essay was designed with just the opposite in mind, the app only offers three choices for fonts and the option to bold, italicize, underline, and cross-out words. These are the true basics of word processing. In addition, the app offers several ways of exporting documents. The most appealing one would be the option of syncing with a Dropbox account.
This is one of the first word processing apps to include built in Dropbox support. So, aside from the traditional features such as email and printing, you can save your documents to virtual disk space that can be accessed anywhere with an Internet connection. It is an extremely useful feature, not to mention that the Dropbox service is free for up to two gigabytes of storage. If you have a dedicated Dropbox account just for documents, you will never run out of space. The last way Essay allows you to export your document, is through the iTunes file sharing dialog. It isn’t the most common way of managing your documents, but it can be useful.
Many apps cut off the menu bar when using them; this app however is designed to still show you the majority of the bar. The only problem is that the word and character count cover where you would usually find your battery life, Bluetooth, and rotation lock icons. This may or may not bother you, but I think the developer should consider moving these.
Essay has built in support for Bluetooth keyboards, however commands such as "cmd + a" do not select all of the text. This is a basic Apple function that is not recognized by the app. Hopefully this will be corrected in a future update. The app also seems to lack a spellchecker. I understand that it saves documents as HTML, so it does not use the same universal spell checking that the rest of the iPad uses. However, it would be something worth adding to the app.
Overall Essay offers an excellent rich text editor for users. It does a great job of eliminating unnecessary formatting options and will help any writer concentrate on their document. It is one of the first word processing apps to include built in Dropbox support, and I think that alone makes it well worth the price.
