The Simple Writing App

It started out as a blank piece of digital paper, with faint pinstripes, a beautiful monospace typeface, and that beguiling blinking blue cursor. No settings, no distractions, just a tool for writing your thoughts in Markdown.

It grew, gaining features with every new versions—things to simplify writing like keyboard shortcuts and lists that continue automatically, along with syntax control to point out when your writing had too many adjectives. It started managing all of your writing, first with a basic iCloud popover, later with an integrated document menu, and most recently with a quick open box to search through everything youve written.

And, heretically, it both brought the file menu back on iOS and added a settings pane to its Mac version. Feature bloat, one could cry.

Yet its not that at all. Every new feature is carefully added—and just as likely to be subtracted, if it doesnt make writing better. Syntax control used to be a distracting sidebar; now its relegated to a quiet spot in the footer, and lets you monitor every type of word you want at the same time. Its simple without being simplistic, an app that makes Markdown writing nice without hiding your markup.

It just works. And thats the highest praise one can give an app that makes up such a significant chunk of their workday.

maguay about iA Writer