IAWriter: Sometimes less is more
Friday, June 17, 2011 at 8:16AM There’s a trend for minimalist writing apps these days. You know the kind of thing. Programs that go back a decade or two and show you nothing but type on the screen.
Some of them even go back to DOS days: black monitor, blinking green type. And click clack sounds as you write. I hate them. Maybe you don’t. Personal choice. It matters.
IAWriter, though, is a different kettle of fish on several fronts. It first appeared as a $4.99 minimalist writing app on the iPad last year. In October I found myself in Helsinki for the Book Fair. My UK publisher emailed and said: did I have a short story for an ebook promotion they were planning for Christmas?
Of course I said. Truth: I had a title. Dead Men’s Socks. Sat down in the Helsinki Book Fair Hall with my iPad and, in a spare hour, typed out the first two opening scenes in IAWriter. Worked very well, though it got finished in Scrivener I have to say. Partly because I didn’t want to write the whole 10K thing on an iPad.
Wouldn’t need to do that now. IAWriter is out for the Mac too. So what’s it like?
First, the thing people seem to talk about the most. The price. It’s $17.99 or £10.99. Which makes some people weep and shake their fists with fury. How is this possible? Apple’s fancy word processing DTP app Pages is about the same price? Where’s the value?
Value. There’s a weasel word. I have one abiding issue with the Apple App Store. You can’t try things before buying them. I’m sure this deflates sales, especially of unusual apps like IAWriter. Let’s leave that aside. Is £10.99 just too much money for something that does very little except let you type in peace? No page makeup features? No formatting — and I mean no formatting, you can’t change the font size or even the font?
It’s a daft question, of course. If you buy IAWriter and use it £10.99 is nothing. I hate the way the internet is driving down the price of everything to 99 cents. If it carries on we’ll just have oodles of half-finished dross — in books and software.
So I don’t mind for one moment paying that for an app that’s useful — though it would be nice to check it out first. What do you get for your money?
A very empty screen with a fixed writing font and something called focus mode which, when turned on, highlights the sentence you’re in and greys the rest of the work. Focus mode apart you can achieve something very similiar in Scrivener’s full screen mode. But you still have choices there — which font, how wide the page, what else to see on your screen?
IAWriter does away with the choices and leaves you with nothing but that white window (or screen if you go for the full screen mode). Here’s an example of how minimalist this gets. Pull up the Help function and you see this…
;)
That’s it. You can type in headers and Cmd-I will give you a faux italic underline (which will, I gather, turn into the real thing if you export to html — which can then be imported into Word, not that I’ve checked this). You can bounce from word to word or sentence to sentence. At the foot of the screen you get a word count for the whole document (not a part of it) and an estimate of reading time. Nothing more.
The screen font is one specially designed for IAWriter and it is perfect. It’s the right size on a small screen or a big one (for me anyway). After a minute or two you don’t even think about it. This is how it should be: formatting is of no interest to the writer. Only one thing matters: words.
I’m thinking of a new short story right now and I have no doubt I’ll try writing it in IAWriter as an experiment. It is a very clean, uncluttered environment in which to work. Nothing intrudes. You simply see your words, and that very clever focus view makes you look at them more closely than anything I’ve ever encountered.
Here are the bad points. While this works very well for a short story I can’t begin to imagine how you could write anything of length or complexity such as a novel in this. There’s no quick way to navigate between those headings. No section or scene word count. All the necessary tools you get in Scrivener for control and strategic focus — show me every scene from a certain point of view, let me insert a comment on something to pick up later — are gone.
IAWriter would make a great cutdown interface to write a single Scrivener scene. As a way of building and manipulating an entire book… I can’t see it. Unless you’re the kind of writer who maps out everything in advance and can type in your chapter and scene headings before you begin to write.
There are a couple of glitches still in what is early software too. When I create an IAWriter file on the desktop app the iPad one can’t recognise it for some reason unless I manually change the file type to txt. And spelling preferences don’t get remembered across sessions. A new version is promised soon which may deal with these — IAWriter is a work in progress (like all software but probably more rapidly than most). Check out their Twitter feed if you want to follow the conversation.
In short: an interesting innovation though some will be put off by the price and the fact you can’t, because of the App Store, try it first. Which is a pity because, for me anyway, this, especially in combination with the iPad app, is a formidable piece of writing kit for shorter projects.
Technology, Writing
Reader Comments (7)
If you ever find yourself sitting at a PC with a few minutes of nothing to do, download Writemonkey and try the same stuff as you have for marking up in IAWriter (# for headings, // for comments, and there are several others, plus you can configure or add your own if you're interested), then hit Alt+J.
That brings up what's called a Jumps dialog which will allow you to pick what type of markup you're looking for and it will return all of the, say, Headings, so you can see those lines and click to go to one of them, right click to go to one while closing the Jumps menu (to get it out of your way and put focus back on the text) or you can cold Ctrl while mousing over the list and the text will scroll between them as the mouse touches them.
Writemonkey's author is working on getting the Jumps dialog (and new functionality that hasn't gone live yet) into a sidebar that will go with the minimalist interface (and, obviously, be keyboard toggleable so it can be gotten out of the way quickly), rather than the default Windows box that it is now. Even the way it is now, though, I don't have any trouble managing long works.
