At long last, the first update to the initial release has hit the App Store. Here’s what’s changed:
New Features
- Auto Correct support for the following languages (based on the built-in iOS dictionaries): Danish, Dutch, Australian/Canadian/UK/US English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish
- Full external keyboard support, including all keyboard shortcuts
- Proper handling of text entry in Korean
- Auto Save (currently occurs every 3 minutes)
- Dictation (on supported devices)
- Ability to enable or disable numbering for specific headings
Bug fixes
- Inability to edit built-in table style
- Applying direct formatting within a table cell messing up column widths
- Several crashes during typing and selection
Other improvements
- Optional “toggle” mode for virtual trackpad
- Scroll document when using virtual trackpad
The other piece of exciting news I have is that I’ve decided to run a special pricing offer on the app for the next two weeks. From now until August the 27th, you can get the app for US$6, instead of the regular price of US$15 (note that prices vary somewhat between different countries depending on exchange rates).
Most of the feedback I’ve had regarding pricing to date has basically been of the form “It’s not worth $15 for what it currently does, but will be once all the promised features are in”. So this is basically a strategy to get the app out to more people and increase awareness. Feedback is also really important to me at this early stage (perhaps even more so than sales), so the more people who use it, the more data points I can get on what features people want to see both in the short term and long term.
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to pricing strategy over the past few weeks. Sales started off really well after the initial release and publicity, but have been fairly slow over the last couple of weeks. Pricing is one of the most difficult things to get right on the app store, and I’ve decided I need to experiment and get feedback on this issue. One option I’m considering is having a “basic” and “pro” version of the app (the latter available as an in-app purchase), which will give users an opportunity to try out the basic features without having to put up too much money, and then upgrade to get the more advanced features if and when they need them. Exactly what features will be included in each version is yet to be decided. Note that if I do go down this route, everyone who has bought the app so far (either at the $15 price or at the current 60% discount) will automatically get access to the pro version as these features become available.
If you have any thoughts on this approach I’d be really interested to hear them.
Since submitting this version about a week and a half ago, I’ve been continuing to work on improvements in a number of areas, almost all of which have been minor usability issues that, while not critical, do result in a usage experience that isn’t as smooth as it should be. Version 1.0.2 is getting pretty close to ready, and I anticipate submitting it to the app store fairly soon. I’ll have more to say on these improvements in future posts, as well as some of the more common questions I’ve received about the app of late.
If you’ve yet to try out UX Write, check it out here.
This looks like a great app! I just have a couple of questions:
-Do the new external bluetooth keyboard shortcuts include shortcuts for bold, italics, and underline?
-If I access a document via Dropbox on my PC, what do I use to continue editing the document there without losing all the formatting I applied in UX Write? Will MS Word do the trick as long as I save back to Dropbox as a web page (HTML) file when I’m done?
Also, as far as future development goes, I saw that Google Docs integration was one of the possible updates you’re looking at. I would love to see this feature.
Thanks!
There aren’t any keyboard shortcuts for bold, italics, and underline. Unfortunately the API that allows applications to work with external keyboards doesn’t give apps the ability to provide their own custom keyboard shortcuts – I’m limited to the small set of shortcuts that are built-in to iOS (which deal only with cursor movement and selection).
You should use a HTML editor to work with your file, rather than MS Word or OpenOffice, because the latter two tend to produce low-quality HTML output. Depending on your preferences, you can use any text editor to edit the file by hand, or use a WYSIWYG editor like SeaMonkey (http://www.seamonkey-project.org) or Kompozer (http://kompozer.net).
Google docs will be a while off, since I want to get word support and some of the other features in first. But thanks for letting me know about your interest in this – I’m constantly trying to gauge the level of demand for various features, so you can consider your vote counted.
Still can’t figure out how to eliminate numbers in headings
Just tap twice on a heading (or long press then release) to bring up the black popup menu, and select “remove number”.
When you add a new heading, it decides whether to give it a number based on the adjacent headings. So in the case of a new document, you can just turn off numbering for the first heading, and all subsequent headings will be unnumbered.
Once I get word support in (which has style-based support for numbering) I’ll likely make this a setting in the style editor.
Just wanted to let you know that this is the iPad word processor I have been looking for! Glad to have found it (accidentally!) during the sale, but I would have paid $15 for it, especially with your development roadmap. However, you probably won’t get that from most people – I’d guess $9.99 after Word support is added.
Most appreciated: speed on long documents! I was using Pages and couldn’t believe the save, open, scroll, and editing lag time for a three page text-only list of names, and I missed full Word interoperability. In Quickoffice I loved the ability to print to PDF but hated the lack of support for such basic formatting as adjusting margins. Your app gives me the best of both worlds with lots of goodies besides, and I appreciate your intended implementation approach to Word docs, retaining formatting and structure info regardless so it’s non-destructive editing.
I also loved your implementation of the autocorrect feature. I will be spreading the word to all my friends!
Thanks. You self imposed a deadline and you kept it 🙂 . Good Man!
I just updated and will be trying the external keyboard tomorrow.
Regards,
Jake