If you’re always on the lookout for a great iPhone note-taking app, search no more: Elements is an excelent app that makes it easy to take notes on-the-go, sync them automatically to Dropbox and supports Markdown, an extremely practical way to format documents.
In this review, I’ll walk you through every feature this app has to offer, ranging from the already mentioned Dropbox synchronization, to exporting your documents to HTML and PDF.
Getting Started
You’re going to need a Dropbox account to use Elements. Dropbox is a great service, and even has a free 2GB plan to get started, so go ahead and grab yourself an account if you haven’t already. Once that’s done, fire up Elements, and login using your Dropbox credentials. The app will automatically create a folder on your Dropbox called “Elements,” where all the documents you create with the app will be stored from now on.
Startup Screen and File Manager
Creating Your First Note
Tapping on the icon on the lower right corner creates your first note. The first thing to do is to write the title of the note, which also acts as the file name.
You can then immediately start writing. Elements uses a special way to format text called Markdown, which allows you to create headings, bold and italic words, lists and even URLs. The idea behind Markdown is that you don’t have to use keyboard shortcuts or press buttons to achieve a specific format, you just write special characters that are later converted to whatever format corresponds. This way, the text you write is understandable even before being exported. The simplest way to learn the basics of Markdown is to check the “Welcome” file that comes with Elements, or you can check this blog post for more info.
Creating a new file and checking some statistics
While writing, you can get some information about your file such as word and character count, for example. Just tap on the first icon on the bottom to reveal a list of information about the file. Another cool feature is the Scratchpad, which, as the app itself describes, “is a great place to jot down quick ideas, store paragraphs you want to get out of the way, or just make a note for yourself later on.” To get to this feature, tap on the fourth icon on the bottom.
Customizing
There are a few things you can customize while writing. Tapping on the second icon on the bottom lets you customize the font, text color and size. For me, the defaults are fine. The default font is actually beautiful, I really like it, and changing the font color to anything but black seems to break the app’s overall beauty.
Customizing the font, text size and color
Previewing and Exporting
If you’re working with markdown, you’ll probably want to make sure periodically that you didn’t commit a formatting mistake, like putting something in bold when you meant italics, or something like that. Luckily, Elements comes with a preview feature. Tap on the star button at the bottom to get an instant preview of your text.
Previewing your file
Another very cool feature is the ability to export your notes to PDF and HTML, send them as attachments, send your note as a HTML email, or publish them to Facebook or Tumblr. You can even print them using AirPrint. Just tap on the lower right button to reveal a menu.
Tapping on export lets you save a PDF or HTML file on Dropbox (which will ask you then to choose a folder), Evernote, email and iTunes.
Exporting your notes
Settings
There isn’t much to configure on Elements. You can change the sorting order for the files, whether to show the files’ extensions and change what the default file extension should be for new files. I prefer to use “markdown” as the extension since I really like that format, although you can use whatever you like. Note that you can use Markdown formatting no matter what file extension you’re using.
Element's settings
Other settings include disabling the automatic spelling checker, and the ability to log out of your Dropbox account.
Conclusions
Elements is a great app. Its interface is simple, elegant and beautiful, all at the same time. It has all the features one might want and need for writing.
I did find some minor issues with it though: you can’t move your files between folders, meaning you’ll need to rely on a computer with access to the same Dropbox account to better organize your files; and exporting to PDF does not render the Markdown format, i.e. it just exports the raw text, which is something I didn’t expect. Besides that, there are some minor issues with the interface, but they’re barely noticeable. I do wish one could choose which folder Elements uses to sync with Dropbox. It would be great to sync my school and work folders with the app, and not just the “Elements” folder.
Considering all this, it’s still a solid app, and I’m pretty sure the issues described above are already being worked on. Plus, I also read on the app’s description that they’re working on integrating more services for publishing (apart from Facebook and Tumblr).
On a final note, you might be surprised to know that this review was written almost entirely on my iPhone using Elements!