A few days ago I asked on Twitter what FTP-capable Text Editor I should get for the iPad. The near-universal answer was Textastic.

I have been using Textastic for the past several days and am getting comfortable with the idea of making small changes and edits to my site files if need be. I wouldn’t code a new site by hand from my iPad alone, but for a current project I’m in the middle of there are times when I can jump into Textastic and make small edits on the fly.

The document workflow is a bit different than what I’m used to with Coda. With Textastic you pick a file or folder on your server you want to work with, download it to your iPad, work with the local copy, feel free to save it, and if/when you’re ready to upload it you chose to upload. In Coda, you’re basically working with the live file, and when you save it, you’re saving it to the server.

However, Textastic’s approach seems to make more sense for an iPad editor because it’s easier to make syntax mistakes and you generally code a bit slower on an iPad (especially if you’re using the on-screen keyboard).

That quibble aside, the app is great. It has an option to use Inconsolata, which I love; it has great syntax highlighting; and it was just updated for the Retina screen.

There was another app which people (Ben Brooks in particular) recommended, and that is Koder. I downloaded this app as well and it’s document workflow is much more akin to Coda’s. However, Koder is not yet Retina optimized and so the text is like ouch on my eyes.

Disclaimer: Textastic has previously been a sponsor of the RSS feed.

Last week when I linked to Federico Viticci’s overview of iPad writing apps, I mentioned how Writing Kit has a particularly clever feature: if you tap in the left or right margin it moves the cursor one character respectively. I just wanted to make note that it appears this feature was first introduced by another app, Writings, back in December of 2010.

If you’ve been wondering why Apple hasn’t implemented Loren Brichter’s clever and obvious “Pull to Refresh” gesture, it may be because it’s patented.

Oh my nerd:

Need to pick someone up at the airport? Now you know exactly — and I mean exactly — where their plane is.

A new show from friends Aaron Mahnke and Dave Caolo about working from home. I work from home, and love it. Though it has some great benefits but also some very unique challenges (and there will be even more of those challenges once Noah grows past his “sleeping for 18 hours a day” phase). And so I’m very much looking forward to this new podcast from Aaron and Dave.

Cameron Moll:

But if our definition of successful blogging — nay, let’s say successful writing — is measured in terms of audience reach and grammatical proficiency, we’re measuring the wrong things.

Amen.

Dustin Curtis shares a peek at the blogging engine and network he’s been building, codenamed Svbtle.

What I like about this is the way drafts are called “ideas”, and his emphasis on having an open and basic text entry field for writing the posts. As he says in his description there are no plugins, post types, social “share” buttons, etc. Fundamentally, Svbtle is similar in concept to Marco’s blogging software, Second Crack, or to Calepin. In that the emphasis is on simply writing something and then publishing it.

More and more I feel that the categories I use on this site are irrelevant. New readers to the site are not as likely to go back through the archives so much as they are to check in each day and read what’s fresh. And long-time readers looking for a past article are probably going to use search to find it.

My point being, there is this mindset that says “only what is fresh is what’s important.” I am not advocating that mindset, but I do see an extreme amount of value in blogging platform which encourages you to turn your ideas into something formed and then to hit the publish button.

Todd Olson:

In our view, iBooks 2 + iBooks Author + iBookstore = a new Wild West of publishing. And not only that, with interactive widgets, iBooks can also be a much less expensive way to create certain kinds of iPad applications, particularly ones that are primarily about presenting content. And not only that, iBooks could become a platform for publishing all kinds of other highly-interactive crazy stuff, from fancy ads to annual reports to digital album extras to college course catalogs to user’s manuals to movie promos to…you get the idea.

It seems like the news and excitement around iBooks 2 and iBooks Author has all but fallen by the wayside since it was announced in January. But I just keep thinking that iBooks Author will prove to be a big deal down the road.

On this week’s episode of The B&B Podcast, Ben and I talk about the difference between the iPhone and iPad Retina displays, 4G LTE speeds around Kansas City and Seattle, Vitamix blenders, and Keyboard Maestro macros.

Makes for galaxy-class white noise. Also, a 102-minute MP3 version is here. (Via Matthew Panzarino.)