![]() ![]() That’s when you have one on a Mac or say with your iOS device. This blog post will take less than an hour to write.īetween the minimal software and the Markdown editing language there is almost no reason to move your hands from the keyboard. I find I can sit at a Mac or iPad and zip through a thousand words or so in quick time. The two apps have an impact on the way you write. There’s something else important about iA Writer and Byword. If you want something more, Byword is the first stop on the road from iA Writer to more complex tools like Apple Pages or Microsoft Word. You can write a book or a 3000 long-form feature in either app. You can use it for complex writing jobs, but it works best for blog posts, putting down thoughts and things like journalism.īyword is a touch more sophisticated. iA Writer is all about the writing and precious little else. The result is the two similar minimal writing tools have distinct personalities. When I’m having bad eyesight days, I can’t adjust the iA Writer type to a bigger size, I can’t alter the font or screen colour to make reading easier. I have a medical condition which means my eyes sometimes don’t work well. Unlike iA Writer which offers next to zero choices, Byword gives you some options. It too is lightweight, simple and stays out of the way. The excellent Byword has its own minimalist aesthetic. Only one other application comes close to iA Writer’s elegance and simplicity. If IA Writer is not for you, Typora is an alternative Markdown editor that brings distraction-free writing to Windows and Linux. Although this style of perfection may not be to your taste. It’s as if the the software developers digested the entire Apple less-is-more credo and spat it out as a perfect writing application. One key difference between iA Writer and earlier simple writing tools is the beautiful integration with the hardware, software and cloud services. It takes seconds to learn, days to master. Type a single hash # character at the start of the line for a top level head, two hashes means second level head and so on. Markdown is simple and keeps out of the way. These were embedded among the words to handle things like bold text, heads and so on. In place of a fancy user interface and menus full of esoteric commands, they relied on the user learning a few standard codes. So were older programs like WordStar.Īll of them attempted to keep out of your way. Even the MS-Dos versions of Word Perfect were minimal in this way. And if you didn’t want a special app, there were the basic text editors shipped with operating systems and tools derived from the Linux or Unix text editors. A decade ago there were minimalist word processors and writing tools for Macs and PCs. With iA Writer you are ready to go almost from the moment you click the app’s icon. Maybe you need to find the right fonts or styles. Often a Word work session starts with something other than jumping straight into writing. Often you’ll need to wait 15 minutes or so before working while Microsoft handles the latest updates to all the Office apps.Įven when there are no updates Word is not instant on. It rarely starts without checking to see if there is a software update - usually once a week. Of course you can do much the same with, say, Microsoft Word or Apple Pages. iA Writer a breeze compared to Word, Pages The app-OS-hardware integration has only improved with Apple’s recent move to iOS 11. This works so well that you can type away on, say, a MacBook, race out the door and pick up from where you left off on an iPhone. You can store documents locally on a Mac, iPhone or iPad, but why would you when you can save them the cloud and have them sync between devices. That’s because cloud is central to the software. If you have an iPad Pro, this would be a good time to invest in a keyboard, although iA Writer is fine if you write on a glass keyboard. If you don’t use Apple hardware, the software is a good reason to change. There are versions of iA Writer for iOS, MacOS and Android. If you need to do tricky typographic work or lay out pages, this is not for you. If you like your writing software flashy and complex go elsewhere. iA Writer feels the nearest thing to using paper in a typewriter and yet it is as modern as the iPhone X. cm-s-obsidian span.IA Writer starts from the premise that some writers focus on their words, not how they look on a page. cm-s-obsidian span.cm-hmd-internal-link, cm-s-obsidian span.cm-hmd-escape-backslash, Part of my CSS File resets the color definitions of the default app.css: /* Reset colors */ ![]()
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