For example, my primary contrivance for making this simulate alot of the things that, say, Scrivener or yWriter might be able to do for a novel writer, is to fill the headings (or comments or bookmarks, or whatever else you'd rather if you'd prefer the headings to be actual chapter titles or something) with easily searchable information about the chapter or scene.
I'll start with something like ".Owen Cayce truckstop Volvo". What this says is that Owen is the point of view character (get it? I put a "." point in front of him; my cleverness is underwhelming, right? trust me, it pans out in a few seconds) for the scene, Cayce is also there, the setting for the scene is the truckstop and they have the Volvo with them. This way, I can go into the Jumps dialog, set it for headings then type, say "Owen" into its search box, and I'll get a list of all the scenes that Owen appears in so I get a chronology of everything he's done in the novel so far. But if I type ".Owen" it narrows down to only the scenes where he's the PoV character. I can also keep track of important items in the narrative to make sure I don't lose track of them and monitor the various sets I've used, just in case. I haven't come up with any cases where I needed more info than that to search for or track things, yet, so that's really all I think 99% of folk might need.
Also, just to get closer to a tool filled app like Scrivener, Writemonkey has various "focus" modes that will allow you to only display the text between two headings or between bookmarks. This was originally meant to help you focus on one piece at a time, distraction free style, but I've used it more as a quick and dirty method for moving chapters/scenes around inside the document. you put the cursor any place inside the chapter, key for heading focus, Ctrl+A, Ctrl+X, key out of focus mode, Alt+J for the Jump's dialog, find the chapter the stuff I just cut is supposed to go in front of, right click on it to jump to and close the dialog at once, key up then Ctrl+V. I know that sounds like a lot, but its only slightly slower than dragging the individual chapter files around in Scrivener and alot more accurate in my case (WinScriv still has issues with the binder, among other things).
Writemonkey also provides a "repository" which is basically the flip side of the file (Writemonkey only works with TXT files, so it basically puts "END OF FILE" after the last of the normal text and then reads anything after that mark as repository content) which is meant for notes and whatnot, but since the author has provided a keystroke method for moving entire paragraphs from the normal view to the repository without selecting anything other than by having the cursor somewhere in the paragraph, I use it as my "trash can" tossing notes in there after they've served their immediate purpose, bits of actual prose that were good or informative but didn't fit where I'd initially put them but might be useful later, etc.
You can also get it to export and/or preview what the document will look like with the markup you've used. It basically uses CSS templates (which you can alter or add to if you geek that much) and actually has an option to export directly to Word (export will ignore the repository and anything marked as a comment). I don't actually geek enough to do CSS myself, but found a way to get Word to do it for me. Build a sample dock with all the necessary styles (including, say, different styles for different levels of headings, block quotes and pretty much any other thing you can think of) in Word then Save As "Web Page, Filtered". That produces an HTML file and a CSS file. Just copy the content of the CSS file and dump it into a new export type in Writemonkey and you're ready to roll.
Okay, so I've gone on too much. I sound like a commercial. Its just that you've shared alot about using software that has worked for you, and now you're showing interest in apps that are more my speed (I am so iPad envious, just because of all the minimalist writing apps available for it, especially the ones that sync directly with Dropbox without even having to have the Dropbox client installed), I felt I needed to help point you at the best I've found (and trust me, I've spent way too much time hunting even the remotest candidates down and testing them out).
Go Scottish Play!
Sounds really - interesting. Will look out for that one. Thanks!
Definitely pick up version 2200 (or later if something changes before you get to it). He added "syntax highlighting" for headings (an underline, actually) and block quotes (an appropriate looking indentation of the block), so added to the highlighting for comments (a dimming or a middle grey depending on how one option is set), there are 3 easy, visual markings for structuring simple TXT files in Writemonkey.
@Todd
Thanks for sharing the info about WriteMonkey! I'd tried it out in the past, but the current version is much better than it used to be. I just changed my settings to look a bit more like iA Writer, including the font color and size, background color, and line spacing. It's not the same, but it's way nicer than the default settings. Now if only I could get a Monospaced font that looked as nice as Nitti Light in it! I'm sure I'll be using WriteMonkey as my default text editor in Windows for now, at least until iA Writer comes out on Windows ;)
@David
I enjoyed your review of iA Writer, and definately agree that it's one of the nicest writing experiences on the Mac and iPad. It's convinced me again that monospaced fonts can be much better for writing. Plus, the Markdown support is brilliant, and I've never seen anything like that on any other app, ever. That alone is enough reason to love the app. And you know the funniest thing about iA Writer's price? It's actually cheaper than WriteRoom, the original clean writing app on Macs. It's been incredibly popular for years, even at its price point. Quality tools that help you work better are worth paying for!
You could have different iAWriter files for chapters or scenes in one specific folder. I use bulleted lists below what I'm writing to gather ideas for what I need to write next. I do see myself writing something long and complex with this. (If you want minimal you have to let go options.)
Nice and useful review.
@Matthew
There's a free (as beer) monospaced font that looked as nice as Nitti Light IMHO: Cousine
@iago
Good spot. Cousine looks fantastic in Scrivener. Now my body text of choice - have bunged in a $10 donation to the author too. Thanks!
The one thing I don't like about Cousine though... the continental dot in the middle of the zero. Not UK or US usage.... Oh well....