Smolpad is Ready for the iPhone Duo
A phone that folds open is a phone whose screen changes size while you are holding it. For a notes app that is not a decorating problem, it is a question about what the app believes it is running on. Smolpad answered that question last week with a release that already supports the new phone.
What the app asks
Most apps work out their layout by asking what hardware they are running on. Smolpad asks something else. It asks its own window how much room it has.
In a narrow window you get one column: the note, the full width of the screen, nothing competing with it. Give it a wide enough window and the note list moves in beside the editor, the way it has always sat on an iPad. Your notes down the left, the one you are writing on the right.
Same app, same notes, same download. The layout follows the glass.
That distinction sounds academic right up to the moment a device has two widths. Closed, a folding phone is a phone. Open, it is something nearer a small iPad that happens to fit in a pocket. An app that works out its layout by asking what hardware it is on gets one answer, and gets it both times.
I shipped it early
Here is the part I should probably admit to.
This went out in 1.3.5, on September 3 on the Mac and September 4 on iPhone and iPad. On the day it shipped, it did precisely nothing.
No iPhone you can buy today makes a window wide enough to reach it. I wrote the layout, tested it in a window I resized by hand, shipped it, and left it sitting in the app doing nothing at all for a device I have never held. It is not in the release notes, and that was on purpose. A release note for something nobody can trigger is noise wearing the costume of news.
It is on the press page, with a picture: the note list on the left, a note open on the right. The part worth noticing is that the screenshot is the iPhone app. Not an iPad build wearing a phone icon, not a mockup. The same download already sitting on your phone.
There is nothing to turn on, and nothing to update. The two column layout is already in the version you have. It is also, today, genuinely impossible to see: no current phone gives it a wide enough window, and an iPad arrives at the same arrangement by a different road.
What I cannot tell you from here is whether an unfolded screen actually crosses the line. I left myself a note in the code, next to the width the layout watches for, to go back and check against the real numbers the day after the announcement. That note is dated. It is the only honest thing to write when you are building for a device that does not exist yet.
If the screen is wide enough, the two column layout is there the first time the phone opens, with nothing to download. If it isn't, you get the phone layout, correctly, and nothing breaks.
Either way there is nothing left for me to ship. That is what ready means here. Not that I have held one. That the work is already in the box.
Your notes don't change
Underneath all of it, the more useful fact is that none of this touches your notes.
A Smolpad note is a plain .md file in a folder, named after its first line, sitting in your own iCloud or Dropbox. That is true on the Mac, on the iPad, on the phone in your pocket now, and on whatever you are carrying in three years. A new shape of screen is a new way of looking at the same folder.
Every few years the industry changes the shape of the glass, and every few years somebody's notes have to be exported out of a proprietary database, converted, or quietly given up on.
Text files just open.
Open Settings › Storage and you can go straight to the folder your notes live in, in the Finder or in the Files app. Whatever you buy next, that folder is the thing you are actually keeping, and you can walk it out of here any time you like.
Buy the shape you like
I have no idea what the Duo is going to be worth to anybody. That is a decision about hands and pockets and money, and it is yours.
What I can tell you is that the notes app should not be part of the calculation. A folder of text files does not care what it is being read on, and the app that reads them should meet the screen it is handed rather than the screen it expected.
So buy the shape you like. Keep your notes somewhere a new one cannot strand them.
Update: Apple changed how toolbar buttons work on iPhone Duo. They've moved them to the right side of an app for easy reach. So we're almost ready. More to come before its release in October!
Smolpad is a tiny Markdown editor for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It lives in your Mac's menu bar, opens on a keystroke, and keeps every note as a plain .md file in your own iCloud or Dropbox. Free for your first ten notes, with every editing feature included.