Just downloaded Daedalus Touch last night. Very happy with it, especially the dropbox and export to ePub options.

I'm also very interested in trying out the markdown formatting, seems like a very neat solution to dealing with formatting .txt files without having to mess up the file with html tags and syntax.

Here are my first reactions/suggestions. apologies if some of this has been discussed before or is already in and I haven't found it.

One of the features that appealed the most to me was the whole stacks/sheets thing to split up my writing into small chunks. Splitting a novel into individual pages, with each chapter as its own stack sounds like a great way to organize things. But I worry that it won't take long working that way until the selection interface is cluttered with lots and lots of stacks that may or may not be related to one project or another.

I think the drawers/nestled stacks analogy mentioned in another thread would easily solve this. Being able to group stacks by project would keep things very neat, so we could go crazy with the cool features of the app. Maybe it could be as simple as tagging each stack with a project name and being able to hide all stacks but those using that project name in the interface.

Can stacks be moved, because I can see a flaw in the workflow if not. Every new stack you create will be farther and farther from the start stack, so you will have to progressively scroll farther and farther to the right to reach the most current file. If anything, the most current file should the the first on the list (but then that would put related stacks in the wrong order, right to left).

Other wish-list features I think would be wonderful to have are:

*Per-page paper color (useful for tagging pages as certain drafts/revisions with pastel colors)

*Exclude page from export to ePub/PDF etc (allows multiple drafts to live in stack without having to delete them before exporting)

*Copy, merge and split pages option (select a page and duplicate, select 2 or more pages to merge into 1, select text on page to split into 2 pages- before selection and start of selection to end of page)

*Preview mode for Markdown. Would be nice to see the results of formatting without having to export first.

And finally, it would be nice if as well as the linear1d left-right selection of stacks/pages, we could also view and sort them on a 2d grid. That would really help when dealing with a lot of individual pages in a stack, they could be handled more like index cards.

Just my 2c...

Wow, quick and detailed reply.

Firstly I should point out my job (which has nothing to do with writing) has me spending a lot of time analzing and refining workflows. A keypress saved here and one less step there soon add up over the life of a project. But the easiest way to get things done properly is to make it as intuitive and obvious to the user as possible. There should be rules, and as few exceptions (if any) to these rules as you can. And that is what I like about Daedalus- it is intuitive and allows you to focus on actually writing by removing options you don't really need.

So I just want to make it very clear that my suggestions posted above should not be taken to infer I am unhappy with Daedalus Touch in any way, or that I need any of my suggestions implemented for it to be useful to me. They are merely suggestions of features I think would improve the app without hopefully destroying its simplicity and elegance.

I also understand that there are only so many things you can do with .txt files as far as formatting goes, I think it does a very good job making each page look good as is. Personally I just want the page to look good in the editor, I am quite happy to delegate fonts and style allocation to the app rather than having to do it myself (somethng that is annoying on a desktop machine wit a mouse, never mind a touchscreen).

I did get a little frustrated last night trying to redefine the German quotes in the extra row of keys UNTIL I realized you have to type the letters/symbols, not just assign a different symbol (or pair of symbols). So you can also use it to define phrases, such as Markdown syntax. This is a much better way to approach custom keys than a simple key reassignment. Very cool.

One final thing. I understand your reasoning for not having support for images in Markdown due to the iOS limitation that all apps be sandboxed. You could use a dummy template image file from within the Daedalus app (have several standard sizes) and use Markdown so you can block out the look and flow of an ePub. It does break the ability to deliver a 'final' ePub file, but I suspect most people will do some hand tweaking to the exported epub file anyway. Or can you already access the image tag in Markdown by just defining a code block, then you would just need access to 1 image and scale it in the html.

I can't believe I'm this excited about a text editor- you must be doing something right! ;-)

I have to agree on reflection, it was a rather hacky solution to the issue. As you'd still have to hand edit the ePub afterwards to produce a final version, it really doesn't save much (if any) time and effort.

I'd rather Daedalus did a few things very well than a lot of things badly, which I think is the philosophy you have.

But the current option to export text/Markdown to ePub and view in iBooks is a very powerful tool in itself (as is), and the one that interests me the most.