Byword-On The Edge!

Apps I love on my iphone

Posted on November 16, 2012July 28, 2015 by Saru

I have close to 60 apps installed on the phone and have tried more than 100 odd apps on the app store, though that doesn’t make me an expert to review the apps store or how the apps work, I definitely would like to share a list of the few favorite apps that make my life easy and wouldnt want to have an iPhone without these apps.

All these apps are elegant and simple while easily setting the standards in their categories respectively.

Instapaper:- have loved and had this on my home screen for over 2 years now, very simple and elegant app that helps you manage and read articles at a later time.
Reeder :- The most popular and my favorite feed reader app that syncs with Google reader . For my detailed review see here.
Camera+:- easily among the best camera App replacement I have tried. The post editing that u can do with the pictures taken is just awesome, fell in love the first time and fits my needs perfectly.
OmniFocus :- The best GTD app available for the iPhone and iPad. I am a newbie to GTD learning things at my own pace. The App suits everybody, be a guru at GTD or a beginner, the app has a ton of features, but u can decide to use what you want to use for yourself.
Instacast:-The only other podcast app i tried besides Apple’s own Podcasts app. I didn’t have a lot of feature needs, I just wanted a simple and easily manageable podcast client and this just fits my needs perfectly.The original Podcasts app by Apple is very pleasing to look and feels great us, but still doesn’t cut the deal on managing the podcasts and files quite the way I want it.
Fast Analytics:- Ever since the blog has been self hosted, I have been using this App for tracking analytics. If you are a number junkie, this shows every important number u might want to look up in your Google Analytics account.Sadly it doesn’t do any graphs and that’s why I use Analytics. But i guess you cant get everything perfect in a free app can you.
Analytics :- The App gives a simple representations of your Google Analytics data in graphs and numbers. I only wish somebody had a mix of both Fast Analytics and Analytics in one app that can do the deal for me.
Byword:- My goto markdown/text editor on the iPhone/iPad. For a detailed review on why I like it please read here.
TweetBot:- My favorite Twitter client on the iPhone and is easily the best twitter app ever made and the most loved twitter app by the Nerds 🙂
Daily Tracker:- my default tracking app mostly used for Expenses tracking, health tracking, and sometimes sleep tracking. The App is very flexible and u can track almost anything u want to track and use it as a daily journal as well and is integrated with iCloud.

These are some of my favorite apps which are frequently used on my iPhone and iPad apart from the few essential apps like DropBox, Facebook, Skype,Instagram and Strava without which my phone feels incomplete.

Byword for IOS – Review

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Saru

Byword app for ios is my recent purchase on the app store and the first of its kind for writing. I don’t have a Mac yet and hence do my writing on the iPad, iPhone or on Write Monkey (you can read my review of write monkey here) on my desktop. Dropbox on both helps me keep my files synced. While I sync my files on the desktop manually, Byword has the option to sync files using iCloud or Dropbox built right within and syncs files seamlessly. Setting up sync is just a breeze. Byword handles conflicts quite nicely as well. There is an option not sync files as well for people who don’t need the feature.

To me the number of features an app has matters but also their implementation and usability. I would prefer an app that has 2 features well implemented rather than 4 features not so usable. Byword is quite a minimalist on the iOS, yet at the same time it has all the features you would need to pour out your awesomeness into words. All you can customize in the preferences is your choice from 4 nice fonts, turn on/off autocorrect, auto capitalization and spell checker. On the settings screen you can export the text into HTML or copy as HTML to paste it directly to your blog , website etc or email it. You can print the document as well via AirPrint. I haven’t tried print as I don’t have an AirPrint printer yet.

p style=”text-align:center;”> What I like about any app is the amount of attention to detail the developers put into the small things that constitutes for a far rewarding experience than otherwise. In Byword I am delighted by the toolbar which doubles as a status bar. It’s so nice and helpful I would like to call it the awesome bar. A few pictures should explain why I would call it the awesome bar.

The awesome bar just shows the word count initially and a tap reveals the number of characters and another tap reveals both the word and character count. Gently swipe the status bar from right to left and you will be surprised to see that the status bar just became your toolbar with buttons for inserting tab spaces, various brackets, quotes and asterisk. On the iPhone the right half of the toolbar reveals an undo button which is nice, but I liked the left and right arrow keys the most. I always felt a need for these keys while typing on the mail composer on iOS, most often I have had to delete the entire word instead of just correcting a letter in the middle of the word and it’s been a pain to get the cursor to the right spot especially on the iPhone. The last button is a nifty keyboard minimizer button. On the iPad the tool remains the same except for the undo and minimize keyboard button are replaced by up and down cursor keys. I am not sure why they changed the buttons, but personally I would prefer the iPhone buttons and functionality.

Further swiping the toolbar once more to the left reveals more buttons to insert markdown shortcuts for headers, links, images and lists. While the right set of buttons remain the same as the previous tool bar. It is questionable that markdown was created with the notion to avoid the hassles of paying too much attention to the formatting and tagging and having tool bar buttons to insert these formatting defeats the purpose of markdown. Well actually in Byword it doesn’t. The iPad and iPhone don’t have a full size keyboard where we have access to all the symbols and numbers with in reach. Most often they are 1 or 2 taps away, so instead of tapping twice to get to a hash symbol for a header we are better off with the hash tool bar button. So the toolbar saves quite a lot of taps in all with out defeating some of the purpose of markdown.

What I would like to see in the future releases of Byword is for a night mode option to just reverse the font and background color. It would be quite nice and handy for somebody like me who fiddles with his iPhone at odd hours in the night.

To sum it up, Byword exceeds expectations for a minimalist writing app and is a perfect markdown writing tool for iOS. I would recommend it to anybody who is looking for a writing app on the iOS markdown or not.