For the last week I’ve done most of my writing on the iPad with the new Phraseology 2.0 (website)(App Store) from Agile Tortoise. I have to admit I buy a lot of text editors and for the most part I find them lacking in one reason or another and within a few days they end up on the scrap heap.

That has never been the case with Phraseology. Agile Tortoise is a one-man developer shop operated by Greg Pierce (yes, that Greg Pierce). Greg is one of the godfathers of the iOS url callback and he’s got three apps, Drafts, Terminology, and Phraseology that leverage these URL callbacks to the great delight of iOS writers everywhere. This lets you jump between these apps (and others supporting URL callbacks) at will. For example, you could write a lengthy email in Phraseology and with one button, send the text to Drafts for processing.

The new version has a shiny new iOS 7 interface. The app supports iCloud and Dropbox (including the ability to browse versions in Dropbox).

The most interesting new feature is speech syntax highlighting. Phraseology will analyze your document for you and highlight (with differing colors) nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, prepositions, and conjunctions. With a little bit of analysis of my longer documents, this makes me look smarter. I like that.

Phraseology is an easy app to recommend. It is smart but not too heavy. It has an innovative developer behind it that you just know will continue to make it interesting and better. It isn’t my daily writing engine because there is no companion Mac app but if there was, I could see myself spending lots of time in this app. After my one week experiment, I’m definitely going to be using it more often, especially for longer documents.