At long bloody last, this bog standard feature has arrived courtesy of TextGuru. The app has garnered quite a bit of attention thanks to it being a rather well-designed, easy to use text editor, one that includes the holy grail of missing iPhone features: cut and paste. I’m not terribly excited by the text editing features, to be honest—if I want to write and edit text, I’ll do it on something with a keyboard (though I’m fairly sure I’ll be writing longer emails in TextGuru before too long).

Anyway, here’s how to get a text file from your computer to your iPhone, then email it to your irate boss.

1. Install TextGuru on your iPhone (at the time of writing it costs 59 pence).
2. Download, install and launch the TextGuru File Share application for your Mac.
3. Find the file you want, and copy it to the TextGuru folder (you’ll find an alias to it in your Documents folder, it’s really in ~/Library/Application Support/TextGuru/Files).
4. Launch TextGuru on the iPhone
5. Click on the File Shares button
6. Click on ‘TextGuru FileServer’
7. Click on the name of the file you copied to the TextGuru folder a moment ago.
8. Click on the Download File button.
9. Click on the Documents button.
10. Click on the name of your file.
11. Click on the little ‘i’ button.
12. Click on ‘Send via Email’.

The technical term for all that is ‘a bit of a faff’, even if you discount the first two steps as one-time affairs. But I’m still really very grateful to the TextGuru developers for giving me a feature that Apple should’ve included from the off.

So, here are the steps I took to turn a stock Eee into the perfect machine for writing on the move.

1. Enable Advanced Desktop Mode, because Easy Mode is just silly.
2. Add extra repositories, from which to download applications not provided by Asus.
3. Install SSH server, so you can connect your Eee from other computers: sudo apt-get install openssh-server
4. Install Subversion, to keep all your files in sync: sudo apt-get install subversion (setting up a Subversion repository is left as an exercise for the reader).
5. Install AbiWord, because OpenOffice is too slow on the Eee: sudo apt-get install abiword.
6. Install VLC, for playing telly programmes on the train when you can’t be arsed working: sudo apt-get install vlc
7. Tweak Firefox to make it more Eee-friendly:
   1. Install the MiniFox theme.
   2. Install the Fullerscreen add-on.
   3. Install the Google Browser Sync add-on, to keep your bookmarks, passwords and history synchronised with your main computer (optional, but well handy).
8. Remember to keep all your stuff on a removable SDHC card, not on the Eee’s internal memory card.

That’s it. The whole procedure takes under ten minutes, most of which is spent waiting for the list of repositories to update and the 15MB AbiWord to download.

I’ve been running the Eee like this for ten days now, and haven’t missed any of the gizmos I’d installed over the last few months. More importantly, the Eee is now as fast as crikey, and I haven’t had a single application crash on me yet.

Just in case anyone thinks I’ve lost the will to tinker, I feel moved to point out that I wrote the above while waiting for a Puppy Linux CD to burn.

I tired of the standard Easy Mode in about five minutes—it’s perfectly usable, but the toytown icons, awkward tabbed interface and limited opportunities for customisation do what is a fairly powerful device a disservice. So, I switched to ‘Full Desktop Mode’.

You don’t need to be a computer whizz to achieve this, just open a terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T in Easy Mode) and type the following, hitting return after each line, while connected to the internet:

sudo bash

apt-get update

apt-get install ksmserver kicker

Then restart the computer. Getting Full Desktop Mode to stick, and boot as quickly as possible, is a little more tricky, but is explained in detail on the Eee PC User Wiki, and shouldn’t be too much trouble, even for users who’ve never seen a command line before.

Once the Full Desktop Mode is in place, the interfaces of a few programmes need tweaking, so that they suit the Eee PC’s tiny wee screen. For Firefox and Thunderbird (the default mail application), this involves installing new themes, and editing each application’s userChrome.css files.

For Firefox, I went with the Littlefox theme, for Thunderbird, Minibird fits the bill. Easy-to-follow instructions for setting a smaller font size for the user interface of Firefox are available here, while tips to slim down Thunderbird can be found here.

Neither application is much use unless it synchronises with your main desktop or laptop, so I switched all my mail accounts over to IMAP, which caches copies of mail messages locally, but leaves them on the server, keeping all your inboxes in sync.

Then, to keep Firefox bookmarks, cookies and such consistent across different machines, I installed the Google Browser Sync add-on, which, so far, has worked flawlessly. I also installed Google Gears, which allows some web applications to work offline—it works very well with Google Reader, letting you update RSS feeds when you have access to the network, then read them when you don’t. It’s a shame that it doesn’t yet work with Google Calendar. (Google looms pretty large when using the Eee PC in my experience—at times it feels like I’m using the laptop as a client for their web services.)

When it comes to adding applications to the set bundled with the Eee PC, I’ve been fairly restrained:

1. VLC - the stock MPlayer is fine, but I’m used to VLC, and it can play pretty much any video you throw at it.
2. Abiword - the default word processor, Open Office, is a big pile of poo, taking an age to launch, and hogging memory once it has. Abiword launches almost instantaneously, and offers a more user-friendly, stripped-down space for writing.
3. Bittornado - I tried a few Bittorrent clients, but this is the only one that just worked for me, and it does the job (though it’s probably unwise to do much torrent downloading on a machine using with a flash drive).
4. Various odds and ends, like the latest Flash player and browser plugins, and some gubbins to make printing to PDF files easier.

Things I’ve yet to do:

1. Investigate methods of syncing information between my Newton MP2100 and the Eee PC. Not urgent, as the Newton is regularly sort-of-synced with my Mac, which is synced with Google Calendar.
2. Work out if it’s possible to install the OpenEinstein Newton emulator on the Eee PC. This would be spectacularly pointless, but good fun.
3. Get filesharing between my Macs and the Eee PC over my wireless LAN sorted out. I’m getting a bit tired of transporting larger files via a USB thumb drive and emailing myself documents.
4. Buy a whopping great SD card, so I can store more music and video on the Eee PC.

(I’ll post a proper review of the machine and its OS soon—I just wanted to get all this down first in case anything goes horribly wrong and I end up having to start again from scratch!)

Diamond is a quirky little app that, roughly speaking, works like a cross between Stickies and ‘distraction free’ editors like Write Room (which I gushed about a year ago), blocking out your desktop, other applications and the Menu Bar.

The most unconventional feature is the one I like the best: as you can see in the screenshot above, text is automatically broken up into columns, and so you scroll horizontally through a document, not vertically. Writing a review this morning, I used a near-fullscreen Diamond window, and found that having what you might call a holistic view of the piece helpful—re-ordering paragraphs was easier, repeated words leapt out, and proof-reading generally felt a lot quicker. It also has the only feature I really need in a text editor, a running word count, which floats unobtrusively at the bottom of the editing window.

Sure, there’s a certain lack of polish—you have to relaunch after changing a preference setting, for example—but Diamond is well worth checking out. It’s simple to use, customisable to suit your needs, and, best of all, lets you concentrate on writing without distractions.