Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Using the iPad (version 3), PlainText and DropBox makes writing even better.

I now have the new iPad or iPad version 3 as some of us like to call it. I even have an Apple Bluetooth keyboard (I know, the keyboard is an old device, but new to slow adopters like me). I have struggled to write on the iPad, but things continue to improve.

My latest tool additions are PlainText and DropBox. DropBox isn’t a writing tool. It is a cloud disk drive or something like that. To me, it is storage somewhere else. I have been using it for over a year, so I guess that shows that I like it.

PlainText is a relatively new piece of software from HogBay Software (how can you not like software from a company called HogBay?). PlainText runs on the iPad. It gives you a plain box to write text, hence the name. The ASCII text is stored on the iPad. That is simple enough, just like the notepad that comes from Apple.

The neat part for me is that PlainText and DropBox work together. PlainText creates a special directory on my DropBox account and moves a copy of everything I write on the iPad to that directory. Later, when I am sitting at an old fashioned computer, I access the PlainText directory on DropBox and there it is – what I wrote.

I like this combination of tools and I find myself using it more often as the weeks pass. Write local with the results going to the cloud.