May 27

Daedalus Touch, a Clever, Gesture-Based iPad Text Editor

Posted in: ipad, Software and Operating Systems, Today's Chili

Daedalus Touch may be the first truly iPad-ready text editor

Despite the ridiculous amount of iPad text editors in the App Store, none have yet managed to feel like truly iPad-exploiting apps. They may be controlled by touch, but they could exist equally well on a desktop machine, controlled by keyboard and mouse.

Daedalus changes all that. It is a gesture-driven app that could only work on the iPad. It also adds some interesting metaphors for documents and — despite some v1.0 glitches — it looks very promising.

The main navigation device is pinching. Your documents are organized in stacks consisting of infinite sheets of paper. To expand a stack and see these sheets, you pinch (or double-tap). To edit a sheet you pinch again.

The other gesture is the swipe. Swipe to move between stacks and pages. When you are at the last page in a stack, you swipe to create anew one and keep typing. You can drag the pages in a stack into any order, which makes Daedalus useful for sketching out stories and screenplays.

Here’s the view of a ‘Paper Stack’, a pile of document pages

The other big features is called “modeless search.” Theres a search bar at the top of the screen at all times. Enter a terms and the instances of that text string are highlighted in yellow. This search stays active as you pinch out to a stacks overview or pinch into a document. This lets you quickly get to any search term, wherever it might be.

There are other niceties, too. Daedalus supports TextExpander for quicker typing. It also lets you tap in the left and right margins to move the cursor left and right, and you cans switch between day and night modes to change the color of text and paper. There is also a persistent character and word count, and one really neat feature: a built in web browser. This gives quick access to Google, Wikipedia or Dict.cc, a multilingual dictionary site which also offers translations.

And of course it will sync with DropBox (as well as mobile me), and will let you export pages as text, stacks as zip files and even let you open the current document in any other plain-text capable app on your iPad.

There are some glitches. The zooming animations can be jerky, and the app likes to crash when you perform some bulk deleting operations. Given that v1.1 showed up just moments after I’d bought v1.0, and that the developer has already submitted a fixed v1.2, it looks like this part is under control.

Daedalus is available now, for $4.

Daedalus Touch product page [Soulmen]

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