Throwing the Baby Out With the Bath Water

Rene Ritchie reviews MagicPad, the $4 iPhone notes app that offers text selection, styled text, and copy/paste, and gives it a rating of 4.5 out of 5. Here’s his list of pros and cons:

Pros

  • Working cut, copy, and paste on the iPhone, come on!
  • Rich text styling
  • Did I mention CUT and PASTE

Cons

  • No auto-correction for spelling
  • Uses 3rd party email server

I bought and have been testing MagicPad for the last few days, and I’d pretty much create the same list of pros and cons. But for a rating, I’d assign it a zero. Without auto-correction, the app is utterly useless. Half the words I type are misspelled, some beyond recognition. It’s an interesting test of how important the iPhone’s auto-correction is in making its on-screen keyboard usable. The answer is “utterly essential”.

The text selection UI works pretty well and copy/paste is nice to have, but you still can’t copy/paste between different applications. So you can change the font and text size, but you can’t actually type.

★ Tuesday, 5 August 2008