Updating websites with your iPad: Gusto vs Textastic

This is a short blog post comparing the features of two iPad Apps designed for editing code and updating websites: Gusto and Textastic.

The first thing to mention is that Textastic describes itself primarily as a text editor, while Gusto is promoted as a website management app. However, the functions available through both apps are fairly similar. You can link via FTP to your website and move files back and forth that can then be edited and previewed locally.

To begin: the highly visual appearance of Gusto is appealing, and very intuitive, especially if you maintain multiple sites. It also allows remote viewing of websites within the app itself - important for server-side languages such as PHP, since there is no way to view these locally in either app.

Textastic doesn't have remote viewing built in (and you'll have to flick to Safari in order to perform this task), but the app is also capable of remote viewing and is far more iOS 4.2 iOS 5 equipped. By which I mean you can move files and folders around within the app, and also send files to other programs. Gusto in contrast feels far more restricted in this respect: while you can send files to Gusto from other apps, within the program you work project by project, and the only way to move files is cutting and pasting the text within them to a new file, which is far from ideal. Each project is also tied to its own website in Gusto, so while you can have multiple projects each with their unique website and FTP you cannot transfer files from one project directly into the website of another.

Textastic can in contrast have multiple FTP sites and easily upload any file or folder to whichever one you choose. Another advantage of Textastic is code highlighting "of more than 80 different types of files while you're typing: HTML, XML, Objective-C, C#, PHP, Perl, Python, SQL, JavaScript, CSS, shell scripts and many more", in contrast to Gusto's plain text editor.

Neither app appeared to be capable of displaying an XML file styled with XSL - something that Goodreader is capable of - but given all the things the apps are capable of, I'm willing to wait for this feature.

On a day-to-day practical level, there are many advantages to Textastic, and until Gusto is capable of more flexibility in moving files and folders within the app and between other apps then Textastic will be my program of choice for updating websites.

I will, however, keep a close eye on Gusto. Since, with more of the iOS 4.2 features embraced it could be a very useful app, that will appeal to many through its visual layout.

Update: Textastic v.4.0 released 10 March 2012 adds regular expressions to its find and replace and also some fantastic additional keyboard buttons for special characters and numbers that save oodles of time once you learn how to use them.

Update: Textastic v.4.1 released 7 June 2012, you can now zip and unzip files. Code completion for Objective-C has also been added.

Note: As new features are added and I discover them, I'm crossing through and updating this article. If you find anything I've missed, please comment.

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