Proprietary File Handling is Trouble

This app suffers a split personality. As a markdown editor, it encourages you to write in a free, open protocol you can format anywhere—in different apps, in HTML on the web, etc. But then it locks your writing away with proprietary file handling—either in a “library” hidden deep within your mac’s application support folders, or in a siloed iCloud folder, or via a live (and buggy) Dropbox connection.

If I want to sync with iCloud or Dropbox, I can just save my documents in my Mac OS iCloud or Dropbox folders. There’s zero need for this “library” and its overwrought (and buggy) attempt to hide my documents in an iA Writer-specific sandbox. The “library” feels a little like iA Writer’s attempt to match a similar (but much better) system in The Soulmen’s Ulysses, but Ulysses is marketed as a manuscript-maker, a binder-like “book writing studio.” iA Writer has always been a far more generalized product, an ever-ready writing pad for anything and everything.

iA writer devs: seriously, guys, quit overthinking it. (Admit it—after Writer Pro’s weird “workflow” states, “overthinking it” is something of a habit with you.) Writers strengths are simplicity and universality; reorienting its document model toward locked systems isn’t convenient or helpful.

MJHY98 about iA Writer