![]() ![]() ![]() When it comes to the identity of an app, what you do not offer is as important as what you do offer. We had to introduce settings because, as the audience grows, the needs become so varied you have to offer some choice. Outside the canvas, we had to make compromises. ![]() Our basic guideline is we preserve the original, focused, pleasant writing experience of version one. No-one comes close to what we do with our typographic engine. When we introduced iA Writer, it had a lot of completely new and unique features – and it still does. For example, Syntax Highlight offers an X-ray on what you write, doing for natural language what coding tools do for code.īut providing focus doesn’t mean being minimal on features. Getting there, we learned a lot from code editors. How did you balance minimalism with the features demanded by writers?įrom the very beginning, we wanted three features: Syntax Highlight, Style Check, and Focus Mode. For focused writing, it’s still the best – and with a keyboard looks and feels like a contemporary typewriter. We liked the iPad right away because it almost did what we’d thought up for the writing device. The early iPad had a much more focused interaction model: one app at a time and no windows. One issue of writing on a computer is constant distractions. Overnight, our plan had become much more manageable. In January 2010, as we were designing our ‘Writing Machine,’ the iPad came out. Years later, I felt it was time to see if something could be done about writing with computers.Īt first, we planned to create our own device – just for writing. Restrictions can be surprisingly helpful! And because your fingers soon start to hurt when typing, that pushes you to find a good twist to successfully end a poorly written sentence. There’s not much else you can do with a mechanical typewriter other than think about what words you want to form next. Yet just as when we speak, we write much better when we think before and while we express ourselves.Īs a student, I bought a typewriter to see if it could help me focus while writing – and it did. The time spent thinking before and while writing was frighteningly low. Most started by adjusting fonts and margins, typed a bit, deleted a bit, moved text around, and got caught in a loop of fumbling. I noticed students wasted too much time on formatting and playing with non-writing-related functions – and that I was no different. Oliver: I used to teach Microsoft Office and academic writing. We speak to iA founder Oliver Reichenstein about what it takes to make a revolutionary writing app – and make sure its shine never fades. But up till that point content blocks is simple and easy for me.The latest iA Writer – still sleek and efficient! Q&A: A brief history of iA Writer My wild guess is I probably wouldn’t write anything longer than about 20,000 words using iA Writer. I don’t know where the “dividing line” is when Scrivener is definitely a better choice … but I’d guess anything longer than 50,000 words I’d definitely do in Scrivener. It’s not unusual for me to write documents that are 5,000 to 10,000 words long and content blocks is just fine & simple in that situation. If I were writing a novel I’d go with Scrivener. So not a fast/obvious as Scrivener, but definitely more than fast enough for my purposes. some other iA Writer file) the app does a great automatic job of searching/finding that other file. But it’s simple enough … a lot of this is because once you start typing a “content block” (i.e. That said, in practice I don’t really mind the content blocks approach. I’m very used to Scrivener and how this is a quite useful feature. Yes, that’s a very nice feature within Scrivener (and Ulysses). ![]()
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