I love Editorial so much that I'm starting to use it as my editor of choice for writing Markdown, even replacing the one in the desktop computer (I used vim for that).
However, I miss the speed of copy&pasting of the desktop. In the iPad, selecting text to copy it from the browser, pdf readers, or any other app, is still a slow and frustrating experience. Moreover, switching tasks decreases a lot my productivity (specially since I upgraded to iOS7, which tends to restart all background tasks, probably due to memory limitations of my iPad2).
So I wrote two small pieces of software that allow me to have the best of both worlds.
Now, I have the iPad with Editoral for note-taking while browsing, reading pdfs, and researching in the desktop computer and, when I find something interesting, I can copy the text to the computer's clipboard and paste it in my notes on the iPad.
I'm so happy with this setup that I needed to share it :-) If you want to try it, you'll need:
- Python in the desktop, with module
xerox
installed. It works with Linux (tested), Windows (tested) and OSX (still untested).
- My clipboard server script,
copypaste.py
, which you can download from: https://gist.github.com/jldiaz/8002349
- Editorial in the iPad (you have it already, don't you?)
- My Editorial Workflows Paste from remote and Copy to remote
How to use it:
- In the desktop computer, run the script
copypaste.py
. Take note of the IP and port which are displayed
- In the iPad, configure the above workflows, setting the IP and port obtained in the previous step (you have to enter these values in the first action of "Paste from remote", and the last one of "Copy to remote")
- Select some text in the desktop and copy it to the clipboard (eg. Ctrl-C in Windows)
- In Editorial run the Workflow "Paste from remote" and see how the text appears in the editor. It is also stored in the system clipboard, so you can use it in other apps.
It can be run in the other direction too:
- Write some text in the iPad, select it and copy it to the clipboard.
- Run Editorial Workflow "Copy to remote"
- In the desktop computer press Ctrl-V (paste) and the text copied in the iPad will appear. Useful for sharing URLs for example.
- Enjoy!