FEATURED APP
Focus on Writing, Not Your App
iA Writer
Laser-focused writing
It happens all too often: We sit down to write but get distracted by other apps and notifications—or even by the menus, options, and windows in the very app that we use to capture our prose. iA Writer provides a writing environment where you can concentrate on your words and forget about everything else.
The idea behind iA Writer is that you should get your thoughts to paper, so to speak, before you obsess about how it looks. The app uses plain text with simple Markdown formatting for the basics, including bold, italics, headings, lists, and links.
But the app’s Focus Mode is where you can really get to work: Enable it and switch to full-screen view, and you get a blank screen with just your text, no distractions. Focus Mode can even dim everything but the current paragraph—or the current sentence—so you can concentrate on what you're currently writing, not what's around it.
If you want a bit of active feedback while still shutting out the rest of your computing life, iA Writer's syntax highlighting color-codes parts of speech so you can see, at a glance, whether you’re edging closer to Joyce than Hemingway, and get a better understanding of how your sentences and paragraphs are constructed.
Reveal iA Writer’s sidebar for easy access to all of your documents, including those saved to iCloud. (iCloud documents sync automatically with iA Writer for iOS, so you can work on any device.) You never have to leave the app—which also helps with focus.
When you're done writing and want to share, iA Writer can export to Word, HTML, or PDF, or publish directly to Medium and WordPress blogs. The app's preview mode shows a preview of how your document will look when exported—you can even view your text and the preview simultaneously, with the latter updated live as you make changes to the former.
Every writer needs a distraction now and then, but iA Writer gives you control over what those distractions are—at least on your screen.