![]() In fact, integration with iCloud Drive and other apps through open-in-place is among the reasons why I’m sticking with iA Writer as my favorite Markdown text editor everywhere. To this day, Ryan uses Pretext in combination with Working Copy’s file provider to make edits to all my drafts and commit them to our shared GitHub repository.Īfter using Pretext for several months, and following my explorations of different text editors in 20, I settled on the text editing and collaboration workflow that I’m still using today, which revolves around iA Writer, iCloud Drive, and Working Copy – all powered by Files and open-in-place. Pretext is, in many ways, the perfect demo to showcase the advantages of the Files document browser and open-in-place to achieve a seamless, reliable editing workflow that was unthinkable until a few years ago on iOS. ![]() I can commit and push files to GitHub using the Working Copy file provider extension while in Pretext’s document browser. The Working Copy file provider can mark documents with uncommitted changes, and it also makes its Commit feature available system-wide in every instance of the document browser. Thanks to open-in-place, Pretext can edit documents from Working Copy directly. What makes Pretext unique is how it does away with a custom library altogether and fully embraces the document browser and open-in-place to make it as easy as possible to edit any text file available on my iPad.Īccessing the Working Copy file provider from Pretext’s document browser.īrowsing the contents of a Working Copy repo within Pretext. At first, I came across Pretext, a plain text editor by Sam Oakley that uses the document browser to store text files in iCloud Drive or edit text files created by other apps and stored in iCloud Drive or third-party file providers. Working Copy began offering a file provider extension with iOS 11, and it also supported open-in-place, so I started wondering if I could edit Markdown drafts from GitHub (accessed by Working Copy) with an external text editor (Working Copy’s own editor isn’t optimized for prose), but without having to copy and re-export text files each time.Īs it turns out, that was a perfect use case for the open-in-place functionality, which is designed to let apps open and edit original files without importing a copy in their own containers. ![]() The beauty of open-in-place is that, in addition to iCloud Drive, it can also be implemented by third-party file providers, which can confirm to the system that their documents support being opened in-place by other apps. I began researching open-in-place as a way to simplify editing of Markdown documents when we started using GitHub repositories (accessed via Working Copy on iOS) to collaborate on article drafts. Furthermore, while open-in-place is optimized for opening one document at a time, editing it, and saving it back to the original location, bookmarks are ideal for persistent access to entire directories of documents that can stick across app relaunches and device reboots. Each iOS app can visually represent open-in-place and bookmarks differently, but they always have to go through the process of letting the user pick files or folders from a Files view first. There’s no concept of full disk access on iOS (yet?) and these permissions are granted on a per-item and per-app basis on iOS, you cannot do what you could do on macOS by telling the system to “give this app full, persistent access to all my files and folders”. Put simply, as of iOS 12, the only way for an app to load an external file or bookmark to an external directory is to manually select it first. Open-in-place and bookmarks have two aspects in common: they cannot be initiated programmatically by apps without the user’s explicit consent, and they depend on the Files picker to select the document or directory you want to open in another app. ![]() Instead, I’m going to focus on what these features mean for the actual user experience and how they’ve helped me build a superior writing workflow where multiple apps can collaborate with each other on the same documents. Open-in-place and bookmarks are technically different, and they’re based on security and privacy principles (such as security-scoped URLs) that I won’t cover in this article. To achieve this, Apple tackled iOS’ sandboxed model on two fronts using the open-in-place and file bookmark APIs, two different but related technologies that enable apps to open and modify files or directories stored outside their own sandboxes. In recent years, Apple has begun offering third-party apps new tools to overcome one of the longstanding limitations of iOS file management: the inability for apps to access and edit files created by other apps.
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