Finally, I’d like to be able to apply basic formatting without adding Markdown’s control characters. I’d also like to be able to export files to plain text, rather than only RTF or HTML. The pale gray of iA Writer seems a bit insipid, and different people’s eyes react in different ways to colors and contrasts-I prefer a sable background when I write in BBEdit, and I know others who like a pale-blue background. First, I’d prefer a few choices for background colors. In keeping with the minimalist philosophy, there are only a few actual features I’d add. I’d like to be able to view more text at once, especially when I’m working on a long document and need to move things around. I appreciate Writer’s focus on simplicity, though I do wish it offered at least three font sizes-given that each line is limited to 64 characters, regardless of your screen size, there’s not a lot of text on the screen at any given time. Documents you save to iCloud or Dropbox using the Mac version can be accessed from the iPad version, and vice versa. When saving a document, you can choose to save locally on your Mac, or, if you plan to work on the document on other Macs or on an iPad, save to iCloud or Dropbox. The latest Mac version of iA Writer shows its iPad-app roots in support for cloud storage. Unfortunately, they fade away as you type-the whole distraction-free thing again-and you need to click the mouse somewhere else in the window to view them. If, like me, you often write to word counts, these numbers are great information to have. You’ll find the usual word and character counts, along with a metric called reading time, which is an estimate, based on the number of words in the document, of how long it would take someone to read it. Writer supports OS X’s built-in spell checker, and in the footer of the Writer window are a few basic document statistics. And if you want formatting without Markdown, you’re out of luck. Formatting characters disappear only when you export a file to RTF and open it in another program. The drawback is that while surrounding text with asterisks, for example, does indeed underline it, the asterisks remain visible, as well, which can be confusing. The advantage of using Markdown for an app such as iA Writer is that you can apply formatting without having to use any menus or buttons (though you can use standard formatting keyboard shortcuts-Command-U for underline and Command-B for bold-and Writer will apply the asterisks for you). If you must have formatting, iA Writer uses Markdown syntax for, for example, underlining (asterisks around text), bold (double asterisks around text), and headers (one or more # symbols)-add these control characters and the formats are immediately applied to the designated text. I would prefer if focus mode would at least highlight several sentences before and after the active one, if not the entire paragraph containing the active sentence.
Just as atoms have value only when they form molecules, individual sentences are meaningful mainly when combined with other sentences-they depend on the surrounding text for context.
To use a chemistry analogy, a sentence is an atom and a paragraph is a molecule. Few writers that I know actually write sentence by sentence. Personally, I wasn’t a fan of focus mode. The program even provides keyboard shortcuts (Command-Option-left arrow and -right arrow) to navigate from sentence to sentence.
According to the developer, this mode allows you to focus on the specific text you’re actively writing. In other words, the sentence you’re typing is displayed in black, with the rest of the text in a medium grey. The second feature is “focus mode,” which, when active, dims all the text in your document except the current sentence.
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