| This is why all my App Store purchases of late have been text editors with Markdown and Dropbox support. Seriously: I have three text editors in the lower four icons of my iPad (four if the ssh client counts): one to have the important work thing open (Editorial), another with my personal note folder (1Write) and yet another for just typing text quickly (iA Writer), jotting quick lists, etc. The "office girlfriend" will often grab my iPad during a meeting to tell me something in private or start writing down notes, and she knows she's only allowed to open the third one. Startup-er folk: pay attention to "enhanced Markdown editors" like Editorial (good inline preview) and 1Write (decent to see an entire folder at once, much like the Evernote UI), not to mention the "todo.txt" category. Make comparable desktop clients (so I don't have to muck about in Sublime Text or Notepad++ trying to reproduce the folder view situation). Sell the world the beauty of plain text, including budding formats like todo.txt and the kind of YAML+markdown that static blog generators use. (When I was young and very abstract/naïve, I dreamed of starting a company to sell custom DSLs. But this is the next best thing: develop text-based DSLs for tagging, todo lists, meeting notes, etc -- readable-but-standardisable standards like Markdown. Make great UIs, make them multi platform.) |