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.