I like deleting backwards. And given that positioning your cursor on an iPhone is fiddly at best, I’ve often found myself feeling a sharp lack of this facility. ‘No,’ I would say to myself, ‘I don’t want to do that press and hold and line up the cursor thing. I just want to delete that character to right of my cursor and not the one to the left.’

So hit ‘q’ – the common Paragraft entry to magic tricks – and then delete and Paragraft will delete backwards. Because you often want to delete more than one character, subsequent hits of delete will keep doing the backwards delete. But if you give it a rest for a second or so, normal function will restore.

I wondered, while implementing this, whether it’d be something I’d actually use. Turns out, I use it all the time. So maybe other folk will like it too.

Waste Bin and Backup / Restore

Nobody ever wants to lose a document. So Paragraft now does that thing we’re used to from the desktop world. When you delete a document it moves it into a waste bin. (Some people in some parts of the world might call this a ‘trash can’.) You can go into the app setting and fish things out of the waste bin or eradicate them forever and ever.

You can now also archive / backup all your documents in a zip file. The zip files are accessible within Paragraft. But you can also email them or upload them to other apps, such as Dropbox. You can selectively restore documents from an archive.

The archive / restore features are a long way from full sync. But if you do have multiple devices, you can use this approach to much more easily move you documents from one to another.

iOS7

The last release of Paragraft (v051) suffered a bit under iOS7. While most of the gremlins were minor, there was one horrid issue with paragraphs clipping during editing. v060 fixes that problem and tidies up some of the other issues. A fully iOS7 version will come in due course.

Features Added

• Backwards delete (delete to the right) – q and then delete – for a short while subsequent delete taps will also delete to the right – wait a short moment and normal delete (to the left) will kick in.
• Deleting documents now moves them to the ‘Waste bin’. They can then be restored or completely destroyed. This is for anyone who has ever accidentally deleted a vital document, i.e. everyone.
• Save all your Paragraft documents as a zip file. This can be used to backup your files or to transfer all your files from one device to another in a single operation. The zip file can be kept locally, can be emailed, or can be opened in another application, e.g. Dropbox.
• Restore selected files from a zip file – files can be restored from locally stored zip files, i.e. stored within Paragraft. Or zip files can be opened from other applications, e.g. Mail or Dropbox. Once ‘imported’ into Paragraft the zip files can be accessed at any time and/or deleted.
• Support for ‘endnote format’ links – links are in the form [friendly name][ref] or [friendly name] [ref] or [ref]. In the last case ref is also used as the friendly name. Definitions are [ref]: www.obliquely.org.uk or [ref]: http://www.obliquely.org.uk. Paragraft also provides the option to convert existing in-line links to out of line links and vice versa.
• Option to use out of line or in line linking when pasting a link into a Paragraft document.
• ‘Keep with next’ for PDF output – headings attempt to hang on to the text that immediately follows them.
• Improved display of document fragments in document listing.
• Updated app icon.

Feature taken away

• Shake to Undo functionality disabled when actively editing a paragraph, The + and – buttons are available in this context. (Changes introduced in iOS6.x created issues with original Undo implementation.)

Bug Fixes

• Adjustments to Markdown processing to cope with some less common cases where italic or bold styling was mis-applied.
• Fixed accuracy problems with word counts on longer documents.
• Fixed issue where paragraph wouldn’t resize when pasting in links.
• Fixed am issue where preview display was temporarily dicey after changing the line spacing multiple.
• Fixed various issues that arose when using Paragraft with iOS7, including clipped paragraphs during editing.
• Other miscellaneous bug fixes and stability improvements.

Paragraft has been updated for iOS 6 and the iPhones / iPod touches with taller displays. There are also a few minor bug fixes – not least for some weirdness that arrived with the iOS 6 update – and one, very modest, new feature.

The new feature was suggested by a user who, like me, found the naming new documents to be a bit more troublesome than would be ideal.

Since the first line of the document is often a short heading and often a suitable title, Paragraft will now suggest this to you as a title, when you go across to the information page (by tapping on the (i) icon at the bottom right of the editor). Since introducing this on my development build, I’ve begun to wondered how I tolerated the many times I’d either rewritten the title I had just written in the document or, just as tedious, painstakingly copied it from the document and pasted it into the title field on the information page.

It’s great to get user feedback. There are several features in Paragraft that have come about directly because of a user suggestion. If you have a good idea, please don’t hesitate to pass it on.