iPad’s Writing Kit

Tim Maly has a sketch of a new iPad app, and I wonder if anyone here is using it. Any reports?

Confession: I use an iPad and I carry it in a ClamCase — and I love it though I think the space bar on the keyboard is not as smooth as it could be. When I write on the iPad, which I occasionally do on an airplane, I use Notes. It works as a seamless conversion to MSWord.docx. But, I wonder about this app.

One of the core features and frustrations of Apple’s iPad experience is that you can only use one app at a time. Joanne McNeil once lauded the iPad’s lack of multi-tasking, saying that it was a focus machine. “It’s putting a constraint on me … and my worst multi-tabbing, unfocused habits.” iOS 4 has since introduced multi-tasking, but that’s in the form of allowing apps to stay resident in memory. You can still only look at one thing at a time. This can be a real benefit, but it gets problematic if you are working on a single task that requires more than one tool. EnterWriting Kit by developer Anh Quang Do.

Most iPad writing apps like WriteRoom, iA Writer or Daedalus Touch focus on doing one thing well. Often their big selling point is that they are a “distraction-free writing environment,” meaning the only thing you can really do on them is type text into a file. If you write like I do–which is to say: in a constant flow between checking notes, looking things up and typing–none of these work for completing drafts.