Textilus App Review - Create and Edit Rich Text Format (RTF) Documents on the iPad
Wednesday, October 31, 2012 at 11:43PM 
Looking around the Apple section of Microcenter, I overheard a conversation someone was having with a sales person about buying an iPad. Apparently the customer has concerned about the "Great American Novel" he was writing and whether the iPad could handle it. The sales associate suggested converting the novel to RTF (Rich Text Format, an older file format for Microsoft Word) then using the RTF with Apple's word processing app, Pages. This isn't a bad solution, but a couple of thing occurred to me. One--why switch to RTF? Pages will import Word files direct and skipping the unnecessary conversion may well preserve graphics and table information that would otherwise be lost. On the other hand--why assume the laptop goes away? It's probably paid for and getting rid of it isn't going to get you much. Why not continue to use it at home and use the iPad when you are mobile. Since the author didn't seem to mind switch to RTF (I'm guessing the novel doesn't contain much graphics--most don't), it makes sense having the project readily available to both machines. You just need to use Dropbox so the RTFs are accessible, and an iPad app that supports editing RTF documents... an app like Textilus from knowtilus. This way you don't lose any functionality, and gain the ability to work on the novel when inspiration strikes.
