elements 2.0

Second gear has released version 2.0 of Elements, their popular text editor for iOS. It’s a beautiful looking app, and I had been looking forward to checking out this latest release.

The new icon is much preferable over the previous one (always a big deal in my book). Generally, it’s a much sharper release, but it has one glaring problem for me — the iPad.

Elements is still utilizing the extra space on the iPad by stretching out list views, and making lines of text span the entire width of the display. It’s almost a completely naive up-scaling of the iPhone version, almost as though coming up with a more usable interface would just be too hard, so they didn’t even try.

If you’re an iPhone only user, or keen on Markdown support, this could definitely be worth a look. However, if you’re spending any amount of time with your editor on iPad, I’d find this hard to recommend. It seems like it wouldn’t take much to make Elements the front runner in the text editor game, but for now I’m sticking with PlainText.

August 15, 2011 at 6:41 pm

@skoda on App.net @technochocolate on App.net