We have covered a large variety of apps that let you type text and they convert to HTML. Some even support typing in MarkUp with a limited number of our Web sites will accept as page code. We just stumbled upon Textastic, a full powered HTML creation/editing tool that even lets us upload our paged directly to our site’s FTP location. Sure, we will keep writing in MarkUp for putting on the wiki pages, but now with Textastic we are able to write full powered code that actually runs the site.
You can be a full hard core HTML (CSS and PHP supported) code writer, or need a little help, Textastic has been stepping up for us all last week. It has the Web guys pretty excited about leaving their notebooks back on their desks and doing their job with just their iPads.
While there isn’t a WYSIWYG editor in Textastic, you can quickly see how your code is looking via a preview button. The feature list tells it all… which we are happy with since our Web folks aren’t about to write us a list to post as they are doing actual Web site coding on their iPads and don’t want to stop playing… er, working.
• Syntax highlighting of more than 80 languages:
HTML, XML, Markdown, Objective-C, C++, PHP, Perl, Python, SQL, JavaScript, CSS, shell scripts and many more
• Compatible with TextMate syntax definitions and themes
• Code completion for HTML, CSS and PHP functions
• FTP, FTPS (FTP over SSL), SFTP (SSH connection), WebDAV, MobileMe iDisk and Dropbox clients
• WebDAV server
• Symbol list to quickly navigate in a file
• Full keyboard dock and bluetooth keyboard support
• Displays additional keys over the virtual keyboard to make it easy to type characters often used for programming
• Cursor navigation wheel for easy text selection
• Supports most encodings like UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, CP 1251 or MacRoman
• Auto-indentation
• Supports different tab widths and soft tabs (spaces instead of tabs)
• Customizable font and font sizes
• Undo & Redo
• Find & Replace supports regular expressions
• File information like character count and word count
• Send files by email
• Local and remote web preview for html and Markdown files
• Supports TextExpander touch snippet expansion
• Web preview: You can now enter a remote url for each file. For local files, you can choose a different file for preview (e.g. an HTML file when you preview CSS files). Firebug Lite integration. Added back and forward buttons and website title.
• Indent and unindent code by selecting multiple lines and using the tab and untab keys
• Text selection with double-tap and drag to select text
• Templates for HTML files
