Hasta La Gadget!

Elements 2 adds a mess of options to the already great Markdown editor

You may remember Elements from last August, a time when new Dropbox-enabled text editors were popping up like mushrooms after a fall rain. Elements, from Second Gear software, distinguished itself by including a handy, popover scratchpad for taking notes, and with its Markdown-powered text editor. Now, Elements has been updated to version 2.

The new Elements, a universal app for iPad and iPhone, has a much-polished UI, but the main difference is getting things out of the app. It still syncs with an “Elements” folder in your Dropbox, but now there is a huge list of export options.

First, you can export you files as HTML or PDF to any Dropbox folder, not just the default “Elements” folder. You can also export to iTunes file sharing, to Evernote, to Facebook and to Tumblr.

The word, line and character counts remain, as does TextExpander Touch support and full-text search. There have been a few cosmetic tweaks, too. The icon is new, the whole app looks sleeker and more modern (there’s even a new default font — Museo Sans), and the Markdown preview has been cleaned up.

Markdown, if you’re not familiar with it, is a human-readable way to write HTML. You surround your words with symbols instead of ugly tags and when you run the text through the Markdown converter, these tags are added for you. Thus *bold* becomes <strong>bold</strong> (in HTML) and shows up in the final document as bold. (You don’t want to see the mess of code I had to write to make all those examples look right in the browser). It makes writing formatted text in a plain text editor very easy indeed.

And of course, you can always use Elements to write plain text, too.

Elements 2 is a free update for owners of v1.x, and costs a very reasonable $5 for new buyers.

Elements – Dropbox And Markdown Powered Text Editor [iTunes]

See Also:

• Elements for iPad, a Dropbox-Syncing Text Editor
• WriteRoom Takes iPad Text Editor Crown
• Daedalus Touch, a Clever, Gesture-Based iPad Text Editor
• PlainText: iPad Text-Editor from the Makers of WriteRoom
• Writing Kit Text Editor Is a Mobile Research Room for iPad …
• Essay: iPad Rich Text Editor Shows Promise, Needs Work