iA Writer 4+

Almost perfect!

This application coupled with an iPad Pro and a magic keyboard have, quite frankly, made my on-the-go writing experience... magical! I’m not a professional by any means, however, as a college student I have had almost nothing to complain about when using this application. My only grievance, you guessed it, is more customization! This means more fonts, more color palettes, and more storage solutions like Google Drive. I totally understand that IA Writer’s aim is to be minimal and focus driven, but more “optional” customization features wouldn’t hurt anyone in my opinion. Overall, this is a wonderful application as is. My only suggestions would be to look into the “show stats” feature as I don’t like how it hangs over your text indefinitely... maybe move the word count to a corner where it doesn’t interfere with your text or perhaps set it to timeout after a few seconds. Also, there’s a wonderful feature labeled “syntax highlight” that I believe shouldn’t be buried within settings but would be of greater use somewhere next to the “aA” button. All the colors hurt my eyes so I never turn it on for long, however, occasionally using the feature helps me identify a myriad of adjectives and nouns to replace without having to read my entire essay again!

Developer Response ,

We don't have plans to add much in the way of customizations to the editor itself. The idea is you spend your time writing and not twiddling settings. When it comes time to put some form around the content, you can use templates to get exactly what you want. You can build your own custom templates too—email us at support@ia.net if you want to know more. On Syntax Control, you can toggle this within the "aA" menu and it will show the last used combination of parts of speech you had turned on.

Almost Perfect for Dungeon Masters

Most of the writing I do is for large D&D campaigns that I work on where there are a lot of small markdown files organized into thematic folders, which this app is perfect for. The writing surface is clean, the lines of text are spaced perfectly and the default duospace font is relaxing to view in both day and night modes, particularly on a large iPad.

I also particularly like how the markdown formatting symbols hang outside of the left margin of the text, which makes parsing documents with a lot of formatting much easier. The placement of formatting symbols is not perfectly right aligned outside of the margin, but that is a minor quibble with syntax that is designed to flow inline in a plain text file.

Feature Request: The ability to add folders from other applications would make this app absolutely perfect. I use the Working Copy app to push all of my documents to Github and for version control. If iA Writer could add my Working Copy folders to the library, the writing experience and repository workflow would be sublime.